Dark Age

by Pierce Brown

  Blood leaks out Ozgard’s mouth and pools on the floor like cherry syrup as he’s dragged back to me. He stares at his reflection. I whisper his name. He’s straight gone. Snapped at the mental waist. He doesn’t even look up as the ramp of the Republic shuttle bangs down at the far end of the room.

  I wait for a bomb to go off in the shuttle. For some horrible weapon to evaporate the gathered host of Obsidians. But the Fear Knight has something more intricate in store.

  His slave, Xenophon, walks from the place of honor at Sefi’s side down the stairs of her throne dais, nearly to the end of the ranks of Obsidian warjarls.

  “Sefi Volarus, are you a god?” Xenophon asks. Her brows knit together in confusion. “Are you a god?” Sefi’s taken aback by the impertinence of her only “loyal” servant.

  Her voice comes out in an annoyed growl. “Xenophon, return to your place.”

  “No.”

  The jarls murmur in discontent. Sefi stands. “Servant, obey.”

  “I obey only one, and you are not him,” Xenophon replies. The Valkyrie bodyguards take a predatory step forward. Even Sefi’s competitors amongst the warjarls seem on the verge of breaking the uppity White’s neck. Faced with something she doesn’t understand, Sefi reverts to what she knows.

  “The blood of Ragnar Volarus runs through these veins,” she says to the question. “Kneel on your knees, or on stumps. I care not.”

  “The blood of Ragnar Volarus,” Xenophon crows. “The blood of a god. Alia was no god. She let the Children of the Spires languish in chains. She sold her sons to the stars for her own gain. From what wellspring then does Ragnar derive his divinity? If not from his mother, then it must be from his father.”

  The room goes still in bafflement. Xenophon raises that crystal-clear voice and suddenly lurches, as if possessed by an evil spirit like a shaman, to sing in flawless Nagal.

  “There was one mightier ’fore Allmother’s reign

  Allfather, King of Stains, was his name.

  For him, Old Kuthul rose against Sunborn

  Till in Ladon was he felled, for kin to mourn

  To the fires his people and the Volk were sent

  But not all to ash and bone must we lament

  From sun to dust did the moons and dragons chase

  The brood of Kuthul, who hid in darkest space,

  Five ages passed of shadow and ice

  Entombed in floating caverns, hunted like rabid mice

  Blossoms of blood and thrones of flesh were grown

  As brother ate brother; sister ate sister

  for a savior, Allfather groaned

  Then came the Outlander to answer his plea

  Mighty were the Lords of Ink, mightier was He.

  Whores of their children, shards of their thrones

  Made He, who crowned Himself with their bones

  And fashioned Dark Wind of those not destroyed

  To serve, to anoint, to proclaim:

  He Who Walks the Void.

  “May I present to the Volk of the heatlands: the Breaker of the Black Thrones of Ultima Thule, Master of the Fleshchain, Bonemaker of Charon, Overlord of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, Terror of Codovan and Raa, Taker of Makemake, Haumea, Xena, Eris. Volsung Great Fá of the Ascomanni, Emperor of the Obsidian, and Broodfather of Ragnar Volarus!”

  Silence.

  And then He comes.

  THE FIRST SOUND IS three thousand Obsidian honor guards raising their ceremonial axes and taking the fighting stance to a warcry. The warjarls turn to see the threat. Behind their turned heads, Sefi looks no taller, no stronger, no more confident than a five-year-old child. Horror, hope, fear, and confusion all muddle together in a grotesque expression, then vanish, leaving only the icy, intelligent mask of Sefi the Quiet.

  I just don’t think Sefi the Quiet will be enough.

  The second sound is metal on stone. Two armored boots stomp down the corridor. Even from the side of the dais, I can see his huge helmet over the tallest guards. It is made of the skull of some exotic beast, triple-horned, fused with asteroid metal, and sparkling with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.

  The third sound is the scraping of a long metal chain that he drags in one hand. Dozens of abnormally large skulls hang from the metal—Ascomanni kings. In the other he hefts a bizarre spear-saw over his shoulder. Two dozen male jarls of the Alltribe follow him out of the shuttle, instead of the true face of the beastly horde he leads.

  The fourth sound is an ululation from his metal throat, like the wail tin makes when it warps in windstorms. The song carries him to the end of the guard corridor, where a wall of Valkyrie bodyguards stand at the base of Sefi’s dais.

  Whoever this man is, he could not be the father of Ragnar. It’s a lie. A Fear Knight trick. Kill him. Slag tradition. Slag what the warjarls think. “Ozgard. Ozgard, I need your help,” I whisper. He stares at Volsung in terror. “Ozgard, my heel. I need your hand.” Even the rootlike fingers of his right hand hold more strength than do mine. He does not listen. “Ozgard!”

  Volsung’s entourage stops well shy of the throne, but Volsung carries on until Valkyrie block his way. He points his spear at Sefi’s throne. “Mine.” He points at her crown. “Mine.” He points at the Obsidian jarls. “Mine.” He waves his spear around to encompass Mars. “Mine.”

  His spear’s spiked haft stomps into the stone, breaking Sefi from her trance. She signals her Valkyrie to take him. He rattles the long chain behind him like a snake.

  “My father, Vagnar, is dead,” she says. “Cut off this imposter’s hands and feet, save his liver for the buzzards and his cock for the dogs.” I cheer inside as three women slip forward in a V to do the dirty work with their axes.

  Volsung moves like a whip.

  His spear separates. Its tip lurches forward and pierces through the face of the leftmost woman, coming out the back of her skull. Still connected to the haft by some sort of metal wire. Volsung leaves it in, and brings the back three-quarters of the spear around to smash into the axe-guard of the rightmost woman. Something in her shoulder breaks and she’s almost lifted off her feet as she stumbles into the woman in the middle. Bellowing like a maniac, Volsung overwhelms them with savagery. Small teeth on the spear’s length begin to saw, and he brings the huge spear down like a hammer in colossal overhand strikes, beating them to their knees, sawing through their armor, and then staving in their skulls in a traumatic display of brute strength. In ten seconds, the three women make a meat salad on the floor.

  Oh, fuck.

  The whole Valkyrie bodyguard raises their rifles to fire on the man.

  More than sixty of Sefi’s warjarls, all men, step forward and make a human wall around Volsung. An ominous silence grips the room as all realize this was planned. Volsung is no stranger to these male chieftains.

  He must have come to them in secret. When? Before Mars? When they landed? When Valdir, their idol, was arrested? Still, they pretend, and shout for him to prove his identity.

  “I have lived three lives,” Volsung rumbles through that titanic helmet. “The last is that of Volsung Fá. The second that of Pale Horse, slaveknight to the Warlord of Ash. The first that of Vagnar Hefga, first broodmate to Alia Volarus, the Snowsparrow, Queen of the Valkyrie, broodfather to the god Ragnar Volarus and greedy little Sefi.”

  He removes his helmet. A long tail of hair tumbles from his shaved skull, falling all the way to his heels. The male warjarls thrust up their chins and bare their throats in submission, proclaiming him Ragnar’s father. The others stare at the length of his valor tail. Even Unshorn is a boy to this man.

  Volsung looks to Sefi, black eyes glittering from eyeholes of the tattooed skull of a Stained.

  “Have I so changed beyond the sun, child? Or are you now just a liar like your mother?” He tosses his helmet to the floor. It ma
kes a seismic thump. “Look upon this face, and say you know it not.”

  Sefi is shocked dumb.

  The father of Ragnar would be over eighty. Yet this man covered with the blood spatter of her Valkyrie looks barely fifty, and moves smooth as any gladiator of the Hyperion Premiere Circuit. In the light, he is more than the pale nightmare I saw in the darkness of the ice. His throat must have been ripped out years ago. The front third is metal, the trachea ribbed gray. His arms are bare and obscenely muscular. The left forearm is metal with a metal hand and dagger-sharp fingernails that look like they extend on sliders. A horrible scar claims half his nose. Blue worm veins of age rejuvenation therapy web the sides of his skull—the first I’ve ever seen on an Obsidian. Even Julii would flinch at the cost.

  “My father is dead,” Sefi repeats like a mantra.

  Volsung reaches under his vest to produce a broken amulet of a griffin.

  “You will remember this, if not the man who taught you to hunt.” He throws it at her. “Your mother broke it in half the day I was taken back to the stars. To be whole again when I returned. Fifty years it took. Fifty years to hear there was no sky burial for the mother of my pride, Alia. No high mountain tomb for her bones amongst ancient kin. Only a lonely cairn of shattered stone, with half of me lost beneath it.”

  “You desecrated our Sky Temple. You slew Freihild. You spit on the Allmother? You attacked the Republic?” Sefi says, her rage playing tug-of-war with her confusion. “Why?”

  “To free you from your chains,” he says. “Alia was desecrated. Why? Because in your hearts you hold the truth. What good is a mother who sells her children? What good is a mother who harvests her young? What good is a mother who is a liar? No better than the frothing rot of a dead seal.”

  His voice is clever and evocative, and he mutates its tone like an amused mummer. He’s no barbarian browbeating them with strength. He’s trained in elocution. Far better trained than I managed to make the skuggi. I recognize the triple-beat pivot of the Palatine’s politico school. This is the Fear Knight’s asset, his super weapon.

  “Under the Allmother, we were slaves, brothers…” He smiles. “…sisters. Under the rule of women, our men were sent to the stars to die, while queens sat on thrones and knew the joy of the hunt on the ice.” He wheels around, speaking to the honor guard as much as the female-dominated jarls. “We died in Sunborn wars, in their fencing practices, ridden down by horseback or gravBoot for sport. In their gambling pits we were forced to kill our brothers, but never our sisters.” He thrusts his huge hands into the air. “These hands have slain seas.” He looks down. “Seas of brothers. Seas of kin.”

  Sefi has lost control. Volsung conducts like a master.

  He slowly opens his vest to reveal a body of muscles and scars and metal plates. A thick pattern of identical scars on his back and chest stand out from the rest. Their shape is unmistakably the slave brand of House Grimmus. “This flesh has known slavery.” He points a finger at Sefi. “What do you know, girl?” He smiles. “Only how to be quiet, it seems.”

  It isn’t only the male jarls who laugh. While the Valkyrie stare in horror, the more numerous honor guard is intrigued. And why not? What he says is true. Most of the men were in the Gold legions. Most of them were slaves. Sefi was not. What would she know of their horror?

  Even I note how small she looks. How timid her fierce veteran Valkyrie are to this lone terror. Yet she draws confidence from the movement of the women jarls. Alienated by this man, they drift to make a thick wall of protection for the Queen, each representing thousands of braves in the camps around Cimmeria. Yet Sefi is blind. She does not see how the words seep into the ears of the three thousand honor guard. How the men in the room looked at the skinned skuggi—all of which were conveniently male and castrated—or how Valdir, champion of the male braves, is now branded traitor.

  It was never about old ways and new. It was always about gender.

  How could she be so fucking blind? How could I not see it festering?

  Volsung bares his mangled teeth.

  “While you were silent, girl, I was a slave. While you struck down your unarmed mother, I conquered the tribes of the Far Ink.” He waves a hand back to the skulls on the chain. “These were their kings. While you let the heatlanders infect you with weakness, I slew with my warsaw those who would not bow. I made cups of their skulls, slaves of their children, and whores of their wives.”

  He brandishes his spear. The way it glimmers…it must be made of a metal I’ve never seen.

  “All I have, I have taken from the deathgrip of my foes. All you have, you have stolen. From the head of a murdered mother, from the pockets of your noble ally, Tyr Morga”—he taps his forehead in respect—“from the legacy of your god brother, from the strength of your mate.

  “You cannot even kill a drake without your servants. Without others, you are nothing. Just a cow who bleats she is Queen.” He addresses the Obsidians. “Obsidian follows strength. I see strength here. With weakness held up by her crown. I issued your queen a challenge. But she hid from me behind you. Brothers, sisters! Look upon her! Your queen is an ass, for she leads from the back!” The image of Sefi behind the wall of Obsidian jarls now becomes an indictment, a mockery. Fá laughs and speaks directly to the honor guard behind him. “She would have you give up war. She would have you forsake the Wind for roofs. Your stone and bone heritage for the soft silk of heatlanders. She would let their cities suck you dry. She would have you live in their world. I would have them live in ours.

  “From the diamond mines of Quaor, to the Boneyard of Charon, to the Black Thrones of Ultima Thule, the Dark Wind of the Allfather gathers to fall on the heatlands to claim all for Volkland. Gold had its time in the day. Red faltered but now we rise.” He turns to Sefi. “But only one can rule. Moooooo.” He walks back and forth mooing at her like a cow in mockery.

  “Bardahgi! Bardahgi! Bardahgi!” the male warjarls begin to chant. Fight. Fight. Fight. Many of the honor guard join them. Ozgard weeps on the floor. I sag in exhaustion. Sefi should shoot him. I would shoot him if I had a gun. But she is a woman trapped by the ways of her own people. If she shoots Ragnar’s father, the Alltribe will shatter apart. If she turns down a challenger with a claim, she is not strength, and they will turn on her. If only Valdir were here, she must be thinking. Valdir would wrangle the fools in line.

  The Queen of the Obsidians looks at Xenophon in betrayal. Then to me and Ozgard and taps her forehead in respect and apology. She peels Aja’s razor from her arm, draws her war axe, and steps down from her throne.

  * * *

  —

  The Obsidians watch father and daughter strip themselves of armor and circle one another barefoot in the center of the hall. Volsung is bare-chested, though his muscles themselves look like armor. He wields his warsaw with both hands. Sefi wears a sleeveless vest of Valkyrie blue. In her left hand spins the razor of Aja, and in her right a great axe.

  No more words are shared. They meet in a sudden flurry of violence that rattles my bones. Sefi bounds backward, more agile than the huge man, but not by much. She hops foot to foot, probing, sliding, and lashing forward. She is a spirit of the ice, nearly Valdir’s match by the reckoning of the dozens of Golds she’s sent to the Void.

  But Volsung ignores the blades and recklessly thrusts at her heart with his warsaw, forcing her to turn her attack into a defense. He is old, and has maybe lost a step, but he is cunning, and Sefi knows it. The recklessness was a trap to lure her into baiting him, and Sefi barely twists her heart out of the way as his blade scrapes along her rib cage.

  She spins back, but smelling blood, Volsung comes on like a bloody storm. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he goes berserker, hammering at the razor and axe as if he intends to chop them to splinters. He uppercuts with the hooked piercing end of his warsaw. Sefi deflects with her razor, lifts her left leg, and sidesteps to her right.
He pivots his spear, and brings the saw half crashing down. She catches it with her axe. Veins bulge in his trunk of a neck. Muscles twist in his core and he pushes down, down, down. Sefi brings the razor around underneath from her left to cut him in half. He pivots the bottom end of the spear diagonal, blocks the razor outward. The metal of both instruments warps as they rebound, hers outward, his inward. He uses the momentum, driving with his legs as he uppercuts with the piercing end toward her opposite leg, ripping a canyon from her mid-calf, through the inside tendons of her knee, all the way up her inner thigh to her pelvis.

  Sefi stumbles back, and in six compact thrusts, he punctures both her ankles, her kneecaps, and both her rotator cuffs. She falls like a slack puppet. Her axe and razor clattering to the ground.

  It took less than a minute.

  Dead silence. I grow nauseous in it. I should have shot Xenophon and died in that room. This can’t be happening. Some of the female jarls bolt for the exits. The Valkyrie go berserk. But they are outnumbered and slaughtered. As pulseRifles whine and axes rise and fall in the periphery, Volsung watches his daughter crawl away from him toward her axe, leaving smears of blood on the stone. He stalks after her and stomps on the back of her head until she goes still. He places the axe in her hand, and crouches with a knee on her spine to say: “Valhalla bears only the brave. Will you remain quiet in the end, my child?”

  Volsung straddles his daughter, putting his weight on her tailbone, and sets to grim work. With the knife from his waist, he cuts open her vest to reveal Sefi’s tattooed back. In a tender sawing motion, he carves off two long flaps of flesh from the shoulder blades to the tailbone, exposing her rib cage. She flails like a punctured fish. Then with a small axe from his hip, Volsung hacks at the ribs on either side of her spine. She jerks in agony, but no sound escapes her. He discards the hatchet and pries open her rib cage from behind to expose her lungs. Tears leak from her eyes. She gasps for air.