Blood of Wolves

by Loren Coleman

  He left a blood spoor across the snow Daol could easily have followed.

  Or any four-legged hunter.

  Having tied cloak and poncho into his bedroll, Kern carried Burok’s broadsword in his hand. A safeguard, in case the large wolf should make another charge at him. One pace after another. One league after the next. He saw the animal a few more times and always at a distance—a shadow in the morning fog. Tracking him by the scent of his blood, he guessed.

  Too hungry to leave off. Too frightened, yet, to risk another attack.

  Kern worried about the night, and what might happen then. So when he stumbled across the trail of a large party soon after midday, at first he considered it a favorable occurrence.

  At first.

  A large group, he reckoned. They had trampled the snow in a wide swath. Kern found enough clear boot prints to determine they were moving from southwest to northeast. Making for the Pass of Noose, maybe. Or just planning to follow the Snowy River country farther north.

  That much made sense. It was the horse signs that confused him. Half a dozen of them: he counted by tracks through the ground cover of light snow. Good-sized animals, but hardly the long-haired draft horses that fared best in northern lands. Even then, Cimmerians rarely relied on such animals. Nordheimers, neither. Finicky beasts, in most clansmen’s opinion. With healthy appetites and poor stamina. They couldn’t climb cliff faces or move stealthily on the hunt. Horses also had the poor habit of breaking their legs in rough ground, and falling over dead if you pushed too hard. And if they ran off—or were taken in a raid—it was usually with half (or all) of your supplies strapped to their back.

  And these were metal-shod, Kern noted, finding a good impression in the packed snow. That meant southerners. Nemedians, perhaps. Early in the year for a merchant caravan, and there was no sign of wagon tracks. Aquilonian soldiers, pushing back into Cimmeria? Had King Conan decided to extend a gauntleted hand into his birthland once again?

  Kern stood on the trampled path, breath frosting before his eyes. The scent of winter freezing his sinuses closed. He looked south, and was lucky to make out the dim outlines of trees a hundred paces away. Though he knew what lay that direction. Forest and hills, then the snow-swept plains below Conall Valley, which finally gave way to Gunderland.

  Three days. Maybe four. Running and covered in blood scent the entire way.

  “I could make it,” he whispered aloud, hearing the same promise he had made to Reave.

  But if Aquilonia was resettling garrisons in Cimmeria again, then food and hope might not be far off. He scouted forward and found some horse dung, cold but not frozen through. Half a day. No more.

  Kern’s hopes surged, bringing a fresh burst of energy to his tired muscles, and he trekked after the horsemen’s trail.

  What surprised him when he found the slaughter was that he had not even considered Vanir raiders. In their frozen wastelands, they had less use for horseflesh than Cimmerians.

  Except as food.

  Fresh blood stained the snow red in a wide area. Where a crossbeam had been tied between two trees, for hanging the meat, ground cover had melted away entirely, turning the ground into a mess of red-stained muck and trampled entrails that smelled of bowels and the metallic scent of spilled blood. He found strips of hide, the castoffs too tattered or thinned for later curing. Definitely horse.

  Ashes in the large cooking pit were cold and slightly damp. The trail led off again to the northeast. So the Vanir had stopped, slaughtered one of the animals (captured in the south) for food, and set off again. They would pass far to the east of Gaud.

  But not the funeral host!

  Kern stood next to the slaughter pit. He looked to the mountains northeast, then to the south, and finally back at the bloody scraps at his feet. He might salvage a handful of meat from the cast-off entrails, washing away the muck and twigs with the last of his fresh water. Even bits of hide, chewed slowly through the day, would lend him strength. He had everything here to help him reach the south. Everything but a bit of luck.

  Turn his back. Look to his own safety and future. Leave behind the clan that had abandoned him.

  Once cast out . . .

  . . . get up eight.

  By Crom, he’d not see his friends chained into a slave line or their heads set out on sharpened poles! Or Burok left to rot in the foothills below the Snowy River country!

  Shaking dirt from a piece of hide, he sliced a small piece free and stuck it between his teeth. Worrying it free of any last trace of fat or meat. Sucking down the rancid oil that slicked the back of his mouth. A few more choice pieces he bundled up in the oilcloth sack that had held his biscuits. This he tied to his belt, for later.

  And then Kern ran.

  Northeast. After the Vanir.

  KERN VERY NEARLY made it in time.

  Premature twilight, brought with the heavy cloud cover and dense fog, stole over Conall Valley somewhere early of the sun being lost over the western mountain teeth. Still Kern struggled forward. League by league. His heart pounding. Lungs frost-scalded from breathing deep the cold air blowing down from the Snowy River country.

  His wounds, scabbing over with a thick crust, complained with every touch as infection puffed their edges with red swelling. Staggering up against a thick alder, Kern rested with his head laid against the silver-gray bark, his breath coming in long, harsh pants.

  He’d run the entire day away. Harder, even, in the last few hours, after the Vanir had crossed and begun to chase after another trail—the Gaudic funeral host. Kern’s eyes, always his bane in Gaud, had no trouble focusing what little light was available, letting him find the paths and the trail sign of the Vanir’s passing. And he had checked horse dung by touch and by scent. It had warmed over the course of his run, very slowly, but he was close. Close enough that a near pile of droppings continued to steam.

  Closer than he thought, he discovered, as his ears pricked up to the sound of clashing metal.

  He drew in a long, quiet breath, and held it. There it was again. A distant, sharp ringing. And shouts! Carried to him on the wind, though hardly more than a thought of raised voices. No words or way to identify who it was.

  Then the horn; long and mournful. Like the zephyrs that blew down out of the Nordheim realms, shouting through the trees.

  Kern shoved himself away from the alder, hands tearing at his blanket roll, stripping away the knife belt and woolen spread and his winter cloak and poncho as he ran. Leaving his items cast off along the trail. All but the heavy broadsword.

  Staggering up a long, shallow slope, then sprinting down the far side.

  Pausing to listen as the trail suddenly tangled into a knot of smaller paths, hearing a few hoarse shouts along a southern reach. Racing after them.

  Nearly tripping over the body spread out in violent measure not another hundred paces along. One of the clan youths Cul had brought for foraging and for vanguard scouts. He had at least three sword wounds sliced across his upper arms, his body. His throat had been violently slashed open. The scent of blood was thick and cloying, and had sprayed over the snow in arcing jets.

  “Cul!”

  A shout from ahead. Not Reave or Daol. Definitely not Maev.

  It was Morne. Bleeding from a shoulder wound. His back pressed up against a tall, snow-frosted cedar, blade held out warily before him to fend off the two flame-haired Vanir who struck at him from either side. Both raiders wore leather cuirasses studded with light strips of metal. Both had full beards and long braids swinging down their backs—common among the Vanir.

  One of them, the nearer, wore a red cloak mantled with the silver fur of a wolf. He had a broadsword and shield. The other a war axe.

  The ringing clash of steel against steel hid the sound of Kern’s footfalls until nearly upon the raiders. It might have been a tremor in the ground that betrayed him. Perhaps the sound of a breaking twig or crunching snow.

  Whatever the reason, the Vanir wielding sword and shield turned sudde
nly, bringing his blade around in a sharp, strong arc. Clashing with Kern’s broadsword.

  The blade vibrated painfully in his grip, his hands more used to the wooden haft of an axe than violent steel. But Kern hung on to it. His own slash was awkward and bounced off the other man’s steel-faced shield.

  A savage grin peeked out of a red, full beard. The raider knew he was not fighting an experienced swordsman.

  Though the man had obviously forgotten Morne, who turned aside the other Vanir’s chopping attack, then lunged forward to slash at the back of the first raider’s leg. Hamstrung, the raider collapsed with a pain-filled bellow. Taking his sword with him.

  Kern left him, circling around to the far side, where he and Morne could divide the attention of the second raider. Morne had more trouble deciding whom to swing at. His war sword thrust out left, then right. Hesitated.

  “Move!” Kern yelled, shouldering in at the axe-swinging raider, throwing him against the cedar’s thick trunk.

  Morne leaped away from the sword-wielding Vanir, who lay on the ground. And away from the man with the axe as well. Without waiting to see how Kern fared, he sprinted away, still shouting for Cul.

  Bouncing back off the bole of the tree, the raider sideswiped his heavy war axe at Kern. Thinking to parry, and Kern lost the blade as it was torn from his numb grasp. A shield, dropped by the first raider, lay nearby, and Kern dived for it. Came up with it just in time to deflect a bone-rattling chop at his shoulder.

  Another chop, and another block. Then Kern moved inside, not letting the raider’s greater reach work for him, and smashed the man in the nose with the shield’s face. He heard cartilage crunch, and blood sprayed out over the metal surface of the shield.

  The man staggered backward, one hand clasped over his broken nose.

  Rather than waste more time, Kern quickly found his sword and left the two men there, struggling in the snow.

  “Reave? Daol?”

  Kern floundered through a snow-hidden bramble patch, feeling the wooden thorns cut at his exposed legs. He followed Morne’s general direction, looking and listening, trying to draw in on another skirmish. He found the sled bearing Burok’s body, overturned up against a pair of boulders. Then another of Cul’s supporters not much farther along, lying in the snow, trying to hold in his entrails where they oozed out of a slit belly.

  He staggered past two Vanir bodies, stretched out in death. One of them had bloody fingers wrapped around the sharpened edge of an arming sword. Like the kind a slight man might use. Or a woman.

  “Maev!” Kern called out, bellowing at the top of his lungs.

  “Kern? Kern!”

  Reave’s shout found him searching among the trees, looking for Burok’s daughter. Kern hauled his shield and sword toward another copse, where Reave laid about him with his Cimmerian greatsword in giant, swinging arcs, holding back four men who circled him like wolves bringing a bear to ground.

  Reave was as good as dead. Kern, too. For all of Reave’s strength and skill, four raiders were easily a match for the two of them. They had to cut down the odds quickly. And without help . . .

  Kern stopped in his tracks with the birth of a desperate idea. Help!

  “This way.” Kern looked back behind him, where he had found dead bodies and a dying Gaudic warrior. “I found more over here!”

  As bluffs went, he thought it a good one. Reinforcements just over the snow-covered dale. No time to finish off these two barbarians. Run!

  Instead, two Vanir men peeled away to confront Kern while two others stayed after Reave. Swords struck and danced. The raiders called encouragement to each other in their harsh, nasal language. In the dimming light, they weren’t much more than shadows with gleaming steel in their hands and feral rage twisting their faces. Kern doubted he looked much different, from a distance.

  But as he loped up, a snarl of defiance baring his teeth, one of the men got a good look at him by the dimming twilight and staggered back in sudden fright. “Ymir! Ymir!”

  Why this raider called upon the Vanir’s chief god, the legendary frost-giant who—legends said—once grappled with Crom himself, Kern neither knew nor cared. All that mattered was that he had only one man left standing against him.

  And that one hesitated as well, sword raised high, confusion clouding his pale features. He struck slowly, glancing his blow off Kern’s upraised shield.

  The Vanir wouldn’t get a second chance. Kern’s broadsword bit into the raider’s thigh, drawing a bloody scar toward his groin and nicking something important. Blood sprayed out in a warm jet to soak Kern’s kilt and splash steaming droplets across his arms, his hands, his bare chest.

  The raider’s howl was angry and laced with pain. It gave the others pause. Reave took advantage of the distraction, leaping back, swinging his greatsword through a wide arc and taking the howling man’s head off his shoulders. Blood fountained as the body toppled to the ground.

  “We have them,” Kern yelled, again calling to imaginary reinforcements. His muscles felt like lead weights, but he waved an arm overhead and forward anyway, as if calling them up.

  Between the yammering raider who had fallen away from Kern to Reave’s impressive strike, and the prospect of more Cimmerians running up in the dark, the three raiders decided to cut their losses. Dropping back into the night, they kept swords held before them. Then the Vanir horn sounded again in three sharp blasts, and they quickly turned for the trees and what companions of their own they might find.

  “Where are . . . the others?” Reave asked, gazing back along Kern’s approach. He, too, was trying to catch his breath. Then he seemed to realize who had just come to his aid, and wrapped the other man into a strong embrace. “You came back!”

  “Obviously.” Air whispered between Kern’s lips as Reave crushed the breath from him. Wedging his newly won shield between himself and his friend, Kern asked, “Daol? Maev?”

  Reave shook his head. He drove his greatsword point first into the ground and leaned heavily on the crossbar. “No idea. Started a running skirmish just after twilight, hoping to gain the pass before dark. But more of them slipped around front. Hit us from two sides.” He wrenched his sword free of the earth. “What, by Crom’s large orbs, are you doing here?”

  It would take too long to explain just then. “Did Cul outlaw me from heading east?” he asked.

  His friend considered that. “Nay.”

  “Then here I am,” Kern said, with the ghost of a tired smile. Every muscle in his body vibrated with nervous energy, ready for action, but soon the adrenaline rush would sour, and he’d be left weak as a pup. If they were going to be any good to the others, they had to keep moving.

  He hefted his shield up to cover one shoulder, and gestured with his sword ahead. “Now let’s go tell him.”

  7

  THE SURVIVORS HAD used weighty evergreen branches to sweep away most of the snow from within a small circle of trees. Those branches now crackled with forced enthusiasm on a medium-sized blaze set in the clearing’s center, throwing angry, short-lived sparks into the night and piling up pungent smoke that tasted both warm and salty.

  Kern squatted outside of the fire’s warmth, barely within the flickering pale of its light. He wore his tattered poncho and winter cloak again, having recovered his castoffs after the battle. Broadsword strapped across his back. An abandoned war axe resting head down on the ground in front of him and both of his large hands wrapped tightly about the handle. Uncertain and angry gazes—at times both at once—always found him waiting. He might not be part of the clan any longer—once cast out, never returned—but he wasn’t going to be easily run off either.

  Though Cul looked ready to try at a moment’s notice.

  Cul’s proud chin had a nasty cut slicing up toward the right corner of his mouth, and his hair, matted with blood, stuck against one side of his head. He paced with relentless energy and had a feral rage kindled in his eyes, matching the fire in intensity. The warrior in him no doubt wanted to
chase after the raiders. The chieftain knew his duties better. And his debts.

  “Share the fire, Wolf-Eye.” His voice was little better than a harsh growl. “You’ve earned that, at least.”

  As any stranger would, who lent aid to the clan.

  “That, ’n’ more,” Reave groused. The hulking giant and one of the women dug through what was left of the stores. His sword lay within an arm’s reach, still bared and bloodstained.

  Kern remained where he was, the rogue on the outside of the pack. He wanted no illusions in the way. And he didn’t want some of these men at his back, either.

  Twelve left. Twelve of the twenty who had started out from Gaud. He looked at the nearby sled, with Burok’s body still waiting for its final rest at the Field of the Chiefs. Three more bodies lay stretched out on the cold ground next to the old chieftain. Jurga, one of Cul’s most stalwart men. Oscur and Agh, both old enough to make the journey but too young to have stood against seasoned Vanir. Three dead, and four others missing.

  And one exiled.

  “Well?” Morne finally asked of Reave and Desagrena. He held a wad of bloodstained cloth against the wound in his shoulder.

  Kern had already weighed the stores by eye, measuring them against the day’s journey ahead to get up to the northern valley. And home. There wasn’t enough. At least five packs had disappeared, along with the four missing. Along with Daol and Maev!

  “Six, maybe eight days,” Desa told them all, returning to the fire, shouldering her way between two of the men. She had a lithe body, not as hardy as most Cimmerians, but was known to be lightning quick and full of a summer storm’s fury when angry.

  “Not enough,” Cul said, stating the obvious. He rubbed at his jaw, winced. “Morne, you will run for Gaud at first light. Bring back Croag, and Hydallan. And more from the winter stores.”