Cold Counsel

by Chris Sharp

  NEITHER-NOR WAS HUNGRY and angry, as usual. The only thing he’d been able to catch in his snares was a skinny fox, which was hanging, throat-slit, over a pan as he stoked the campfire. The little red dog smelled like skunk, and he didn’t imagine that boded well for the flavor of the meat. The hunting along this ridge of the mountain had been getting spotty as of late, and he wondered if whatever curse had claimed the Iron Wood on the far side of the river had begun to spread. Soon he’d have to move again, find another uninhabited cleft of the mountain beyond the prying noses of those infernal Rock Wolf scouts.

  Neither-Nor had once belonged to a real clan—right-hand goblin to a Khan who was worthy of the Big Boss title of the Goblin Horde. He’d seen plenty of war, gutting more than his fair share of enemies, and feeling the bite of grievous wounds time and again in return. These Rock Wolves had never been tested, never had to defend their claim from thousands of chanting maniacs come to take it; or even a few hundred of the biggest, fiercest warriors that the land had ever known . . .

  Sometimes, he still had nightmares from that battle—waking up in a cold sweat with his heart going at a sprint and the earth-shaking roar of the Blood Claws echoing in his pounding head.

  He spit into the fire and slid a long, skinny blade from his boot. With a wince, he hiked up his pant leg to reveal the lines of runes that had been cut into his calf. As he waited for the coal bed to heat, he set to work, deepening those etched marks as the blood trickled again. It was his life’s work, and he’d been going at it for a quarter century now, having covered every inch of skin across his entire body with the protective letters, save for a strip down his back and across his ass.

  Before his clan had fallen, the Chief Hex Doktor of the Moon Blades had devised the body map of arcane sigils. It took him five years to complete Neither-Nor’s chest, arms, legs, upper back, head, and neck. Neither-Nor had found creative ways to fill in most of the gaps in the decades since. In that time he’d taken six killing blows to test the design, and he’d always returned. As long as someone took out the arrow or blade, and put the pieces aright, the runes would shift and lock into place and his heart would kick again. The infernal markings themselves were the only wounds that never fully healed, always as raw as the day they’d first been carved. Now, the constant sting of the marks was the only thing that reminded him that he was still alive.

  For all his protection and the rewards of his suffering, he awoke every morning feeling only the vulnerability of the last uncovered spots. He’d grown to hate the company of others, and he shunned the pursuit of kinship, which he’d once held so dear. He trusted no one to finish the work on his behalf; no amount of money could be exchanged to guarantee that one who saw the old map wouldn’t just kill him mid-rune and take the precious paper for themselves . . . It was only a matter of time before someone buried a knife in his lower spine and ended him for good.

  He stopped cutting and angled his pointy ear toward the drop-off beyond the tree line. Somethin’ there? Instead, the wind whipped past and the branches of the tree he sat beneath swayed with a sprinkle of leaves—yellow, red, and brown. The dead fox swung on the end of the rope, and the trickle of blood missed the pan. Neither-Nor tossed another couple of sticks on the fire and yanked the crusty hat from his head. Along with the scars, the red cap had become his signature over the years. He liked to keep it dyed a bright crimson, though at the moment the sickly brown color flaked off as he shook it out. He dabbed it against the fresh wounds on his calf, but the blood there was a paltry offering.

  The goblin stood and moved to the swaying fox. Again, his long, pointy nose crinkled at the musk of it as he knelt beside the pan and dipped the cap in the pool within. It came out with the glistening color he liked, and with a last little shake, he slapped it back on his crown, sloppy drips and all.

  Then he heard a scrape of the rocks again, and spun to see a monstrous hand reach over the ledge, just before an even more alarming head poked up from the lip with a grimace. Its black hair was matted and filthy, and the thick tusks that framed its face reflected the orange of the flame as if it were a demon crawling up from the pit. Its skin, gray-green and marred by hard use, was liberally spattered with dried blood, and it moved with a fluid grace that seemed at odds with the incredible bulk that continued to rise over the edge.

  Just like in his recurring nightmares, Neither-Nor’s heart leapt to a sprint as he dove for his fighting blades.

  SLUD HEAVED HIMSELF over the edge, surprised to find the flickering light of a campfire. The vicious little goblin standing beside it sprang into an artful tumble that brought him up with a knife in each hand. He snarled with pointy teeth as what looked like fresh blood dripped across his face.

  Slud furrowed his brow and scanned for wolves and companions, but saw neither. The bag came off his shoulder as he reached inside, nice and slow. He was hoping for the sword, but his hand came away with the ax, and he didn’t want to take his eyes off the wiry little fucker before him.

  “Oi, li’l fella, easy now,” Slud cautioned as he raised the ax slowly. The goblin was covered with finely carved rune scars, and he handled the two knives like he was no stranger to their use. “If ya ain’t Rock Wolf, dere’s no need dyin’ today.”

  The goblin’s eyes were wide and filled with terror, but he spun the knives deftly and adjusted his stance for combat nonetheless. One of his blades was curved in the shape of a crescent moon and had been worn down after years of sharpening and use. Slud lowered his grip on the ax handle and shifted his shoulders ever so slightly. “Yer Moon Blade Clan, ain’t ya? Ol’ Aunt Agnes told Slud about ya fellas.”

  “Not possible,” the goblin hissed. “Yer a ghost, come to finish me fer good.”

  This goblin was clearly insane. “No ghost, li’l fella. Slud’s da name. Just passin’ t’rough s’all.”

  “Yer here fer me map,” said the goblin. “Well, ya can’t have it, but ya can die tryin’, troll wraith!”

  The goblin lunged faster than Slud expected, but the distance between them was too wide. Slud cocked the ax and released. It was a good throw, and the ax spun once in the air before the heavy head whipped around to bury itself deep in the goblin’s chest. The force of it took him off his feet and knocked him back beside the fire with a flop, and that was the end of it.

  The troll chuckled as he advanced. Agnes had always said, “You never know when you’ll have to kill someone, so always be ready, yes.” He stepped over the goblin corpse with a swift yank of the ax handle followed by a heavy spurt from the chest, but his eyes had already shifted to the dangling fox.

  He took a long inhale of the rich, musky stink in the air. “Dat’ll do nicely,” he said, before reaching down to pluck one of the fallen goblin’s blades from the earth. Slud had watched Agnes carve out the scent glands of a fox for one of her stews before, and though he did not carry fond memories of the smell that had filled the hovel that week, he couldn’t pass up such an opportunity to throw the coming wolves off his trail.

  The knife made quick work of the fox pelt; Slud had the little dog sliced and peeled in a couple moments. He looked down at its shaved hindquarters with a hard cough. This would be nasty, but as Agnes used to say, “The quickest path through pain is straight ahead.” The knife tip went in at an angle, the way she’d shown him, so as not to rupture the first little sac before removal, but he lost focus when a rasping inhale sounded behind him.

  The rune-covered goblin sat up with a dazed look, like the wind had been knocked out of him. Slud furrowed his brow and picked the ax back up. “Oi, li’l fella, dat’s a fine trick.”

  The goblin’s eyes focused again as his fingers curled around the handle of the moon blade. He turned toward Slud with a gradual dawning of recognition, followed by a fierce snarl—just before the troll buried the ax back in his chest.

  FIVE: The Unforgotten

  THE NIGHT WOODS had never been so bright and full of promise. Before, on his long rides away from the clan, every snap of a twig
and skitter from the shadows had sent a jangle of unease up Dingle’s crooked spine. He’d never been one to lead the way, and was not counted among the brave or self-reliant. But now, he was filled with a desire to see what mystery lay around each rock and tree, and moreover, a hunger to be the first to discover it. He couldn’t explain it.

  He’d been riding for two days straight without sleep. At first he’d held on to the shaggy fur around the wolf’s neck for dear life, trying desperately to keep up with the Rock Wolf hunting party that had been instructed to kill him if he failed. He’d ridden to the witch’s house, praying with every breath that he might find some way through this mess, just so that he could get back to his rotten little bed again and dream of a better life. Now, he wasn’t sure he’d ever need sleep again, and the life he’d always imagined seemed to be waiting just ahead.

  He’d forgotten all about how his thighs and back had felt like they were on fire that morning while he clung tight and low on the loping wolf’s back and spurred ahead of the pack. His untrained eyes scanned the ground for the heavy prints of the giant’s path, spotting broken branches and indented earth where he’d previously have proven useless. Some of the hunters around him had even commented on his surprising zeal for the mission—an observation that would hopefully keep him alive upon completion or failure.

  Dingle kept mum. He figured that it had all started with that fingerful of the giant’s potion—not just energy, but something more that spread through him and took root. The diminutive goblin fantasized that, whatever it was the two of them had drunk, the sharing of the draft linked him with the giant he hunted. As he raced up the slope through the darkened trees, he secretly wished that those around him would fall away, and that he alone would find their quarry and offer his allegiance. Clearly that was what the fates were instructing him to do.

  Dingle’s wolf stopped running, its nose snuffling along the ground. The others caught up with lolling tongues as the riders took a moment to adjust their equipment and crack their backs. A particularly burly goblin came to a halt at the head of the pack. He had chicken bones strung throughout his long orange hair and multiple rings through his nose, ears, and lips. Dingle thought his name was Groole, but he kept his focus on the ground, searching for signs of the giant’s passing.

  “Ya ride good, runt,” said Groole. “Them tiny eyes spot real nice in the dark, don’t they?”

  Dingle ignored him as Groole’s alpha wolf raised its huge head to sniff the air with alarm. It turned its gaze in the direction of the now distant river. The other wolves caught the scent and turned to face that way as well. Dingle’s wolf flattened its ears and tucked its tail low as a snarl crept out of its throat. Another wolf took a step back with a quiet whimper. All eyes were locked on the darkness of the woods, but nothing moved there and no sound emerged from the still trees.

  Groole stroked his wolf’s neck. “Is the beast out there, boy?”

  Swords and bows started to come out, but Dingle spied a muddy print at the top of a boulder ahead, and then a scrape in the bark high up on a tree where the giant must have passed.

  “No, th-th-this way!” Dingle shouted as he turned his wolf back upslope and heeled it to action. Dingle had no time for distraction—he had to see the giant again. His wolf caught the scent and locked on to the trail once more, and with an abrupt bark of Groole’s alpha, the rest of the pack followed the smallest goblin’s lead.

  FROM THE HIGH branches of a beech tree, black-on-black eyes watched the goblins retreat into the distance. The wolves had sensed Agnes’s presence. They were right to be scared of her strange scent: like the dank, rich soil of a bog, overlaid with wild spices and anise. These wolves had never smelled a proper night-hag before, let alone the last vestige of she who had spawned the Demon Wolf himself—Fenrir Odin’s Bane, Hound of Ragnarok.

  Agnes had almost turned the wolves against the goblins, filled them with such hunger and ferocity that they would have eaten their riders, and then each other, until only the strongest and most insatiable of their ranks remained. Once, that had been how she’d chosen which wolves to breed, culling the pack so that only the largest beasts remained to run and fight beside the giants of the Jötunheim. But she needed the noses of these wolves to find the troll who would be king—now it was he alone who carried the promise to rekindle the ancient battle that she had sparked so many ages ago.

  While the Rock Wolf riders had spent the day running down and then back up the mountain to ford the river, Black Agnes had filled her empty stomach on meat, organs, and brain, and then asked the spirits of the air for a lift. They’d placed her gently among the upper branches of this tree where she’d taken a nap as she waited for the hunting pack to pass by.

  She was the color of tar, her limbs like the gnarled branches of the trees she hid within. Even the keen eyes of the smallest goblin scout could not have picked her out from the night scene if it had locked its gaze right on her. Images of this same goblin came back to her from the life that had come before—the part of her that had been Gullveig, and would always be, never forgot. This goblin had been there at Aunt Agnes’s demise. It had laughed with its fellows, and thrown spears at her withered form. Now, the tiny imp vibrated at a different frequency than the others, and Agnes recognized the dark magick at work in its little body. Him, she would eat in full, take back what was wrongfully stolen.

  That had been a potion most precious, the Nectar of Amrite, a recipe passed down from the Golden Goddess herself. Gullveig had learned its mix from lovely Freyja, who had been a queen of the People and, for an age, the one who had united the tribes to keep the peace between the old gods and the new. It was a concoction steeped in whispers and shadow, a link between the worlds and a solution to the riddle of death. No goblin of the Rock Wolf Clan deserved to taste its mystery—only those who were destined to spin legend from life.

  Black Agnes closed her eyes again—remembering Angerboda, her namesake, in her final days. She could still picture the vast field of Ragnarok from atop the high cliff of a mountain range that was no more. She could still feel the land shake as the giants stormed into battle, hear the piercing howl of Fenrir as he broke from his chains and gave fear back to the night. She’d watched with pride as her daughter, Hel, called an army of the dead to rise from the earth; and the sting in her nostrils was still fresh from her middle child’s poison breath, as Jörmungand, the Midgard Serpent, rose out of the oceans to swallow whole the world of the gods.

  But those were old stories; it was time to carve new tales from the dwindling remnants of her people. Agnes’s arms and fingers ticked, then creaked as they broke from the wooden mold they had assumed to become arms once more. The twisted claws of her feet came away from the trunk they had fused with, and a shudder of life licked through her form like an electric current. She would descend and follow the pack’s trail. When she found the prodigy of death, she would teach him how to take back the dark places of the Dream, and use his killing gift to show the world that some nightmares should never be forgotten.

  THE FIRST SENSATION always felt like an abrupt horse-kick to the chest. That was the heart remembering to beat. Then came the burning wave as Neither-Nor’s lungs filled with air again in a desperate heave. His eyes registered light out of the darkness sometime around the second torturous inhale, once the air had reached his brain, but for the first few seconds he couldn’t see anything but blurry colors—in this case, the searing orange glow of the campfire. The noxious skunk-waft of the damn fox found his nose next, and he was vaguely aware, once again, of his fingers groping for the knives that were no longer there.

  The troll materialized out of the blur on the far side of the fire—scanning over the runic body map that Neither-Nor had hidden inside a secret pocket in his rucksack. The goblin instinctively snarled and tried to sit up, only to discover that now his arms and legs were bound tightly with rope. After a few guttural rasps he found his voice. “Get yer foul hands from me map, troll scum!”

  The tr
oll chuckled. He held up the crinkled page, and his unsettling gaze narrowed as he looked between the map and Neither-Nor’s face. “Fine trick, indeed. Ya come up wit’ dis yerself?”

  “I’ll gut ya, troll—watch ya bleed out on the rocks like I done yer kind before!”

  “Easy now, li’l fella. Ya don’t wanna hurt Slud’s feelin’s. He’ll put de ax back in, ’n’ den see how dose nifty runes work on fire.” The troll motioned to the roasting fox on a spit above the flame. He’d added more wood and stoked the coal bed nice and hot. “More meat on ya den on de li’l red dog, ’n’ Slud’s gettin’ real hungry.”

  Neither-Nor scanned the clearing for some means of escape, but all the knives and the huge ax were resting against a newly cleaved log that the troll was using as a seat on the opposite side of the fire. The knots that bound Neither-Nor were a little sloppy, and he was pretty sure that he could dislocate a shoulder and get his hands free if he had a couple moments to himself, but the troll didn’t seem to miss much.

  “Any bit o’ ya not marked?” asked the troll with his deep, rumbling voice that seemed always on the cusp of wicked laughter.

  Neither-Nor tried to betray nothing, but he tried too hard.

  “Haven’t finished her yet, ay? No worries, yer secret’s safe wit’ Slud.” The troll winked before lowering the map. He picked up the goblin’s moon blade instead. “Ya seem good ’n’ handy wit’ a knife, dough. N’ ya recognize Slud fer what he is.”

  Despite his predicament, facing the living embodiment of his nightmares made Neither-Nor want to talk. “Killed trolls like ya at the battle of the Moon Blades and Blood Claws twenty years past. Yer s’posed to be dead.”

  “How ’bout dat . . . Agnes was right. But Slud heard it was de Moon Blades all died dat day, yet here’s de two of us, talkin’ ’n’ breathin’.” The troll ran the curve of the blade across the back of his arm and drew blood in a thin line. “What, ya turn tail ’n’ run?”