Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2

by Loren Coleman

  Ehmish had his eye on a thick, felt blanket, to replace the threadbare woolen spread he’d brought from Callaugh Glen.

  “Make yourself useful somewhere else then.” Waving him aside, Desa pointed at Gard Foehammer, who stood off by himself, staring up into the dark sky. Into the rain. “See what Gard needs.”

  Well, what he needed was a dry cloak and some meat in his stomach. Not that anyone asked. And not that he would complain. Ehmish knew he should have simply found more work. It surprised him every time, that cleanup after battle took so much longer, and felt so much more desperate, than the actual fighting.

  Scavenging among the dead for useful weapons, for food. Seeing to the wounded.

  Counting up what the pack had gained versus what it had lost.

  They had not lost Mogh, though the clansman had taken a Vanir arrow in the side. For that, they could all be thankful. Especially the dour Taurian. The broadleaf head, thick as a Nemedian silver piece and shaved to a dagger’s edge along one side, had stuck in deep near the bony jut of his hip.

  Bad enough to have dropped the Taurian, who had bloody scrapes up the right side of his face where he had struck the ground. Easy enough to pull out and bandage. Mogh would limp badly for several days, but it hardly compared to the near-fatal wound Ehmish had taken weeks earlier, which still pained him.

  The young Cimmerian felt sorry for Mogh not at all.

  All in all he felt he had handled himself with great experience. As a man should, who had four kills and had lived for several months now by his wit and his strength among such hard men and women. In fact, running forward with Kern Wolf-Eye and Daol and the others, listening to Frostpaw’s howls dying off behind them as the dire wolf abandoned its warnings, he had felt only a tightness across his chest. A shortness of breath. Maybe a twinge of pain beneath the twist of scar tissue that snaked along his side, but mostly just the tightness. Anticipation of the coming test.

  That was how he had chosen to look on his new life as one of Kern’s rogues. Youngest among those Ros-Crana’s people had dubbed the Men of the Wolves. Tests. The constant struggle all of them had chosen as a way of life.

  Cimmerians don’t fear death.

  He remembered his father saying that once. It felt like a lifetime ago. Before he had left behind clan and kin forever. Following the outcasts after Vanir raiders to avenge the death of his friend, and to help save Maev, Bear-slayer’s daughter.

  Cimmerians don’t fear death. They wrestle with it every day. And they win, by Crom. They win till the day they die.

  That was the strength Ehmish had seen in Kern Wolf-Eye. Cast out, Kern had returned to lend his arm and sword against the Vanir raiders. He had then chased after the Ymirish and to save Maev and Daol, Nahud’r and a handful of others, and instead of finally fleeing south to possible spring and safety, Kern had taken the battle to the Vanir raiders. To the Ymirish who led them.

  To Grimnir himself.

  Ehmish had started that journey as just one of the village youths. A child on the blade’s edge of becoming a man, having to live up to an impetuous decision. Or, simply, having to live. Learning what he could from the others in swordplay and tracking and hunting.

  Surviving.

  And he’d survived. Again. By fortune or skill, what mattered was that the warrior band had carried the battle and without a single life lost. A few nicks and cuts. An arrow wound that Desagrena had cauterized with the hot tip of a knife. A small price.

  Especially when compared to the darkness and pain Gard Foehammer must have suffered from the Ymirish’s dark sorceries. The young Gaud approached Cruaidh’s onetime protector carefully, still not completely at ease with the other man’s close brush with the unnatural power. Unsure how such a struggle would affect a man’s mind or heart.

  Gard stood out in the center on a flat expanse of unbroken black rock, just this side of a soft-edged, mounded ridge that separated the working clansmen and uneasy merchants from the open rock flow pool. The same pool which, if Reave was to be believed, Kern had created when he lifted a Vanir overhead and hurled the raider down onto the brittle ledge that covered it.

  Not that Ehmish called Reave a liar. You didn’t do that to such a warrior. And you didn’t doubt Kern Wolf-Eye’s feats.

  But he wondered . . .

  “You have a question?” Gard Foehammer asked, interrupting his cautious approach.

  Ehmish stuttered his next step, toe digging carelessly into gravel and scattering it in a sharp clatter. “Nay. But I was asked to check on you.”

  He remembered the proud warrior from when the band had met him in Cruaidh. Tall and powerful, and confident. Accepting Kern Wolf-Eye and the others as warriors, but never backing off from a position of strength. Now, Gard Foehammer waited for . . . something. Staring up into the sky, and the rain, where Ehmish only saw the glint of falling drops reflecting back the glow of open rock flow. That, and blackness beyond.

  “I am fine, Ehmish. I enjoy what small glimpse of the rain I have now. It is something I never thought to see again.”

  It was hard to imagine missing the sight of rain. Rain led to cold, wet nights and tight muscles come the morning’s hike. “Then you are healed?”

  Gard looked over and down. It was the first time Ehmish had seen the other warrior without the bandages over his eyes. Covering the white blister scars that had burned away part of one eyebrow and puckered flesh around his eyes like pox scars. Gard’s eyes were both so completely blood-shot that they looked red and swollen.

  He remembered the oily mist that had risen out of the fog that morning, hovering before the Ymirish sorcerer like a living thing. Dark tendrils had lashed out at men and women, burning them across their faces, driving them into madness and—quickly—death. Gard had reacted faster than most, throwing himself aside and saving his life. And his vision. Mostly.

  “I am healing,” the Cruaidhi said. “That is what matters to me. You are a blur, Ehmish, but one I recognize. And I could see well enough today to fight. So I continue.”

  “That is what matters to you? To continue?”

  Gard shrugged. Turned his unblinking gaze back into the rain. “What matters to you, Ehmish?”

  He liked the way Gard Foehammer used his name. An equal. Though because Ehmish had risen in his regard, or Gard had fallen so low?

  “Killing Vanir,” he finally said. What more was there? What more could there be anymore?

  “And Wolf-Eye?” Gard asked. “What do you think matters to Kern?”

  “Killing Grimnir.”

  That one was easy. Though even as he said it, he wondered. Did Kern still think about the home and clan they’d all lost? About Maev, Bear-slayer’s daughter? Ehmish had seen her come to Kern’s bedroll one night, after her rescue. In gratitude, he assumed. Or in defiance of Cul Chieftain who had certainly planned to take her as his wife and had not come for her. And while Ehmish had known a moment of childish jealousy over Maev, he had never thought less of either her or Kern for stealing that one moment—at least the one—for themselves.

  Did Kern still wonder about her?

  If so, their wolf-eyed leader had hardly given any sign of that. He’d hardly shown much more in the last few weeks than a single-minded pursuit of the Vanir who continued to raid and rape Cimmeria. But at last they were looking back toward the valley, and home.

  What was Kern thinking?

  Whatever it was, Ehmish trusted their leader to tell him when he needed to know. One more thing he felt he owed.

  As a man.

  SENDING THE BOY after him had been smart. Though Gard doubted that Desagrena or Kern or whoever had done so had intended it as anything more than a way to run Ehmish off. To keep him from underfoot.

  How would they have known? None of them had ever met Alaric Chieftain’s-Son. Couldn’t know how close Ehmish resembled Sláine Longtooth’s boy—one of Gard’s best warriors when he’d been Cruaidh’s protector.

  In his first life.

  Such an idea would not
have gone well around an evening campfire. It didn’t sit well with Gard now, for that matter. Cimmerians learned from a young age that Crom had done his part by gifting the men and women with incredible strength and a powerful will to meet any and all challenges cast upon them. Crom had even wrestled with the other gods in the before-time. With Ymir, the frost-giant god of the northerners, who had wanted to promote the Nordheimers over the Cimmerians.

  Because of Crom’s victory, the Vanir and Aesir people had been banished north of the Eiglophians, and the Cimmerians’ god had been able to leave behind the troubles of mortals. Grimnir the Terror, with the blood of Ymir running through his veins, might think to rekindle that ancient fight. But Gard Foehammer and his kinsmen would always find the strength to stand against such a creature.

  Crom had done his part. Now it was time for all right-blooded Cimmerians to do theirs.

  But then, where did that leave a man like Kern? A son of Ymir and Crom. Outsider to both Nordheim and Cimmeria and certainly scorned by both gods as well. Did he make his own path?

  That was what Gard had thought back in Cruaidh. There, he’d given the wolf-eyed warrior the benefit of his doubt. And the man hunted Vanir, fought Ymirish—how could Gard have thought less of him? Then again, that was the life when he had respected Sláine Longtooth. The life that had existed before he should have died on the battlefield above Broken Leg Glen.

  “Then you are fine?” Ehmish asked.

  Having lapsed into silence for so long, standing so still, like Daol or one of the other hunters who had so trained themselves not to disturb their surroundings, that Gard had forgotten him.

  Or, Gard had simply grown too accustomed to his blindness. Now the outside world did not register unless it directly threatened him. Which was why he watched the rain, beginning to drift back into scattered squalls. Caught the glimpses by the reddish-orange glow of the fresh rock flow. Tried to make out each red-gray blur before he lost it again in the smothering dark.

  “I might be,” he said. Turning his back on Ehmish, he left the young man with his question unanswered as he went in search of Kern Wolf-Eye.

  Near a slaughter pit, where Brig Tall-Wood and Hydallan had butchered two of the wounded horses. The place rank of death and blood. Pieces of hide, scraped clean, had been set aside for possible salt-curing. Large hanks of the horseflesh had already been wrapped in oilskins for tomorrow’s meals.

  The men gathered around two of the merchant’s flaming brands, which were able to ignore the rain as they dripped bits of oily fire. Kern argued with the head merchant and the caravan’s chief of guards. The southlanders were still trying to convince Kern to travel north again, helping secure their safe passage up to Callaugh and Conarch, where they would trade for blue iron before forcing the Pass of Blood to Cruaidh. A very usual spring trade route, Gard remembered.

  “We’re down twelve men,” the merchant, Tahmat, was saying as Gard joined the small knot of men and women. “Nearly as many horses. I need strong backs and steady blades to get my goods through safely.”

  A large, heavy man who wore padded leather armor beneath a voluminous brocaded robe of deep moss green. He was round in the middle, with short, thick legs and a second chin thickening his neck. Tahmat was certainly fat. He had also shown some skill with an arming sword and a great deal of hidden strength. One of those trapped in the caravan’s rearguard action, Ashul and Wallach Graybeard had already talked about how the caravan merchant had used the distraction of their arrival to lay hands on one of his attackers and bodily lifted him off the ground. Hurling him into the other raider.

  And the merchant was still alive after a running battle that had lasted most of a day. That was saying something as well.

  Tahmat’s Cimmerian carried a heavy accent, but was passable. “I make it worth your time,” he said, pressing his argument.

  Daol, Hydallan, and Ossian backed Kern, who stood with arms crossed over his thick chest and his frost ivory hair plastered back like a river otter’s fur. He was not the largest man in the group. Shorter than Ossian and not as broad as the Gunderman chief guardsman. And Kern was by far not the best warrior in the small band, though he held his own in most any fight. But he was obviously the leader the way others arranged themselves around him. Carrying himself like a chieftain, even if at times he looked uncomfortable under the burden.

  “We move south,” Kern said, shaking his head.

  Gard could tell it wasn’t the first time Kern had said it. He couldn’t make out the outcast leader’s eyes, but had to imagine their gold, lupine stare reflecting back the flickering torchlight. And the too-pale skin so odd next to the darker clansmen, soaking in the reddish torchlight until Kern’s countenance turned crimson.

  The men standing behind Kern drank from a silver flask no doubt provided by the merchant as a way to open negotiations. A custom in most southern lands, where supposedly treachery was harder against a man you had shared drink with. Gard no longer believed that. Any man could turn traitor. Even one he had known his entire life.

  “South!” The merchant spat to one side, rejecting the plan. “Nothing but shattered villages and a few Vanir race to catch up behind the main push. You think to exist off raiding the raiders? Yea? You’re dead or starving men in a week.”

  The tawny-haired Gunderman nodded. “Just unlucky, we was, caught by a Vanir camp. Listen to Tahmat. Good trade. Plenty men to kill.”

  The way the Gunderman ran a thick-callused thumb up the edge of his blade, you couldn’t be sure he wasn’t considering adding a few Cimmerians to the list. Gunderland and Cimmeria were rarely on good terms.

  But Gard had caught something in the merchant’s boast. A word hiding behind his thick, southlands accent. Something Kern had missed. He didn’t care anymore in which direction Kern Wolf-Eye led. Whom Kern chose to call an enemy so long as there was a use for his pike and his sword. What was left to a man when he was no longer useful? Abandoned. Cast out.

  That was one question.

  What was left of the Vanir camps that had moved south, though? That, suddenly, was the bigger question in Gard Foehammer’s mind.

  “Push?” he asked. “What push? We were told that raiders had struck as far to the south as Westermark and Gunderland, but nothing about an organized drive.”

  Tahmat looked puzzled. “What care?” He looked back at Kern. “Vanir closed off all trade routes north for too long. Then large host moves through week, two weeks, ago. I tell you. Many frost-haired ones. Like you. Some thin and dangerous, like spiders. Unnatural, them.” Sorcerers. “Others very, very large men. Collecting slaves and taking heads.”

  Kern had caught Gard’s urgency. “A war host?”

  That could only have been Grimnir, driven farther south than they had thought, then. Avoiding the Pass of Blood for the wild lands around Venarium.

  “Nordheim,” the Gunderman said. He rehomed his sword, slamming it into the sheath. “Vanir, mostly. Aesir, too. And the cold ones. A few villagers cry about a monster. But never see him.”

  A monster. That fit the giant-kin’s description. The great war leader who had sent—not led—one army over the Teeth. Traveling south to gather up more of his brethren. A larger army than he’d even had the first time, certainly. Like locusts, swarming and devouring and killing.

  “Where?” Kern asked. He stepped forward, laying a rawboned hand on Tahmat’s arm. The Gunderman slapped it away, and both Daol and Ossian stepped into the guard leader as if he’d threatened Kern with a dagger, their hands on hilts and blades half-drawn from sheaths.

  A dangerous moment. But the guardsman either knew better than to start a battle at these odds, or else received some kind of sign from Tahmat to let it go. He relaxed at once. But his smile showed large, sharp eyeteeth and could almost be called a snarl. And a challenge.

  “All trail sign I saw,” Tahmat said, “pointed north and east. Lots of men, moving hard. Traveling light. Cleared my trail after the Broken Leg Lands and the blue-iron mines. So only one pl
ace I see they could go—Wolf-Eye!”

  Grabbing the oil-burning torch out of the crack into which it had been shoved, Kern waved it overhead in great, sweeping arcs. The flames crackled and snarled, fanned to terrible brightness. Kern was already on the move. And Daol and Ossian and, Gard noticed, himself as well. They all followed as Kern led them, torch waving, for the pile of bedrolls, and collected weapons being sorted through by Garret Blackpatch and Wallach. Reave appeared with Desa, the two of them moving together like a pair of great wolves themselves, mated and perfectly matched. Ashul and Aodh gave answering shouts as they noticed the flaming brand and passed a quick call for the others.

  “Grab what we need, what we carry easily,” Kern ordered.

  Tahmat had chased after him and stood silent, as Garret and Wallach passed out a few fine blades and some of the better belts, shields, and scavenged food. Strom and Valerus also hurried over, leaving the third Aquilonian to hold their horses. Strom had obviously been a field warrior long enough to recognize a fast-breaking camp.

  “Now? It is nearly full dark. Where do you hope to reach so fast?”

  “Venarium,” Kern told him.

  Tahmat shook his head. “That is two days’ travel. Bad ground, even once you are off the rock flow.”

  Strom didn’t care as much about the time. But, “Hard on the horses, Wolf-Eye.”

  “Leave them,” Kern suggested.

  Gard had some idea of how valuable the trained mounts were to the southland warriors. Not many mounts could have stood up under a fast charge over such terrible ground as the black rock flow expanse. And Kern had made him responsible. For all of his fall from glory, there was still a measure of pride left.

  “They can’t just leave the horses, Kern.”

  “Leave them, sell them, or butcher them for food.” Kern tossed the flaming torch to Reave, who held it while Kern quickly tied a large hank of wrapped meat into his blanket, then wrapped the entire package in the felt mat he had taken from an early raid against the Vanir. A length of good rope tied each end of the roll. “Or follow at your best time. But we make use of the night.”