The Ship of the Dead (Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard #3)

“Well, you thought wrong!” He blinked twice, as if he’d surprised himself. “This isn’t my home anymore, just a random tourist stop! What does it matter?”

He sounded less than certain. I wondered if it would be helpful to offer to switch up the teams. Mallory had a gift for distracting Halfborn. I would’ve been willing to trade her for…I don’t know, Alex, maybe. But I didn’t think the offer would be appreciated by anybody else.

“What about Hearthstone and Blitz?” I said. “Shouldn’t I wake them up?”

“Good luck with that,” Alex said. “They are out.”

“Could you fold up the ship with them inside?” T.J. asked.

“Doesn’t sound safe,” I said. “They could wake up and find themselves stuck in a handkerchief.”

“Ah, leave ’em here,” Halfborn said. “They’ll be fine. This place was never dangerous, unless it bored you to death.”

“I’ll leave them a note,” Sam volunteered. “How about we scout around for half an hour? We’ll meet back here. Then, assuming somebody’s found the train, we can all go there together.”

We agreed that plan had a low possibility of violent death. A few minutes later, Halfborn, T.J., and Alex headed off in one direction, while Mallory, Sam, and I headed the other way—wandering the streets of Fl?m to find a train and some interesting enemies to kill.





AN OLD LADY was not what I had in mind.

We walked about three blocks through crowds of tourists, past shops selling chocolate and moose sausage and little wooden troll souvenirs. (You would think anybody descended from Vikings would know better than to create more trolls.) As we passed a small grocery store, Mallory grabbed my arm with enough force to leave a bruise.

“It’s her.” She spat the word like a mouthful of poison.

“Who?” Sam asked. “Where?”

Mallory pointed to a store called Knit Pickers, where tourists were oohing and aahing over a sidewalk display of locally produced wool yarn. (Norway offered something for everyone.)

“The lady in white,” Mallory said.

I spotted the one she meant. In the midst of the crowd stood an old woman with rounded shoulders and a hunched back. Her head craned forward like it was trying to get away from her body. Her white knit sweater was so fuzzy it might have been cotton candy, and cocked on her head was a matching floppy hat that made it hard to see her face. Dangling from one arm was a bag stuffed with yarn and knitting needles.

I didn’t understand what had attracted Mallory’s attention. I could easily have picked out ten other folks from the cruise ship who looked stranger. Then the old lady glanced in our direction. Her cloudy white eyes seemed to pierce right through me as if she’d ninja-chucked her knitting needles into my chest.

The crowd of tourists shifted, engulfing her, and the feeling passed.

I gulped. “Who was—?”

“Come on!” Mallory said. “We can’t lose her!”

She dashed toward the knitting store. Samirah and I exchanged a worried look, then followed.

A senior citizen dressed in cotton candy shouldn’t have been able to hobble very fast, but the lady was already two blocks away when we got to Knit Pickers. We ran after her, dodging tour groups, bicyclists, and guys carrying kayaks. Mallory didn’t wait for us. By the time Sam and I caught up, she was clinging to a chain-link fence outside a small train depot, cursing as she scanned for her lost prey.

“You found the train,” I noted.

Parked at the platform were half a dozen brightly painted old-fashioned railcars. Tourists were piling on board. The tracks wound away from the station and up the hills into the ravine beyond.

“Where is she?” Mallory muttered.

“Who is she?” asked Sam.

“There!” Mallory pointed to the last car, where the cotton candy grandma was just getting on board.

“We need tickets,” Mallory barked. “Quickly.”

“We should get the others,” Sam said. “We told them we’d rendezvous—”

“NO TIME!”

Mallory nearly mugged Sam for her Norwegian kroner. (Currency provided, of course, by the ever-resourceful Alex.) With much cursing and hand-waving, Mallory managed to purchase three tickets from the station attendant, then we bolted through the turnstile and made it aboard the last car just as the doors were closing.

The cabin was hot, stuffy, and packed with tourists. As the train rattled up the hillside, I felt queasier than I had since…well, the day before, roasting that dragon heart in Alfheim. It didn’t help that I would occasionally catch snippets of bird chatter from outside—conversations I could still understand, mostly about where one could find the juiciest worms and bugs.

“Okay, Mallory, explain,” Sam demanded. “Why are we following this old lady?”

Mallory slowly made her way up the aisle, checking the faces of the passengers. “She’s the woman who got me killed. She’s Loki.”

Sam almost fell into an old man’s lap. “What?”

Mallory gave her the quick version of what she’d told me a few days ago: how she’d set a car bomb, then regretted it, then gotten a visit from an old woman who convinced her to go back and disarm the bomb using a couple of super-useful daggers that turned out to be super-useless. And then ka-boom.

“But Loki?” Sam asked. “Are you sure?”

I understood the anxiety in Sam’s voice. She’d been training to fight her dad, but she hadn’t expected it to happen here, today. Fighting Loki was not a class in which you wanted a pop quiz.

“Who else could it be?” Mallory scowled. “She’s not here. Let’s try the next car.”

“And if we catch him?” I asked. “Or her?”

Mallory unsheathed one of her knives. “I told you. That lady got me killed. I intend to return her daggers, points-first.”

In the next car, tourists pressed against the windows, taking pictures of ravines, waterfalls, and quaint villages. Squares of farmland quilted the valley floor. Mountains cast shadows as sharp as sundial needles. Every time the train rounded a bend, the view seemed more scenic than before.

Samirah and I kept stopping, dumbfounded by the scenery outside, but Mallory had no interest in pretty stuff. The old lady wasn’t in the second car, so we moved on.

In the next car, halfway up the aisle, Mallory froze. The last two rows on the right were arranged in a sort of conversation nook, with three backward-facing seats and three that faced forward. The rest of the cabin was jammed with people, but that little nook was empty except for the old lady. She sat facing our direction, humming as she knit, paying no attention to the scenery or to us.

A low growl started in Mallory’s throat.

“Hold on.” Sam grabbed her wrist. “There are a lot of mortals on this train. Can we at least confirm that this lady is Loki before we start killing and destroying?”

If I had tried to make that argument, I imagined Mallory would’ve hilt-bashed me in the groin. Since it was Sam asking, Mallory sheathed her dagger.

“Fine,” she snapped. “We’ll try to talk to her first. Then I’ll kill her. Happy?”

“Delirious,” Sam said.