“Good doggy, good boy,” I said encouragingly. “Want a treat?” Garm halted, regarding the loaf of bread with flaming yellow eyes. I hurled it as far as I could. “There you go!”

And like that, Garm the hellhound took off after the bread, bounding into the dune grass, where a contented snuffling and munching sound arose.

“Well done,” Mikill said.

I dragged my arm over my forehead, wiping away anxious sweat and frost-giant residue. “What did I say last time, Mikill? Put the bread up front!”

He glanced at me. “Forgive me. I had forgotten the lack of stature that comes of human blood.”

I sighed. “Just drive.”

Mikill put the buggy in gear. “Keep your limbs well inside the vehicle during the descent.”

He wasn’t kidding.

I’ve never been to California, but I’ve seen pictures of giant redwoods with a hollow so big you could drive a car through it. Yggdrasil II was bigger. You could drive a car into it.

Which is exactly what we did.

The path to Niflheim spiraled downward and downward, hewn into the living wood inside the trunk of Yggdrasil II itself. How far down it went, I couldn’t say. Local legends say the town of Singapore settled deep beneath the sands during the earthquake of 1914. They don’t say how deep.

I kept my elbows tucked firmly at my sides, ignoring the curving wall of heartwood rushing past me inches from my face.

An icy mist arose from the distant realm below. The deeper we went, the colder it got. Mikill stopped dripping, his icicled hair and beard hardening with crackling sounds.

Shivering, I huddled under the fur coat.

At last we reached the bottom, emerging beneath a vast canopy of spreading roots tended to by the three Norns, who drew water in wooden buckets from a deep wellspring beneath the very center of the canopy and poured it lovingly over the massive, fibrous roots. One of them glanced at me as we passed, smiling. She looked like a kindly old grandmother, except her nails were long and curved like talons.

“Ma’am—” I began to call out to her, hoping for a little soothsaying as long as I was here.

Shaking her head, she laid a taloned finger against her lips.

The frost giant grunted and gassed the dune buggy. “They have no counsel for you, Daisy Johanssen.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “To undertake a hero’s quest, you must first become a hero. That is the way it is.”

See what I mean?

There’s not a lot to the buried town of Singapore, also known as Niflheim II or Little Niflheim, or, if you’re feeling really flippant safely aboveground in the daylight, Deadwood. Basically, it’s one road and a handful of buildings. Thanks to the stabilizing presence of Yggdrasil II’s root system, as well as the prodigious efforts of the duegars, or Old Norse dwarves, it’s . . . well, stable.