Edge of Destiny

by J. Robert King

  “Spirit of Wolf, guide my work.”

  A few of the armsmen tittered, but their laughter tumbled to silence as Eir brought the first blades out—a great axe in either hand. Both weapons began to rotate in slow, deadly circles above Eir’s head.

  Garm sat down to watch the show.

  These warriors had no idea what they had unleashed. Eir was no mere sculptor. That was no little prayer she’d spoken. It was an invocation, channeling the powers of the boreal forests to make her art.

  And they did.

  Out of that thunderhead of swinging steel, an axe dived down to shear away the bark from one edge of the bole. The other axe followed like a thunderstroke, stripping the opposite side. The blades rose again, spinning, and fell. The broad bole grew slender. Already, it was taking on the lines of the man.

  Sjord no longer posed, but gaped.

  Eir circled the fir bole, axes slicing down in rhythm, cleaving away all that was not Sjord Frostfist. Halfway through this ecstatic dance, the axes slid back into the belt, and the hatchets came out. They chopped at the form, flinging off chips and rounding the wood into the figure of the man.

  “Straighten up!” she reminded without stopping.

  Sjord jerked back into his noble pose.

  And just in time, for the daggers and chisels were out now, fitted to sleeves on her fingers that brought them to bear with intricate care on the wooden form. Now it was down to shavings, curled ribbons of wood cascading around the rough figure.

  “It’s me,” said Sjord breathlessly.

  And so it seemed, the bole taking the shape of the man.

  “Bear, guide my work.”

  And then it was not knives and chisels in her hands but living claws, long and sharp, sliding along every contour of the figure. And it was not the lashing brawn of a norn warrior beneath that apron but the ancient muscle of a grizzly. The artist had been transfigured in her art.

  Then she stepped back from the figure, the bear aura melting away. She was Eir Stegalkin once more, artist and warrior, slumping on a nearby bench and staring at what she had made.

  It was magnificent. The sculpture was the man—Sjord Frostfist in wood. Indeed, the man and the statue stared at each other with such unrelenting amazement that few could have told them apart.

  The swaying brothers began to chant, “Sjord! Sjord! Sjord! Sjord!” They hoisted the man who would lead them into doom.

  “Not me!” Sjord protested, laughing. “The statue! The statue!”

  The men lowered their friend to the ground and snatched up the carving. “Off to the market! Off to the market!” they cried joyously. “Sjord will stand forever in the market!”

  “And nowhere else,” Eir murmured as Garm loped up beside her. She was spent. These ecstatic moments of creation always left her drained. She looked down at Garm and said bitterly, “He can’t save us. He can’t even save himself.”

  That night, Eir couldn’t sleep. Garm had seen many such nights. The spinning in the bed, the pacing, the muttering, the sketching. She was imagining something, conceiving it as other women conceived children.

  Garm rose from his blanket and trotted over to the workbench and looked down at the page where she drew.

  It was an army of wood and stone.

  For a week, she didn’t carve but only sketched in her workshop or paced through the courtyard or stared past the bridges that joined Hoelbrak to the Shiverpeaks all around. Garm had seen this look before. Eir was waiting for something. He knew by the way she sharpened her blades and oiled her bow.

  A fortnight later, as the cold sun descended into clouds, the sentries of Hoelbrak began to shout.

  “Invasion! Invasion! Icebrood!”

  Eir turned from a sketch and strode to the wall where her battle-gear hung. She dragged off her work tunic and strapped on a breastplate of bronze. She girded herself and threw on a cape of wool, strapped on boots, and slung a quiver charged with arrows. To these, she added also her carving belt.

  She looked to Garm and said, “Today, I carve Sjord Frostfist—again.” Lifting her great bow, Eir headed for the door. “Come.”

  Garm followed his alpha out into the courtyard, where the shout of sentries was joined by the thud of boots. Eir charged into the lane, Garm loping beside her. Bjorn the blacksmith spotted them and trotted from his smithy, iron armor clattering on his smoke-blackened figure. They passed the weaver’s workshop, and Silas emerged with short bow and shafts. Olin the jeweler and Soren the carpenter formed up with them as well. They were the crafters of the settlement, and Eir was their leader.

  “Some of these icebrood will seem to be norn,” she advised as they rushed down the lane toward the northern bridge, “but they’ll not be. They are newly turned, their minds stolen by the Dragonspawn. They’ll still have flesh and blood within their frozen husks, and killing them will be like killing our own kin.”

  Bjorn shook his head in anger. “We send our fools north, and the Dragonspawn sends its armies south.”

  “There are other, more deadly icebrood, too,” Eir reminded. “They’re mindless beasts of ice. There’s no reasoning with them. Only shattering them.”

  Beside her, Silas nodded. He was a thin norn in the twilight of his fighting days. “So, for the ones that look like norn, it’s arrows then, yes?” he asked, hoisting his short bow.

  “Yes. We must kill as many as possible on the tundra before they reach the forts, but if the horde is great, the battle will push past the forts and reach the bridges to the hunting hall.” She glanced at the rest of her militia. “Then there’ll be plenty of work for all of us.”

  There was no more time for words. The group ran onto a bridge that stretched from Hoelbrak out to the fields beyond. At the end of the bridge stood a wooden defense-work that already bristled with warriors, including Knut Whitebear and his handpicked warriors—the Wolfborn. More norn streamed in each moment.

  Eir led her group past the cluster of fighters to a thinly defended ridge and gazed out on the darkening northern fields. Mottled moss and torn lichen stretched to the misty distance, beneath towering mountains of ice.

  “I don’t see anything,” Silas said, squinting.

  “There,” Eir replied.

  Out of the mist emerged a brutal horde. A dozen appeared at first, no match for the hundred norn along the ridge. But more came with each moment. Soon the icebrood were as many as the defenders, and then twice their number.

  “Are they hardened yet or newly turned?” Silas asked. “My eyes are thick.”

  “Most look newly turned,” Eir said. Indeed, the enemy were covered with a thin crust of rime, though their eyes were dead things.

  “Arrows, then!” Silas said, hoisting his short bow and holding it somewhat shakily.

  “Yes, Silas,” replied Eir as she lifted two arrows and nocked them on her bow and drew back. “Wait until they reach the red lichen, so that you can see them and your bow can reach them.” With that, Eir let fly, and both shafts soared out above the ridge and climbed the sky, seeming to sail forever. They vanished in the darkling air, but a moment later, two of the distant figures fell, pinned to the ground. Even as they dropped, she loosed two more shafts, and as they skimmed the sky, she unleashed two more.

  Four down. Six. Eight. Then other archers began to fire. In their dozens, the icebrood were falling, but in their hundreds, the invaders bounded over the bodies and kept on coming. When they reached the red lichen, Silas shot his shaft, and it found its mark in the forehead of an ice-caked foe.

  “Not hardened yet!” Silas shouted. “Bring them down!”

  Now their foes were close enough to hear, and what a howling sound they made! They had been driven mad with the desire to serve their lord.

  Eir had already sent fivescore arrows, and she drew the last two from her quiver and buried them in a pair of icebrood. The rest crashed on the ridge like a tidal wave.

  “Wolf, guide my work,” Eir murmured. Her eyes glowed with battle and her hands glowed with ax
es. She swung them overhead in a storm of steel.

  An icebrood, newly turned, flung himself over the ridge and came down with a swinging axe. “Die!”

  Eir leaped back from the blade and brought her own around to split the creature from shoulder to hip.

  Another dead man leaped the ridge and bounded toward her.

  Her other axe fell and broke the man like bread.

  “Fall back!” Eir cried. “Give them room to land.”

  The crafters complied, stepping back while mauls and axes and swords rained down.

  Eir was in the midst, her knives and chisels now slung on her fingers. They flew as if she were carving wood instead of frozen flesh. They flayed skin and muscle from bone.

  Beside her, Garm leaped to latch onto throats and bring down more of the enemy.

  Bjorn meanwhile pounded the icebrood as if they were iron.

  Olin and Soren fought back-to-back, cudgel and pry bar wreaking havoc.

  Which left only Silas, the weaver, who had felled two of the creatures before they reached the ridge.

  Now two felled him. One ripped out his belly while the other smashed his face.

  Eir heard Silas’s scream and turned to ram her chisels into the back of Silas’s attacker. The steel sank to her fingertips, and red foam bubbled hot from the wounds. The rime-covered norn, gasping, rolled from Silas. Garm clamped onto the neck of the other icebrood and shook him like a rag.

  Eir looked down at the weaver, her old friend. It was too late. Silas was gone.

  Face and belly—he was gone.

  Eir roared, her blades flinging out to slash the throats of two more icebrood. They fell beside her as another came on—a man with hair like a horse’s tail.

  She knew this man, though his face was smashed, his nose canted to one side, his teeth gone where some great fist had struck him. His flesh was sealed in ice. His eyes were white, filled with the fury of the Dragonspawn.

  “Bear, guide my hands,” prayed Eir as she strode toward him.

  It was just as it had been back in the sunlit courtyard. It was a storm of steel, slicing away what was not Sjord Frostfist. As she worked, she became the Bear—transforming so that the work of chisels became the work of claws. The only difference, this time, was that she carved flesh instead of wood.

  Soon, the bloodied bear stepped back, and only pieces were on the ground before her.

  That’s how she fought the rest of the battle. That’s how she avenged Silas and defended Hoelbrak.

  When the battle was done, the defenders had prevailed. Even so, it seemed as if the Dragonspawn had won.

  Back in her workshop that night, the bloodied woman stripped away her armor. She poured steaming kettles into her bath and washed the battle away. Dressed in a simple tunic, she used the water to bathe her wolf as well.

  Wet and weary, Garm retreated to his blanket. He drifted into fitful sleep, haunted by the monsters he had fought.

  Eir, though, was haunted by something else. She wandered among her army of statues, at last reaching the one where she always stopped. It was an aged norn male, his once-proud figure stooped a bit, his head bald, his eyes enfolded in rings. But a hopeful smile was on his lips.

  “We stopped them, Father,” Eir said simply, looking down at the statue’s feet. “I wish others had stopped them for you.” Her hand strayed into his, carved of stone and cold. She had carved that hand, had known it so well from holding it just this way when she was a girl—before the icebrood came.

  “I’m going to kill the Dragonspawn, Father. I’m going to kill the Dragonspawn and the Elder Dragons themselves.”

  CAT AND MOUSE

  Logan Thackeray knelt beside a boulder and glanced back, motioning for the other scouts to vanish into the rubble field. They did. Logan smiled. With dun-colored leather armor, the scouts could move like ghosts through this blasted landscape. That was fortunate, since they were stalking a company of charr.

  Logan cupped a hand to his ear and made out the distant thunder of clawed feet. Brown eyes flashing with anticipation, he slid to his stomach and crawled out across a shelf of stone. Just ahead, the shelf dropped away. Logan crept to the edge and peered down.

  Below lay a deep, narrow canyon, a passage through this arm of the Blazeridge Mountains. About a mile to the east, the charr were on the march. They looked like beetles in their glinting black armor, scuttling along the base of the canyon.

  Up close, though, charr were huge. Five-hundred-pound brutes. Muscle and fur and fang. They had faces like lions and horns like bulls, barrel bodies and bowlegs, clawed hands and feet. Ravenous. They’d already stolen all of Ascalon—all except for Ebonhawke—and they were determined to take that fortress, as well. They were marching to intercept a supply caravan from Divinity’s Reach, but they hadn’t figured on Logan and his scouts.

  “Got to stop them.” The stone shelf underneath Logan was crisscrossed with fractures. “A little more weight, and this would shatter like an egg.” He glanced back up the boulder-strewn slope. “The right lever beneath the right stone at the right time . . .”

  This was exactly the kind of job Logan loved—moving fast, striking hard, vanishing. His brother would call him a mercenary, but Logan preferred leather armor to polished steel.

  Staying low, Logan drew back from the cliff’s edge and motioned for his team to follow. They picked their way up the boulder-strewn slope. At last, near the peak, Logan found what he sought—a great round stone poised on a lip above the rest and hidden from the canyon by a fir tree.

  In its shelter, he gathered his team. “Ready to strike a blow for humankind?”

  Twelve pairs of eyes returned a look of eager resolve.

  “We’ll need a lever—a sapling, stripped of branches. And we’ll need a fulcrum, flat on the bottom and angled on top. This stone, here, will start the rockslide.”

  “Close off the gap,” said Wescott, “before the charr can march through.”

  “Exactly. We’ve got little time. Wescott, take Perkins and Fielding and get us a lever. Bring the tree down quietly, out of sight from the canyon. Everlee, work with Dawson and Tippett to position the fulcrum. Castor, take the rest of them to scout an escape over that ridge to the west. When we bring this rockslide down, this hill will be swarming with charr.”

  “We’ve never faced charr,” said Everlee. “We’re not Vanguard or Seraph.”

  “Thank the gods you’re not. You’d be in a hundred pounds of plate mail.” Logan grinned. “No, we’re scouts—fast on our feet. Now, get going.”

  The young scouts went swiftly and silently.

  While his teams worked, Logan climbed to a lookout point. He surveyed the scene—the keystone boulder, the rockslide slope, the choke point that would soon become a wall, the canyon . . .

  From it rose a streaming banner of dust, kicked up by hundreds of claws on the march. Logan watched the ribbon of dust rise and stretch and coil, approaching the choke point. “Almost time.” He withdrew, rejoining his team beside the trigger stone.

  Already, they had a long bole poised atop a fulcrum, and the team had positioned themselves on either side of the lever.

  “Hold,” Logan said, lifting his hand. He peered down the slope to see the snake of dust approach the choke point. “Now!” The scouts heaved on the lever. It strained against the fulcrum, hoisting the great boulder. The huge rock creaked forward, tilted up on the lip of stone, and tottered. The scouts climbed onto the lever, and Logan put his hands on the rock: “Push, you sods!”

  The boulder teetered beyond the lip and began to roll. It bounced once against the slope and bashed another boulder. The second rock rumbled down as well. These two struck more, setting off a chain reaction. Giant rocks leaped into motion, and the hillside became a thundering herd of stone.

  The ground shook.

  Logan and his comrades stared in awe.

  The rockslide reached the cliff and poured over it, breaking loose more stone. Massive blocks hurled themselves into the canyon
and funneled in to fill the gap. Dust and debris plumed above the cleft while more boulders cascaded down. They piled atop the charr, forming an impassable wall. “We’ve done it!” Logan called to his team, pounding Wescott’s shoulder.

  The last of the stones tumbled down, and the roar of rock gave way to the roar of the legion—a sound of fury.

  Logan cringed. “Everyone, stay low and out of sight. Castor, take us over that ridge. And quickly!”

  The young woman nodded, turning to lead them down a dry wash, through a cut of trees, and to a narrow pass over the ridge. They left the roar of the charr legion in the valley behind them and gazed out on a rugged but silent wilderness.

  “Well done, everyone,” Logan said. “We bought the caravan a day, maybe. Might’ve even crushed some of the vermin. Still, some of the charr’ll track us, so we can’t go back to the caravan. We’ve got to lead them as far away as possible before the sun quits us.”

  Centurion Korrak Blacksnout led three hundred charr soldiers through the Blazeridge Gap. The centurion lifted his grizzled face, snorting dust from lionlike nostrils and sneezing. The scars that crisscrossed his dewlaps seized up as if his face might fall apart. The old creature blinked cloudy eyes and ran a claw over his horns, broken from hard campaigning. He growled, “Can’t wait to sink my claws into some fat human merchants.”

  “They say it’s the last caravan,” said Legionnaire Sever Sootclaw beside him. “They say Queen Jennah’s going to get the asura gate in Ebonhawke repaired. It’ll be a highway for troops.”

  “Let her try! We’ll turn our siege to storm and tear down the walls and the damned gate,” Blacksnout growled. “In the meantime, we’ve got to stop this caravan!”

  “Got to get through the pass, first,” muttered Rytlock Brimstone.

  Korrak shot a hateful look at him. The dark-furred Brimstone wasn’t even Iron Legion, just a Blood Legion cur who’d volunteered for this thankless duty. “What are you doing up here, Soldier Brimstone?” growled Korrak. “I sent you to the rear so I wouldn’t have to listen to you.”

  “I came up to warn you.”