And, in other places, the rain splashed into unblinking eyes and pooled in the open mouths of corpses left to rot in the muck and mud.
Lodur kicked aside another body, this one with a leg bitten off at the hip. He splashed through a deep puddle. Already soaked to the bone, his frost blond hair matted and water dripping down through his thick beard, the Ymirish worried little for the wetness and less for its icy touch. He’d lived his entire life with the cold of winter in his bones, and not even the great white bear cloak draped over his shoulders could ward away that chill. A night’s discomfort meant little to any of his blood.
And the misery of any Vanir raiders meant even less.
Grimnir’s war host was large, still numbering over fivescore men and women. Most of them huddled with the camp dogs against the side of broken huts, seeking warmth and refuge beneath overhanging thatch. A few pitched canvas tents, or built hasty lean-tos with poles and bark from ruined huts. They slept fitfully, their night full of cold shivers and muttered curses. The strongest among them had fought for and claimed one of the dozen large huts left to the village, kindling fires that had finally banked down and now cast a dim, orange glow through shattered doorways.
Except for these glowing coals, the night’s darkness was near absolute. Thick, black storm clouds blocked out moon and stars. The rains had long since doused any attempt at night watch fires. Still, Lodur had no problem finding his way through the village. His golden, lupine eyes drew in every measure of light, every orange flicker. To him, the night was hardly worse than a gloomy twilight.
To him, the night was an ally.
Or would have been, were the night—and the war host—still his to command.
He approached the center of the village as he had every challenge placed in his path. Directly. Storming forward with steel at his side and a cold slab of ice in his chest, he climbed a narrow path that led up the side of a rocky upthrust, where two Vanir guarded the trailhead. Large men, even for the flame-haired warriors of Vanaheim, they were still half a head shorter and a good stone’s weight beneath Lodur’s own bearing. One reached out, as if to hold him.
He could have crushed them together for presuming to challenge one of the blood. Instead, he brushed by with a glare. “He calls me,” the Ymirish said.
That was enough for the guards. No one questioned a Ymirish who invoked his will. Just as no true Ymirish defied it. Ever. And if Lodur were marching on his death, now, finally, he’d meet it the same way as he had every battle.
Without fear. Without weakness.
The village lodge hall was not much larger than a good-sized hut, actually, though it had a strong roof and thick walls and good position atop the upthrust. The Tunog clansmen had thought to rally here, but abandoned it quickly on seeing the full strength of Grimnir’s war host come against them and the savage creatures summoned down from the upper, wild reaches of Ben Morgh. Yeti, almost as large and fearsome as Grimnir himself.
A few of the Tunog wounded, trapped inside, made one strong, final stand. Buying time for the others to escape, to flee across the mountain’s wide-ranging slopes while Grimnir’s yeti shrugged aside arrows as if they were mere splinters and pulled open the walls in several places.
Lodur had been among those who’d taken the Tunog heads, and later set them up on poles outside the ruined lodge house walls. Four men, one woman. All with high foreheads and faces painted with woad, both traits common among the mountainside clan that spread itself among several villages on and around the slopes of Ben Morgh.
He recalled his pleasure, striking that first head from a still-fighting enemy. The temporary flare of warmth as that thrill mixed with his rage, and he led a handful of flame-haired raiders through the ruined walls, into the dark interior to hack and pound and destroy. A warmth he had not felt since the attack on Clan Taur, that winter. A warmth that had fled, and been lost to him, when a certain victory had been snatched away by the Other. Corrupted blood.
Kern.
The name came to him in a whisper, as cold flame sparked behind his eyes. Yea, Lodur knew his enemy. His false brother. And stepping through a ruined hole in the large hut where a door had once been, he again knew the cold, frozen shame of his own failure. To not kill the traitor son of Ymir when he had the chance.
And now, look what he had wrought!
Grimnir waited within. The Great Terror. The Invulnerable. Descended from the First Born of frost-giants, half again as large as any man with a thick, mottled hide, eyes of pure, golden flame, and a savage fury no one could—no one should—stand against.
The hulking war leader took up a fourth of the large hut, slouched into a corner near a great carpet of snowy white fur. Old blood stained and crusted in the giant-kin’s long, ropy hair. The right side of his face was a mass of healing scars, twisting that edge of his mouth into a permanent snarl. He rested with a massive war axe across his lap. His golden eyes were clouded with pain and hatred and raw, directionless anger.
This was Lodur’s crime, as well as his punishment. To see the Great One fallen. Still healing from the winter assault against Clan Conarch, where Kern had stood against he-who-could-not-be-stood-against! Lodur had not been there. Had been sent away in disgrace. But he had heard how this Ymirish of corrupted blood had dragged Grimnir over the cliff’s edge, pulling the northern leader with him toward death.
Yet both survived. Kern, because he caught against a ledge only partway down the steep face. And Grimnir, who could not be killed by mortal means.
But the cost had been high for surviving. Seeing his war host in ruins. His body battered, broken, and needing time to heal. Only his wrath remained unblemished. And that was a terrible thing, indeed.
“Late,” Grimnir growled, in a voice that rumbled up like an earthquake ready to shake the world apart.
The snowy carpet at his feet shifted, and a head looked around with cold, devilish blue eyes and dagger-sharp teeth stained with blood. The saber-toothed cat stared at Lodur, growling, then lay back down but shifted to keep a single open eye on the newcomer.
The massive animal was not the only other occupant in the large hut. Two sorcerers attended the Great One. Two slender Ymirish who shared Lodur’s golden eyes and dead-frost hair and pale, waxy skin. Thinner than he, nearly emaciated in their visage, these men were former warriors who had been blessed with Ymir’s Call. Who had had opened to them the full strength of their blood. Their heritage.
Lodur once believed he would attain such power someday.
If Grimnir let him live, he still might.
“You ordered me to seek the survivors. Two were found hiding within the nearby trees. Another we dug out of a small cave.” Dug out, and quartered her for the effort it had taken, the time wasted. Her screams still echoed warmly in his ears.
“Others?” Grimnir asked.
Nothing for it but the truth. “Lost to the mountain, or the yeti. Scattered across the wide slopes or down into Conall Valley in search of other villages of the Tunog.”
And there were several. Ben Morgh was a massive rise, dwarfing the snowcapped peaks that ran a line north all the way to the Eiglophians. Hot and fire-scarred on the western side. Wooded canyons and hardscrabble all down the eastern and southern slopes. And a cold, white-blue cap that thrust above the clouds. Was it any wonder the Cimmerian referred to it as “Mount Crom?” A suitable throne for their absent god?
At least two clans claimed the wide spread of Ben Morgh’s lower slopes and much of the surrounding land as well. The Tunog were the largest, and most widespread, with no central stronghold to storm and destroy, it seemed.
“Many of them scattered up the slopes, as if thinking to hide from us above the high snow line. Or, there may be a strong point for them yet. I had no time to discover this. I felt your summons, Great One. I returned.”
One of the sorcerers laid a past-crusted bandage over Grimnir’s side, where the skin was mottled purple and black, and the bones beneath the skin looked shifted at odd angles. Br
oken? Setting poorly? Grimnir snarled at the man, who ignored the threat and bent to claw fingers into the bandage and flesh beneath.
Lodur waited for Grimnir to tear the man’s throat out with his own great teeth. Or for the saber-tooth to sink its massive fangs into the sorcerer’s side.
Neither happened. The cat remained watchful of Lodur, and Grimnir growled, a deep rumble that rolled around in his chest, but did not move for the pain. The sorcerer grimaced, bent to his task. Lodur could not see the change, but he felt it. Sparks of pain lighting off behind his eyes and a violet wash of energy that all but flooded his vision for a moment. Something beyond the dark that waited when he shut his lids. Formless. Powerful. And, it seemed, pouring from the sorcerer and into Grimnir’s wounds.
His vision swam, as it seemed for the moment as if he might actually pass over with faint. But then the anger returned. The rage he had come to know again in the brief but bloody assault on the village, which could warm a Ymirish and sustain him through the hell of a northern blizzard or on the most brutal of battlefields. Something more than bloodlust.
Something pure.
When he straightened up, he saw the one sorcerer reeling back from his efforts, exhausted, and the second staring straight at him. There was no derision, no judgment at all in his brethren’s eyes. Only cold, brutal calculation. And the bandage around Grimnir’s side was caked-on in a kind of partial cast. Cemented against flesh and broken bone. The paste hardened over in a kind of ivory-yellow crust.
The violet haze clung to the edges of Lodur’s vision. It wrapped around his brain like a wire mesh, cutting and compressing. Rising up in an ache that threatened to split open his head.
“What would you have of me?” he asked. Detesting any sense of weakness he might have shown, his voice was clipped and harsh.
Now Grimnir leaned forward into a crouch, his axe held up threateningly. The eyes blazed, golden and furious. He suddenly looked every measure healed and ready for battle, and his great cat snarled to sense the disturbance. Lodur could not tell if it was weakness that stayed his leader’s hand or the remembrance of the task at hand. But the giant-kin relented, dropping his weapon though the fury never left his eyes, his voice.
“Pick four fists good men and leave mountain. Now.” Grimnir spoke in broken Nordheimir, the flat-sounding language mangled by his powerful voice, pushed out with the force of an echo of thunder. “Take. Give to Magni.” Another of Lodur’s Ymirish brethren. “Then back to Venarium. Bring more.”
Twenty men to his brother. After which Lodur was ordered to collect more of the scattered Vanir raiders who flocked around the southwestern camp.
And where would the others go? North, at Cruaidh again? Across the valley, and up onto the Hoath Plateau? Where could Grimnir not roam at will, loose in Conall’s Valley with a horde of Vanir raiders? While Lodur was left behind, to live with his shame.
The insult was almost too much to bear. Almost.
“I serve, Great One.” They were the hardest words Lodur had ever had to utter, even into the bestial face of so magnificent a leader as Grimnir. They choked him and left behind a foul, flat taste. “Of course, I serve.”
But he could not take much more. His blood called for vengeance, and murder. The cold touch of winter that dredged deep down through his gut, and spiked slivers of ice in his bones even under the strongest sun, would not be denied much longer. He thirsted for the same release he’d found in the day’s assault. Now that he had been allowed to touch that heat again, he would not—could not—let it go for long. His shame at Taur notwithstanding, Lodur knew this. As he knew that Grimnir was nay fooled by the hard-spoken words.
The war leader knew how he felt. Just as Lodur had known he was summoned and that the sorcerers had been on edge this entire time, waiting for him to raise a hand to his master, upon which they would have killed him. That was part of the Ymirish blood as well. Was it not?
The terrifying leader grinned, showing savage, sharp teeth. And then rested back again, no longer worried for Lodur. He had the Ymirish man’s allegiance still, even balanced against that growing rage. Lodur did not begrudge this descendant of First Blood that knowledge. In fact, he reveled in the open secret.
He would return to Venarium. Eventually, he would. And he would bring back a final host, to hammer into Conall’s Valley like a sledge into soft wood. This he would do.
But he would not be sent away again.
By the blood of Ymir, he would not!
6
KERN DID NOT believe in omens. Even so, he kept one wary eye on the treacherous sky as his warriors prepared to depart Callaugh the next morning.
Dark thunderheads had rolled in over the night, socking in the Broken Leg Lands and piling up over Callaugh Glen like a blacksmith’s anvil ready to drop. A low rumble echoed down off the side of the Teeth like Crom’s own growl. Kern wrapped his gray wolf fur tight around his shoulders. There would be a hard rain come before the day was out. Cold and bitter as only a Cimmerian spring knew how to be.
Dour-faced Mogh stated it best. Tromping up with his gear already bundled into the heavy felt tent covering, two pieces of thick rope forming loops that he’d slung over both shoulders. New broadsword slapping against his thigh and a steaming oat flat cake stuck onto the end of his long dagger.
He spit to one side, then nodded at the black overcast.
“That’s about right,” he said.
Ossian laughed hard and chucked his fellow Taurin hard on the shoulder. Aodh and Ashul kicked out a nearby cooking fire, tossing the last few griddle-hot flat cakes to those who stood nearby. Kern caught one, dancing it on his open palm while it cooled enough to eat. Wallach Graybeard fumbled the other, trying to catch with both hands when he only had the one now.
Kern watched him recover the flat cake from the ground, brushing away the dirt and a few flecks of dead grass. The oldest veteran in the group, save Old Finn, Wallach had seen more raids and fought in more battles than any other two clansmen in Kern’s pack combined. In the battle against Grimnir, he’d lost his left hand to a battle-axe. Kern and four others had held him down while Desagrena cauterized the wound with a red-hot blade. The still-raw stump was now covered and capped with a circle of boiled leather.
His iron-gray hair was thin and scraggly on top but long enough on the sides to pull back into a twisted ponytail. His beard was thick and square-cut, and near fully gray, with only a few hints of black left to it. Often serving as the small band’s weapons master, Wallach carried his weight even with just the one hand—slinging a load beneath his right shoulder and a good-sized broadsword tied across his back.
Ready to move.
Kern bit into his flat cake, through a dark crust that tasted more of stale grease than anything. Watching and waiting. Not many from Clan Callaugh had bothered to turn out to see the valleymen off. A few warriors who had fought close alongside Kern and his pack. A few women who had lain close alongside Mogh, and Daol, and Brig Tall-Wood, bringing travel packs of dried beef and, in Daol’s case, a dark-honed dagger of blue iron.
Receiving a weapon from the young Callaugh woman was no small token as it was. But such an expensive blade flustered the younger man. He accepted it after a sidelong glance at his father. Then reached up to pull the woman’s left-side braid forward to cover her ear. Her blue eyes were afire with interest and strength, and she nodded. If she’d expected to be taken with the small warrior band, she showed no hint of disappointment. Content, apparently, with Daol’s gesture of affection and what amounted to a promise to return. When he could.
If he could.
A better parting than Kern had ever managed. Then again, what had passed briefly between him and Maev, Burok’s daughter, had been little more than her care for the future. Hadn’t it? At least for her? Better, she had said, that she not know for certain if any child was raider-get.
Maev had seen away her clan kin when the small band finally struck out from Taur. But no words passed between them. No promises. Sh
e’d refused to trade even the briefest of glances with Kern Wolf-Eye.
Not the send-off Kern would have wished for his friend. He wished Daol better luck in such pursuits.
“S’a nice blade,” was all Hydallan said, as his son returned to the gathering pack.
Ehmish limped up with Desagrena and Reave. Nahud’r gathered himself in a dark woolen cloak and, with an eye on the brooding skies, wrapped his head tightly in a long scarf. Desert-fashion.
Nodding, Daol tucked the sheathed blade into the wide leather strap belting his kilt. “It is,” he said.
Reave was not about to let it go at that. “Only fair,” the large man said, voice a deep rumble very much like the thunder that answered from the nearby mountains. “She must have thought the same about yours.” He grunted as the off-color remark earned him Desa’s elbow into his gut.
Daol glared at his friend, but said nothing more. Then he busied himself studying the wet, black cliff overhang, steaming as always with the hot spring runoff.
But not all of the few who gathered at the edge of the glen were content with curt nods or a stolen clench. Nahud’r saw them first, approaching from the far side of the village. Three men on horseback and another walking alongside with his hand on the flank of the lead beast. The Shemite nodded in their direction, his left hand always resting easily on the hilt of his long, curved scimitar.
Kern wolfed down the last of his oat cake, licked the grease from his fingers, knowing that such trail fare would be very common in the days ahead. Watched them approach. He had expected something. Though not this, exactly. Part of him had expected Ros-Crana herself to see them off, though apparently she had spoken all she’d had to say the night before. Instead, he waited as a blindfolded Gard Foehammer and the three Aquilonian horsemen approached.
All of them were outfitted for travel, with packs tied to the backs of their saddles, or, in Gard’s case, slung behind a shoulder. He also carried a spear-tipped pike, using the base as a walking staff just now.
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 6
