by P. J. Fox
Take the bait and lose control, playing right into this man’s hands.
Beside him, Bjorn growled.
“Of course, were you to join us…return to us, really…she could be paroled into your care.” The man smiled slightly, the merest quirk of the lips. “We are a pragmatic sort, those who’ve sworn to Maeve. We’re prepared to overlook your penchant for torture, and whores. Indeed, your penchant for torture might actually prove useful. I understand that you’re quite skilled at…extracting confessions.”
At that moment, the only thing Hart wanted to extract was the man’s liver. A man who hadn’t yet given his own name, but who seemed to know a great deal about Hart. And he was keeping Hart talking…why was he keeping him talking?
Pausing now, Hart could hear the clash of steel on steel outside. Still. A din far louder than accounted for by his paltry band—or by the hundred or so defenders that he’d been promised.
“If I die this day,” he replied, “then I die. I am prepared to meet my God.”
He swept his sword up. The time for talk was over. “But if this room be the last thing I see, then it be the last thing you see also.”
A bleak sorrow weighted him down. The bleakest of bleak sorrows, a weight under which he could scarce move. He’d been charged with a task, and he had failed. Through overconfidence or sheer stupidity, he didn’t know. But he’d led his men into certain death, a fact which bothered him far more than his own demise.
He prepared to die.
Then Bjorn spoke for the first time. “How?”
Hart felt the world slow, an eternity stretching between each heartbeat.
“You know how.” The stranger’s tone was condescending.
“We’ve been betrayed.” It wasn’t a question. Bjorn’s tone was pitched low, his words laced with hate. He understood, in that moment, as Hart understood, what had happened.
And now they were here, in this accursed hut, with this man…it all seemed so surreal.
Almost from the first moment of their arrival in Molag, Hart had felt as though he were dreaming again. Caught in a nightmare from which he could not awake. Now he wondered if he hadn’t died in the passes and been sent to the underworld. Had he been here, facing this man, for ten minutes or ten thousand years?
“Silverbeard understands, as you should, that resistance is futile.”
But Hart wanted only for the man to stop stalling, so he could either die at his hands or kill him, and then join his brothers to die outside. He’d prefer to die outside, he thought, in the snow. Under the open expanse of steel gray winter sky. In sight of the mountains, which he so loved.
“I ask you once more: join us. Spare yourself, and me, this folly.”
“Fight me like a man.”
“If you die, you die for nothing.”
But if he lived, he’d live as a traitor. Hart could imagine no worse fate. Letting loose a cry, half of defiance and half of despair, he charged.
Freed of the snow, Hart’s footwork was sure and nimble. Far more lightly than his frame suggested, he pirouetted as he engaged the man. One foot behind the other, for balance, and to spring right as the opposing blade came scything down. Right, left, back, he danced the dance of death with this stranger. His own blade glinted in the low light as it moved, darting in and out with lightning quick movements like the viper for which he was named.
Capable of striking a distance equal to that of its length, the black death, as it was most commonly known, gave a picture of being lazy. It basked in the sun, warming itself, or slept curled up in an unassuming little ball. The snake was rarely more than three spans long, and near as slim as a garden snake. For which it was often mistaken, by fools.
The only mortal snake in the mountains, its bite caused death. Or, in the luckier cases, the mere loss of a limb. The snake’s venom, as Hart had learned from Callas, brought acute pain. Which was severe enough on its own that sufferers had been known to beg for death but was nothing in comparison to its later effect. Within hours, the flesh around the bite began to swell and discolor, turning the black of grave dirt. Until the flesh itself, before the next sunrise, became that of a corpse. A dead arm attached to a living man. And if the arm wasn’t removed, the pestilence would spread.
This was the name that Hart had earned: for the speed and precision of his sword, for his single-minded focus on his enemies. The black death was said to track its intended prey for leagues and leagues, waiting for the lesser creature to tire. Hart the forsaken. Hart the torturer. Hart the man alone.
Bjorn came at their opponent from behind, screaming a torrent of blind and hopeless rage.
The man was good. Very good. Hart was accounted a blade master and had been named such by Tristan, but hadn’t let himself grow stale. Too many did, continuing to believe themselves the best until they died at the hands of one barely trained.
Hart continually pitted himself against those who bested him: Brom, Callas, and even Tristan himself. Tristan’s skill with the sword was preternatural, and Hart had never seen better; it was as though master and blade were truly one. But this man…this man was good. As good as Hart himself. Perhaps as good as Callas.
Where was Callas?
Was it as the man said: that Callas was gone?
Hart couldn’t let himself believe. Couldn’t let himself be distracted. Pirouetting again, narrowly missing a downward strike, he thrust his own blade out. He and Bjorn together should have made quick work of this man, but he held them off. Hart’s brow was slick with sweat, his breath coming in labored gasps, but there wasn’t a mark on him.
He looked…almost bored.
Lord, came the silent prayer, help me now.
The din outside was growing, absorbing the longhouse. Absorbing the world. A maelstrom that would sweep them all into oblivion.
“It’s not too late,” the man taunted. “Join us.”
His blade swept up in an arc. Hart blocked it. There was a shriek of steel sliding on steel.
“Kill me, and die outside.” He parried Bjorn’s thrust, as easily as swatting a fly. “There can be no victory, this day. The rot goes deeper than you know…into the very bowels of the black keep you call home. The men you sup with…how many are sworn to Maeve?”
Traitors…within Caer Addanc? Such a thing was impossible. Tristan’s retainers were loyal.
And yet….
The thought made a horrible kind of sense.
But if there were traitors within their ranks, who would tell Tristan? Hart had complete faith in his master, and more than suspected that Tristan already knew. Could list each traitor by name, if such people even existed. And yet…what if he didn’t know? What if Tristan, like Hart, like Callas, like Bjorn fighting beside him, had been duped?
Who would remain alive to share this news?
Traitors within their ranks, one traitor who’d betrayed them into the hands of Maeve’s henchmen. Hart would live to revenge himself on Owen Silverbeard, or his shade would haunt the failed chief throughout this life and into the next. With a renewed strength born of rage, a rage more powerful than any he’d felt before, he attacked.
The man staggered back, stunned before the renewed onslaught.
With every sweep of the blade, every thrust, Hart gained another step. And another. And another. Even Bjorn stepped back, in awe. Hart felt a strange kind of laughter boiling up from deep inside and, as he let it forth, his lips pulled back in a rictus. He was as a man possessed, and possessed with one thing.
There was no talking now.
His opponent, having lost his appearance of cool, stared at Hart with open fear.
Hart struck.
It was over. The man fell to his knees as, with a thud, his head hit the ashes and rolled. Cutting free a piece of the man’s tunic, Hart cleaned his sword. He did so slowly, and with deliberation. He’d never even learned the man’s name. Nor who’d sent him.
Bjorn’s eyes were wide. “Truly brother,” he breathed, “you are a werewolf.”
Raising his gaze, Hart’s eyes on his were bleak.
Was Callas, his blood brother, gone? Hart had to believe that, had Callas died, he’d have known it. Have felt the phantom pain as the sword entered his own vitals. He and Callas…to call them friends mistook the point. Callas was his partner in all things. If they were to die, was he to be robbed of the chance to die alongside his partner? Fighting for the glory of the North?
To die for a principle was better than to die for nothing and if one had to die, then at least one deserved the solace of dying alongside one’s comrades. He didn’t want Callas to have died alone. Couldn’t believe that Callas was dead. And yet…and yet…where was he?
“I intend to take as many with me as possible.”
Bjorn absorbed this news in silence. Then, “I am proud to die beside you, brother.”
“And I you.”
He wished he’d been able to see Isla again. Perhaps, from the nether realm, there would be some means of passing a message to her. And Callas and…and he found himself, in that moment, thinking of a downturned gaze and a small but competent pair of hands.
“Then let them toast us in Hel!”
Together, they strode toward the door.
FIFTEEN
Bjorn threw the door wide, onto a scene from the underworld.
Hart’s adopted religion taught that death was a sexual embrace: between the dead man and the goddess who ruled the afterlife. Hel, of her eponymous kingdom, or in some sagas her nine daughters received him from life into her cold and lifeless body. Hart had never bedded a corpse and didn’t intend to start now, but thought almost anything might be better than what was now before him.
There had to be a thousand men, churning what had once been hard earth into blood-drenched mud. A thousand. A thousand thousand. He’d never seen anything the like. Had never imagined such a thing. Even the most vivid descriptions of Ullswater Ford had failed to capture the truth of pitched battle, he now knew: the blood, yes. But the sounds. The sounds. And the smell.
He could scarce tell friend from foe, scarce see beyond the wall of packed humanity in front of him. If humanity could even be a term rightly applied. He’d fought before, against groups of armed bandits two and threescore large. But this…this was the shore of Hel’s kingdom, a shore created from corpses where the water lapping against them was bile.
Indeed men fought on corpses, crushing their fallen brethren underfoot as though they were no more than shells. Underneath the din of clashing swords and men screaming and moaning in pain was a terrible crunching sound. Hart thought, in that moment, that he might be sick.
But then he had no time to think as the first sword hurtled toward him.
Bjorn, beside him, cut down his first opponent. In the longhouse, Bjorn had held back; there was little enough room for two men to maneuver, and Bjorn could scarcely engage their common opponent without cutting down Hart. But here, he was in his element. Calling on his gods to aid him, he set about with a vengeance. He was, Hart thought, like a whirlwind. A whirlwind of death.
Hart, doggedly, fought on.
He knew his own worth as a warrior but there were so many of them. So many. However many he cut down, more came on. A never-ending swarm that, try as he might, managed to get a few stings in. Hart felt them, felt the blood trickling down from his scalp. Down the inside of his leg. Along his flank. His forearm. His shoulder.
And he was growing tired.
Bjorn took his first direct hit.
Gasping, he took a step backward. Blood fountained from the open wound, a deep cleaving of the shoulder that gaped open. “Betrayers!” he gasped.
Bjorn took another hit, this time in the gut. The sword snaked out of nowhere, before Hart could intercept it. Bjorn’s entrails spilled from him, hissing in the snow, and yet still he fought. Hart struggled to reach him, forcing a path through the press of men with his sword before Bjorn was swallowed entirely.
Bjorn was still swinging about him, like a giant.
And then he toppled, and fell.
They’d neither of them made it a few strides from the longhouse.
Hart stepped in front of his fallen friend.
Their opponents pressed in.
He swung furiously, determined to keep them from Bjorn. He didn’t dare glance down, for fear of losing both their lives. Could Bjorn survive? He didn’t know. He’d seen men recover from worse. From injuries so horrific, so disfiguring, that they should have been fatal. But the Gods had spared them. For what purposes, only They knew.
All around him, chaos ruled. The stench of blood and guts and piss and shit was overpowering. Hart’s gorge rose as he swung and parried, now mechanically. He could no longer feel his arms. He thought not of the future, nor of the past, but only of one more swing. One more parry. One more swing. One more parry.
Swords cut him, but he didn’t feel it.
Men lay face down in the snow. Or moaned, clutching their innards to them. One held his severed arm like a child. Some were from the South, others Northmen. Did it matter? All men were the same, in death. Or so Hart had come to believe.
But the worst came from those still standing. Ragged bands of men, their tunics cut to rags and smeared with their own blood and filth, moved among the fallen like wraiths. One, a Southron by his coloring, stopped astride a man and, grabbing a fistful of his hair, yanked his head up. Then, as coolly as if he were slicing potatoes, he sliced the man’s nose from his face. The man howled. He was still alive.
All over the field, men were taking trophies: noses. Ears. Fingers. Eyes.
Hart saw another tribesman fall, his jaw sliced from his face.
And still he fought on.
He was hungry and tired, physically and emotionally drained. At some point, he’d passed the point of exhaustion. He didn’t remember when. There was no point in a man’s life when he thought, I know, I’ll go to war. No morning when he paused from his labors, surveyed his still fields and thought, I know, I’ll leave these to rot. Never did he imagine those same fields churned under a thousand feet, under a thousand pounds of piss and shit and entrails. Of his barn burned out, his home abandoned to the animals.
Only in the bards’ tales did men seek glory, or risk their lives for honor. In truth, men fought because they had to. In Ewesdale, Hart had fought brigands because there’d been no one else willing to bother. And accounted himself seasoned, idiot that he’d been.
A man was always alone in battle, even with his comrades beside him. Whatever cause joined his lot with theirs, his life was his own. And his death, too, he faced alone.
Hart had gone North for a chance: to matter. He’d discovered within himself in those final weeks before their departure for Barghast a side he hadn’t known existed, a side that had only grown on their journey north until by the night of his sister’s wedding it had consumed him entirely. He wasn’t the man who’d bedded Rose in the barn, he knew that. He’d never be that man again. Couldn’t be, even if he wanted to. He’d never laugh as he once had, never wile away the hours relaxing with his friends. Or the men he called such. He’d ceased to be Hart the lover, Hart the joker, and become the Viper.
A viper that was now cut and bleeding, surrounded by foxes.
He’d killed before, in hot blood and in cold. He’d tortured the man he’d ordered burned, not as a Chosen but as a guardsman. Tortured him for information and because he’d deserved to be tortured. The man had raped small children. Male and female both; they looked the same, when they were young.
But Hart didn’t consider himself a truly evil man. A man of circumstances, as all men were. A man who’d made what choices seemed best, for himself and those he loved.
He wondered who would protect Isla.
He saw the sword thrust before he felt it, a flash of reflected light.
He glanced down, and then up.
Into the eyes of the man who’d just killed him. An older man. Grizzled, with the scars of battle writ clear across his face. A survivor of Ullswater F
ord, perhaps. They existed.
Staggering, Hart tried to raise his sword and found that he couldn’t.
What…had happened?
He blinked, and the world swam.
There was—no pain but something. The strangest sensation. He blinked, and the world swam. The blade pulled free and he staggered again. Was night falling so soon? Minutes before, the sun had been bright. Too bright, the reflection off the snow stinging his eyes.
He blinked, and blinked again. He could see so very little. What had he…?
And then night fell.
SIXTEEN
Tristan moved silently through the forest, leaving no trace of his passing.
A modest magic, truly, but one that impressed the simple-minded. Men were, in his experience, mesmerized by those tricks, which seemed to manipulate the natural world: wind, fire, snow. Cause wind to rise, cause fire to light. Cause the crust of the snow to remain pristine. Party tricks, in simple point of fact. Things any hedge wizard could do. Convincing men to agree with each other; convincing men not to kill each other. Running a kingdom so that the market stalls remained full and the roads provided safe passage to them, this was true magic. Magic that all could learn, yet that interested few. Rare, indeed, was the man who cared one way or the other save that his own plate was full.
A grim smile twisted his lips, and was gone.
He was on another errand now, his position as duke temporarily forgotten.
Around him the fir boughs dipped low, laden with snow. Hares moved through the undergrowth, coming out into the open to feed now that night had fallen. In winter, this meant eating twigs, and the bark from trees. Sometimes the still-forming buds from flowers, which would otherwise bloom in the spring. Rarely, in cases of extreme desperation, they stole meat from baited traps.
Desperation…indeed. Tristan knew something of the feeling. He paused then as a lynx darted past him, kicking up the fine white powder. His cloak billowed briefly and settled.
Somewhere, a hare screamed.
