There were cries ahead, and around them. The distant, mournful calls of strange birds, perhaps. Perhaps.
Then Desagrena’s blade rasped free from its sheath. Tergin’s as well. And strong broadswords carried by two other Galla warriors.
Ehmish looked back at those who followed. Kern, sliding his shield off his shoulder, drawing his short blade. Reave, behind him, greatsword already gripped in massive hands.
Not Gard, who left his blade sheathed but held his pike in a strong, ready grip at a crosswise angle across his body. He glanced back at Ehmish, saw his hand on the hilt of his weapon, and nodded.
Sometimes, Ehmish decided, it might not be childhood tales come back to haunt him. He recalled the stories he’d heard more recently in Murrogh. The battle Morag Chieftain fought against strange creatures on his way back from raiding Clan Lacheish. Shape-shifters, some of the tales said. Dragon-spawn, another. Ehmish wasn’t sure what to believe, but certainly something out there, amid the foul waters and icy fog, had the others worried.
He pulled free his broadsword. A bit heavy for him still, but a beautiful blade he’d taken in spoils after their battle on the Pass of Blood. Chased with silver, etched along the blade on both sides with the outline of a stalking snow leopard, it was a treasure as well as a tool.
Most of Kern’s warriors and at least half the Galla had clumped together within direct sight. Daol still led them forward, but cautiously.
An animal screeched nearby, in fright or challenge, and everyone started.
A pair of large splashes ahead. Another behind.
Daol and Brig turned back to back. Tergin and Kern. Reave stood alone, mighty blade up and ready, but Gard crouched down near the other Galla warriors to present as small a target as possible.
Ehmish swallowed dryly, tasting the Frost Swamp’s sour odor on the back of his tongue. He crouched and shuffled over next to Wallach Graybeard, who held a broadsword in one hand, held up the pike that was his left. Both points readied, Wallach peered out into the gloom.
“Someone’s out there, sure enough,” he whispered. “Can nay see them. But they’re . . . there.”
He stabbed his pike-hand forward, pointing to a thin veil of mist between two leaning cypress trees. Ehmish thought he saw . . . something. A dark shadow shift from hiding behind one tree to the other. Heard a distant splash of water.
“See that?” Wallach asked.
“Mayhap,” Ehmish admitted.
He searched between the trees again, saw nothing. Then followed the line back to the tip of Wallach’s pike. The leather cuff strapped around the stump. The belt then laid back along his bare arm to tie off around his elbow and upper arm.
The long, blackened vein snaking up the inside of Wallach’s arm! And the corrupted flesh turning black at the edge of the cuff.
Ehmish’s hand shot across, grabbing Wallach by the arm to pull him closer. He could smell the corruption now. Not just the smell of the swamp, but of Wallach’s flesh. The older man winced, drawing a sharp breath through clenched teeth and tried yanking his arm out of Ehmish’s grip. Failed.
“Leave off, Ehmish.”
By Crom he would not! Forgotten just then were the shadows. The swamp’s strange noises and the sudden worries of the other warriors. Ehmish saw one of his outcast brothers in pain, and in trouble, and he acted. Standing, half-dragging Wallach up with him.
“Kern!” he whispered. His voice breaking on their leader’s name, coming out as a harsh croak.
But anything he might have said, any warning, was lost as Daol suddenly yelled, “Down!” and an arrow whistled out of the shifting fog.
It buried itself in the thick bole of a nearby cypress. Then a second sank into the tree, the shaft quivering with a low hum.
Then a third arrow punched in with a more meaty thwap, and someone yelled in pain. And kept yelling, even as the Vanir broke from hiding and splashed at them through the muck and shallow water. As more arrows sliced in to shatter against shields or stick into trees, or be lost behind them in a whistling instant.
And Ehmish, falling hard to the ground, staring at the arrow that had pinned him through the left forearm, sticking into the wooden back of his buckler, realized only then that the warrior yelling in pain . . . was him.
GARD FOEHAMMER HAD dismissed his irrational fears of the Frost Swamp right up to the moment Daol rasped his sword free and Brig Tall-Wood nocked an ashwood shaft into the hunting bow he carried. That was when he knew it was nay just him.
Truthfully, he’d felt a prickling sensation since that dawn, when the morning fog had rolled up to surround the encamped warriors. Though there had been no danger at that time, anything that limited his vision bothered him more than he cared to admit.
An aftereffect of the sorcery inflicted on him by one of Grimnir’s Ymirish.
A fear he could never bury, and he would nay have to live with much longer.
Gard’s eyes would never fully heal. He’d accepted that long before, grateful his vision returned at all. Those early days had been the hardest, locked away in a dark cage, abandoned by the chieftain and clan to which he’d sworn his life. No doubt Sláine Longtooth expected Gard to release himself with the edge of a dagger some night. Gard couldn’t say he’d not have expected the same if a warrior under his command had fallen to the same fate.
But Ros-Crana’s shaman had thought there might be hope for his eyes. So he waited. He suffered the humiliation of being led about, for a time anyway, if only to find a better method of dying than releasing his own life’s blood onto the ground. And his eyes did begin to heal, eventually. Returning to him a world of dark shadows and dimmest light. Then a gray, blurred haze. Finally, color returned to the world, though never as sharp as it had once been. As if a thin haze had permanently settled into his eyes.
He could live with that, though, for a time. To find a new life, and hopefully a better death. And he had found the former. With Kern Wolf-Eye.
Grimnir, he knew, would take care of the rest.
But the fog. It pulled a second veil across his vision and made it hard even to tell one warrior from another at ten paces. At twenty, he was lost in a gray nighttime he could never explain to anyone and would wish only on his darkest enemy. It didn’t help, either, that the swirling mists reminded him so much of the oily, soot-stained cloud the sorcerer had summoned, slashing at his face, its thin tendrils burning with the touch of acid.
So, yea, he’d felt the point of a dagger digging at the back of his skull that entire day. Ehmish’s challenge had been unable to distract him. And the sudden tension of the others went a long way toward proving he’d been right the entire time to hate and fear the fog. But mayhap this was it for him. The end of his journey.
Then Ehmish screamed, and fell, with an arrow stuck through his left arm, pinning it to the buckled shield he wore.
Gard leaped forward as shadows darkened against the veil of frozen, white mists. Burly men and tall, wiry women, wearing the heavy leather skirts and wide-horned caps common among the Nordheim warriors, and all with savage cries at their lips. He put himself between Ehmish and the advancing raiders without a second thought. Crom damn them all to the northern wastes again! So much as he hated to admit it, Gard had grown fond of the boy, this young man who reminded him so greatly of Alaric Chieftain’s-Son. Of the charge he’d failed to protect.
Nay this time! With a hoarse cry, Gard heaved his pike forward as he might a javelin, hurling it in a flat arc to take one of the advancing raiders in the chest. The northerner’s feet kicked forward, and he dropped into the swamp’s evil waters with a scream of pain and a great splash.
It bought him time. A few pounding heartbeats only.
Spinning his shield off his back, he set his left arm through the leather strap and locked an iron grip on the metal handle. His broadsword was in hand in an instant. And none too soon, as the raiders swept up at the mixed group of Cimmerians, blades rising and chopping and shields ready, hurtling forward with reckless stre
ngth breaking the allied band into a half dozen smaller fights.
One of his attackers had an arrow stuck into his shoulder. Courtesy of Brig Tall-Wood, if Gard had to guess. The Vanir’s blade cut through the air, and Gard ducked beneath it. Stabbed out with his own sword, and felt it turn hard off the bronze-faced shield of one of his attackers.
A second raider, a woman, slashed at him with a curved saber. Her arm was light, but fast. And any one of her slashing cuts could lay him open to the bone. He thrust his shield into her face, let her beat against it.
The two drove him back several long steps, but he held them off while Wallach Graybeard helped Ehmish back to his feet. He had very few opportunities for a return swipe, but took one when he could. The raider with the arrow in his shoulder was a mite slower than he normally would be, and Gard managed to open up a long, bloody cut down the inside of his shield arm.
As blood poured over the ground, spattered against his boots, the raider would only grow more tired all the faster. He already had the drawn, desperate wildness of a hunted man with nothing left for him but to take an enemy life with him.
In fact, he also had muck spattered to the side of his face. And slopped through his long, red braids, sticking them together. Dried blood stuck to the side of his neck from an earlier wound. From that morning, or the eve before.
The woman was also coated in muck and had twigs and leaves stuck in her wild mane of hair. And a leech, which she hadn’t noticed or couldn’t be bothered with, attached itself to one leg, swollen to bloating.
These weren’t warriors who had lain in ready wait, fresh for an ambush.
They were battered and bloodied. And likely on the run themselves.
“Fall back!” Kern shouted from somewhere nearby.
Gard recognized Wolf-Eye’s voice easily enough, though he had lost Kern and several others among the tangle of trees and hanging moss and the infernal, Crom-cursed fog.
“Set a new line. Brace up!”
Gard could hear the reason for Kern’s retreat. More battle calls, howling out of the fog and screen of dark trees. A second rush of Vanir warriors. And the angry, piercing cry of a hawk, which sounded very familiar and in no way belonged to this swamp.
There wasn’t much he could do without abandoning Ehmish and Wallach Graybeard, however. He did try to turn the two raiders away, but they circled back on him, forcing Gard to backpedal again. Ehmish was at least on his feet now, Gard saw. With a savage yell, he broke off the arrow pinned through his arm, casting aside the feathered end. Then, retrieving his blade, he set forward with Graybeard to split the two raiders coming at Gard.
Gard ended up with the woman coming at him, as ferocious as a maddened wolverine. Spitting mad, with a wild, berserker rage in her eyes, she slashed at him again and again. Hammering her saber against Gard’s shield, cutting apart the thin metal facing, she chipped away at the target’s wooden backing. When he thrust at her with his broadsword, she beat it aside with a savage backslash. Then was on him again.
Shield then sword. Sword then shield.
But never worried for the two together, Gard noticed. He immediately came at her with an obvious, overhead slash, striking his broadsword at her shoulder.
Steel rang heavily against steel as she threw every bit of her weight into a clashing blow, driving his sword to one side and stepping out from under the cut. But he was already following it up, side-arming his shield into her side. Then again, shoving her back with heavy crashing blows against her arm and her bronzed breastplate.
He cut at her again, but she beat his sword aside once more.
The target had no spiked boss, but turned to one side it had a chipped and wicked edge. Gard sliced it forward this time, raking the serrated edge across her face. It tore through skin and muscle, laying open her cheek and splitting her ear.
She reeled back, tried stumbling to one side. And Gard put a good length of steel through her side, punching the tip of his broadsword right between two ribs.
Ehmish and Wallach had taken care of their man as well. Wallach had slid his pike-hand right through the man’s gut, twisting it around, while Ehmish chopped deeply into his neck. They kicked the dead man away, back into the swamp, where a darker stain slowly spread out from his wounds to color the muddied waters.
A pair of gray rats did not even wait for the battlefield to calm. They broke out of some nearby brush and rushed upon the floating body, drawn by the blood’s warmth and fresh scent.
Wallach leaned up against a diseased elm, covered in a yellow-tinged bark that crumbled beneath his arm. Panting, his face flushed and sweating, he let his pike-hand hang loose at his side as if the blade were too heavy to lift.
Ehmish did much the same with the arm holding his buckler, face twisted in pain as what was left of the arrow shaft continued to dig at the wound. Blood seeped out, dribbling down his wrist and palm, running twin trails along two fingers. He rested with the tip of his broadsword shoved down into the earth.
“Which . . . way?”
Kern! And the others! Gard remembered hearing the cry to fall back and set a new line. He had barely registered, then, the shadows of Reave and Tergin and Desagrena, moving away, pursued and attacked by more Vanir.
They could hear the echoes of battle still. The yells of rage, and pain. The clashing ring of sword blades beating against shields and other swords. But those sounds twisted about in the fog, and among the moss-draped cypress and willows, until they could have come from any direction. And seemed to.
Gard peered into what was, for him, a dense wall of gray cotton. He did not see the tree with the arrows in it.
Did not see the path they had been standing on before the battle began.
If he had to guess (and it was a guess) it was back along an unfamiliar-looking direction from which the loudest cries seemed to come.
A good thing, then, that Kern broke through the fog from the completely opposite direction. Splashing through knee-high waters as he waved a large broadsword overhead. The gray mists swirled thickly around him, but there was no mistaking his stringy clumps of frost blond hair, or those great, golden eyes.
“This way,” he called. “Hurry!”
His voice carried poorly across the brackish waters. Hollow and weak, as if a distant echo. But it was Kern.
Ehmish took a step forward, into the ice-rimed waters, wading away from the trail. And Gard moved to follow. Wallach laid a hand on the young man’s arm, though, holding him back a moment.
“A moment,” Wallach said, struggling down off the path, holding Ehmish back. Gard wondered about that. Far, far behind them Frostpaw howled, and he glanced aside as if searching the fog. So did Wallach and so did Ehmish.
Kern did not.
“No time,” Kern yelled. His voice stronger. He rushed at them, kicking up a spray of muck and scummy water. Stopped. Looked behind him as if worried for who might be chasing, the heavy broadsword held up and out in a guard. He backed toward them, looked back and gestured again. “Move it, boy. The two of you drag him along.”
In their months of travel together, Gard had never heard Kern speak so sharply to Ehmish. Not for any reason. Ehmish recoiled as if slapped.
He waded after them. Two leeches clung to Kern’s lower legs. Bloated and full. Another on his arm. He’d lost his silver armlets somewhere in the swamp, and his kilt was caked heavily with dried mud and blood and fresh muck. His face thin and haggard, he looked desperately near the end of his strength.
Or maybe it was all a trick of the poor light and the veil of fog.
“The others!” Kern called, nearly frantic now. Closer. Only a few steps. And Gard did hear the shouts and cries, the crash of blades, as the three of them moved forward.
Though still, they seemed to come from behind.
Wallach stumbled forward, ahead of Ehmish and Gard, then pulled himself upright and saluted Kern with a flourish, bringing the tip of his sword up to his forehead, and slashing it down. “A relief,” he said, “to see y
ou alive, Wolf.”
And Kern mirrored the salute. “Nay for long, if we do not move fast.”
Now it was Gard who hesitated, and Ehmish as well. The two of them glancing at each other, and the odd way Wallach, then Kern, had begun to act. Wolf?
But for his part, Wallach Graybeard appeared satisfied. He dropped the point of his blade and waded forward, passing Kern on his unguarded side. Glanced back quickly. “Well?” Wallach asked of Gard, and Ehmish. “You two are nay going to come?”
Kern’s glance back at them, following Wallach, was equally frustrated.
All the more so, in the next heartbeat, when Wallach spun hard and fast. And slashed his pike-hand right across Kern Wolf-Eye’s throat.
14
IT WOULD HAVE been hard to be more prepared for an ambush and so stunned by it at the same time.
The ferocity of the assault all but bowled Kern over at first, putting him and many others on the defensive, giving ground quickly as they traded one long step after another for time. Time to regain their footing. Time to call up those warriors who had trailed the main pack.
There were shouts along the back trail. Calling forward for the wolves and the Galla to hold, and back to rally the others. No way to know if they’d be in time. Swords rose and fell, slashing and stabbing, and Kern retreated behind his shield to let that first, maddened rush burn itself out.
Except that it didn’t.
One of Tergin’s men stepped forward, matching his opponent with a series of clashing parries, unused or unwilling to fight within a concerted group. Vanir to either side turned into him and ripped their blades across his abdomen, his chest.
Tergin nearly gave his life away then, leaping forward to save the man, who was already dead. Daol prevented that by tackling the Galla warrior around the chest, lifting and driving to all but carry him toward the back of an overmatched, bowing line.
Age of Conan: Songs of Victory: Legends of Kern, Volume IIl Page 15