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spell was wildly off, and it just didn’t parse for me. Ahllan was a webtroll, and her ability to spit out fast binary was greater by far than my own talents at deciphering it, but that didn’t explain all my problems, not by a long shot.
    I didn’t have any time to stop for analysis either. As soon as we arrived at the other end of the gate, Ahllan started running again, this time leading us up the stairs of a round stone tower. We emerged on the parapets of . . .
    “Is this really the Tower of London?” I whispered. “At the same scale as York Minster?”
    “Yes, and no. Now, hush.” She pointed into the court-yard below.
    There, the big poodle had the hand at bay in the doorway of the Bloody Tower. His master lay in the dirt of the path nearby. The poodle growled once, then pounced. It was a beautiful leap, and it should have landed him squarely on the hand. But the silvery leash suddenly went tight, stopping him in midair. With a crash, the poodle landed flat on his back a few feet short of the hand, which took the opportunity to make a break for it, scuttling out of sight around a corner. A bare half second later, the gray man entered the scene through a gate in the other direction. He held a bit of the silvery cord.
    “I’d untangle my hand if I wanted to keep it, Loki,” said the gray man.
    “You’re not going to send him back again, are you?” asked the man on the ground, though he was already unwrapping the cord from his wrist.
    Loki? Damn it, why was that name familiar?
    “Of course I’m going to send him back. That’s the whole point of binding the wolf in the first place—keeping him tied up.”
    What wolf? All I saw was a very unhappy-looking upside-down poodle.
    “But he gets so hungry for company,” said Loki, sounding genuinely sad.
    “And you’re his father, and you love him so much you can’t bear to see him that way. I know this song and dance by heart. You’re the prince of lies, Loki. Your mouth moves, but any truth that falls out does so by accident. I’ll listen to none of it. Good-bye, Fenris.”
    Fenris? Loki? I’d run across those names in a class or something, back when Lachesis had sent me to a human university. Something mythological. Norse gods? Yeah, that was it. There was just one problem: according to everything I knew about the way the multiverse worked, there were no Norse gods. They didn’t exist. Unlike Zeus and the rest of my extended family, the Norse pantheon was an enormous and elaborate falsehood, which was why I’d paid so little attention to the topic when it came up in class.
    The gray man started to snap the fingers of his right hand, only instead of the sharp “cracks” I expected, the movement produced a series of “booms” like drums, and not just one or two, but dozens, an entire orchestral drum section. The out-of-proportion complexity of it reminded me of the self-harmonizing spell-whistles used by some of the true gods and the most powerful magical computers. Magic far beyond the reach of lesser powers—me, for example.
    If the drumming had an equivalent effect, the gray man was actually a gray god. One I didn’t recognize. Since I’m related to pretty much all the gods there are, it lent weight to the idea of a viable Norse mythos. Which in turn meant something was very, very wrong with the multiverse. That, or my education about it.
    The gray god finished his snapping. In response, the dog’s leash started retracting. It dragged the resigned-looking dog backwards across the ground, picking up speed as it went and moving steadily faster and faster until both leash and dog vanished across the drawbridge.
    Loki had regained his feet by then. Patting himself once, he magically removed the dust from his clothes.
    “You didn’t need to play it so harsh, Odin. You’re ham-handed. You know that, right? I could have sent him back to his island prison with no more than a whisper in his ear.”
    Odin? Really? The king of the Norse gods? Where am