Age of Conan: Songs of Victory: Legends of Kern, Volume IIl

by Loren Coleman

  He was ambitious as well as strong. And standing far too close for Ros-Crana’s comfort. Too close for her pair of uneasy guards as well, whom she’d ordered too far back to do her any good should one of these trusted men suddenly take a mind to shove her over the ravine’s long, lethal drop.

  Appearances.

  “Ros-Crana!”

  A shout from the far side of the bridge. A stir among the warriors still waiting to cross as a man shoved his way forward from the back. He looked familiar, even from a long stone’s throw distance. Thick, dark sidebeards, but his chin scraped smooth.

  “Callaughnan Chieftain! I bring word from T’hule Chieftain.”

  Clan Conarch! She recalled the man now. Barod, his name was. From Conarch’s lodge hall, and the feast thrown to honor the arrival of spring’s first merchant caravan.

  Where she’d insulted T’hule Chieftain, turned her back on him and stormed out on his hospitality. She had even stripped the peace bond from her weapon, throwing the leather stay into the fire at T’hule’s feet. He could have called her into a Challenge Circle for that alone.

  Now one of his men raced up behind her? This could not be helpful.

  But she must receive him. If Callaugh hoped to stave off a feud, if there was still time for that, she would hear his words.

  “You have something to say, then come across,” she shouted. Crom take her if she’d scamper back over the arch as if a dog bidden by its master.

  The messenger for T’hule Chieftain crowded into line, though he hesitated a moment at the bridgehead. Likely when he saw no one had bothered with so easy a safety measure as a few handfuls of sand and gravel thrown out along the weathered arch. Three steps out he wavered as a sharp gust of wind nearly blew him off the arch’s back, and Ros-Crana flinched as she pictured the man’s body tumbling into the rock-strewn waters below, being pulped and bloodied and broken before she heard his message.

  Also as she imagined Clan Conarch’s response when the messenger sent after her simply disappeared. Or was found dead downstream.

  The fates were not so cruel, and Crom’s gift lent the man strength enough to hold his footing and make the journey safely across. He jumped the last several strides, landing in an easy crouch, and straightened before her. “A fine challenge, that.”

  Ros-Crana shifted her stance only slightly, able to face the man but still keep an eye on her crossing army. Still giving them the benefit of her audience. The winds blew a few hairs across her eyes, which she ignored. A light sheen of spray splashed against her face, leaving her lips tasting of sweat and mountain ice.

  “What has T’hule Chieftain to say to me?”

  Barod rubbed at his smooth-shaven chin. His blue eyes were twin shards of ice, staring at her as if from a great distance. “A new Vanir threat has come down from the Eiglophians. Not a large war host, but strong enough to threaten smaller clans throughout the northwest territories.”

  “Good,” Dahr said, though he spoke out of turn. His scarred face twisted with a grim smile. “Will give T’hule Chieftain something to occupy his time while we are away.”

  It would at that. Ros-Crana had left an understrength guard at Callaugh Glen, counting on their strong, palisade walls to help protect the clan’s home. It would be good for T’hule to be occupied elsewhere.

  She shrugged. “Kern Wolf-Eye warned us that it would be so. T’hule chose to mock his warning and his help.”

  “The outcast has no standing among clans and chieftains. Even if some talk of him as Conan, come again.”

  Ros-Crana laughed in the man’s face as the barb failed to strike at her. There were similarities, yea, between the legends of Conan and exploits from many among Kern’s band. His Men of the Wolves. She had even heard fireside renditions of those tales told as Conan stories. Properly embellished, of course. But Kern Wolf-Eye, she knew, would have been the first to admit it. He was no Conan.

  “Try again, Barod, if it was your chieftain’s orders to insult or anger me. Otherwise, say what it is you have come to say and leave off.” She jerked her chin toward the Teeth, their snowcapped peaks towering above them. “I have a long climb ahead over the Pass of Blood.”

  “You are saying it is not some misplaced loyalty to the whelped one that you cross those mountains, turning your back on your own people and lands?”

  She did not miss how Barod’s gaze wandered, bringing the men standing beside Ros-Crana into the conversation. He spoke for their benefit as much as for hers.

  “Nay. It is not.”

  “There are . . . rumors.”

  She’d wager there were. Having let Kern’s warrior pack guest at Callaugh Glen for several weeks. And certainly someone with a loose tongue had seen Ros-Crana seek him out in the village’s hot springs, joining Kern Wolf-Eye in the baths. For talk! Only for talk.

  Though still, she recalled that one moment when she had moved toward him, moved into him, all too clear. The mineral taste of the spring’s water. The steam which had soaked his pale, frost blond hair, weighting it against the side of his head. The wariness in his golden, feral eyes. And the flash of heat that had thrilled her. Briefly.

  But his skin, when she’d touched his chest, had nearly burned her for as cold as it was. Not even a corpse’s flesh could have remained so lifeless, immersed in the hot baths. Before she could help herself, she jerked her hand away.

  “You are . . . cold,” she had said. Freezing.

  Kern’s eyes had been two slits of golden fire. Watching her. “All my life.”

  Yea. She remembered that moment very clearly. The expectation that had built up, then was lost when something in her recoiled at his unnatural nature.

  “Rumors be damned.” Ros-Crana brushed aside the implication. “I respect Wolf-Eye’s accomplishments. And feel a debt to him for the aid he gave us on the bluffs overlooking Conarch. I remember, Barod, because I was there. I watched as Grimnir’s mighty host nearly crushed the best three clans had to offer. I saw Conarch burning and my brother fall beneath the swords of the Ymirish and their Vanir dogs. And I know we’d have lost the field that day if Kern had not dragged Grimnir over the edge of the cliff, pulling the creature with him into death.”

  “Only they did not die.” Barod echoed his chieftain’s words, said at the feast several weeks before when Ros-Crana had used the same argument. “Grimnir lives. Kern Wolf-Eye failed.”

  “Kern was fortunate enough to land on a small ledge, though the rocks scraped away more flesh than they left on his back, his side. And Grimnir . . .” She could not help a shiver, remembering the great man-beast who had taken the field against them that day. Giant-kin, with a thick, muscular hide the color of rotten snow and the same fierce, yellow eyes he shared with the Ymirish—and with Kern. “Grimnir’s survival could not have been foreseen. We cannot hold it against Kern, when he was willing to spend his own life for ours.”

  “Blood debt,” Dahr said. And Carrak, though silent, nodded.

  The last few warriors of her host, stepping down from the nearby arch of stone, beat fists against their chests, saluting the tradition if not the man.

  “There is no blood debt to an outcast and outsider, by Crom. The wolf-eyed man has the blood of Ymir in his veins. He admits this. Your brother knew the traditions, Ros-Crana Chieftain, and would tell you now that such a one is owed nothing.”

  A mistake, invoking her brother’s name. Reminding her of him, of all he had been to the Callaughnan.

  Narach had been a good chieftain. Perhaps even a great one, for a time of relative peace. But he had been too slow to recognize—to respond—to the dangers of the Vanir and of Grimnir. He’d known that after Kern Wolf-Eye provoked him into working with Sláine Longtooth’s Cruaidhi. He’d explained it to her, in bits and pieces, over campfires and quiet talks inside his private tent.

  His words still echoed in the back of Ros-Crana’s mind.

  Tradition demanded we give Wolf-Eye no standing. No credence. But his actions shamed us. We appeared weak, and
so we were. And so we would have remained, victims of the Vanir, had we not finally acted and also fought at his side.

  “You think to use my brother’s memory against me? Narach was twice the chieftain T’hule will ever be, and you can take my words back to him. My brother recognized the needs of honor over blind traditions. Saw that we must act. As we act now.”

  Dahr nodded, for no other reason than Ros-Crana expected it of him, and Carrak slapped the sheath of his broadsword. “Grimnir is also the other side of those mountains.”

  Barod spat to one side. “And let the Great Terror stay there. Let him fight and bleed, and be weakened. But to chase after him leaves us all the more vulnerable. These are the words of T’hule Chieftain, and they are true. The beast’s host grows far stronger than you will be able to face. Any of you!”

  Something lurked beneath the surface of Barod’s words. Something more than a dark omen. A promise. Ros-Crana seized on it at once and turned on the Conarch warrior with a furious strength.

  “What? What else did T’hule Chieftain send you to say . . . or not to say?” A flush warmed her neck, her brow. “What more does he know?”

  “There is more,” Barod warned. “He asks—he does nay command—that you, any of you, return to speak with him. Give him that courtesy, and he will forgive any earlier insults to Clan Conarch. If you wish to chase off after your death, then so be it.”

  Carrack sneered openly at the offer, but Dahr hesitated. Ros-Crana all but read his mind. The offer to shore up damaged relations. A delay, which might derail the entire quest. Mak, safe, for another season. Of all the short-sighted views!

  “Weeks T’hule Chieftain has had to talk,” Ros-Crana yelled, letting her fury build. “And you chase us down now, here, in the shadows of the Teeth? Looking for any excuse, or threat, to hold us back? Does your chieftain strike a bargain with Grimnir now? What does he know?”

  She saw the flash of defiance behind his ice-blue eyes, threw her spear aside and reached out to grab two large handfuls of sidebeard before her seconds could stop her, or even caution her, against laying hands on the messenger of Conarch. Before she thought better of it herself, she yanked Barod forward and spun him around her, as if she might bodily hurl him from the ledge and out over the ravine’s deadly drop. But she held back, barely. Shoving him right up to the edge of the drop, letting his heels hang over the edge of the damp stone and dangling him backward with only her grip on his sidebeards between safety and a long, lethal plunge.

  “Speak, you little worm! Ah! Don’t even try to raise your hands. And do not think to hold back from me anything that might save Cimmerian lives, or by Crom’s hairy orbs I’ll send you to the crows.”

  Pain and desperation warred briefly on Barod’s face. A severe grimace. But he kept his hands down at his side, away from Ros-Crana’s arms, and breathed with tight, careful huffs.

  “Our warriors struck back at the raiders,” he said, words rushing through clenched teeth. “Pushed into the Breaknecks.” A long stretch of knife-edge ridges and broken ground. A no-man’s-land stretching from the settled territory of the northwest all the way to the Eiglophian Mountains. “There, we found evidence of many, many more Vanir. Camps and slaughter pits. A few stragglers who pushed not south. But east. For Crom’s mercy, Ros-Crana!”

  She hauled him back from the edge and threw him away from her onto the safety of the nearby path. All but dared him to reach for his sword. Even a single flinch.

  “East! Then the Vanir flood across the broken lands far above the Teeth! They rally to Grimnir’s banner—not to come after us, but to crush any threat of the clans united!” And T’hule Chieftain would indeed sell those clansfolk to Grimnir if it kept his own carcass safe.

  Barod rubbed at his cheeks, his eyes no longer so distant but wide with a mixture of fear and rage for how close he’d come to death. “We will burn Callaugh’s walls to the ground, Ros-Crana. And salt the earth in which your crops grow. Conarch’s vengeance will be terrible and swift, against you all, I swear by Crom!”

  Dahr stood frozen, caught between the devil he knew and the devil he feared. Carrack reached for his sword, ready to draw it the moment Ros-Crana ordered this man’s death. But she held him back. Held back with one upraised hand all of the snarling clansmen who stood around Barod in a loose circle, ready to tear him apart for such a threat.

  “You put strong words in your chieftain’s mouth, Barod. Mayhap he’ll listen to you, and T’hule will accomplish this in my absence. Truth. But now you take my words back to the dog you serve. I will return to the northwest lands. By Crom’s gift, I will. And with the men and women able to march halfway across Cimmeria and return from battle against Grimnir, you ask him how much I’ll worry for turning such warriors loose against Clan Conarch.”

  “He does nay fear you, Ros-Crana. You or that wolf-eyed cur.”

  She smiled and accepted her spear back from one of the nearby guards. Held it across her body.

  “Nay, I imagine he does not fear either of us,” she agreed. “And neither does Grimnir.”

  She looked from face to face, slowly. Smiling. Showing a supreme confidence that she did not feel but was necessary for the men and women who followed her. And for the man who would take her words back to her newest enemy. Posturing, though no one else need know that save her.

  “But they should, Barod. They should.” She brushed past him then, leaving him standing alone at the bridgehead. “Your chieftain is fortunate that he is currently the lesser of my enemies,” she called back to him.

  “I go now to teach that lesson to the greater of them.”

  6

  SWINGING AROUND THE southern end of the lake felt to Kern as if the land had buckled up under pressure. Here the lake’s gray waters pushed up very close to cliff faces, part of the Black Mountains separating Cimmeria from the Border Kingdom. Here the trails often zigzagged around and through flood cuts, steep hillsides, and broken ridgelines. The land dried out—more rock and fewer muddy trails—except for some small waterfalls and an occasional stream feeding winter melt into the nearby lake.

  Here the tired warriors looked forward to rest and respite. Most of them.

  For his part, the closer to Clan Murrogh they came, the more distance Kern maintained from his warriors. Too many spoke of seeing family, friends again. Wondered if children looked any taller. If a sick kinsman had turned for the worse. It felt far too much like coming home.

  Except that it wasn’t.

  Not for him.

  Cul Chieftain had made that very clear, two weeks before, when he’d led Kern’s pack back to the Murrogh stronghold.

  “Do nay think to rest easy here, Wolf-Eye. I do this for my people. Nay for you or yours.”

  Kern was used to being an outsider. Had lived with it his entire life. Though he’d not been certain how his warriors would take to it, among their own kin. “I am here only to seek strength against Grimnir and his Ymirish.”

  It had seemed, for a moment, that Cul might relent. “They are an unnatural force, which spoils everything they touch, yea.” He’d looked Kern square in the face. “And you are just like them.”

  Cul could have no real way of knowing just how close his remarks struck home. He’d not been nearby earlier that night, when terrible power had suddenly boiled up within Kern. Darkness and rage and a sudden thirst for both. So hard had it come at him, he had stifled it out of reflex. Held it off at arm’s length, keeping a slippery grip on it.

  And whatever Cul mayhap witnessed later—and understood—he kept that quietly to himself. For now.

  But Kern had been able to think of nothing else after the battle, or on the long hike back to Murrogh. Dark power raged in him still the next morning, singing through his veins as it pushed for release, a release he refused to grant. He had known—known without thinking!—that a terrible purpose roiled within, and, if he stepped forward to embrace it, he would claim the same strengths and powers as any Ymirish sorcerer.

  Wasn’t enough
that he bore their mark in his golden eyes, the frost blond color of his hair, his waxy, pale skin. That his northern blood had crowded aside everything he’d believed about himself—the Cimmerian heritage he’d claimed for so long from his mother’s side, not knowing any better.

  Winter born. That’s what so many had called him before. The blood of wolves. No one had really known the worst of it.

  That Kern was raider-get. The same blood that flowed through Grimnir’s veins, and the warlord Ymirish brethren, also flowed through his. And now that blood called for its heritage. A heritage Kern neither wanted nor, it seemed, could he barely control.

  “You quiet.”

  Nahud’r stepped up next to Kern, elbow bumping Kern’s arm as the Shemite crowded alongside on the narrow trail. The path was actually one of several that snaked along a boulder-strewn hillock. Kern had veered high on the slope, giving his warriors a wide berth as they stepped up the pace, eager to return. He’d sought to be alone. And said so.

  The dark-skinned Shemite wore a long woolen scarf wrapped about his head in desert fashion. Usually covering all but his eyes, he’d opened it enough to bare his entire face. Now he smiled, showing white, white teeth, and nodded farther up the slope.

  Frostpaw. The dire wolf had skulked up on Kern’s left, running a higher path as it scrabbled among thorny brush and rocks. Eight hands across the shoulders and easily twelve-stone weight with the return of spring’s bounty, for a large animal it moved with remarkable grace, powerful muscles rippling beneath a silver-gray pelt. The dire wolf had one white paw and a dark band of fur slashing across its eyes like a mask.