As they rushed forward toward the cliff-edge, I staggered after them. My head still ached from the shock of two swords clashing on my helmet. At the edge of the cliff was the narrow stairway, chiseled down the solid rock of the precipice to the fiord below. Two dead Aesir warriors who lay on the stair showed what had become of the guards. Thor started down the steps, but Frey's heart-stopping shout halted him.
"Look! We are too late!"
Out on the ocean, a ship was forging southward through the raging waves, its sail taut in the screaming winds. It was heading straight along the precipitous coast of Midgard. Swiftly it vanished beyond the cliffs.
"The Jotuns and Freya!" moaned Frey. "They have her and the rune key. Now they can loose dark Loki and bring destruction on Asgard!"
Thor shook his great hammer in terrible rage.
"Loki's work!" he roared savagely. "It was the arch-traitor who put the thought of that cunning ruse into the heads of the Jotuns, by his telepathic tricks."
"Are we just going to stand here?" I cried wildly. "They've got Freya, as well as the rune key."
It was Freya I was thinking of in that moment, rather than the key. Though the key might loose Loki and bring about the final attack on Asgard which the Aesir feared, that possibility was less dire to me than the threat to Freya. To have her snatched from my arms in this very hour when I had won her love! I felt a red fury that made me long to destroy every Jotun in payment for any harm they might do to the Viking maid I loved.
"We can overtake them if we're quick," said Frey. He swung around to the Aesir warriors who had come running from his castle. "Down to the harbor!"
At top speed, we ran down the narrow stairway in the cliff. Thor led, with Frey and me close behind the Hammerer, and a score or more of warriors following. The Moon shone out from behind the flying storm clouds. It lighted our way down the dizzy path that the Aesir had hewn to their harbor. The steps were no more than four feet wide, and there was no protective rail of any kind.