Blood of Wolves

by Loren Coleman

  Or to silver. But the one sword the small war host had scrounged up with inlaid silver was lost now in the dark and the struggle, thrown clear when the chieftain’s warrior had been snatched into the monster’s jaws.

  Kern took the first battering strike against his shield. It was like being struck with a maul. The shock slammed through his entire body, and it felt as if his arm might be broken. Bruised to the bone, certainly.

  He and Daol split around either side, swords thrusting into the snapping jaws, jumping back from its snaring coils. Several times Kern brushed aside strikes, turning them with his shield. Close enough to feel the bitter cold radiating from the demon. To see the scales sculpted into the beast’s white body. Its cries of frustration and rage were far more like savage howls than a serpent’s hiss, and a carrion reek rode its breath. A smell Kern remembered. Wet gangrene.

  The serpent took a third man. One Kern did not know. And when he leaped to the man’s defense, hoping to jar the monster hard enough to throw that warrior clear, the serpent took him as well.

  A glancing blow from its head ripped his shield from numbed fingers.

  His arming sword bit only through soft snow, slicing out a spray of white powder.

  Then his blade suddenly struck into hardened snow-flesh as the body turned rigid. The shock nearly jerked the weapon from Kern’s hand. He held on, but it pulled him forward, off-balance.

  He felt the thick body snare him, looping around and pulling him into the serpent’s deadly embrace. It trapped his sword up against his chest, the edge of the arming sword lying in close to Kern’s own neck, its point thrusting just above his right shoulder. He slipped his naked shield arm free just before a crushing weight settled around his chest, and a good thing, too, as he managed to get it up against the serpent’s jaw before those glittering fangs sliced into him.

  It was a contest Kern was bound to lose. His strength waned quickly, holding the monster’s head away from his exposed throat and upper chest. He felt scales rasping against his bare skin. Smelled the dank, cold breath this demonic creature had brought with it from whatever frozen abyss it had been summoned.

  “Shoot!” Daol yelled.

  Kern couldn’t tell who Daol yelled for, but he did feel his friend working with careful sword strokes down near his exposed legs. The coils shifted around his body, and he worked his sword up a scant measure. Then a bit more.

  If the creature hadn’t been wrapped around another man, finishing him off first, Kern would already be dead. As it was, he could barely breathe, and he heard the pounding of his own blood in his ears. Loud and pulsing. But if he had a moment longer, just enough to work his sword free . . .

  Which was when the arrow struck.

  He felt the hot breath of its passing as it whispered past his ear, and a sharp stinging pain he later discovered was the shaft’s broadleaf head slicing along the inside crook of his elbow. It was a shot made with Crom’s own eye. Threading the needle between his neck and his arm, plunging hard into the serpent’s open mouth.

  Kern felt the deep shudder of pain that lanced through the monster, nearly suffocating him as the coils constricted for the span of a handful of heartbeats. A rasping cry belched foul, frostbitten air into Kern’s face.

  Then it loosened its deadly grip. Enough to let Kern Wolf-Eye free his sword arm, spearing the blade forward even as he began to slip free, sliding down toward the frozen ground. The point of the arming sword rammed up beneath the serpent’s lower jaw, then into the upper as well, pinning its mouth closed as Kern added a third “fang” between the other two.

  He fell faster, legs crumpling as he hit the ground, dropping him into an untidy pile as breath rushed back in to fill his lungs. The serpent lashed about with its head and beat at the earth with thick coils. One spasm knocked Daol back hard. Another smashed Kern flat into the hardened earth, pressing down on him with new weight as the serpent’s death throes piled it up over the top of him.

  Just when he thought the pounding would never stop, the serpent’s weight collapsed into nothing more than a small avalanche of snow. It fell over Kern like a smothering blanket, but one he kicked himself out of quickly enough with the helping hands of Daol and Brig Tall-Wood.

  Daol had a bruise darkening beneath his left eye and a trickle of blood drawing a line from the corner of his mouth down to his chin. But relief showed clearly on his face.

  Brig looked as if he had taken the beating under the serpent’s coils rather than Kern. Haunted eyes. A weary slump in his shoulders and unsteady on his feet. Face taut against the pain, not wanting to show weakness.

  “What is it?” Kern asked, gasping for breath.

  Hydallan led a handful of archers forward, surrounding the trio crouching alongside the small snowdrift. Most turned their attention back to the bulwark’s crumbling defense. Arrows lanced out into the night, adding cries of pain to the howls of loss for the snow serpent.

  The first of Sláine’s warriors also arrived, carrying short logs and armfuls of brush, rushing forward to throw their burdens up against the icy wall. A few did not wait for the pile to grow tall enough to climb, and simply leaped for the top of the bulwark and slipped over to the other side. The growls of mastiffs and yelps of canine pain soon joined with clashing steel as the battle breached the icy wall.

  “What?” Kern asked again, shuffling about in the snow, searching for his sword and shield. He found the first and abandoned the second.

  Brig Tall-Wood finally shrugged. “Just don’t do that again,” he said.

  The makeshift ramp had grown up half the side of the bulwark. Slipping his bow back over one shoulder, Brig drew his broadsword and clambered up the pile just as Reave, Nahud’r, and Ossian all pounded up, winded, blades naked in their hand.

  “Don’t do what?” Reave asked between laboring pants.

  Daol reached over and struck a fist against the larger man’s chest. “Worry about it later,” he said, and shouldered him toward the woodpile.

  Nahud’r and Ossian helped Kern struggle back to his feet, and the three of them followed. Hydallan, Aodh, Garret, Ehmish, and Mogh staggered in by singles and pairs, adding to the growing knot of warriors that swarmed up Sláine’s ramp and dropped over to the far side with blades ready, thirsty for Vanir blood. Brig, Daol, and Reave waited, a small island in the growing sea of chaos. Old Finn dropped in behind them, cursing as he slammed a knee against the hard ground.

  “Others are right behind me,” he let Kern know.

  Reave had already claimed another head. Ossian and Ashul split aside only for a moment, dealing death to a wounded Vanir who had thought to hide behind a snowdrift.

  Another raider tried skulking along the wall of ice. But when Desagrena came over the wall farther along, falling against him, his secret was spilled. The raider threw Desa down and pounced on her, driving his sword like a huge dagger. The blade missed as Desa shifted her weight, throwing the man off her chest. He would not get a second try.

  Several men had run to Desa’s aid, but Ehmish was faster. He bowled over the beefy raider, using a running start against the Vanir’s greater weight. As the man tumbled over and struggled back to his feet, the youth whipped his arming sword up to rake its edge along the raider’s throat. The Vanir fell back. Ehmish finished the job with a sharp stab into his chest.

  Desa led the panting, wide-eyed Ehmish back to the others. Reave clubbed the young man on the back. There was nothing else to be said about it, and no time if there were.

  “We stay together,” Kern said, his voice hard and strong. “Shields up front to worry the archers. We take them two to their one when we can. No wounded is left behind alone, but other than that we don’t stop. I want that sorcerer.”

  His warriors growled back an agreement, and the pack charged forward with a hundred Cimmerian clansmen streaming around them in all directions.

  But most of those fanned out to either side, clustered by village and clan, running the wall as they struck down beast and raider.
It was Kern’s small band that speared forward, out into the open, charging into the throat of the Vanir maw with Daol and Brig working each side with bow and arrow, Reave with his greatsword out in front and Kern not half a step behind.

  The others ran up on their backs, forming a tight wedge that blasted through the shaky raider defenses.

  The Ymirish sorcerer and his two frost-bearded companions never stood a chance. Kern’s pack ran them down like snarling, savage wolves after wounded game. By then, Daol and Brig were out of arrows, replacing their bows in hand with sword hilts. The trio of Ymirish turned to fight, with two warriors obviously protecting one among their number who hesitated in the back.

  With no time or strength left for another snow serpent, apparently, the sorcerer still was not quite finished. The snow erupted in between the two groups, slashing at the Cimmerians like a thousand, tiny ice-wasps, stinging and bedeviling the attacking clansmen. A few stumbled back, or off to one side, temporarily blinded.

  Reave fell face forward, having borne the brunt of the assault, and Kern had no choice but to run up his backside. He and Ossian and Nahud’r were first through the small, blinding storm.

  The two frost-haired warriors in front of them carried broadsword and a warhammer. Nahud’r dived at the first of the two, Ossian the second, knocking them aside so that Kern could thrust his way between them with arming sword held high and search for Grimnir’s sorcerer.

  The tall Ymirish held a long dagger and scourge, flailing about to keep Kern off him while holding the blade for any body-to-body charge. He stood bare-chested to the frigid air, his chest painted or tattooed with large, demonic yellow eyes. Like the false eyes of a serpent’s hood. A pair of silver bracers flashed at each wrist. His snarl was feral and full of white, white teeth.

  He cursed in Nordheimir, and Cimmerian. Calling down the wrath of winter and of Ymir onto Kern.

  “Too late,” Kern said in broken Nordheimir, drawing near.

  The sorcerer’s feral eyes glowed in the darkness. As, Kern knew, did his own. The other man stared openly, as shocked to recognize Kern’s features as Kern had been the first time he’d met one of Grimnir’s frost-men.

  It was enough of an opening. Kern pushed forward, ducking the scourge’s barbed tails as he stabbed with his arming sword. Its tip punched through the sorcerer’s breastbone, right between the raging eyes painted to either side. He drove forward, ramming the full length of his short blade through the other man. Propping him up as the strength fled his face, his arms.

  Letting him fall back only when Kern felt certain the other man had lost his grip on life.

  And of the sorcerer’s two wardens, it was all over by the time Kern turned back. His pack of outcasts had swarmed over them, blades rising and falling, slicing, thrusting. Staining the snowfall red. Within a handful of heartbeats, all three of the great northerners lay stretched out over the frozen ground. By the shouts behind them, around them, Kern knew the other Cimmerians all claimed similar victories.

  The pass was open.

  22

  THE BROKEN LEG Lands were supposed to be some of the most treacherous ground in Cimmeria, and, dropping down out of the mountain pass, Kern quickly saw why. Worse than the badlands where his group of warriors had been caught in the blizzard, the high plateau country was cut apart by narrow canyons and sharp-edged bluffs that fell hundreds of feet onto piles of boulders and white-water rapids.

  A good challenge for raiding and cattle-taking during the best of times.

  A hard land for chasing down a Vanir war party while still in the grips of winter.

  Kern’s small band of warriors stood at the bridgehead of a giant stone arch that crossed one of the deeper cuts. More than a ravine, Kern decided, but not quite a canyon. Below the ledge on which the warriors waited, white water smashed among dark rocks, raging down the cut and toward the plateau. To his left and right were long, frozen cascades of ice. Snowmelt that hadn’t made the long drop to the broken water.

  Come spring, these frozen waterfalls would drop with a brisk chatter, brushing the sides of the cliffs with frothy white splashes. Now they gleamed dull and gray, daring any Cimmerian to try his hand at climbing down the near side.

  Not that the northern side offered much more. Less ice. Steeper drops between a few narrow ledges. A few ancient dwarf pine clung stubbornly to the opposite face, gnarled and twisted as they fought for sunlight and soil within the narrow cracks splitting the pale, red rock. The stone arch crossing wasn’t more than two arm’s lengths wide, and slicked with snow and ice. Room enough for one man at a time to cross.

  Sláine had been first, of course. Now he led the early-crossers down the opposite side of the cut, finding a few narrow switchback trails but mostly climbing down near-vertical drops with nothing better than a crack in the rock face or roots of dwarf pine for a handhold.

  Kern watched, crouched at the edge of the drop-off, a stiff breeze tugging at his bone blond hair. A clump of dwarf pine grew out of some cracks in the cliff face below him. Leaning out, he’d spotted a chucker nest woven between two branches with early eggs peeking out beneath a tangle of brown moss and wet black leaves. With Reave as an anchor Kern swung a large hand down into the nest, fishing up a clutch of red-speckled eggs. Five of them.

  He tossed one egg to the four nearest of his warriors and cracked the top off the fifth for himself. Slurping the milky contents straight from the shell, which tasted rather flat and slid down his throat in one quick dollop.

  Dropping the shell’s crumbs over the cliff, Kern ignored the shrill protests of the chuckers, which had returned to find their nest plundered. As still as a craggy rock thrust from the cliff side, he counted the men and women spread out along the opposite face, the handful currently traipsing over the arch ducking low beneath the wind, then estimated the numbers still waiting for their turn to cross.

  “Fewer,” he said aloud.

  A hundred. Maybe a few dozen more.

  In the afterglow of victory, and without the constant threat of a Vanir attack, Sláine Longtooth had lost some of his control over the small war host not long after crossing the wintered pass. Around every outcropping, over every sharp-edged ridge, Kern noticed more Cimmerian warriors slipping away in tight knots and old allegiances.

  Forgetting the common need that brought them together back in Cruaidh. Looking toward their own honor and the needs of their home villages first as the custom of the bloody spear lost its sway.

  “Of course they do,” Aodh said when Kern remarked on it. The older man stood brazenly at the edge of the cliff’s plunge, letting the wind toy with his short, ragged-cut hair and the hem of his heavy winter kilt. He reached up to stroke the salt-and-pepper moustache he liked so much, now being joined by salt-and-pepper stubble from the beard growing in. “So did we.”

  Several of the others nodded. Reave and Desa. Garret. Brig Tall-Wood stood mute.

  Ossian hawked and spit over the edge, then nodded up the cleft where a trio of Cimmerian warriors had split away from the main group and worked their way in another direction. “Sláine promises them revenge for the Vanir raids. What they needs is cattle, and wives. And blue iron.”

  The Taurin still scraped his head clean every morning, but Kern noticed that he had braided a few silver rings into his long goat’s beard. Taken from fingers of the Vanir dead back inside the pass. Nahud’r wore a new cloak, as did Mogh and Doon. Ehmish, too, had claimed spoils from the battle, tying a silver-chased broadsword over his narrow shoulders.

  Not even Kern had been immune. As well as the bracers, taken off the wrists of the dead sorcerer, he’d found a pair of metal greaves backed by good mountain goat wool. Anything to guard against the inevitable sword’s edge.

  Everyone wanted something.

  “What is it you really want, Ossian? A few more trinkets to take home? Cattle for your chieftain?”

  Ossian paused a moment, then, “For my father,” he admitted for the first time.

  Kin, easily,
Kern had figured. But father and son? Ossian had left behind his clan, and possibly his claim on the chieftain’s position once his father died. Likely he’d meant every word back in Taur, that it was a quest worth chasing for its own sake. But the personal reason . . .

  “Why? What draws you on with us, then?”

  The warrior gave it a moment of serious thought, looking out over the deadly drop. His smile, when it came, was grim and hungry at the same time. Like a starving wolf moving in at his prey. “A story worth telling around a campfire,” he said at last.

  Desa laughed. “In your old age?” she asked, not bothering to hide her mocking tones. “None of us will live that long.”

  Probably true. Wallach Graybeard and Hydallan were unusual for their collection of gray hairs and time-weathered faces. And in larger villages, Old Finn would have been looked upon as a respected elder to have survived so many years and so many battles. Larger villages with more food to afford such a luxury.

  If Finn still harbored a grudge over the expulsion, it didn’t tell on his face. “At my age, most men are already dead. So I figure I’m ahead on that score. I’ll settle for my next campfire.”

  For his part, Ossian simply shrugged aside the prospect of violent death. His leg was bandaged heavily around the knee where a sword slash had laid it open down to the bone; but he hadn’t let it slow him, or the group, down. “Something my sons will remember then,” he said. “And tell to their sons.”

  Mogh, with the dour outlook Kern recognized as the man’s habit, simply shook his head. “It will be told as a tale of Conan if anything.”

  The assertion made Daol laugh and even brought a thin smile to Kern’s face as well. There could be worse endings, he supposed, than being added to the legends of Conan. Rising, stepping back from the edge of the cliff, he clapped Ossian on the back and steered the other man toward the bridgehead.

  “Like the time Conan guested at Taur,” he said, “and the Vanir came, led by a frost-bearded giant of a northern man. Conan led the charge from the bulwark gate, his broadsword striking out to the left and right, driving the Vanir before him.”