Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  “Njr, Grarnir kann njek kalt,” another says. “Fer ragnver en la.” I dust snow off my shoulder.

  Cold, Gray Fox?

  Nah, Gray Fox can’t get cold. God fire burns inside him.

  I’m a walking, talking totem of invulnerability. A spirit warrior. Proof of the existence of gods. Only Ozgard knows I was under major psychotropic influence during the mine heist. The Obsidians either don’t know or don’t care that the hunterkillers didn’t fire on me because I had Gray DNA and held a mop. I wasn’t touched by the gods. I just wasn’t a threat, according to their software. All they know is that when Sefi and Valdir caught up, I stood amongst the enemy howling like an ice-veined banshee.

  Sefi and Valdir hit like the hammer of god five seconds after I landed. Can’t rid myself of the sight of armored Obsidians hacking at tripod robots, or how their meat smelled as the robot lasers cleaved through five braves at a time.

  Thirty-five thousand Obsidian crack troops died cleaning out the hunterkillers in the mines of Cimmeria. And me? Not a bloody scratch. Ozgard got me drunk for three solid days. Pax stood in amused silence when he saw me being carried on the shoulders of Valkyrie. Electra literally almost died laughing when I told them what’s what afterward in my rooms in Olympia. I thought she’d be jealous. But she thinks it’s the funniest thing she’s ever bloody heard, though the mop jokes are rather overdone. Now she actually talks to me without looking like she wants to cut my balls off.

  That’s all it took?

  Freihild and the skuggi are drunk with valor for their part in taking the mines. Several of the females have even been given the honor of taking part in the hunt. The men stand on the ledge with me, Valdir, and the highest-ranking male jarls, tribal leaders. They were no less brave in battle, and they know it. It has always been this way, but that doesn’t mean they like it.

  Sefi and Pax peer off a ledge not twenty meters away amongst a long pack of Valkyrie hunters. The furs they wear are crusted in a shell of ice from days of tracking. It crackles when they move, and twinkles when light from the shoulder lamps of the mechanized guards catches in the gloom.

  For six days the Valkyrie have stalked their prey. While Electra accompanied Freihild on the stalking expedition to the White Shards, Pax accompanied Sefi to find scale-trace at the Sundered Peaks. The know-it-all could tell you the molecular structure of Obsidian arrowheads, but couldn’t have cared less the day of their departure. The boy misses his mother.

  Apparently Sefi knows something about children. It is difficult to hold on to grief after six days of whiteout conditions, frostbite, saddle sores, and sleeping in seal-hide lean-tos. Pax knows how lucky he is to sit in the saddle behind her. Of the Obsidian braves, not even Valdir ever has mounted a griffin for a hunt. Pax’s melancholy has been replaced by intense focus.

  His head snaps back when a high-pitched whistle echoes across the glacial valley, several notes higher than the screaming wind. Xenophon, wrapped to his nose in thermal gear, explains to the political guests I ferried on the Snowball: Freihild is in motion. The chasers are out. The beast is flushed from its alpine cavern.

  The killwing waits. Sefi waits.

  The snow settles on her shoulders and bone helmet. She looks like a god of winter, a permanent and unyielding feature of the mountain.

  A second whistle trills.

  The younger Valkyrie look to her in expectation. The older hunters know the Queen’s patience and stay motionless. The guests murmur in excitement.

  A third whistle sounds, impatient, urging her forward. Sefi resists. Pax shoots her a glance. Seconds tick past. And then Sefi raises a clenched fist.

  “Sljr,” she whispers, jumping off the ledge. A horn moans.

  “Sljr. Sljr. Sljr,” shout the Valkyrie, and fifty women slip over the edge. Pax goes with.

  “Hunt,” Xenophon parrots.

  The Valkyrie disappear and a moment later a series of screams rises from the other side of the ridge. Sefi’s pale steed bursts off the ledge beneath. Pax rides in the archer’s saddle behind her, not out of place or afraid like I thought he’d be.

  A rush of air forces snow into my mouth as several griffin banking overhead dislodge snowdrifts above. Two Red allies stumble into each other, laughing and marveling at the mounted Valkyrie careening down into the valley keening death. Bare-armed in the cold, Valdir steps forward and watches with a practiced eye, and a purity of awe, love, and jealousy. Anyone could see how much he wishes to fly upon the beasts of his people. I don’t like the man. He’s a closed book. But I feel for him. No longer a slave of Grimmus, but still not quite free.

  “Your first hunt?” Xenophon asks me, taking a pause from the narration so the onlookers can collect themselves.

  I nod. “Not yours, it seems.”

  “My third. During the war, Her Majesty would return when she could to honor the sundeath. I believe she feared she would forget who she was if she spent too long away from the Ice. I advised her against this hunt, however.”

  “Ozgard and Valdir seemed bullish enough.”

  “They would. It may invigorate the spirit of the shaman and satisfy Valdir’s expectations of a queen, but such considerations are specious for a modern head of state, given the unnecessary exposure to risk. Not to mention the details of state which pile up in her absence. I designed her government to function with a monarch. Without one, it functions at fifty percent efficiency, not that Valdir or the madman would care for such trivialities.” Xenophon looks around. “Have you seen the madman?”

  “He’s probably drunk in a cargo hold somewhere,” I say, growing annoyed. I want to watch the hunt.

  “It is a high probability.” The sexless mammal squints to the west as Valdir points and calls out to the others. “Ah, the drake. Excuse me.”

  I look west. Scales glint in the gloom, rippling low against the snowy boulders of the valley floor. The glint becomes a blur that becomes a leviathan of the ice. Though I know its ancestors were carved by mad Violets in conjunction with Yellow geneticists, the ice drake seems an ancient creature. Something older than we are.

  I realize I’ve forgotten to breathe.

  “This specimen is a black ice drake of the Níðhöggr strain—one of the rarest and most revered creatures in Obsidian mythology,” Xenophon explains to the guests. “ ‘He Who Strikes with Malice’ is said to be the bringer of winter. This one is an old bull, as can be divined by the nine lateral tusks and triple horn, which mark his decades. Of course, the hunting of sows is forbidden, and punishable by the Blood Eagle.”

  The guests whisper with awe, as if the creature were magical, and not thirty tons of lab-engineered death.

  Pursued by Freihild and her chasers, the bull tears through the mountain valley. Even at our distance, I feel a chill. The Obsidian guards watch in appreciation, Valdir in pure love. Few would have ever seen a drake in flight, or slipped into a lair to kill and drink the blood of a hatchling to begin the Way of Stains.

  The drake spots Sefi’s hunting band ahead and banks right, thinking to escape over the north side of the valley. Thunder crackles from the peaks. Obsidian youths, who summited the mountains with hooks and rope, light sulfur-based charges into their braziers, and launch them into the clouds with slings. Huge claps of sound frighten the dragon back and forth across the valley as it seeks some escape, only to be herded again and again by small explosions from surrounding peaks.

  Someone screams as it banks our way. Amidst the guards, skuggi light fuses on the brazier and hurl the clay bombs into the air. They laugh as the pots explode. Gudkind tosses me two. I light them and hurl them skyward. Boom. Booom.

  The rush of air from the drake’s wings nearly knocks me off my feet. It passes a stone’s throw from us. Debris and rocks the size of a man’s head are crusted in the ice along the wyrm’s belly. Attendants scatter, laughing in relief as it pinballs back down into the v
alley toward the Queen. Valdir rushes to the cliff’s edge to lean forward and watch. Scores follow him.

  Above a frozen alpine lake, an inverted V of Valkyrie hunters forms around the drake. Sefi waits at the far tip of the V to deliver the killing stroke. But as the first arrows from the Obsidians fly from their flanks, the drake uses an updraft to go into a precarious climb. It knocks two griffins from the air. Their riders flail from the saddles, but their safety ropes snap them back toward their tumbling steeds. One recovers. The other collides with a mountainside below as her griffin is bisected by the razor tips of the drake’s wings.

  The guests are horrified. Valdir touches his heart. A good death. His eyes search the chasers, young griffin riders with more spirit than experience, looking for Freihild, I reckon. My optics pick her up by the green plumes of her headdress. Electra sits in the archer saddle behind her, priming combustible arrows.

  Sefi blows a horn, and the griffin V inverts as the riders kick their griffins into motion. The beasts bank upside down and race beneath the drake as Freihild leads the chasers to follow it to the higher altitude. Huge sounds rattle the valley as they shoot arrows with combustible tips to herd it back down. The sound scares the dragon off its ascent, forcing it back toward Sefi’s re-formed V nearer the ground. The first of Sefi’s hunters begin to harry the drake, soaring past to hurl spears or shoot arrows into its side.

  Only Sefi continues flying away from it, pushing her griffin two hundred meters past the rest before she banks back around. Her wingsisters pull taut ropes connected to the spears and arrows embedded in the creases of the dragon’s scales. The first riders are jerked sideways by its mass, but soon more than twenty ropes are secured and together the skyhunters anchor the drake along its path toward their Queen.

  “The weakest scale is just beneath the dragon’s eyes,” Xenophon explains as I switch to long-range optics. “A difficult shot for even the most skilled archer. Skyhunters aid their daughters in crafting their first bow from godtree wood and the gut string of leopard seals. Only when the daughters are strong enough to draw this bow do they begin to practice marksmanship. Two more bows will they make before they fashion their skybow from the horn of a tanngrisnir goat. In her time, Sefi killed six ice drakes with her bow, named in honor of her father Promise of Pale Horse. The same bow which slew two Gold overlords of this province on the Day of Breaking.”

  Harnessed from the sides, the dragon continues its course toward Sefi, not yet noticing her. Two hundred meters, one hundred. Pax hands her the skybow from her saddle. It is twice as long as a man. She nocks a great arrow. “The drake will be slowing from the marrowfish venom in its veins,” Xenophon says, but the drake seems, if anything, even angrier. Sefi stands in her stirrups. The drake is at eighty meters. She draws back on the bow. And then…nothing. She seems to freeze. I zoom in with my hood’s optics. She draws back on the string again, and again stops halfway, unable to summon enough strength to draw the arrow back to her face, much less her ear.

  Xenophon has gone silent. Valdir stands. Something is wrong.

  The drake is fifty meters out, and sees only Sefi and Pax atop Godeater blocking his escape. Sefi’s given up trying to shoot, and veers Godeater swiftly down and to the left. The drake follows, lashing out with its wings and severing half the ropes, while hurling other skyhunters, including Freihild, through the air. Electra nearly falls from the saddle. Something’s gone terribly wrong. The drake closes on Pax and Sefi, extending its neck to impossible length. Its teeth snap off the back of their saddle, almost tearing Pax in half. Godeater slashes futilely against the hard scales. The drake coils its neck for another lunge when Freihild slashes past and buries a spear in its eye, just missing the sweet spot.

  She hurls herself from her griffin and lands on the dragon’s head, burying two climbing hooks, she is tossed sideways, almost losing her perch. The drake ignores her and bears down again on Sefi and Pax, trapping them against the valley’s side. Godeater scrambles along the sheer walls, unable to escape.

  I act without thinking. I rush to a stupefied brave and demand his rifle. “The creed forbids it!” a guard growls.

  “Fuck your creed.” I jerk at the rifle, but in his hardened grip, it goes nowhere.

  “Give him the rifle,” Valdir orders from behind me.

  Grudgingly, the guard surrenders it.

  Praying I’ve not run out of time, I rush past the gawking onlookers and fall prone, steadying the barrel on a divot in the rocks. Its energy pack whines as it charges up. The targeting computer is slow to start. I go analog. Thanks to the guard’s delay, I’ve lost time. The lights from the nearby shuttles reflect against the optic. They disappear. I glance sideways to see Valdir blocking them for me with his body. Not his first time as a spotter. For a moment, I think he won’t let me take the shot. I could hit Freihild, but he nods. “Wait for it to turn its head.”

  I peer back into the optic.

  Godeater has gone to ground, trapped by the drake on a rocky scree as the other Valkyrie fruitlessly try to regroup and bypass its razor wings. Only Freihild protects her Queen, stabbing in vain at the thick scales of the drake’s head, but her efforts dirty my shot.

  I sink into my breathing and try to forget Valdir looming over my shoulder as I settle the crosshairs on Freihild’s back. The dragon’s head is faced away. She blocks the shot. Move. MOVE. My hands shake from nerves. Her arms raise to plunge the spear into the back of the dragon’s neck. I wait for it to sink deep. It bites into the meat behind the ear slits. The drake whirs its face around, snapping at her. I aim two hands above her shoulder and squeeze.

  A beam of white light divides the gloom.

  * * *

  —

  A city forms around the downed drake on the frozen plain. It is called a drekinhaugr, a dragon mound. Tribeswomen and men of the Valkyrie Spires along with a great many of their allied tribes bring huge logs for the bonfire on sleds pulled by aurochs. Lesser shamans ferry vats of hard grog, berry liquor called azag, and sweet mead in leather gourds the size of bathtubs. Chanting and drums resound from a train of thousands as they flow into the valley to witness the last harvest of light.

  They chant Freihild’s name, and mine. Protectors of the Queen. The young skuggi sways over to where I stand with Pax and Xenophon in a great bear cloak and wraps me in a hug. “They sing of us, Grarnir! They sing of the glory of our arms! No sound is sweeter.”

  “Here I thought they’d pin me to a rock and splay open my ribs,” I say to Freihild.

  “A poacher’s gun is not a poacher’s heart,” she says, then draws close. “But I would have killed it on my own.” She sees me eye the cooked skin of her right shoulder. “Close shot. Close shot!” She saunters away laughing and shouting encouragement to the harvesters.

  “Did you know you would hit it?” Xenophon asks.

  “I knew I had a chance.”

  The White considers that. “And if you had killed her while Valdir stood over your shoulder?”

  “I doubt we’d be having this conversation.”

  “True enough. Now I believe I have had enough excitement for the day. I must return to my functions.”

  “See you at the party. First drink’s on me.”

  “I am not invited.” The White looks me up and down. “Your assimilation is not surprising. You display traits any martial culture would value. I, on the other hand, will always be an alien. Enjoy the sundeath. I am told its color composition can be quite moving to the warrior spirit.”

  The White sways away toward a flier to be taken back to the Echo of Ragnar, which Sefi disappeared inside as soon as it set down on a mesa overlooking the valley. The destroyer, more a mobile city of war than a ship, makes even the mountains look small.

  “That’s one sad human,” I say to Pax.

  “They’re not sad,” Pax murmurs, more focused on the harvesting than our blathering. “If
anything, they’re sad that they’re not sad.”

  I soon forget about Xenophon. The harvest is a sight.

  Young braves climb the dragon’s flank, wedging climbing hooks between the slippery scales to carve the most flavorful meat from the sides of the spine. Electra races several Obsidian youths up the side, and has them beat by ten meters when a dead scale sheaves off and she plummets back down the flank, hits the elbow of the dragon’s broken wing, ricochets, and plunges into a gaping incision made by harvesters. When she emerges covered with gore, the Obsidians whoop with laughter.

  Poised on the ridge of the dragon’s back, the crews use levers to dislodge the scales and long saws to butterfly the spine. Great hunks of meat are stacked in steaming piles atop a parade of sledges brought in ceremonial fashion by youths as the elders drink and call out capricious instructions.

  Pax whispers the destiny of each body part to me. The scales are for ceremonial rites and griffin battle armor. The joint fluid and eyes for poultices and elixirs. The blubber for candles and lamps and to be mixed with berries to make a dish called atuka. The liver and brain to be eaten frozen or raw, “obviously cooking would destroy the vitamin C.”

  “Obviously.”

  I poke his hip. “You’re not wearing your harness.”

  “We were hunting.”

  I slap his head. “I told you to always wear your harness.” The harness he made himself in his garage. “After all, I got a ship now.”

  “Which?” he asks.

  “The jade one.”

  He whistles. “Too good for you.”

  A group of skyhunters with pierced noses and tattered ears stomp over to me to give a sign of respect. The women look at Pax and cover their eyes in shame. He pretends not to care as he examines my ship in the distance.

  “Looks like you’re the fall man,” I say.

  “Naturally.”

  “What happened up there? Why could Sefi not draw her bow?”

  He focuses on the harvesting, pretending to not notice the scornful looks passing braves give him. “The cord has an immensely strong molecular composition, but can contract if not protected from the cold. I forgot to keep it in its heat sheath during the stalk.”