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By Root 1078 0

were everywhere, but never in bands of more than two or three and more often than not solitary. Invariably they blundered straight into the traps we laid. They didn't always get to feed on the tethered goats we put there to sucker them in, either. Often Thor would leap out from hiding and cosh them on the head while they were still rubbing their tummies and smacking their lips in anticipation. It never once occurred to any of them to question why an animal was standing tied to a peg at the end of a blind canyon or next to an outcrop of rock large enough to conceal several soldiers. The prospect of a free, easy meal made the creatures even dumber than normal.

Winkling them out of caves was a mite more problematic. But again the nickering of a frightened goat usually did the trick, drawing them up from the depths as efficiently as a dinner bell.

Mostly we had to subdue them with gunfire, if Thor didn't get the chance to knock them out cold. We'd use tear gas as well, stun grenades, magnesium flares. Once, swear to God, a female troll got so disorientated and stressed out by all the noise and smoke, she wet herself. I felt strangely guilty about that.

Odin's ravens were with us the whole time. Radio didn't work across the frontiers between worlds, so Huginn and Muninn kept their boss updated on our progress. They also enabled him to guide Sleipnir's pilots to our location when a troll was ready for retrieval.

By the end of it, when Odin decided we'd caught as many trolls as Asgard could handle, I could have done with a break. We all could have. But there was no time to rest. Mrs Keener's state visit to the UK was only a few days away, and we didn't know if this would coincide with another - maybe larger-scale - attack on us, but it seemed a fair bet. So on we pressed.

Thor was despatched on an errand to Svartalfheim, to request a favour off the gnomes. He took with him some sketches I'd drawn - "blueprints" would be overstating it, given the crapness of my drawing skills - and his wife Sif went along too, ostensibly as moral support but really because Thor wasn't big on tact and, according to Odin, dealing with grouchy gnomes required finesse.

I'd remembered Bergelmir saying how good the gnomes were at making tools. Odin had confirmed it, talking up their blacksmithing ability. "Masters of moulding metal," he'd told me. "They make it dance in their hands." He'd gone on to describe at length their underground forges, their furnaces that were heated by nothing less than the magma beneath the earth's crust, their vast cavern workshops that resounded deafeningly with the sound of hammered iron and hissing water.

If gnomes couldn't manufacture what I'd designed, no one could.

Not that it mattered much either way. That plan was something of a long shot, and the main purpose of it was to get Thor temporarily out of our hair. He couldn't come with the rest of us where we were going. We couldn't bring him along because we couldn't count on him to play nice and behave.

Not in Utgard, capital of Jotunheim and main hangout of the frost giants.

Thirty-Nine

Sleipnir, a set of snazzy ski fittings attached to its wheels, whup-whupped across Jotunheim. Ice fields glittered and winked below.

In the Wokka's cargo bay, with its familiar smells of grease, rubber and oil, Backdoor and Chopsticks played cards, Paddy frowned at a Penguin paperback with some kind of boring fine-art cover, Baz stared out of a porthole with the light slanting along his face, and the Valkyries kept to themselves at one end, crouched beside their snowmobiles, sharing silence and nips of something hard and clear from a hip flask.

Which left Cy and me going over strategy and comparing notes. The deep, concussive thump-thump-thump of the rotors meant we had to lean our heads together and shout.

"First and foremost," I said, "this is a diplomatic initiative. We're ambassadors from Asgard."

"And when it all goes tits up..."

"Don't you mean if?"

"No offence, bruv, but diplomatic? You?"

"Point taken. But I think I have some leverage here. The frosties