by Alex Sapegin
“Ler, yes, ler!”
They were a stone’s throw from the hills. The three dozen griffons still alive with their riders flew down to the ground and walked on the beasts through the arc. Timur watched his people and then carefully started landing. The rider was still in bad shape. He wasn’t able to get away quietly. The ground shook beneath them from a strong blast. Obscuring the rising sun, enormous flames rose into the sky. The air, which had become tight and heavy, threw the portal-building mages onto their backs; Timur and Pumpkin dove into the rippling teleport.
Tantre. Southern Rocky Ridge. Andy…
Andy snuggled up against a tree and laid his head against the rolled-up blanket, warmed by the sun. Today they didn’t go into the village either but stayed on a wide field near a pure mountain stream. Slaisa shot two grouses along the road and promised to cook a rich stew for dinner. Ilnyrgu had built a fire. A slight breeze blew the smoke towards the were-dragon. Stinging his eyes, it made him think of the gigantic flame of the funeral pyre built on the deck of the snekkja headed on its last voyage along the Ort from Ortag’s main dock….
…A black, caustic smoke spread over the water and, breaking into little shreds by a gusty northern wind, carried the bodies of the fallen warriors to Valhalla to Odin’s feasts, to the heavenly palaces of the Twins and Khirud the lightning-armed. The mighty Ort did not wish to send the snekkja to the strong current and turned the boat in the center of the inland city harbor. Andy watched the bright flame as it consumed the bodies of the Norsemen and of Berg. Toryg—a female orc who had been given the honor by the northerners of being buried with the warriors—lay beside the half-orc’s hut. The red-haired Olaf was left alive without a scratch. He laid the orc woman onto the bundles of wood beside the hut himself. The hut housed the Vikings, gone yet triumphant in battle. Some of the warriors set straves[8] or mugs of beer on the footpath. They put the personal effects[9] of each of the departed alongside his body and put chicken’s eggs in their hands.[10]
“The Valkyrie….” Olaf said to the other Vikings, going down to the pier. No one asked any questions. Everyone had seen how the female orc had fought. “Kerr?” the red-haired man turned to Andy and glanced at the two bound men.
“I will.” Andy sighed heavily. He knew his duty. The Norsemen formed a wide circle and untied the captive lords’ warriors. The unit commander, all mottled with scars, took a step forward and threw a couple of swords at the two now free men’s feet.
The soldiers grabbed the weapons. The short, elderly sergeant looked at Andy, who had stepped forward, and snarled meanly. The second man, a young guy across from him, convulsively grabbed the sword and looked around with a bewildered look. It was part of the funeral ritual. Fallen warriors should have guides and servants in the afterlife. The Vikings had preserved much of their Earthly heritage, although the form and content of some customs had changed in part. Some of them died, faced with new beliefs, and some were born at the junction of cultures and influences of other peoples. But the funeral ritual remained, even if altered somewhat by people over the course of time. Andy did not know exactly what motivated the unit commander and the other northerners, but he was not about to refuse a strange offer or honor extended to him. The new world continued to try him and test his strength. This was yet another test, and he had to pass it. The Norsemen had taken him into their circle. He wasn’t about to push away a hand extended in friendship. Earning respect was challenging; losing it was easy.
Andy went to meet the doomed warriors with a heavy step. The sergeant, grinning grimly, tried to catch him in a counter-attack and got stabbed in the liver. The young soldier, with a loud shout, lowered his sword to the place where his opponent had stood just a moment ago, and died with a heart pierced by cold steel. The northerners picked up the defeated soldiers and laid them at the feet of their dead tribesmen and orcs—the very place for servants. A large male horse was led to the pier. The unit commander held the stallion’s bridle as it stomped its hooves. A few minutes later, the dismembered animals[11] were laid on the deck. Nanna, the unit commander’s wife, cut the heads off a rooster and a chicken and threw them on the snekkja. The Norsemen pushed the boat away from the shore with their long wooden poles. The current grabbed the ship and carried it out to the middle of the harbor. A flaming arrow lit up the sky and buried itself into the bundles of wood, which had been generously covered with oil.
Andy walked up to the orc women. Tyigu let go of Ilnyrgu’s hand and hugged him around the waist with her face in Andy’s stomach. The girl was trembling. Andy awkwardly patted her on the head, secretly shocked that he had completely lost the ability to feel sorry for anyone. Hiding the bodies behind the clouds of smoke, the greedy flame swallowed the small craft. In thirty minutes not even a trace of the now buried warriors remained on the rippling surface of the water. The Ort’s current had carried the smoking remains of the fraternal grave to the sea.
“May you have a light afterlife, brothers!” the unit commander cried and was the first to head towards the tables set up on the shore. The remembrance feast had begun.
***
…Master Berg and Toryg died in the northern barracks. It was so stupid—Andy couldn’t call it anything else—and ordinary. Was it Hel, who had cut off two more spikelets as she gathered her harvest, or had Khirud wanted to change the guard at his throne? Well, who cared about the religious aspect anyway. His mentor was gone. What had motivated the half-orc? Why had he decided to go with the Vikings to free the guards who were surrounded in the barracks? Andy didn’t know. The she-wolves, in response to all his questions, only answered that it was a matter of paying his debt of honor. And when had Berg managed to incur debt? Either way, Ilnyrgu and Toryg went with him, and Toryg died a few steps from her teacher. When the fighting in the city ended, Andy tried to discover the truth from primary sources and questioned the warriors and Ilnyrgu for a very long time. But they could not draw a clear picture for him of how Berg had died. No one saw the actual moment of the half-orc’s death, as is often the case. In the throes of battle, each one was busy with his or her opponent. The narrow streets of Ortag did not allow them to turn around; the battle at the northern barracks took place in a crowded place, people had no time to look around.
The Norsemen bolted through the gate of the arsenal and went around the big fire they had caused. They trampled Lord Worx’s militiamen in the dirt, squished the squadrons of white armbands against the walls of the buildings, and passed like an iron boot over the still living mechanics who manned the fortress chuckers. Burned by red-hot and molten stones and beaten down by the magical attack and the quick death of the mages, they practically didn’t put up a fight at all. After clearing the nearby streets and rooftops, the unit commander divided the men into three squadrons. The first stayed in the fortlet; the second and third headed towards the barracks. Andy, dragging his feet heavily, got out of the volcano he had set up himself and trudged to the arsenal. He could barely walk. The applied spell drank up a fair amount of his internal reserves, which went to pumping mana from the astral, and it struck him painfully with the “recoil.” Still, operating with such enormous volumes of energy in his human and dragon bodies were two different things. What was easily done in the winged hypostasis was much more difficult for the human. The internal energy that had been lost in the commotion calmed down in about twenty minutes.
Andy sat down on a pile of bricks left from the outermost building and focused completely on listening. From the north side, explosions were sometimes heard; fires blazed and flared up like morning heat lightning. A dark smog hung over the city, obscuring the stars and the Goddesses’ Eyes. The soot from the houses burnt by his spell fell like fat flakes on clothes and earth. At some point, silence fell…. After a moment, a cannonade broke it. Judging by the frequent cracking sounds, Andy concluded that the Vikings had reached the barracks and were firing on the rebels with “firelights.”
It would have been foolish to expect the planned operation to take pla
ce as planned. Squeezed in from both sides, the rebels resisted fiercely. Among them were magicians and swordsmiths, who took a lot of souls to Hel’s court. The sheer accident or great luck for those besieged in the arsenal was that the best fighters and fencers of the besiegers were close to the magicians at the moment when Andrew brought the “fiery rain” down on them. If things had been different, the brave performance of the Norsemen and mercenaries outside the walls of the fortress could well have ended in blood gurgling forth from cut throats.
Things at the barracks turned out differently. As soon as the shelling began, the rebel commanders and the soldiers of Lord Worx, realizing that their plan to seize the strategic facilities had failed, regrouped their subordinates and tried to break through the line. Evenly dispersed over the retreating army, a few mages were covered in defensive amulets from head to toe, which more than compensated for their small numbers. They managed to hold the shield and fend off Ilnyrgu’s and four mages from the arsenal’s magical attacks. The offense and the defense switched sides; the massacre began.
A couple of master sword warriors and the last few mages left alive responded to the rebels’ fierce attacks. The Norsemen ran out of magical arrows, so they no longer needed to defend the troops as they burst through. The mages, ready to strike at the annoying Ilnyrgu and the former bookworms from the arsenal, to the chagrin of master Berg and Toryg, had formed a compact group. A couple of orcs and archers, using Andy’s technique, decided to take to the rooftops and cut off the retreating forces’ escape route. One of the mages saw a human figure on the roof. To avoid coming under fire again, half the mages put up a shield, and the other half attacked the building.
Berg had time to jump from the roof of a crumbling two-story building into a narrow opening among the fighters. Toryg and the archers were under the rubble of a fallen structure at that time. A cloud of dust covered the street. In a few moments, the pavement was piled with sheaves of bodies of the guards, who were warlocks of magical interweaves. Those under guard outlived their bodyguards only by a few minutes. Under the constant attack and arrows that came with “surprises,” the mages’ defensive amulets lost their charge. Berg’s jewelry, on the other hand, weren’t drained by any kind of attack and were full of energy. He pressed right through the shield they had up and fed those mages some cold steel. They had zero chance of declining the “filling lunch.” Once he was inside the tiny dome, he showed the villains what he could do. Some swordsmen unexpectedly joined the exchange; they did not save the mages, but they went at Berg with all their might. The half-orc caught one of them in a sharp transition to a low stance and dealt him a cleaving blow to the legs. The swordsman fell onto the dirty pavement, where Berg promptly cut off his head with a second swing of the sword, sending him to Hel’s judgment. But here, the witnesses’ stories diverged. The poofing dust blocked them from a good look at the details. Some said the half-orc’s foot got caught in a deep pothole. Ilnyrgu, busy with three foes at that moment, said that a wounded lords’ soldier stabbed him in the calf with a curved ankle knife. In the end, a second swordsman managed to take advantage of the half-orc’s momentary troubles, stabbing him with a dagger.
From underneath the rubble of the dusty street, coughing and spitting gray spit, Toryg appeared. Her defensive amulets had saved her from dying under the weight of the heavy debris. When she saw Berg falling onto the pavement, she went insane. Flying on the killer like a whirlwind, the she-wolf carried him to the walls of the building, boxed him in, first cut through his thigh muscles on his right leg, then pierced his throat. Once she had slaughtered the swordsman, her eyes burning with rage and pain, Toryg threw herself at the Lord’s soldier. There was no defense from her twin swords. They were short, no longer than twenty-five inches, but the “twins” could not be better suited for battle in a crowd and at short distances. Over ten orc women had already been killed when she butted heads with yet another master warrior and luck turned its back on her. In a battle of mastery, steel sometimes wins over steel. Upon meeting the smoky steel of her enemy’s blade, forged by dwarfs, with a ringing cry of protest, the sword in the she-wolf’s right hand broke. The corpses at her feet prevented her from increasing the distance between herself and her enemy. Just as hers had done moments ago, her enemy’s sword cut the muscles of her right thigh. On the way back after this strike, the tip of the enemy blade struck her armor; a few rings of chainmail fell to the ground, splashing in her scarlet blood. The wounded orc got a few more swings in, but with each heartbeat she got weaker and weaker. Ilnyrgu, finishing up with her opponents, hurried to her aid, but it was too late. The lord’s master swordsman’s sword gleamed in the first rays of the rising sun—and the young she-wolf’s soul was sent to Khirud.
***
When they had disassembled the rubble and the barricades, the guard, half consisting of those same Vikings, came out onto the streets. Things immediately got tight for the fighters. Those who had the misfortune of falling on the pavement never got up again, trampled down by their enemies and their allies alike. After finishing with Toryg and beating the hired soldiers of the second squadron of northerners, just like a cork popping from a bottle of champagne, the rebels and the swordsman burst out onto the open fighting space. Instead of the fizz of champagne, warriors and the men wearing white rags burst forth. They rushed to the southern city gates, the road to which, ironically, ran past the arsenal.
Andy sat on a pile of bricks with his eyes closed, looking like a statue from afar, had fallen into a trance. He was patching and strengthening his internal energy channels. Along the way, his muscles bulged. The astral dragon shone with all colors of the rainbow and radiated warmth, which poured forth with a pleasant languor. He had absolutely no need to take energy directly from the astral; he used the old tried and true method. The deafening sound of stomping feet broke into his quiet world of settage like thunder. His people wouldn’t be that loud…. Andy fell out of his trance and looked at the street. Around the nearest bend, he saw the first bothersome folks. It was too late to run under the cover of the arsenal walls; no one would take the risk of opening the heavy gates for his sake. What about constructing some sort of killer spell…? No time. Hmmm… been a long time since we faced impossible challenges… watch out, or life might start to seem too pure and clean.
A tall warrior with twin swords in his hands was moving ahead of the battered crowd. His bow appeared by itself out of nowhere. He put the bowstring on the bow and his bone wrist guard on his left arm in one swift, smooth motion. It all took less than a half a minute. While the “lone warrior” prepared his bow for battle, the distance between him and the armed attackers was reduced by half.
Thunk… thunk… thunk… the bowstring’s fatal song sounded. The arrows, with red-hot tips, sped towards their intended victims. There wasn’t any time to “charge” them with mana. One rebel, looking in surprise at the feathered arrows sticking out of some men’s chests, fell under the feet of his comrades. A second, who had managed to cover himself with a small shield with a convex umbo and a long protruding spike in the middle, cried out in pain. An arrow, fired from fifty steps away, punctured the shield, and his arm. A third, a warrior with two swords, in a careless motion of the blades, beat back both death bringers aimed at him. The next two Andy sent met the same fate. Andy let a few more fly, which met their targets, and put his bow back into his “pocket.” Time to switch to a blade.
The enemy swordsman smiled, swung each sword around at his wrists and signaled for Andy to come at him. No matter how confident the guy was, his self-esteem must have fallen a bit when he saw the cold steel of the elvish blade—apparently, the sword’s former owner was someone he knew. Andy didn’t stop to think. In a few long jumps, he traversed the distance between them and with all his strength kicked a small pile of smoldering coals. The swordsman shielded himself instinctively from the coals flying right at his face and… lost his right arm. There was no time to play at politesse and nobility. A chopping blow to his leg made
the enemy fall to the ground; the sword, held “backwards” (opposite the thumb) in his left fist finished the job. The swordsman’s death brought on a sudden sigh in the ranks of the rebels. The slight hum of the sigh grew into an enraged roar. Dozens of people threw themselves at Andy at once. Things got tough fast, but one thing made him happy: the street was so narrow, no more than five armed men could fit in a row. Retreating under the pressure of the crowd, he knocked down the most zealous with short lightning bolts and thinned out the rows with occasional fireballs. Those struck down by magic and the sword fell at the feet of the attackers, who seemed not to notice the losses but continued to move forward with the force of a bulldozer. Andy decided to leave direct connection to the astral as a backup, as his most deadly last resort. He had only just gotten his energy channels in order; he had zero desire to tear them with the boundless power of the ocean of energy. If he got really desperate, he could always change hypostasis. He had already killed more than twelve people; now he was working on his second dozen. The rebels tore their way to freedom; behind them were the guards and mercenaries, who dreamed of getting even for the death of their friends and colleagues. On the streets running parallel to his, iron rang out with might and main; people shouted. Andy lost his old blade, stuck in the hackneyed shield of one of the insurgents who had pounced on him. He could have stopped, grabbed the shield from its owner, and pulled the blade out, but it seemed somehow inconvenient to do so surrounded by sharp steel. No matter how great of a warrior you are as a one-on-one opponent, standing your ground against a crowd’s just not realistic. He had to walk quickly backwards, zap the most zealous ones with lightning and other magical surprises and try not to fall down on the pavement. Turning around meant taking a knife to the back or a dagger to his shoulder blade, and then they’d certainly chop him to pieces. But even now, he’d already been adorned with a few deep, bright red cuts.