"Skoal to the Aesir! Skoal to the great race that is gone forever!"
Then his bearded face sagged to the floor in death.
I helped Freya to her feet and dragged her out of that scalding, steam-filled chamber. The Earth-shocks were becoming more violent with each moment. The crash of falling masonry was ominously loud.
"We can't stay here any longer!" I cried to her. "But if we can get to my plane, we can escape."
"Let me die here with my people," Freya moaned, her white face agonized. Abruptly her eyes cleared and she clasped my arm. "No, Jarl Keith. Even now I wish to live for you. But can we escape?"
I stumbled with her up through the shaking, grinding halls of Valhalla castle. The Jotuns had fled or been buried. The scene outside the castle was appalling. Storm still blackened the sky. Lightning flared and thunder roared, but all noises were drowned by the terrible grinding crash of the Earth-shocks.
The castles around the edge of Asgard were being shaken down into ruined masses of masonry. The Jotuns were fleeing wildly down toward their ships in the fiord.
I hastened with Freya toward Bifrost Bridge. A terrible roar beneath us heralded the new shock that flung us off our feet. From cracks splitting in the solid rock of Asgard, wild clouds of steam rushed up. There was a prolonged roar of falling stone. Freya cried out. I looked back just in time to see great Valhalla collapsing into flaming, tumbling ruin.
By this time we had reached Bifrost Bridge and were stumbling precariously across that corpse-littered, dizzy, trembling span. The rainbow bridge abruptly rocked beneath us, threatening to throw us into the crazily boiling sea far below. Some Jotuns were escaping ahead of us, paying no attention to us in their mad panic.
My plane suddenly loomed out of the stormy dusk. The Jotuns, in their fierce eagerness to get into Asgard, had not even molested it. I pulled Freya into the cabin. The rocket motor roared into life, and the plane rushed along the quaking field and lurched into the air. Upward we climbed, the ship bucking and rocking in the terrific currents.