“Jeep, four-wheel drive, all-terrain vehicle, whatever. I don’t have one, and it’s not a route I’d risk if I did. How else did you think we were going to get there?” I asked him. I might have been the only citizen in living memory to visit Pemkowet’s underworld, but everyone knew where it was, more or less. Yggdrasil II is the entrance, and it’s tough to miss a pine tree the size of a skyscraper jutting out of the sands that swallowed the old lumber town.

“I don’t know,” Lee admitted. “I imagined something less . . . prosaic.”

“Well, let’s see if we can get an invite,” I said.

He followed me back downstairs and into the park across from the alley, gathering the folds of his duster around him to sit opposite me on the grass. There was a hint of afterglow along the western horizon, but dusk was falling and there was a slight chill in the air warning that autumn was coming.

I set the iron casket between us and opened it, taking out the copper bowl and nestling it in the grass.

“What is that?” Lee asked.

“It’s a bowl,” I informed him, unwrapping the woolen packet and extracting a scaly chip of pine bark. There were seven of them, each about the size of my hand and densely inscribed with lines of runic script. Hel hadn’t given me any criteria for using them to contact her or any assurances that she would replace them if and when I’d used the last. I hesitated, second-guessing my decision.

“I can see it’s a bowl,” Lee said with irritation. He pointed at the pine bark. “What does it say?”

“I have no idea.” I wondered what Hel would do if she determined I’d wasted her time to satisfy the whim of a geeky gaming genius. Then again, my rationale was a valid one. If Hel disapproved of the idea of a database documenting the entire eldritch population, I’d better find out now. I’d already made a few promises regarding the significance of my as-yet-nonexistent ledger. It was probably best to stick with my initial decision.

“You don’t read futhark?” Lee asked in disbelief.

I scowled at him. “No, I don’t read futhark. What’s futhark?”

“Uh, it’s only the runic alphabet.” Clearly, he thought I was an idiot. “See here in the center?” He pointed again. “H-E-L. It’s written horizontally and vertically. Probably some kind of summoning locus.”

“Great,” I said. “What does the rest of it say?”

He pursed his lips. “I can’t tell. I’m afraid I don’t actually speak Old Norse.”

“Neither do I,” I said. “Except for a few words here and there that I’ve picked up along the way. So that sort of invalidates the purpose of learning to read futhark, doesn’t it?”