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

by Loren Coleman

  His words grasped at Lodur, stopping him midstride. And though the Ymirish sorcerer felt no stirring of true power in the room, still he rallied his own strength as if readying to defend himself. He turned back, his gaze drawn to the shaman. Ready to meet any challenge with violence.

  No need. The man had spoken his piece and had given Lodur the perfect opening. “Did I nay mention Deirdre?” he asked. He feigned innocence so badly, it would take no truth-sensing to know he’d withheld it on purpose.

  Cailt froze into a statue of pure ice. It radiated off him, almost at the same strength Lodur might have tasted from one of his northern brethren. But there was still a hot spike of anger buried deep within his voice. “What about Deirdre?”

  Lodur smiled, and not pleasantly. “Your daughter, Cailt Stonefist. She, too, has left Murrogh. She travels north with Morag Chieftain.”

  A fire lit behind Cailt Stonefist’s eyes. Slow-burning, but—once set—it would consume all in its path. Clan Lacheish would be heading west. Lodur did not doubt it.

  The right words. As Grimnir had promised him, they could move mountains.

  FOR TWO DAYS, Ros-Crana had tried to find the right words.

  A way around the insult with which T’hule Chieftain had struck Sláine Longtooth after the battle over Conarch. A bid of strength, to goad the older chieftain into joining her on the paths eastward.

  Now, she was down to raw anger and threats.

  “You bargain your honor like a southern merchant, Sláine Chieftain! If my warriors had not bled and died for you, your walls might already be burned to the ground, your people put to the blade or dragged north in chains.”

  Cruaidh’s entire courtyard had been ringed with tall spears hung with strips of cloth dyed gray and blue. The colors of Clan Callaugh. Within that large confine, by mutual agreement, her people were welcome and safe. Outside of the staked area, nearer the cattle yards and homes of the local clansmen, Cruaidhi warriors patrolled to keep their kin and kine safe.

  Many of them, as well as small pockets of Callaugh’s warriors, gathered about Carrack and Dahr with hands resting in the hilts of their blades, waiting to see which chieftain would first call for blood.

  Sláine Longtooth had hardly changed since last Ros-Crana saw him, with thick, gray stubble on his cheeks and a white tuft growing out from his bottom lip. With thin, salt-and-pepper hair, hard lines around his mouth, and those pale, summer-sky eyes, no one could mistake him for anyone else. One of the oldest chieftains she had ever heard of among any Cimmerian Clan, past or present, Longtooth was an unheard-of seventy summers.

  And still fit to cross blades with any of her warriors. She’d seen him fight. Knew what the man had burning deep within him when he called upon it.

  Now he called down the curses of Crom on her, sputtering at the outrage of comparing his honor to one of the “civilized” bandits who bartered and cheated along the trade routes from spring through autumn.

  “Woman! Your brother would have stropped a dagger across that viper’s tongue of yours if he hadn’t feared ruining a good blade. Narach was a pup’s age by my eye, but he dealt fair once Wolf-Eye shamed him out from behind his walls.”

  “Shamed you both, Kern did,” she reminded him. “Then T’hule Chieftain behaves like the stubborn, selfish-eyed prig he’s always been, and you storm off like a bawling mooncalf. Expected him to open his gates and feast you for the next year, did you?”

  “Nay more than you expect it of me now!” He gestured wildly. “What I saw outside my walls was impressive, nay mistake about it. But it returns the debt we put on you by coming across the Pass of Blood this last winter, and nay one thing more.”

  “Overbearing, ancient crust of a man!”

  “Wet-eared slip of a girl!” His hand fell heavily to the hilt of his broadsword and the peace-bond stay that tied it into its sheath.

  Her hand came up as if ready to draw the war sword slung across her back. “Demon seed!”

  “Slattern!”

  Ros-Crana reared back, ready to draw blade or rake her nails across his insufferable, arrogant face, or simply to slap him and let the insult run before injury. Instead, she beat at the air with a closed fist, half yelling, half laughing.

  “Crom’s sharp shaft! What ever caused Kern to think you were an honorable leader?”

  Sláine Chieftain held his composure for only another few heartbeats. Then it cracked with one lip twitching. That crack let a short bark of laughter slip through, which quickly blew outward as the opening of a full-chested laugh. “Yea. The wolf-eyed one spoke well of you, and your brother, as well.”

  A more formal meeting, two leaders who had not known each other before, and their argument could just as easily have ended with bloodshed and a feud that might last generations. Still might have, Ros-Crana realized, as the hard laughter cleansed them both. But somewhere within the threats and the insults—unpardonable during the best of times—were two strong-minded leaders who had shed and spilled blood together, and beneath it all had a healthy respect for the other and for the man who had once brought them together.

  “Narach would have come himself, I believe, if he’d lived.”

  Longtooth sobered. Nodded. “Sorry I was when he fell at Conarch. T’hule insulted his memory as well when he ran us off, the job half done.”

  She nodded, then gestured to one side as Callaugh’s shaman limped up with the flask she’d asked him to hold. Arguing was thirsty work. She took a drink, then offered it to Sláine Longtooth, who started a sip for the sake of courtesy, then drank deeper and with great surprise when he discovered it was no sour ale or thin mead she’d offered. Ros-Crana had brought along a good southern wine, tapped from a cask she’d bartered out of a merchant before leaving the northwest territories. Sweet and flavored. A good token for smoothing things over.

  Also, she’d wanted Longtooth to think about his last comment a moment longer.

  “Why not help us finish what was started?” she asked. “By your own admission, Grimnir has torn apart every small clan and village in Conall Valley. Many of these looked to Cruaidh for protection. For strength. Nay for hiding behind their walls and letting the northerners rape our lands and people.”

  “Don’t get us started again,” he warned, taking another healthy draught. Then he handed back the leather flask, with some regret and not a little sadness.

  “It is because Grimnir has gutted the valley that I can nay afford such a risk. There are clans who will never rise again. My own kin will be years in recovering from our winter battles.” He hesitated. “At some point, Ros-Crana, you must look to the future.”

  “At some point, Sláine Longtooth, you must ask if the future is worth looking toward.”

  His expression slackened. “That is a dangerous path to travel. I looked down it several times this winter and spring, after Alaric was killed by Grimnir’s assault on Cruaidh. Children came late for me, Ros-Crana. Getting past my son’s death was nay easy.”

  She had not forgotten the elder warrior’s pain. By all accounts—and she’d heard plenty from Gard Foehammer while he recovered at her village—Alaric Chieftain’s-Son had been a man whose loss was worth grieving. But she had not mentioned him first, waiting for the father to bring up his son.

  Now she slid in for the kill, or to start a real feud between their clans.

  “Children have not come to me at all, yet. So I can only imagine.” He nodded. “But how many more sons will be lost in the coming years, as Alaric was, how many clans will fall to never rise again, if fathers do nothing now?”

  She said this low, for Longtooth’s ears alone. Watched as the elder man bent slightly, shouldering more than his share of pain, awarding her a murderous glare. Then bucked up right after with a strong, dangerous gleam in his eye. A look that promised they could be allies, or enemies, and that Sláine Longtooth would give either one his all. He had lived too long, believed too much in his own legend, to let much hold him low for long.

  And she knew that
she had him.

  “You did not learn such patience, lying in wait for an exposed throat, from your brother. Narach’s anger was warm.” He said this not kindly, but with respect at the least. “A wolf’s tactics.”

  “Patient hunters bring down their kill,” she said. “So long as, when they strike, they do so with ferocious abandon.”

  “If you go setting the hunt at Grimnir, you’ll need both. It is a long trail across the valley and onto the Hoath Plateau. And the fire-eyed demon has already proven himself impossible to kill.”

  She recalled something one of the Aquilonians had said at her lodge hall council. Dredged it back from memory, building on what she remembered from that final battle over Conarch. “We saw it bleed,” she said. “Saw the creature in pain, and raging. Which means it fears. If it bleeds, and fears for itself, then it can be killed, Sláine Longtooth. And I will be there to see it.”

  Longtooth hesitated, just for the space of a single heartbeat, then nodded. “And I,” he whispered. Then, stronger, “Yea. Crom hates a coward. And never meant a man of Cimmeria to live so long as I have anyway.”

  He held out his hand. Ros-Crana reached forward to grip his wrist; and he, hers. There were some brave cheers, more than one battle cry hollered out to see the chieftains in accord, and lots of hands beat against thighs, against chests, against shields. An ovation from warriors of both clans.

  “Tell me,” Longtooth said after a moment, the two of them standing there, listening to their warriors’ support. His hazy blue eyes were more alive than she had seen since walking through the gates of his palisade. “Tell me, bloody spear or nay, do you believe Kern Wolf-Eye ever truly believed we’d head east? Either one of us?”

  Ros-Crana wanted to say that she would never bet against what Kern Wolf-Eye might do, or even expect. Certainly he’d proven his own expectation to be high, very high. But instead, she smiled with her teeth. A predator’s grin.

  “Let us go find out,” she offered.

  13

  SLOWLY, SO SLOWLY one might not notice, the elevation rose as Kern’s warriors and the Galla tribesmen ran north alongside the Black Mountains. Ehmish felt the change in the air; turning thinner, colder, forcing him to breathe deep and leaving a raw ache in his chest he hadn’t felt since winter’d released its stranglehold on Cimmeria.

  One morning there was frost on the ground again, as the morning dew iced over. By that evening, he saw his breath frosting by the sun’s dying twilight.

  The following morn brought a light ground fog, cold and clammy. It seemed to flow down out of the north.

  “Nearing the Frost Swamp,” Hydallan said. “Might be on the edge of the Hoath Plateau by nightfall.” The old man limped about camp, obviously feeling the cold deep in his joints. Stretching, limbering up for the day’s run.

  Old Finn was the worse for it as well, Ehmish saw. Stoop-shouldered and hobbling about, barely able to lift the weight of his own broadsword and tie it across his back. The gout in his leg reacted badly to severe changes in weather and temperature, but the tough old bird never voiced one note of complaint. Never had, that Ehmish recalled. Not when Cul Chieftain drove him from the village. Nor when Kern expected (and at times pushed) him to pull his own weight among the outcasts.

  That was the way Kern Wolf-Eye worked. He never expected, or accepted, anything less than your all.

  It was the way of the pack.

  Camp broke apart quickly, with stale flat cakes handed out to be washed down with a few last swallows of the milk they’d carried out of Murrogh. Water, from now on, and just as well. Days old, sloshed about, the milk was starting to turn. Ehmish filched an extra cake from Valerus and dry-swallowed a few more chunks of the crusty flatbread, preferring oats and stale grease to the chalky taste sitting at the back of his throat.

  Daol and Brig ambled away from camp first, striking the trail that everyone else would follow. Then a trio of Galla warriors. Hurrying now, wanting to catch up with the front-runners, Ehmish gathered up his bedroll and one of the leather sacks filled with a share of the pack’s provisions. Tucking his leggings into the tops of his boots and snugging the laces tight, he felt someone move up on his left as he checked the strap on the small buckler tied to his arm. Glanced up at Wallach Graybeard.

  “Ready?” he asked. Something of a reflex, wasn’t it? One man encouraging another?

  Except Wallach looked nay anywhere near ready. Not to Ehmish’s eyes. The man’s skin was pale, cheeks sunken, eyes dark, and sweat already stood out on his forehead. Always one of the group’s most stalwart veterans, today he looked wasted and abused.

  He tucked twists of blackened, blood-soaked cloth under the leather cuff he wore over his amputated wrist. The one with a pike’s head driven through the end, giving him a blade where his hand had once been. With a grimace of pain, he tightened the cuff’s belt strap back around his elbow. Then glared sharply at Ehmish.

  “Mind your own, boy,” he rasped.

  The rebuke stung, deeper than Ehmish wanted to admit. He’d worked hard, come a long way in the last several months. He’d killed, and nearly been killed, many times.

  Weapons master or nay, Wallach had no call to be talking down to him. Then again, the man was obviously feeling ill. Ehmish decided he could overlook the slight, and slipped away to find Gard Foehammer. Gard might also speak harshly to him at times, when he thought Ehmish was still acting the pup. But he was usually game for a good wager, and Ehmish could use a bit of contest this morning.

  “First man to fall back?” he asked. His breath frosted in a large cloud in front of his face.

  “For what stakes?” Gard looked him over, squinting. The haze in Gard’s eyes had cleared as much as it was going to, leaving a slightly milky cast over dark, fathomless blue. He still had white, teardrop scars surrounding his eyes, splashing across part of his face, from the welts raised by a Ymirish sorcerer’s foul magic. An attack that had blinded him for a time, though he’d refused to lie down and die as many men might have done.

  “Half a ration of meat this eve?” Hedging his wager only slightly, in case he lost. Ehmish was the faster between them, but Gard had deep, deep reserves.

  “Done,” Gard agreed. He immediately started forward at a strong pace, ducking around Valerus and his horse, leaving Ehmish to wait for the animal before he could follow and catch up.

  Planning to race the day away.

  Except the morning’s ground fog only grew thicker as the day wore on. The path, twisted. Less certain. Slowing, they worked harder to follow what little trail sign was left. The trees leaned in overhead, dripping tangled curtains of feathery moss over the trail. And there were several standing ponds to work around: old, stagnant water with broken stumps sticking out, smelling of mud and water-rotted wood, a rime of ice and black scum frozen near the edges.

  From behind them Kern’s wolf howled, as if calling them back. Whatever was ahead, Frostpaw wanted little to do with it.

  Ehmish began to believe the same thing.

  By their noontime rest with its short, sketchy meal, many warriors had clumped up behind Daol and Brig and Ehmish and Gard. Not much of a race, Ehmish decided, squatting over a patch of hard, frost-dusted ground, tearing more flat cake into small, bite-sized pieces. And he had still not forgotten the hard words spoken by Wallach Graybeard. Something in them bothered the young man more than the simple insult. He watched Graybeard move off to one side with Desagrena, letting her change the bandage on his wrist and smear a thick salve over the stump. A terrible wound, refusing to heal properly.

  Ehmish knew all about that. He’d nearly been killed on the trek over the northwest territories as well. Taken a Vanir blade along his side, flaying the skin back from his left breast down toward his hip. The sword had chipped into his ribs. Scoring them. Cracking a couple.

  He’d missed that final battle on the bluffs overlooking Conarch, and had never totally forgiven himself for it. He’d lain under Desa’s care and the attentions of Callaugh’s shaman for
weeks after, fighting infection, regaining his strength, which he only recently felt he’d recovered at full measure. The scar no longer pulled too badly against his left side. And he rarely dropped back on a hard run anymore. No pain—not even that barest twinge that had plagued him through Gaud and over the Pass of Noose.

  Starting out again, he felt healthy and strong if a bit unnerved for now by the forest’s dark canopy. By the unnatural twilight and the shifting fog that rolled in the clammy breeze. By the sounds of insects and chirping frogs and creatures that scurried in the brush without ever showing themselves.

  Passable ground came in short supply as the ponds stretched out wider and longer. An unnatural place, this. It certainly wasn’t cold enough to freeze standing water, but ice skim over the brackish water grew thicker regardless. The hanging moss dried and turned brittle. In some places it froze solid, with tiny icicles burrowing through the feathery leaves.

  Ehmish wondered if it were the ground itself that radiated the cold, soulless feeling. He would have voted to skirt the edges. The Vanir seemed ready to run right through the swamp’s black, frozen heart.

  It began to play on his mind. At times, walking near the front of the line, he believed he saw shadows leaping between trees ahead of them. Silent, drifting spirits. Or there would be a quick splash of water off to one side or the other. A rat or some other kind of swamp vermin, certainly. Though he wondered. He wondered. He reached for his blade several times, but always resisted in the end, marking it down to nerves. To childhood tales told in the dark, late at night, and which he had not yet forgotten.

  Then he saw Daol, blade naked in his hand and shield unslung, and Brig Tall-Wood with an arrow nocked and half-pulled, and did not feel so bad for his own fears.

  It wasn’t what they could see, Ehmish understood. It was what they couldn’t. The fog would thicken. Dark shadows danced and drifted inside the curtain. Arms and long, blackened blades sliced apart the curtain in glimpses, in a haze. Dark voices whispered at the edge of his hearing. Then the gray curtain thinned, cleared, to show an empty stretch of swamp water or maybe a thin, scraggly tree with branches reaching out like arms, or a blade. Stalks of cat-tailed grasses rubbed together, whispering in the clammy breeze.