I pointed. Southward, well behind the advancing Jotun army, rose a crest. Upon it was a small group of clustered objects that gleamed in the last rays of the half-obscured Sun.
"Aye, I see," Odin said in his deep voice. "Loki prepares to loose his lightnings upon us, as we feared."
The Aesir king began to manipulate the enigmatic controls of his big spherical generator, to throw up a defensive screen. The wind was moaning around us with increasing force as the darkness spread rapidly across the sky. The gloom seemed to boil up visibly from the distant crest where Loki had his storm-cones, and from which he was spraying a terrific electric field to unlock the tempest.
Down in the sea beyond the cliffs, the dark waves were churning ever higher. They and the shrieking winds were wildly tossing the Jotun and Aesir ships that maneuvered swiftly for battle.
Crash!
Out of the night-black sky, a blazing flash of white lightning had struck amid our massed footmen. It left a heap of scorched dead. On its heels came another blinding bolt that blasted three horsemen.
"Lord Odin, Loki's lightnings begin to slay my men!" roared Heimdall from the right wing. "Let us charge them!"
"Wait!" Odin called, undismayed.
At the same time, the spherical copper generator began to throb with power. The radioactive matter in it, which Thor and I had procured with such risk from deep Muspelheim, was breaking down into pure power. The energy was being transformed into a radiant shell of power that was broadcast from the smaller copper ball atop the generator.
Up into the storm-nighted sky, Odin's mechanism flung a great halo of glowing light. The halo that tented our forces stopped the blazing lightning-bolts that had begun to decimate us! Those blinding flashes hit the halo and splashed harmlessly upon it.