by John Ruch
He was under no under illusion that he had just glimpsed some gooey heart of marshmallow beneath Rinka’s seared crust. Night only knew what private thought truly motivated a woman like that to smile. She was a killer and a torturer, predilections that had saved his life, but perhaps only incidentally; he regarded her like a saber that didn’t care whom it skewered. People who thrill at meting out pain often enjoy receiving it as well, and he wondered whether Rinka’s actions in that infernal basement had something to do with that, and if it would spur her to more dark troubles.
And there was the fact that she was imbued with magica, a mystery that Arrowmask had counseled him to let lie, wisely noting that families often bonded better by secrets kept than divulged. As Arrowmask was known for his daring rashness rather than insight, presumably this was a hard-earned truth from the inner sanctums of his family messes. But that didn’t mean Alfie had to hand out trust and goodwill to Rinka like gumdrops, no.
However, it was the hyperactive little cultist who intrigued him the most at the moment. Granted, Mieux was as good-natured and tummy-rubbing affectionate as any pup, but that only made her attraction toward the callous Pain priestess all the stranger. And despite her innocent blinks and charmingly profound cultural ignorance, the Shardaian-by-way-of-Kundh was no naïve child. Young, yes, but a skilled warrior-priestess of some religion with wisdom enough and secret magica of her own. All of her jibber-jabber about auras probably had some basis in truth as well. Did she see something within Rinka they overlooked? Was she trying to lure the dominatrix with unfamiliar kindness? The girl never weighed in when he and Arrowmask traded Rinka notes, and was quite a mystery herself.
Rinka had caught him watching and stared him down with those blue eyes, their color like seeing sky through an arrow-hole in flesh. Intimidation was her game as always, and a younger man might have interpreted her gaze as hostile or contemptuous. Alfie, however, had met many dangerous stares in his long and sullied days, and the nature of this one was challenge. Rinka was daring him. “Transgress. Cross some line,” the eyes beckoned.
He had seen far worse expressions from a woman far more imbued with dark magica. Melthissa’s stare was the filmy white of curdled milk when she had leaned in to kiss him with her jawless rotten mouth.
I transgressed long before you were born, girl.
He met Rinka’s gaze, politely doffed his houndstooth cap, and kept some secrets of his own.
CHAPTER TWELVE
As Elsbeth Steeleye slaughtered her family and friends, she grinned so hard her teeth hurt.
A single swing of her axe took off the top of her brother’s skull and caved in half of her sister’s face, and Elsbeth exulted in her murderous skill. She wheeled about, following the axe’s momentum, to see Gullaug, that gentle goatherder, her closest friend since childhood despite the mountains time had raised between their life-paths. The horror in Gullaug’s eyes ended as Elsbeth caught her under the chin with the axehead and exploded that beseeching face into a ruined spray. Elsbeth screamed a battle-cry as she tasted indisputable triumph in the flavor of her friend’s lifeblood. The sheer satisfaction of steel slamming bone, of babbling mouths and clutching hands stilled forever, burned in her with its wonderful simplicity. In this red dance, she let rage lead.
Burning anger had guided her true before. In months past, it had sent her and these very kinsfolk in cutting through hordes of Harfells. That was when those outsiders were still considered bent-spirited foes who came night-creeping to kidnap infants and steal young livestock, all to feed to their nameless new god. Then as now, she delighted in the straining sinews of her lean-muscled shoulders, torso, arms and calves as she opened the bastards up. She had gathered more scars on her face and fists, but felt no pain, no doubt, not even outrage at the hill-savages’ crimes. There was only the throbbing, tingling sensation that fire must feel when it leaps from the hearth and consumes everything. And like a blaze, it did not care who it burned.
Now that the cunning Harfells had tricked and seduced so many of her own people into worshiping their dark-dream god, now that it was her own little Valka they came for, her fury turned on them. Kin-blood tasted just the same as enemy-blood as she swallowed it between laughs. It tasted good.
Her strong and proud hero-husband Rogvahtr, who had seeded her with Valka, whose iron-hardened hands had carved the gentle curves of her cradle, lay with his flesh in tatters from three-score wounds. He died badly, for horror and disbelief were driving her then, and her defense of Valka against the baby’s own father was hesitant, unwilling, still hopeful it would not end in blood-spill. Her stabs and slashes were shallow. Then the rage-geyser burst within her, and even Valka was forgotten. The seams of her green leathers burst with the force of cutting milk-nurse Kolla in two at the waist. Elsbeth’s mother, huntress Ulfrun, who had taught her to dress a deer, now herself became the gutted and headless corpse. Elsbeth waded through her entrails to seize the thrall Sorkell by the neck and slam his head against the doorpost until his skull went soft. She shouted her throat raw in death-lust so loudly she felt but did not hear the splintering of his brains collapsing.
So she ended clan Vinr, named for its loyalty in the Time Before the Trees.
Murder-mad in their own way, the people of Mengroenn still had not lost their kin-love. When they overpowered her in numbers like a wolfpack, they beat her with oaken cudgels to send her to battle-sleep instead of slaying her. She could have awakened as a ghost fighting forever in the Fastsongr or wandering clanless among the shadow-trees of the spirit forest Vidrfelan. She would have relished it, and they were fools not to deliver her to her fate. Instead, she blinked back to consciousness, spat blood on the floorboards, and lifted her throbbing head to see them feeding pieces of her dead baby to something soft and furred in a cage. Valka’s severed head lay upside-down in a killer’s palm, her dead eyes rolled white.
Rawhide bindings tight on her wrists and ankles did nothing to stop Elsbeth’s attack. She chipped a tooth biting the face off her neighbor Asmund. She seized his dagger and cut through her bonds, heedless of how she slashed her own flesh, and began slicing throats. Her den-mother howls and the bites of her steel-fang sparked panic. Someone released the flesh-eating animal from its cage and it darted out of the longhouse door in a shapeless blur, followed by the half-dozen villagers who had tended to it. Valka’s remaining tiny limbs, knocked from a table, fell limply to the floor. Elsbeth smashed a lantern over them to raise funeral-flames. Tonight Valka would be reborn in Vidrfelan. Or maybe only broken pieces of her would lie scattered among its fallen limbs.
Battle-axe back in hand, Elsbeth rampaged across the village, slashing at any in her path, even the children who had helped to deliver their siblings to the young-eaters. She barged into the yfir’s longhouse and hacked down his men before they could draw weapons, then took off his left leg at the knee. She left the chieftain to bleed himself cold as she rummaged for the scorn-pole, the tool of magic insult whose erection demanded ceremonial dueling or the suffering of a perpetual curse. Obscene engravings twined around its length, topped with a carving of a giant wooden cock fucking an asshole. Elsbeth’s rage had burned down to anger, and other, unsettling emotions could be seen through its thinning flames. She needed this kindling to stoke the blaze. She needed to finish this. Her dagger-point scratched a single rune on the pole—the rune of Mengroenn, for it was the entire village she would challenge today.
She planted the scorn-pole at the stream’s edge and skewered the yfir’s head atop its cock-tip, facing the village to curse them all. Her eyes burned like watchfires and she looked a redhead from the blood soaked into her blonde braids.
“You child-slayers! Baby-chokers! Come fight me, you bastards!” Elsbeth growled from her scream-wracked throat, slapping the flat of her axe-head against the steel-flesh of her arm-muscles. “Fight for your dung-worm of a god, or be cursed for cowards!”
But accursed cowards they were, pale-hearted now that they faced a grown woman who could st
and and fight them. The villagers stood around her in a ragged, ever-widening semicircle. She hissed at them like a fire splashed with water too small to quench it.
She tore the pole from the earth and slung the head off its end to roll at their feet. Many ran, but some old friends and comrades appealed, mewled her name, urged her to see that the sacrifices demanded by their god were worth some mystic prize, a protection against some nameless chaos they feared with their weak hearts. In fury she stalked off into the forest, the scorn-pole in one hand, her axe in the other, shouting incoherently and slashing down small trees and limbs. Her thighs burned as she climbed the rising slope until she stood on the earth-and-stone dam atop Mengroennfoss, the forty-foot waterfall where villagers washed clothing and in olden times made offerings to the water-grims. For a century, the dam had prevented flooding and allowed the village to farm fish in the pond behind.
Elsbeth stood for a moment on the lip of the dam and gazed at the village of her birth, the place the gods created her Veidimadr Sjau tribe. A smudge of smoke rose from the roof of her longhouse. Above the treeline rose the dark serpent-humps of the hills that were home to the Harfells and their hateful god.
Then she lowered herself into a notch in the dam, where terraced stone reinforced a spillway. She braced her back against the earth, her feet against one of the stone blocks, and pushed with all her anger. Her muscles swelled as she knocked it loose to tumble over the falls. She did the same with another, and another, until water began spurting between blocks and they hung askew. Perching atop the dam once again, she used the scorn-pole to pry until the stone gave way utterly and the waterfall grew in a moment to ten times its thundering size. She watched the stream swell into a river and crash through Mengroenn. She heard the screams all the way up there, over the water’s roar, as the roofs disappeared. She stood as the water ate away the earth at her feet until she joined in its cold inevitable fall.
Again she awoke failing to hear the steel-song of Fastsongr or the forgetting-wind in the trees of Vidrfelan. It was not the touch of a nature spirit that breathed life back into her, but the snuffling and pawing of a bear testing her fitness as meat. Its stinking breath was hot on her cheeks as she lay face-up on a pebble-strewn riverbank.
Instantly she drew her dagger and slammed it into the bear’s eye. She coughed water as she screamed a war-cry and stabbed again and again, rolling aside from the lunging bite and slashing paws. She ended up riding the bear’s back and clutching the dagger lodged in the eye socket like a saddle-horn until it died.
Elsbeth skinned the beast of its rich brown pelt and used it as a sack to hold as much meat as she could carry. She dragged the hunt-prize a mile downstream, away from any more predators drawn to her kill, learning of her fractures and bruises along the rough way. With a bit of flint, her dagger, and some oak-bark shavings, she started a fire to drive off the lethal chill setting into her bones and to burn away the mist that cloaked the riverbanks.
Only then did she cry.
The river gravel tore her knees as she crouched in the dirt, pebbles flying as she pounded the earth with her fists. Grinding her forehead into the black sand, she screamed until she vomited, and screamed some more, her broken ribs screaming back. She sobbed for her murdered child, for the husband she had murdered in return, for the loss of kin and friend and rank and home. She wept at her failure to die. She rolled onto her back, looking up at the dull steel glow of the clouded sky framed by the firs, and shouted hate at the All-Father. She cursed him as a pale-heart and a gelding. She yelled at the empty sky, whose colors matched her eyes, until her face was wet with tears, snot, and mist.
Then she remembered that the gods had battles of their own, and were only as strong as their believers. Maybe even now they battled this new Harfells bone-god who sent shapeless beasts out to fetch baby heads.
Elsbeth rose slowly and stood over the fire, steam swirling off the blood-wet yet warm bearskin as she draped it over her broad shoulders.
“Just as there is no more clan Vinr, no more tribe Veidimadr Sjau,” she vowed silently, “there will be no more tears. If I cry again, it will be to share the heart-pain of new friends and new kin.”
Her heart-pounding slowed as she looked into the deepening shadows of the firs on the river. “If I can earn honor with a new tribe, that is life enough. But if the All-Father wills it, and if my tribe is strong enough, we will return and put down this dog-god like the Ásdráp of old.”
The river ran south. Perhaps she would find a place among the Flotnar, those southern folk who called themselves “Imperials” or “Corcorids” and once believed themselves rulers of all Skógr. There had been Imperial heroes among the Ásdráp, and they had their own south-tongue name for the war-band. She thought a moment and then nodded.
The Godkillers.
She walked out of the forest a season later, the nights glazed with hard frost and the days golden with falling leaves that patted her shoulders like the gentle slaps of her lost child at suck. She wore fresh leathers and a new war-axe, both gained in trade for the bear’s skin and fangs and claws at a river village. The villagers were Skógr people, but would do no more than trade with a wandering survivor of gods-blasted Mengroenn. That was weeks behind her, and she had not seen another person since. Other things, she had seen—beasts and worse. Some she hid from; some she slew. Another bear’s pelt draped her shoulders and brow, and one of its claws twined in rawhide hung from her neck.
She stepped onto a great road of stone, its interlocked blocks black flecked with green. She had never seen its like, but she made no hesitation in using it and headed east. She walked until she came to a tower of whitewashed stone, one of the many post-inns of the Imperial Mail, as she later learned. Within she found her Flotnar. But they were not the new tribe she had imagined that day on the riverbank—not friends, surely not god-killers.
The Imperials were short and fat and soft. They stared at her scars, her tattoos, her bearskin. And they looked away when she met their stares, surely because they were ashamed they had not earned such marks of honor. Pitying these fearful people, she bartered another bearclaw for a round of the strongest ale for all. They looked at her differently then, and cheered her ability to down half a keg and still beat all comers in the knife-throwing contest.
But drink-friends were not true-friends, and in learning more of their language, she learned that they were a devious and shallow tribe. Instead of bartering with their own creations or battle-won hacksilver, they traded with coins handed to them by some master. Instead of ranks, they held “jobs.” So they toiled on as nameless as thralls. A few of them wore armor and went around armed, but it was to guard the petty belongings of others, not to fight for their own honor.
The first job she found was arm-wrestling for gamblers’ coin. She was too good at it. Even before the challengers stopped coming, she had to pay out too much of her winnings to repair the damages that followed when some brute returned to the inn’s tavern to unsuccessfully avenge his honor.
She headed into the city, then. Cor Cordum, “Heart of the World,” but more like its asshole. A pit of beggars and thieves laid low by rulers who never showed their faces in its streets, and she could see why: they failed their people by hoarding their wealth instead of opening their mead-halls and treasure-chests like true yfirs. A man offered her a saddlebag full of coin just to sit in a certain entryway beside a shuttered window—a simple house-guarding task, she assumed. Then the giggles and whispers made her realize she was being spied on through a hole in the wood, displayed as a monster for a half-coin a peek.
Back at the post-inn, she looked for better uses of her skills. No one needed more guards, but out in the wagon yard, she saw a blacksmith pounding steel and believed she could do that. Her overpowered swing cracked the haft of his hammer in her first try, but that only pleased Jorum, and he set her to work making horseshoes. That led to shoeing horses in the stable built along the yard’s boundary wall. She knew nothing of pack animals, but sh
e proved a gods-gifted talent with them, her hunter’s instincts making her sensitive to the beasts’ small signs of panic or fear or meanness. Most drivers knew only to yank the head this way or that, to whip for speed and pull for a halt; they overlooked the spirit and temper that makes each animal different. One day she saved the life of the stable-boy Arnbold, throwing him clear when she sensed a draught-horse’s fidgets and knew it was about to lean spitefully to crush him against the stall wall.
After that, Jorum borrowed the old firewood-hauling mare and taught Elsbeth to ride. It brought her a joy she had not experienced since Mengroenn days. Riding combined the wonderful aloneness of the road with intense partnership with the horse. Elsbeth felt nearly a beast herself, her power and speed enlarged as she rode to the next post-inn and then the next. She reveled in fresh air, the ale-stops, and the occasional battle-dances with road-thieves. Smithing and riding made her muscles harder yet, and she found pounding shoe-nails harder work than lopping off a few filthy bandit heads.
Soon she was driving supply wagons, then Imperial post caravans. And so, four years later, she found herself at the Imperial stables, eyeing the silliest batch of soft-bottoms she had ever been hired to haul around—this time to her homeland in the “Shrouded Vast.”
They will probably die out there, she thought. The man claiming to lead them, Ashton Arrowmask, was small and, though he talked a lot, shy. The other man was a typical fat Weàlae outfitted for bed, not the road. The woman, Rinka, was tall and strong, with a warrior’s pride, but painted her comely face like a whore and dressed like one, too. They had a child with them, a squirrel-like girl who fidgeted and barked rude questions about Elsbeth’s tattoos, scars, and honor-name. Elsbeth sat on a hay bale, chewing a hunk of pine tar, and looked at them.