As the net came closer, Loki knew that this was the critical moment. He had to leap the net as he had done before, and this time he would race toward the sea. He tensed, like a spring about to whip back, and then he shot into the air.
Thor was fast. He saw the silver salmon glitter in the sun, and he grabbed it with his huge hands, just as a hungry bear snatches a salmon from the air. Salmon are slippery fish, and Loki was the slipperiest of salmon; he wriggled and tried to slip through Thor’s fingers, but Thor simply gripped the fish harder and squeezed it tightly, down by the tail.
They say that salmon have been narrower near the tail ever since.
The gods brought their net, and they wrapped it tightly around the fish and carried it between them. The salmon began to drown in the air, gasping for water, and then it thrashed and twitched, and now they were carrying a panting Loki.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “Where are you taking me?”
Thor just shook his head and grunted, and did not reply. Loki asked the other gods, but none of them would tell him what was happening, and none of them would meet his eye.
III
The gods entered the mouth of a cave, and with Loki slung between them, they went down deep into the earth. Stalactites hung from the ceiling of the cave, and bats fluttered and flickered. They went down lower. Soon the way was too narrow to carry Loki, and now they let him walk between them. Thor walked immediately behind Loki, his hand on Loki’s shoulder.
They went down a long, long way.
In the deepest of the caves there were brands burning, and three people stood there, waiting for them. Loki recognized them before he saw their faces, and his heart sank. “No,” he said. “Do not hurt them. They did nothing wrong.”
Thor said, “They are your sons and your wife, Loki Lie-Smith.”
There were three huge flat stones in that cave. The Aesir set each stone on its side, and Thor took his hammer. He broke a hole through the middle of each stone.
“Please! Let our father go,” said Narfi, Loki’s son.
“He is our father,” said Vali, Loki’s other son. “You have sworn oaths that you will not kill him. He is a blood brother and an oath brother to Odin, highest of the gods.”
“We will not kill him,” said Kvasir. “Tell me, Vali, what is the worst thing that one brother could do to another?”
“For a brother to betray his brother,” said Vali, without hesitating. “For a brother to murder a brother, as Hod killed Balder. This is abominable.”
Kvasir said, “It is true that Loki is a blood brother to the gods, and we cannot kill him. But we are bound by no such oaths to you, his sons.”
Kvasir spoke words to Vali, words of change, words of power.
Vali’s human shape fell from him, and where Vali had stood was a wolf, foam flecking its muzzle. The intelligence of Vali was fading from its yellow eyes, to be replaced by hunger, by anger, by madness. It looked at the gods, at Sigyn, who had been its mother, and finally it saw Narfi. It growled low and long in the back of its throat, and its hackles rose.
Narfi took a step back, only a step, and then the wolf was on him.
Narfi was brave. He did not scream, not even when the wolf that had been his brother tore him apart, ripping open his throat and spilling his guts onto the rock floor. The wolf that had been Vali howled once, long and loudly, through blood-soaked jaws. Then it sprang high, over the heads of the gods, and it ran off into the cave-darkness and would not be seen in Asgard again, not until the end of everything.
The gods forced Loki onto the three great stones: they put one of the stones beneath his shoulders, one under his loins, and one beneath his knees. The gods took Narfi’s spilled entrails, and they pushed them through the holes they had made in the stones, binding Loki’s neck and shoulders tightly. They wound the entrails of his son around his loins and his hips, tied his knees and legs so tightly he could barely move. Then the gods transformed the intestines of Loki’s murdered son into fetters so tight and so hard that they might have been iron.
Sigyn, Loki’s wife, had watched as her husband was bound in the entrails of their son, and she said nothing. She wept silently to herself for the pain of her husband, for the death and the dishonor of their sons. She held a bowl, although she did not yet know why. Before the gods had brought her there, they had told her to go to her kitchen and bring the biggest bowl she had.
Skadi, giant daughter of dead Thiazi, wife of Njord of the beautiful feet, came into the cave then. She carried something huge in her hands, something that writhed and twisted. She bent over Loki and placed the thing she carried above him, winding it about the stalactites that hung from the ceiling of the cave, so that its head was just above Loki’s own.
It was a snake, cold of eye, its tongue flickering, its fangs dripping with poison. It hissed, and a drop of poison from its mouth dripped onto Loki’s face, making his eyes burn.