“Where is he? Where’s Cruhund?”
Griope pointed back towards the stairs. “Up another level. In his apartment. Hiding with that woman.”
“One more head.”
Spear turned one last time to look over his crew before walking up the steps. Seana stared at him. Her eyes blinked back tears. She was covered in blood. A gash ran across her brow and one pale braid was a dark dripping red. Her shield, a fragment now, was still held in one hand. Blood painted over the flowers.
He was so close to her. The copper tang of blood, sweat, piss, and shit.
“What?” he said. “Should I turn back now, right here, right at the edge of victory? Should we dance into the flower-filled fields of the North? Should we walk in with swords cast aside into the welcoming arms of the clans?”
She turned from him, unable to match his gaze.
Then he saw a shadow separating from the walls.
“Spear,” said Night, “my friend, your words.”
“And where the hell have you been, litter mate? Hound. Brother. Could have drifted in here and killed the whole lot of them. But you’re just worm food, aren’t you? Nothing for us to return to, and even if we found the others, and especially Shield, he would drive a sword through your magic-blackened heart. You could at least use your dark magic to win something of worth.”
“Of worth?”
“This keep! The head of Cruhund! You could have saved the damned girl before he dropped her! You could have done that!”
Night writhed within the cloak, his face darkening and disintegrating. Then Night was gone. Spear stared where he once stood looking at the stone wall.
“I will end this,” said Spear. “And finally get the life I deserve.”
He charged up the stairs not waiting for the others, not caring what they might say, not even caring whether they followed him. He did not need them to storm Cruhund’s apartment. He did not need them to question his dream now that it stood right before him.
The hallway was long and empty. A single door halfway down was open and spilled dim light onto the stones.
A cold wind rushed from the tunnels below.
He crossed to the door quickly and stepped inside. The remnant tatters of white curtains fronting the balcony opposite buckled against the wind, and behind them, the sky was a dark milky gray, the blue sky completely replaced by a wall of clouds. The unobstructed daylight had been consumed by dark clouds rushing in from the west. The bright sun was no more. In the distant valley, past the forest, sheeting gray rains blurred the fields. Amid the buffeting winds, crows tumbled in flight.
The room was empty but for a single bed, and on this bed lay a wizened figure in the tangle of sheets.
Spear approached carefully, turning left and right with his sword, waiting for Cruhund to hurl himself from behind the old tapestries that hung on the wall.
Cruhund was nowhere to be seen.
Spear prodded the sheets with the tip of his sword.
An emaciated face turned to him.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Spear. All these years. I’ve been waiting for you to return.”
Yriel’s hair still hung in dark curls as he remembered. Her eyes held the hint of a sparkle but even that had dimmed. He felt as if he were looking at a faded memory. She was bone thin, her cheeks jutting, her skin dried and stretched. She looked hollowed.
Her stick-like fingers crept from beneath the sheets, crawling forward like a mantis. Then her hand turned over, palm up, and the fingers curled, beckoning him close.
“I am sick,” she said. “Dying. Eaten from inside. But now he is gone I feel different. Maybe you returning to me after all these years is my cure.”
“I have not returned for you,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Why did you leave? Why did you not come back for me?”
He laughed. The others were in the hall now, their steps approaching. “You did not wait for me. I was hardly gone before you had invited him into our bed.”
“A mistake. But then you left. You did not even fight for me. You let him have me. You should have fought for me.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Yet you return.”
“I come for this keep.”
“You come for both of us. I can make sure you don’t make the same mistakes again. Do you think he gained all this by his own wit? I know how to make men follow. I know their appetites. He was born to fail. But with you by my side, we can lord over these lands. Not a king of the carrion eaters like he was, but a king of men.” Her fingers stretched towards him. “You know this as well as I do. You can become what you were meant to be. We can become what we were meant to be.”
Spear’s knees buckled at the faint scent of pines.
Seana stood at his shoulder. “Who is this corpse?”
“I am Yriel, and Spear has come to rescue me from this monster.”
“Where is he?” asked Spear. “Where did he go?”
“He has fled. He has run from a dead girl. He knows you are coming and he has run. Into the tunnels.”
“We should leave this cursed place,” said Seana. She shivered beneath the paint of blood. “Spear, can’t you see that it will never end? You will never stop. The world will never be enough. Insatiable.” She laughed. “It’s not this place that is cursed. It’s you. Spear, you’re cursed…cursed in your hunger for coin, for a return to what was lost, to never be happy.”
“Leave!” said Yriel, her voice a sudden screech. “Go ahead! Run! Because you are not man enough to seize the destiny that waits here for you.” She cackled. “You can’t burn stone, though, can you? How will you forget this place?”
“A price must be paid,” said Spear. “All this can’t be for nothing.”
Seana backed out of the room. “I’m leaving. For the North.”
“Run!” cried Yriel to Spear. “Run away with her! Let another take this fortress. Let another be the border lord you were meant to be. More than just a keep. Enough coin to buy two armies over.”
“Where’s the coin?” he said.
“Bring me his head and I will share everything with you. The king and queen of the border.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CRUHUND HUDDLED IN front of his wavering torch. The walls of the tunnel were slick. Small drops of water caught the meager light as they ran in rivulets down the rough hewn stone. These walls were not the dressed masonry of the keep but the hacked-away heart of the mountain.
He was relieved to be away from the keep. When he had reached the stairs and heard the fighting in the hall below, he had known it was time to flee. The keep no longer mattered. Yriel no longer mattered. He needed to be away. He wanted to create a new life. Mostly, though, he wanted to outrun the ghost of the girl.
A sudden sound behind him broke his thoughts, an echoing scrape that matched his own unsteady gait through the tunnel.
He stopped, craned his head. He listened. Nothing. He held his breath, squinting into the darkness beyond the torch light, beyond his own shadow. He stared down the passage through which he had just come. Under his pent-up breath, he heard the hiss of the blood through his veins, driven by the pounding of his heart.
Did he hear something? Was it a footstep? He took one step. The sound again, far down the tunnel. Was it only an echo? Or was she trailing him in the darkness, matching him step for step, breath for breath? Why did she wait? Why didn’t she coming tearing out of the shadows? If she wanted to kill him, she just should.
“Come at me!” He screamed. “You want me? Come get me! I’m not afraid!”
His voice echoed back at him. A drop of water slid down the wall. It slowed as it reached a small protuberance, pausing almost as if to stop before being pushed by the weight of the water above it and then racing down the wall towards the floor.
He squinted into the darkness.
A scream came back at him. Then a shout and the distant clash of metal. The keep was lost. Spear had somehow broken through. He had bre
eched the walls and killed everyone. He rode on a wake of blood.
Cruhund pinched his lips into a snarl. Spear he could handle. How many years had he waited for that bastard to come into his life again? He should have gone harder at him on the bridge. He should have killed him, then and there. He should have used the girl as bait to lure Spear in.
He remembered the girl slipping from his hand. His desperate attempt to grab her. Did he really try to grab her again? Or had he meant to drop her to her death, just so he might savor the look in Spear’s eyes? How can he not remember events from a day ago? He shook his head.
If Spear followed him, he would kill him. He would stick him like an animal and gut him. That would end everything. Done with Spear, with Yriel, with the ghost of the girl. He could finally be free.
“I’m not afraid!” he yelled.
He returned back down the tunnel, his steps hurried. He followed a familiar path. The tunnel forked and he stayed to the right. He could make out the sharp chalky marks he had made with a stone when he had first explored this tunnel, the marks that would guide him out.
The cold here was more penetrating. He could feel it numbing the tip of his nose. He opened and closed his fingers constantly against the seeping pain. His breath formed before him, clouding his vision. Had it been this cold in prior times when he followed this path? It seemed colder than it ever had before, as if the walls were made of ice.
He came to the doorway. He blew his foul breath into his fist to warm it up. He glanced once more behind. No one followed.
He put his shoulder against the thick wood and pushed. The door slowly opened behind his weight and the light of the torch reflected the gleam of gold.
Cruhund stood for a moment on the threshold of his treasure room. The chamber was as he left it; in truth, no one visited it but him. He did not want curious men slinking into his tunnels, nor greedy men to covet what he had found in the mountain’s heart.
Unlike the tunnels, the treasure room was large, vaulted, the interior made of carved stones. Along the left wall were the sacks of coins he had gathered from his raids and robberies – a half-dozen bulging burlap sacks filled with greasy silver and copper. A fortune in its own right, here on the border. Enough to build a small army. His meager bags of coins were nothing compared to the vast treasure that filled the chamber: from wall to wall, it was covered in piles of gold coins. Rubies, diamonds and sapphires spilled down the slopes of coins. The tips of crowns and the bejeweled handles of ceremonial swords poked out of the mountains of gold. Small golden statues and silver boxes inlaid with ivory were strewn about. Golden skulls had been stacked to form a pyramid. It was the treasure of a kingdom, not of a keep.
But he would not be able to take it all with him.
He emptied out the sacks of copper and silver coins and the crude baubles he and his men had stolen over the past year. After filling the bottom half of two sacks with gold coins, he raked through the piles for necklaces and gems, anything small and precious. The crowns, statues, and scepters were tempting, but they would be too cumbersome and harder to turn into useful coin. The gems and jewelry were worth more than their weight in gold.
Finally, he had four sacks packed. He tied off the ends and attached a length of rope so he could hang the paired bags over each shoulder. The bags were heavy. He stumbled a few steps and then he got his weight beneath him. First chance he got he would steal a pack animal. But first he needed to escape.
He shuffled to the doorway and turned one last time to see whether there was anything else he should grab. That was when he noticed the missing skull.
A pyramid of golden skulls sat near the back wall. Scores of them, carefully stacked, rose as tall as Cruhund. He had examined the skulls on one of his previous trips to the room. They were heavy and he never figured out whether they were human skulls coated in gold or bits of macabre art cast from pure gold.
The top skull was missing. He was sure a single skull once perched on top of the pyramid. Now it was gone.
Then he understood. His head was meant to be the last one. His head was meant to cap the pyramid.
Burdened beneath the sacks of gold, he shambled through the door and into the tunnel. Something stood in the hall. He was sure of it. Something merged with his torch-deformed shadow. It had to be the girl. He was sure of it. She stood between him and the keep, so he turned and hobbled as fast as he could deeper into the tunnel.
He ran, he shuffled, and then he walked. He refused to glance over his shoulder. He would keep going. He would outrun her.
He pushed through the darkness, the torch lighting his way. He was tired. He wanted to stop. But no. He kept moving. To move was to put distance between her and him. She trailed him. If he stopped, she would catch him.
A few times he swore he could feel her hands on his neck and quickened his pace. Once he was convinced it was her fingers and he swatted at them only to bring his fingers back covered in blood. How could she have reached him?
He realized, then, that the ropes holding the bags of gold and gems across his shoulders were rubbing his neck raw. He could drop the bags. The pain would stop and he could outpace her. But he would have nothing, and he did not have the heart to start over with absolutely nothing. He at least needed the coin.
He traveled deeper into the tunnels than he had ever been before. The air was colder, a slight wind numbing his lips and fingers. Even the heat from the torch was swallowed by the cold.
He stumbled on, exhausted, weighed down by the coin and prodded by the fear of what might be behind. The path ahead became darker.
While he was replaying the events of the bridge over and over in his head, he nearly missed the faint glow of light ahead. Then it was gone. At first, he imagined it to be a trick of his eyes. But then it was there again, a faint radiance. How could there be light so deep in the mountain?
He held his torch behind him and peered ahead. It was definitely light, a small glowing circle. He redoubled his pace and as he did so, the light became more clear: it was the end of the tunnel.
The dark passage opened up to another world on the other side of the mountain.
Distant snowy peaks rose. The whole wide world lay before him. He finally had a chance to escape all that pursued him. He would have a chance to start over.
His laughter echoed in the tunnel, sharp and short like the cry of a crow.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
SPEAR TROTTED INTO growing darkness of the tunnels. He had ventured beyond the light of the hallway. There he had left Seana, Bones, and the others. A part of him hoped they would have joined him to hunt down Cruhund and win the last head for Valda, but they had stood in the hallway of the keep, heavy armed, heads hung. And, too, he had hoped for a word with Seana before he entered the tunnels. Instead, she descended the stairs, not even looking over her shoulder one last time.
He thought about chasing her down, about telling her to wait for him. He wanted to tell her that he would be back.
Instead he plunged into the darkness of the tunnels.
The cold seeped into his bones. It penetrated every fracture and mended bone and aching joint. The cold opened the history of his body.
The swollen joint in the index finger of his right hand reminded him of the time he had been running with Shield Scyldmund. They had just left Lake’s End and were in a skirmish with a Dhurman patrol when Spear’s finger had gotten caught in the armor of the man he was stabbing. The pain of the twisting and popping of his finger returned to him, awakened by the cold.
He had forgotten that moment. What else had slipped away? Were these faded moments not what made him who he was today? Shouldn’t they matter more?
He turned. The entrance was lost. Spear was on his own.
How many days had it been since he and his crew had swept down on the pilgrims? He lifted his bruised hand and remembered striking Valda’s father. Would his world have changed, if he would have just let them go? He tried to remember what it was like when Valda offered
him the gems for the heads. He recalled how, even then, Seana had been slipping away from him and how, even though he saw it, he did nothing.
He had been hungry for coin. Longbeard was threatening to steal everything he had himself stolen and Spear had known he would not get another chance to lead a band. That first gem, tiny and hard, was easy and he hungered for the rest. One head after the other. It was so easy at first. Then everything began to fall apart. The arguments with Seana and Night, the sniping of Longbeard, and the death of Little Boy. Before, it had seemed like fun and games – hunting down heads for the prize of gems. After Little Boy, it became a nightmare. The bridge, Cruhund, and Val.
What he had passed through would change him forever. He felt that deep inside, but what was the change? He wished Seana was by his side so he could talk to her. Maybe she could see what he was blind to.
An open door loomed ahead on the right, a darker mark on the tunnel wall.
Spear paused outside the door, the heat of his torch touching his cheek, the walls dripping. He heard nothing. Did Cruhund lie in wait? The flames of the torch bent to the cold wind.
Spear stepped into the room.
It glittered. Mounds of gold coins filled the room. Bright rubies and diamonds sparkled. It was littered with necklaces and a crown and ceremonial swords. It held the treasure of a kingdom.
Spear eased into the room, the coins singing beneath his feet. He could not contain his laughter. All the riches he had dreamed of here in this room. This room was his now. He wanted to scream to Seana and Night and Bones and Biroc and to tell them to come running and to shout that their fortunes had forever changed. This was the stuff of kings. With a handful of these gems and coins, he could begin to buy his army. He could rule the border lands from this keep. He would not need to hunt out the treasures of others. He could pass the rest of his days spending this treasure and never deplete it.
Five Bloody Heads (The Hounds of the North Book 3) Page 21