Days of Broken Oaths

by Matt Larkin

  They’d granted Hervor a chair before the throne. One for Starkad too, but he instead paced about the hall, inciting the warriors about the glory of the mission and the chance for plunder. Like as not, a good many of those who went might die. Maybe they’d all die. Then there wouldn’t be the least bit of plunder, nor anyone to tell the truth of their stories.

  A morbid thought, true, but the more Hervor heard of Win’s tales of Miklagard, the more she misliked the whole damn plan. Starkad intended to sail into port posing as merchants and their guards. The Miklagardian walls were said to be massive, so the port was the only approach, really .

  The locals would search the ship, of course. Meaning their crew had to bring cargo actually worth selling. Unfortunately, no one here seemed to know much of any real details about the city or its people. They’d be going in half-blind, nigh as she could tell. Didn’t bode well. None of this did.

  Still, she’d promised to help Höfund, and she wouldn’t break that promise. And if they managed to pull through, maybe she could get a promise out of him, too. Maybe he’d judge her when she told him about Orvar. Maybe he wouldn’t want to wed her anymore—hardly a loss there. But if he could help her put an end to the draug without Starkad finding out, it’d be worth it.

  “All Starkad Eightarms has said is true,” Win said, rising. “Ahead of us we may find glory fit to sate even an Ás. Though too, you must be prepared to gaze into the very gates of Hel before you see Valhalla.” He strode down beside Starkad. “Many of you have fought the Miklagardians. What lies ahead of us will not be like what you faced before. And still I ask you to stride forward, ready to meet the Aesir if that is your urd.”

  Hervor frowned. She’d almost met an Ás at Gylfi’s funeral. And Starkad didn’t seem overfond of the man. The more she saw of the world, the less sense it all made. Maybe all that mattered was carving out a piece for yourself. She’d do so, and damn the cost.

  Vebiorg shoved her way through the crowd almost as soon as Win finished speaking. “You know you need me.”

  Win stiffened. Didn’t like the shieldmaiden? Maybe he’d fucked her once or something. Either way, the woman seemed bold enough and had the build of someone used to swinging that axe hanging from her belt .

  Hervor rose from her seat and joined the others. “What makes you better than the rest?”

  Vebiorg cast a sneering glance back at the gathered throng of warriors. Those closest to her actually backed away a few steps. “I’m stronger, tougher, and faster than any man here.”

  Huh. Bold claim. But then, Hervor liked bold. “Does she speak true?”

  Win glanced at Hervor. “Vebiorg is … a varulf.”

  Oh, Odin’s stones. Varulfur in Skane had torn through Hervor’s crew there like they were sheep. She still had godsdamned nightmares about that night from time to time. It was all she could do to keep her face even.

  Starkad managed even less. “We don’t need varulfur.”

  “She does speak true,” Win said. Hervor had almost forgotten her original question.

  While she didn’t fancy having a varulf around, someone that strong, that fast … on their side. It could prove a boon. “How does a varulf come into the service of the king of Holmgard?”

  “Long story,” Vebiorg said. “Maybe I’ll tell you one day. Your best odds of success are with me, and you all know it. I can hunt. I can track. And I can kill Miklagardians better than anyone else.”

  Starkad took a step toward her. “Not better than anyone .”

  “She’s in,” Hervor said before Starkad could dismiss her. Varulfur might be the stuff skalds threw in tales to scare people, true, but their mission seemed dire enough without turning away those with superhuman abilities.

  A light rumble ran through the gathered throng, and someone else came shoving her way forward. A girl, maybe seventeen winters on her, though she had a scar across her cheek and her mail looked well-worn. “You can’t take her and not me!”

  Now Starkad actually rolled his eyes.

  “Leave the children at home,” another man said. He had dark hair and deeper skin, almost as deep as Afzal had. “If you’re going up against Miklagard, you need someone familiar with it. I grew up on those city streets.”

  A Miklagardian?

  “If that’s so,” Starkad said, “how are we to trust you?”

  The man smirked. “I never got aught from those streets save beatings and runny shits. Eventually I was shipped off to Kaunos and got caught in a raid. King Rollaugr took me—maybe the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  A woman had grabbed his arm and was trying to pull him back into the crowd. The Miklagardian pulled her forward instead. “I’m sure my wife will want to come too.”

  The woman, another shieldmaiden maybe, grimaced before offering a wan smile.

  A well-muscled man stepped forward. “Bunch of former slaves are hardly enough when things turn to troll shit. You need someone who can crack some skulls.”

  Hervor had to admit, the man looked like someone who could do just that, and probably enjoyed himself in the process.

  “Fine,” Starkad said to him. “You as well. That should be enough.”

  “Wait,” the young girl objected. “You haven’t even seen what I can do.”

  The big man scoffed.

  Then the girl kicked him in his stones. An instant later her fist cracked him on the ear. Hervor wouldn’t have thought a little thing like her could fell an oaf like that. But he just toppled over, one hand to his groin, the other to his no-doubt-ringing ear.

  “Yeah, you’re in,” Hervor said.

  Starkad turned on her, mouth open. Maybe he was going to object to her choosing the girl over the oaf. She silently dared him to say as much. But Starkad just shrugged.

  “What’s your name?” Hervor asked.

  “Afrid. Afrid the … uh … Well, I haven’t fastened a name yet, but don’t think I won’t!”

  Hervor quirked a smile. Had she herself been like that a few winters back? “Afrid Stonekicker.” A few chuckles from the crowd. “Welcome to the crew.”

  Maybe none of this was quite what Hervor had imagined when she’d agreed to come with Höfund. Maybe, but here they were, sitting in Rollaugr’s hall, while Höfund and Baruch—the Miklagardian—gathered supplies to leave in the morn.

  Four dogsleds, Starkad had said, two people to a sled. They’d have to go as far as they could toward Kaunos and get a ship there to carry them across the Black Sea. A long voyage, and not one she expected to go smoothly.

  “This is it, right?” she said.

  Starkad was fiddling with a brazier, but he looked up at her. “Huh?”

  “I mean, we do this job, get rich. Use the gold to rebuild Grandfather’s lands, or maybe buy a title from another king. Something. But no more of this afterward.”

  Starkad groaned. “You know … that’s not how it works with me. I cannot make any such promise, Hervor. No ma tter my intent, the wanderlust always comes back. Nor can I long seem to hold wealth.”

  “You don’t have to. I will.”

  “You know who I am. I never made the least secret of it.”

  “Well, you can still try to change. Grandfather has been asking me to stop the wanderings, to—”

  Starkad stood up abruptly, turned his back on her and stormed from the hall.

  Odin’s godsdamned stones. What would it take?

  “Waiting for him to wed you?” Fjolvor asked.

  Hervor started. She hadn’t even realized Baruch’s wife was in here. “It’s more complicated than that with us.”

  Fjolvor shrugged. “I married a freed Miklagardian slave. I get complicated.”

  “You don’t even really want to go, do you?”

  The other woman offered a fake smile. “Sometimes people do things they don’t want to in order to help the ones they love.”

  Didn’t Hervor know it.

  18

  M uch like draugar, vampires lost many of their superhuman abilities
in sunlight. Fortunately for Orvar, they countered this weakness by constructing a network of tunnels under Miklagard. Mostly, only vampire cast-offs lived down in the so-called undercity. Those fallen out of favor with the Patriarchs, perhaps scurrying to try any tactic to redeem themselves.

  Then, though, there remained some few human enclaves who operated with the sufferance of their vampire overlords by paying tribute in gold and perhaps, in blood. As with this faltering hovel of shanties clustered around a wide chamber beneath the markets. These people were thieves and beggars so wretched they could not even lurk in the alleys above ground.

  Perhaps they didn’t know what lurked down here. Perhaps they thought anywhere out of the open was better than being on the streets at night. A man with a pock-marked face wormed his way against the back wall, as if he might escape from the confines Orvar had trapped him in.

  Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance .

  “I will ask you one more time,” Orvar said, leaning close enough for the man to smell the rot coming off him, even over the stench of these tunnels. “Where do I find the foreigners?”

  “Don’t know shit, I told you.”

  “Ugh.” Orvar seized him by the throat with one hand, hefted him off the ground, and slammed him into the wall.

  The ugly man hung motionless for a moment, dazed, no doubt. Then began to wriggle in Orvar’s grasp as if he might be able to break it. In truth, the withered and underfed beggar couldn’t have gotten free even had Orvar been out in cursed daylight with merely the human strength of his own muscles. Here, in the darkness, the man might as well have been trying to push over a mammoth with his bare hands.

  Orvar tightened his grasp, ever so slightly. Enough to bruise the man’s throat without actually crushing his windpipe. Beggars and other undesirables knew a lot. That hardly mattered if they couldn’t speak.

  When he judged the man sufficiently cowed, he released him. The beggar slumped to the ground in a heap, gasping, choking, maybe even sobbing. Hard to be sure what the disgusting mix of guttural noises amounted to. Orvar had no sympathy for the fool’s pain. The living could not imagine the eternal agony of the damned. An endless torture abated in only the slightest by visiting suffering on those around them.

  Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance.

  “Tell me where to find the foreigners. North Realmers who came on a ship two days back, out of Kaunos. You either know where they are, know who does, or are useless to me. It would be unfortunate for us both if the third option is all we are left with.”

  The man gasped again. “Verniamin … ”

  “What?”

  “Verniamin. He sells information from the bath house on Merchant’s Street.”

  Orvar barred his teeth. “If I have to come back here, I will eat your foot and leave you to hobble through this filth. Assuming you survive.”

  The pock-marked man nodded hesitantly. “Verniamin.”

  The tunnels connected to the bath house, leading up into a basement where furnaces heated the waters. The workers down here—slaves, probably—studiously ignored his passage, trained, no doubt, to not meet the gaze of anyone coming up from the tunnels. One would assume that normally included only vampires.

  Orvar trod up the stairs and out of the back rooms into the main hall. Curtains blocked off several disparate pools, a few of which were lit by large windows. Other pools, mercifully located on the interior, were lit only by braziers.

  A slave bearing a jug passed by, a naked girl of maybe fifteen winters. Orvar snared her elbow.

  She uttered a yelp of surprise, quickly stifled, and stared at her feet.

  “Where do I find Verniamin?”

  At that, the girl started to look up, apparently thought better of it, and pointed at one of the curtains. A pool in the middle of the hall. Excellent. Orvar released the slave and strode through the curtain.

  A half dozen naked men and women lounged waist-deep in the pool. One man leaned against the side of the wall, a woman draped over his shoulder and whispering into his ears. He—and several others—looked up at Orvar’s entrance and sneered. Maybe at him coming in clad at all, much less in travel-worn clothes, or maybe at him being a foreigner. Hardly mattered, really. Either way, their disdain only made this all the sweeter.

  Orvar kicked off his boots, then hopped in the pool without bothering to remove aught else. Mud from his trousers immediately spread around the waters.

  “What’re you doing?” one of the men demanded.

  Orvar looked to him. “Verniamin?”

  This one glanced at the man by the side of the pool, with the woman. That was who Orvar had figured, but best to be certain first.

  He snatched the closer man’s throat and drove him under the waters, holding him there while fixing his gaze on Verniamin. The woman next him shrieked and scrambled out of the pool. Another man and woman blundered gracelessly for the steps.

  Orvar ignored them. “I understand you have information.”

  “You’re one of them.”

  “Distant cousin. I’m going to ask you a question now. You’re going to tell me the truth. And then I’m going to leave. If any step in this process does not go as I have laid out, you will find it unpleasant. Do you understand?”

  Verniamin nodded. “For fuck’s sake, let the man live.”

  Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance.

  Orvar had almost forgotten about the fool he was drowning. He jerked the man up from under the pool. The bastard was already still in his grasp. With a shrug, Orvar released him. “A group of North Realmers came in two days ago, on a ship from Kaunos. They stirred up trouble and then they vanished. So, tell me, peddler of information, where did they flee?”

  The man’s eyes widened a hair. “You mean those imbeciles who broke into Tanna’s tower. Word is they were grabbed in the undercity by … those seeking favor with another of the Patriarchs.”

  “Which Patriarch?”

  “Lord Nikolaos, according to rumor.”

  Orvar frowned. Did that mean Hervor was dead? What would this Nikolaos do with foreigners who tried to kill another lord? He hadn’t handed them over, that much Orvar was fair certain of.

  Not granting Verniamin another glance, Orvar left the pool.

  “Our society is complex,” Tanna said. “Built upon traditions left over from civilizations that turned to dust ages before the coming of the mists. From eras no one remembers, even among my kind. And from them, our customs have blossomed like a garden full of creepers, densely intertwined until we are all choking one another, unable to so much as move.”

  Orvar glowered, sitting upon one of the Patriarch’s lush couches in a hookah den beneath his palace. The couch wasn’t comfortable. Naught could ever make Orvar comfortable. His existence was made of pain. “Until an outsider like me comes along to hack away at the excess.”

  Plumes of smoke from the hookahs drifted around the vampire lord, though he seemed not the least affected by them. “Perhaps, but as I said, we are intertwined. Any such weeding must be done with utmost care, lest you harm growths we hold interest in.” The vampire too reclined on a couch, sipping from a goblet Orvar seriously doubted held wine. Crimson droplets dribbled down Tanna’s chin. “Nevertheless, an outsider might have his uses. Perhaps, when our mutual enemies are dead, you might find long-term employment in the society of your … hmm, kindred.”

  Orvar was fair certain Tanna had intended to say “betters.” Vampires might well have had more powers than draugar. They certainly seemed to find eternity less unbearable. But the idea of serving the decadent, self-important lord indefinitely tasted like ash. Indeed, it took studious effort to keep the disdain from his face. “We’ll discuss the future once the present has been attended to.”

  With the hand holding the goblet, Tanna pointed his index finger at Orvar. “You still plan like a mortal. Perhaps in time you will learn to machinate on a grander scale.”

  Keeping the sneer off his face was getting harder and harder. Orvar didn’t give a troll
’s shit about manipulating societies from the shadows or Miklagardian courtly intrigue. Or this decadent absurdity Tanna lived in. Beside the hookah den lay a massive harem with unclad women and girls from all over the world. Even if Orvar’s cock still worked, who the fuck needed forty different women? Did Tanna even know all their names? No, only one thing mattered to Orvar.

  Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance.

  Naught else could ever stand next to that all-consuming need. If he was finally sated … it was hard to even imagine that. “What does Nikolaos want with Hervor?”

  Tanna shrugged dismissively. “Perhaps he means to abet her attempt to assassinate me. ”

  “You don’t seem overly concerned about that.”

  “Whatever Nikolaos’s play, he wouldn’t dare strike against me himself. That leaves only mortals. Barely worth considering. Besides, I already have an agent among them. When they come, I’ll be waiting.”

  19

  I nnumerable books, scrolls, and loose parchments ringed the shelves of the vampire archives. A library unlike aught Starkad had ever seen. Presumably, Arete had brought him here to try to impress him. Since Starkad couldn’t read, the effect might have been somewhat less than the vampire had hoped for.

  She ran her fingertips over the spines of several books in a row. “Some of these are written in languages so old no one living would even recognize them. Scribed in paper so ancient, we dare not open the volume for fear it would crumble to dust.”

  “What’s the point in a book no one can read?”

  “Because these preserve thousands of years of history, tradition. Not only of the vampire race, but of the race of man. Of truths about your own past that you cannot begin to imagine.”

  Starkad shrugged. “They don’t preserve aught. If no one can look at them without destroying them, the history is still just as lost.”