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

by Loren Coleman

  “Again!” Grimnir ordered, forcing his will upon Lodur while the bond was strong. And the lightning walked.

  Two Ymirish warriors fell to the needs of their master this time. The channel burst wide, and like a great beacon Grimnir now glowed within a nimbus of power. Not the storm shroud nor the failing sun, which fell closer and closer to the western horizon, could create a darkness capable of dimming his strength. And, summoning Lodur to his side, the two together rallied the rear guard and the core of the Grimnir host. Several hundred men and women. Vanir and Ymirish.

  “FORWARD!” Grimnir ordered.

  His merest whisper came with the strength of fifty men as he threw his best and strongest into the teeth of Cailt Stonefist and the war leaders of so many of Cimmeria’s great clans.

  Lodur smiled as well, having siphoned off enough power for his own. Strengthening his mental grip over the wyvern, healing his own fatigue, and for one last thing as well. To feel back along the bloodline link that connected all Ymirish and sense out Kern Wolf-Eye.

  Who just then was close by and moving forward quickly.

  Never realizing that he ran straight to his own death.

  WHEN THE SKIES split open, Kern and Ros-Crana had been working side by side to break through a rearward patrol of Vanir.

  A brawny lot, these raiders, carrying battle-axes and heavy war swords, commanded by a Ymirish warrior with a fanatic’s gleam in his golden eyes. But with nearly three to their one, the Cimmerians were wolves on a great bear. They swarmed over the enemy, breaking their line into a dozen smaller battles. Blades rose and fell, rose and fell, and it was more Vanir blood than Cimmerian that stained the ground black.

  Ros-Crana traded high, swinging slashes against the Ymirish’s greatsword, her blade ringing against his in clear, pure tones. Kern came in low and from the side, looking for an opening that would let him loose the man’s lifeblood out across the blood-soaked ground.

  Then he felt the darkness surge within him in a too-familiar feeling. One he had recently experienced. He dodged back and tackled Ros-Crana. Bearing her back to the ground, out from under the greatsword’s long reach, while the violent strike of lightning crashed down over the powerful warrior and hurled him aside as if he’d been nothing more than a child’s rag doll.

  It left the warrior in a broken pile, while somewhere ahead of them Grimnir’s roar echoed over the plains in a rage of fury and pleasure both.

  The stench of charred flesh and ozone mixed hideously, burning behind Kern’s eyes. He tasted blood on his lips, and spat.

  “Keep running!” Kern ordered, regaining his feat in a bound and pulling Ros-Crana along with him.

  He saw Reave and Nahud’r breaking forward of the thinning Vanir lines. Daol. Desa, Ossian, Ehmish, and Gard. And Frostpaw! Trapped on the battlefield, the dire wolf was doing all it knew how to do. It ran with its pack. Every so often it looked aside and howled, as if wanting to warn Kern that he ran into danger, not away from it.

  As if he didn’t know that. There was nay sign of Garret Blackpatch or Mogh breaking through the last skirmish. “Let them come through safe,” he whispered.

  “How did you know?” Ros-Crana asked, shouting to be heard above the din of battle, the howl of the wolf and the winds. “The lightning?”

  “Happened earlier,” he said. Wanting to let it rest at that. Knowing he could not. “Felt similar. The air. Thought it might be coming for me again.”

  “Lightning rarely strikes again.”

  “Don’t you believe that. Not this day.”

  The farther south they moved, the sharper some of the hills sloped and the more often they came across the occasional upthrust of rock. There were also more corpses, Vanir and clansmen both. Kern nearly stumbled at one point, feet burning as he raced across a killing ground of bodies and charred, smoldering grasses. Shadows whispered to him, pressed. Formed an image of Grimnir within his mind, bellowing at the sky with an aura of dark power cascading around him. And in his bright shadow walked another man, a Ymirish sorcerer with the winds whipping about him in a cyclone of power.

  Grimnir had walked here!

  “This way.” Kern turned, following the echo of power. Pointing his short blade a bit more east than south, toward the tall shadow of a nearby mesa, he led the mixed company of wolves and Callaughnan slightly off their original line.

  “How do you know?”

  How to answer that? There was no way. Even if he’d been of a mind to, how would a dog describe its sense of scent, or an eagle its superior vision to a man nearly blinded. It was simply more of what one might already feel, or know. Instinct.

  Sorcery.

  Kern shoved aside that thought. Not hard to do as they were soon challenged by a half dozen Vanir standing guard over a field of recently slain kinsmen. The wounds on the bodies were horrible and fresh, with arms missing and chests caved in on so many of them. Still, the raiders had been checking them quickly with stabs into the chest, the throat, just to make certain.

  Kern and Ros-Crana each ran over one, hardly slowing. Left the other four to those who followed. Racing at the head of a snarling wolf pack for the end of the world.

  That is what it looked like. The end of the plains. Where the ground ahead, running even or maybe slightly downhill, simply dropped away. Then nothing, until the steep mesa cliffs, as if a void had simply opened in the plateau. The clash of men at arms and the shouts of the dying were loud now, and seemed to come from that void. Below their line of sight.

  A steep drop-off only, as it turned out.

  They leaped out over the fall, dropping close to a man’s length before hitting the actual slope. Running down into some lowland depressions that stretched for a league, at least, and finally butted right up against the mesa’s sandstone cliffs. And here, across the entire plateau, men struggled and fought and died. Several hundred Vanir, with their Ymirish masters whipping them on. At a guess, not nearly so many Cimmerian warriors. Though it might be close. Kern could tell them apart by the way the clansmen would attack, press, then retreat as needs be, while Vanir raiders simple came at them again and again, pressing the Cimmerians back at all costs.

  Kern took this all in with a glance, lengthening his stride as they raced down the hill, the line of warriors spreading out on the attack.

  Lightning flashed below, and he blinked away the after-image. He’d felt the strike coming again, and the life it had taken in a rush of strength. The dark power hammered inside his head for release. It had slipped out once too often now. It was not going to be denied forever.

  Just long enough, he hoped.

  Coming down off the slopes, leading much-needed reinforcements, Kern heard the rousing cheer sent up by the Cimmerian war host. There were few northerners in their way, though these quickly formed a hasty line of defense. One archer who had carefully hoarded his arrows began to loose one shaft after the next.

  Kern raised his shield and tried to ignore that one, hastily searching for where they might be needed most. About anywhere, it seemed.

  Bearing spears, hung with different totems, dipped and waved in distress all across the battlefield, including the curling ram’s horn of the Lacheish straight ahead. Vanir horns sounded the attack, adding their mournful dirge to Frostpaw’s nearby howl and the wyvern’s shriek as it stooped and raked its claws through a knot of Cimmerian swordsmen.

  Kern also counted several fists of bareback chargers, wheeling about over open ground, readying for another charge. Only one man among them in chain mail, the armor a dull gray next to the much darker leathers of his companions.

  So, Valerus had also made it through!

  “Kern!” Daol shouted in his ear, thrust a hand forward nearly straight in line with the Lacheishi standard.

  The winds kicked up dust and grit, bits of grasses, throwing the debris in their faces. Kern’s eyes watered, and his vision wavered, but there was still no missing what Daol’s hunter’s eyes had spotted first.

  Grimnir!

 
; The Great Beast was here. Holding the center of the battleground, bright with his own power as he laid about with battle-axe and warhammer, the giant-kin stood out like a god among mortals. Half again as large as any man, with thick muscles stretched under a mottled, gray hide the color of ancient, rotten snow, his golden eyes blazed with fresh fire and his bellowing roar stormed up at the heavens.

  Kern slowed long enough to gauge the strength between their reinforcements and Grimnir’s rear guard. His eyes watered again, tearing up. He felt the darkness stir within him as it did when he felt threatened. Which was when he saw Lodur, the Ymirish sorcerer. Kern hadn’t seen the frost-bearded man since Taur. And he had grown thinner—nearly gaunt. But still, he knew. And what was more, Lodur was not surprised to see him, to know him, either.

  He stood not far back from Grimnir, surrounded by a thin guard of Vanir. And between Kern and that line was a great deal of open (watery) space.

  No Ymirish warriors.

  Only a double handful of Vanir at best.

  Then a spike of pain tore through Kern’s mind, and he felt the presence moving in at his side hard and fast and strong.

  He barely had time to tense for the impact, then it was on him! Knocking him into a barrel roll across the hard ground as claws dug into his back and a fanged maw came within a handbreadth of his throat.

  One of Grimnir’s great, white-furred cats. A northern saber-tooth.

  Its breath stank of fresh meat, and Kern could guess what kind. Its claws were razor-sharp, like a handful of daggers raked across his leg, his chest.

  In the end, about all that saved him was the light hand required by his short blade. He had held on to it while the saber-tooth pounced, and managed to get it between his neck and those snapping jaws. The animal bit down on the blade, and Kern swiped the sword aside, flaying open its cheek and ripping a bloody gash down the side of its face.

  The animal leaped one way. Kern rolled free the other, wondering how he had missed it on the grassy plains.

  But the illusion was already falling apart even as he rolled to his feet, coming up in a guarded crouch. Like bursting up from a still pond on a summer’s day, the blurry landscape shifted around him, and suddenly he saw the Vanir warriors where they had crouched in hiding, cloaked beneath Lodur’s dark sorcery same as the great cat had been. Wrapped in the storm’s winds until the eye simply wanted to slide away to look elsewhere.

  A trap! And his warriors, Ros-Crana’s, were running right into it.

  “Ware!” Kern shouted. “Vanir!” He had time for little else, searching for the cat before it struck out of ambush again.

  But the wolf already had it in a death grip.

  Having chased after Kern and the others this far, it had come over the ridge and down onto the flats. Certainly it knew the scent of the cats. It had fought them before and knew them as a threat to be dealt with at once. Frostpaw had powerful jaws clamped about the saber-tooth’s neck, dragging it around to prevent it from whipping its sharp claws up, and wasn’t about to release it until death.

  With Kern’s warning the illusion had apparently come undone for everyone. A few warriors were unlucky enough to have a Vanir at their elbow when the sorcery broke, and they were taken down quick and brutal. Throats slashed. Blades driven through backs.

  The others managed to at least get a sword or shield up in time, most of them, as the field erupted in fresh, desperate fighting. Reave’s greatsword slashed around in a wide arc, protecting Daol as well as Nahud’r, spoiling one ambush. Ehmish was set upon by two raiders, and with his broken arm would have been easy meat if Gard hadn’t stepped in with a strong blade and a shield to help protect the younger man.

  Desa and Ossian fell back under a rush, tried circling around the far side.

  Garret had disappeared.

  Ros-Crana and another of her men barreled right into a trio of raiders, and all went sprawling hard over the ground. A broadsword flashed up, then sliced down hard. Blood spurted in a crazy fountain.

  Someone in that pile would not get up again.

  Kern raced up as hard as he could from the back of the pack. His wolves and Ros-Crana’s warriors threw themselves forward one struggling step at a time. Far from an open race, it was now a defiant struggle even to get near Lodur. Or Grimnir, who hacked and beat his way at anything the Cimmerians could throw at him.

  The Great Beast had already taken a lance though his gut. Since it was hardly slowing him, he did not bother to pull it out. A Murrogh charger raced in, his second lance thrusting forward. Grimnir batted it aside and used his battle-axe to split the horse’s head open, dropping the animal.

  A backhand slash with the heavy weapon cleaved the warrior in two right after.

  The warhammer laid about with savage fury, breaking skulls and shattering bone.

  With these, Grimnir clawed and battered his way through the thickest part of the fighting, right for a thick cluster of bearing spears, including Lacheish, as if ready to single-handedly wipe out the war host’s leaders.

  Exactly ready.

  Kern struggled forward, laying about with his short sword, smashing his shield forward to take desperate blows off its face. Calling to his men, his wolves. Pushing them onward. The line surged, and halted. Spread wide and surged again. Kern couldn’t have been more than a handful of heartbeats behind Ros-Crana now. Perhaps a good stone’s throw behind Grimnir, in fact.

  But in either case, it could be just late enough.

  Nay! He had not come so far, halfway across Cimmeria and back again, over mountains and the Hoath Plateau, to be denied now. With his enemies before him, celebrating in the death and destruction they had wrought, his anger returned. Burning within him in a way he had not felt—truly felt—since that day at lakeside when he’d overcome it.

  The dark power had stirred afterwards, yea, but not the mindless rage he’d suffered at Gaud, and in the presence of Cul Chieftain, and again at Gorram Village. A berserker’s lust for battle and blood. And the singing call of his Ymirish heritage. The sorcery he wanted nothing to do with, though of course it was a part of him just as his Cimmerian blood and beliefs were. But which the stronger?

  He did not know. Struggling forward. Blood rushing in his ears. His pulse hammering within his head as he pushed to make it.

  Stealing time between heartbeats as everything slowed around him.

  Ros-Crana, picking herself up from a tangle of limbs and blades. Bleeding, staggering, but ready with a dark, singing blade and every last measure of strength and skill she possessed.

  Reave, stabbing his greatsword through a Vanir, but then swarmed by two others, pulled to the ground. Daol and Nahud’r pressing forward, but set upon by another wild berserker.

  Lodur, the sorcerer, who stood just barely out of reach on the struggling field. He blazed with power of his own, fed from the storm. Tugging on the wyvern’s leash as the creature turned in the sky, wheeling about for another diving charge.

  And Grimnir! The Unnatural Terror who challenged the entire field with his thunderous roars. The Immortal Demon himself, descended of frost-giants and the bane of Cimmeria. He stormed forward with sparks striking from beneath his bare feet as their touch ruined the earth; weapons hacking, hammering, nearly within reach of a small knot of men that included Cailt Stonefist and Cul and Loht, Jaryyd, Hogann, and Sláine Longtooth.

  Kern began to think about saving his friends, no matter what they had promised each other. Knowing he would not reach Grimnir in time.

  Or wouldn’t have, if two men hadn’t dived in front of the beast.

  One with a fast sword, slicing deep through Grimnir’s side. Punching the blade’s tip between two ribs.

  The second, with a familiar style and a veteran’s ease, coming in behind the monster, trying to hamstring the brute while his pike-hand stabbed several times into Grimnir’s side.

  His men!

  Brig Tall-Wood and Wallach Graybeard!

  For a few long heartbeats, another half dozen steps, Ker
n thought Reave might extract himself from the tangle of bodies and blades. And Ros-Crana looked to be doing well now, laying about with her dark sword, driving one man back, then another, the fight taking everything she had left. But then she could not see the third warrior who slipped around at her blind side.

  And his decisions were all taken from him.

  Still ten paces to a dozen short, Kern raised his sword overhead and heaved, putting all he had behind the throw. Everything. His rage and strength. His focus. Every last measure of his regrets and his hopes. The pain of Ashul’s passing, and Old Finn’s. The raw emotion he’d shared on those two winters nights with Maev.

  Letting slip the safeguards he had so carefully—so rigidly—kept in place these many weeks and months as the dark power coursed and raged and flowed.

  Calling down the skies.

  Guiding his hand, then his sword, with a phantom touch as it tumbled end over end over end.

  The lightning ripped down and struck through his short sword just as it buried itself in Lodur’s gut. A good arm’s length of steel, it glowed violet-bright inside the harsh, glare of the long, lingering strike, which caught and held the sorcerer like an insect trapped in amber. A thunderclap broke hard against the plateau, and the force of it knocked aside Vanir and Cimmerians alike, hammering several warriors to the ground. Winds whipped up, gusting in a strong breeze to envelop Kern, pulling at his frost blond hair as the howling rose in an earsplitting banshee wail.

  And Grimnir turned, his golden eyes alight with the same, sudden shock mirrored on Lodur’s face as both witnessed the event and knew it for exactly what it was.

  The dark birth of a new Ymirish sorcerer.

  Darkness clouded over Kern’s vision, reducing the land into deep shadow as he continued his blind run forward. Caught between heartbeats as warmth flooded through him. Not the false promise that rage had once bought him. True heat! Blossoming from deep inside as that tiny, cold spark deep at his core flared to life for the first time. A gift of his northern heritage.