Kern raised his shield, letting the awkward blow hammer at him rather than pulling away. He took a firm grasp on the cord-wound hilt and twisted, spreading the blade between ribs and coring out a mortal wound.
Blood burst from the raider’s mouth in a froth that covered a gargling howl, spitting warm flecks into Kern’s face. Kern jumped back, bringing his sword out. Bumped into Reave’s side and wedging himself back to back against Reave and Nahud’r as the three men formed a smaller island of safety and sanity amidst the growing chaos.
Wallach Graybeard formed another, hauling in Old Finn and Doon and Mogh, fighting to link up with Kern. Ashul, Aodh, and Desa fought not too far away, using their combined strength to protect each other and pull down larger enemies.
Behind them all, Daol and the other archers fired the last of their arrows, and were finally taking to sword. They seemed far, far away.
There was no longer any order to the battle. Grimnir reaved through the enemy line with powerful strokes that sent men tumbling aside broken or bleeding. The snow-cats had returned to their master’s side as well, and struck out with claws and teeth where men charged at the giant-kin’s back.
The mammoth pounded forward, now guided by a small knot of frost-haired Ymirish warriors and one of the sorcerers, who cast before them that same wall of dark slashing mists that had blinded and blistered the Cruaidhi. The mammoth was the other strong point in the raider line. The creature shrugged aside arrows and swords, and few lances had the thrust to penetrate its thick hide.
Kern thought he saw Gard Foehammer working his way toward beast and northern brothers, and wished the man Crom’s own strength.
Closer, the battle fared well. The smell of blood and bowels rose over the battlefield, and the snow had been stained red in many places. And though they bled, none of Kern’s people were down yet.
Beating off another attacker’s charge, Kern turned him into Reave and the greatsword’s deadly reach. Then a horse screamed nearby as a lance punched through its chest. Its rider was thrown back, a jumble of tangled chain mail and leather straps and broken lance. The Aquilonian hit the ground hard, and the dying beast fell across his legs, pinning him to the ground.
Stupid, useless animals.
Kern did it without thinking, leaping for the fallen man’s side as he would protect one of his own. He saw a raider staggering around the flailing beast’s other side, intent on finishing off the downed soldier, who was slow to crawl back to his feet. Kern would not see any ally cut down so easily as that. Conan’s man or not, that argument mattered little to Kern.
What surprised him was when a bare-chested Ymirish also ran forward, and slipped in at Kern’s side!
Kern’s vision dimmed and his eyes stung to tears, as if he’d been brushed across the face with the smoke of a greenwood fire. The smell was of hoarfrost, though, and it thickened at the back of his throat, closing off his breathing. Time slowed as he and the frost-haired follower of Grimnir pushed forward together. It wasn’t the first time another warrior had glanced at Kern’s coloring, and looked past his Cimmerian garb to see a threat from the north. It was one of the few times that a Ymirish had made such a mistake though, too intent on a victim to see the danger until far too late.
Black spots swam before Kern’s eyes, and his lungs pounded, as if he’d forgotten how to breathe. Nothing wrong with his arm, however. He circled around in a spinning slash, chopping the broadsword right into the back of the large northerner’s neck.
A set of yellow eyes glanced over for the space of a heartbeat, confusion reigning. He died without realizing the mistake he had made, staring into Kern’s pitiless gaze.
Shouts of triumph and a bellowing roar of angry displeasure assaulted the battlefield. Chants of “The serpent! The serpent is destroyed!”
The Cimmerian calls drew Kern’s attention to a spot on the bluff edge not far away where three men slowly dug their way out of a small mound of snow. Two of them had blood leaking from their noses, their ears. The third dropped a heartbeat later from long gashes torn into his chest and neck.
Kern staggered forward as if suddenly released from a dark grip, coming astride of the fallen Aquilonian, who was barely back to his hands and knees with the thick chain mail slowing him down so. The fire-headed Vanir paused, shocked into a moment’s hesitation. Kern thrust the broadsword through the other man’s neck. Blood fountained down the length of the blade and splashed warmly over Kern’s fingers. He pulled it free, then nearly whipped it around at Desa’s neck as she elbowed him in the side.
“That’s two of those bastards!” she said, and her normally waspish face was bright with bloodthirsty delight.
She helped the struggling Aquilonian back to his feet. His companions were wheeling their own mounts around, coming back to his aid.
Two. The events were so closely tied—Ymirish and serpent—that Kern could not fail to make the connection. He shook the last of the haze from his mind, and glanced around. Saw the patchy fog around him—stained dark and sooty—dissipate on a final breeze.
Almost he caught a glimpse of bright, springtime blue overhead.
Kern glanced at his feet. The frost-man had fallen on his side, and he toed the body over with a sharp kick. Two golden, blazing eyes stared back from the man’s bared chest. A sorcerer! Kern had taken the head of another of Grimnir’s cruel cadre.
And the northern leader knew it. Had felt it somehow. Roared still his anger and displeasure. Desa grabbed Kern by the shoulder and spun him around, pointing him at the danger.
Grimnir, hacking and beating his way through the Cimmerian war host.
Driving straight for Kern!
“Sure and you had to get that one’s attention,” Reave called back, slinging gore from his blade over the ruined snow.
Nahud’r and Aodh pulled in at Reave’s side, but left room for Kern as well. Aodh’s left arm hung useless at his side, blood sheeting down from a deep shoulder wound. He carried Ehmish’s silver-chased blade in his good hand, having borrowed it for the day’s battle.
Desa and Ossian also tightened up ranks, holding off a trio of raiders with blocking cuts and a lot of shield work, buying the pack time. Kern drew from their strength, their support. He hefted Burok Bear-slayer’s sword, adjusting his weakening, blood-slicked grip.
“To the end,” he called.
Reave was first to back him. “To the end!”
The end the others all whispered or shouted, or they simply nodded their promises. It seemed as if a determined futility had settled in over them all, which was fine with Kern. In the face of desperate battle, what more was there?
Nahud’r gripped Kern on the shoulder. “A miracle occurred this day,” he said.
Kern smiled grimly. Nodded. Then he brandished the broadsword and, with a violent yell, charged forward into the face of Grimnir’s steady advance.
His wolves ran at his heels, snarling and snapping.
28
BLOOD SANG IN Daol’s ears, and he tasted its iron scent on the air. Calls and battle cries hammered into his head, raising his own bloodlust even as his bowstring thrummed and swift death flew out on the late-morning breezes.
He recoiled just the once when he heard the crash of war hosts meeting in the center of the small plateau. Shattering bucklers and dented helms and steel ringing against edged steel. Wounded cries. Rage-filled shouts.
A fading scream as some unlucky warrior was flung off the edge of the nearby bluff to fall down through the heavy fog enshrouding Broken Leg Glenn.
Another arrow. And another.
Daol had felt the separation when Kern and Reave and the rest of the small band charged forward, leaving him, his father, and Brig Tall-Wood behind to volley arrows at the onrushing horde. Had felt it like a warm cloak being pulled from his shoulders, leaving him exposed to the dank and the dark.
Not a great deal of time to worry about such things. As fast as he could pluck arrows from the ground in front of him, Daol strung them, drew back to
his cheek, sighted along the polished shaft, and drew in a steadying breath—loose!—and the arrow was away. Then the next.
And the next.
Hydallan and Brig worked as hard as he to feather the Vanir line with gray shafts and piercing heads. Here and there a man stumbled, went down, and was trampled by companions. More often their arrows bit into wooden targets or shattered against upraised, metal-shod shields. But it was something. Enough to soften the blow against Kern’s charge.
If he could, Daol knew that he’d also have put himself right in front of his friend, facing down any swordsman who dared approach. Not out of gratitude for his rescue or for their longtime friendship, either. Not anymore. That might have been the case a few days back, or even a few weeks back when Daol had seen his capture by the raiders to be a just reward for his weakness in abandoning his friend. Nothing Kern could have done after that would have lost Daol’s support. Not even Kern’s determination to throw them after the Vanir.
Taur and Cruaidh and the Pass of Blood.
Callaugh and their series of hard, fast strikes over the Broken Leg Lands.
No. Not for friendship. It went beyond that. Daol couldn’t say exactly when it happened—after the battle for the Pass, certainly before the meeting of chieftains at Callaugh—but it had. He’d realized it as he turned to follow Kern from the circle of torches there, ready to fight and die if Ros-Crana or Narach Chieftain threatened them. He realized it again now, plying the skies with arrows and always—always!—keeping one eye on Kern.
He’d begun to believe in the legend.
“Out!” Brig called, lowering his bow and drawing his sword. Hydallan did the same.
Daol still had a trio of shafts clenched in his teeth, but he mirrored the others. The battle had spread out from two shattered lines into a wide field of hard knots and solo contests. A group of raiders might band together for short, vicious assaults, then shatter like quicksilver as a heavy fist of Cimmerians pulled together to strike back. The tide of battle ebbed and flowed, washing over the snow-shrouded battlefield from the rising slopes to the cliff edge that dropped down onto Clan Conarch.
A few Vanir swordsmen had broken free to run loose behind the lines and Daol used one of his final arrows to put a metal head right into the gut of one raider who pressed too close.
“Getting friendly,” Hydallan said, ducking a vicious slash by another raider and opening up the northerner’s belly like overripe fruit with a single, efficient slash from his broadsword. He waved the younger men forward, after the rest of their band. Forcing themselves into the thicker part of the fighting.
Daol agreed, especially as it seemed that only Kern and Ros-Crana seemed to hold strong islands amidst the seas of blood and fortune. He saw the raven-haired war leader off to their far right, keeping a line of pike-men in good order as they set a defensive wall of glistening steel that no Vanir had yet broken. Kern did not operate so rigidly, Daol judged. His people simply knew how to respond as one, as if guided by a single will. They worked together, rather than in competition or out of blind courage.
Which also made them a target.
“Grimnir!” Brig shouted, seeing the danger at the same time as Daol.
While the sun rose, thinning the patchwork fog, Daol had lost sight of Grimnir. Or had forgotten him on purpose rather than worry about the terrible giant-kin. His ferocious visage was enough to strike fear even into the hearts of Crom’s favored. The bestial face. A titan’s strength that flattened men before him. His eyes of blazing fire, which reminded Daol of Kern except for the murderous rage that smoldered within.
Now Grimnir waded through the battle with the same care a man might take fording a young stream. Battling his way toward Kern and the rest of the valley pack.
“Worse, I’m thinking.” Hydallan waved his blade toward the eastern side of the field, where the mammoth had trampled along, swatting and stomping over Cimmerian lives.
The great beast had a dozen arrows or more sticking out of its back, its neck. But it moved with fresh strength as it turned and stormed back toward its master, called by Grimnir’s challenging roars or by some arcane sense. A trio of Ymirish flanked the beast on one side, and a dozen or more Vanir. An unstoppable force, pointed right at Kern’s small bastion, putting them inside a slowly squeezing vise with it on the one side and Grimnir the other.
“I’ve got this,” Brig called back over one shoulder, taking a step in the direction of the mammoth’s path of rampage. Sword in one hand. Bow in the other. “Get to Wolf-Eye,” he said.
Daol grabbed him by the elbow, pulling him along another few paces with him and Hydallan. “We all go,” he said, talking through clenched teeth and around the arrow shafts in his mouth. “Kern ordered us together.”
There wasn’t time for a conversation. There was hardly time to draw breath in between threats. But Brig Tall-Wood spun around to face Daol, turning his back on the fighting as he shook his arm free of the younger man’s grip.
“Then it won’t be the first time I’ve ignored a command from my chieftain.” The outburst was as surprising to Brig as it was to Daol. The fact that the other man even named Kern a chieftain seemed a hard admission for him to make.
“I stay away, and Cul has no chance to reach him.” He shook his head before Daol could ask. “No time to argue. I need to do this, Daol. For me and for him.” He shouldered the other man aside then, setting off into a hard sprint. “Get to Kern! Go!”
What else was there to do? Daol barely had time to spit out one of his last two arrows. Notch, draw, and loose at Brig Tall-Wood’s back.
Taking a Vanir spearman in the side, just beneath the armpit, before he could run Brig through with his long shaft.
“Let him go,” Hydallan said, kicking a body free of his sword. “A man makes his own choices. Always.”
He did. And Daol knew his choice had been made already. He and his father ran forward, splitting apart from Brig’s path as they raced after Kern and tried to get there before Grimnir. Before the northern force rallied to their living god.
Before their outcast chieftain was lost to them all.
KERN WATCHED AS Grimnir and a troop of his largest warriors bore down on Kern’s small band with the savage fury of Ymir’s legend. The outcast’s mouth dried with the bitter taste of adrenaline and no little fear as the giant-kin stomped forward with a brutal swagger that dared all to cross his path. Those who did rarely lasted long. One-handing the battle-axe or smashing at raised shields with the warhammer, Grimnir reigned brutally over the blood-spattered snow and hard rock.
“Ymirish!” he bellowed. And then, “Gorge! Rend!”
Not only did several more frost-haired warriors rally, but the white-pelted saber-tooths hauled themselves away from nearby fights as if jerked on the end of invisible tethers. Frostpaw snapped at the heels of one, giving chase, but shied away from a Vanir’s sword when the raider suddenly blocked its path.
The large cats bounded to their master’s side. And the next warrior who stood in their way, they both leaped at her. One sank teeth deep into her leg. The other into a shoulder, bearing her to the ground and working its back claws to eviscerate the hapless woman’s bowels.
The animals left her screaming and dying, innards strung out and glistening against pink snow.
Forming into a thick wedge with Grimnir at its head, the juggernaut trampled forward over the lives of strong clansmen. A small fist of Cruaidhi hammered at one side, splitting off a few northern swordsmen. And a javelin flashed through the few remaining tendrils of fog to skewer a Ymirish through the chest, knocking him back and pinning him to the earth like a beetle fastened to a fisherman’s barbed hook.
Hardly enough to dent the mob. Certainly not enough to slow it. Several dozen raiders with blood staining their blades and fury glowing in their eyes bore down. Too many for Kern’s small band to hold off. Too many to stand against longer than a few sword strokes.
But Kern raised his blade defiantly, as did the others arou
nd him. Reave and Nahud’r. Ossian, Finn, Mogh, and Aodh. And the Aquilonian horseman, with his saber and a small shield held at the ready. Kern had almost forgotten about the Aquilonian.
Fortunately for them all, the southerner’s comrades-in-arms had not.
Wheeling horses around with lances thrusting out and strong arms driving their points, they saved the wolf pack from taking the brunt of Grimnir’s charge. Like avenging demons, they hammered into the side of the mob, driving deep, skewering two men on the end of their lances. One pole shattered just back of the tip. The other man managed to back his lance out, then clubbed at another Ymirish with it, striking him just over one ear and knocking him senseless to the ground before the lance was yanked from his grip.
Spurring forward, sabers rose and fell, rose and fell; hacking at faces and shoulders and upraised arms. Blood splattered, and men cried out in pain. A few Callaughnan warriors ran forward, into the wound inflicted on Grimnir’s line, their own large swords working incredible damage.
It stalled the northerners’ charge. For a moment.
The men of the wolves wasted no time, dragging down several raiders at the fore while the northerners’ line was a shambles. Wallach Graybeard and Garret both drove their broadswords into the chest of one of the saber-tooths, which died slowly, spitting and snarling and still trying to claw its way toward the Cimmerians.
Kern and Reave charged forward together, followed quickly by the others. Their weapons scissored at a Vanir who had joined Grimnir’s charge. Striking him from both sides. Cutting deep, deep wounds.
Then Grimnir, with a banshee howl like the fury of a blizzard, leaped into the air, hammer raised. The frost-giant brought the maul’s flat head down between the eyes of one horse, shattering its skull into bits of bone and brain. The animal dropped without a whinny or a whimper.
Kern saw the Aquilonian rider kick free of his stirrups, landing in a crouch with his saber held at the ready. Not that it mattered. Kern was too far away to help, laying to on all sides in an attempt to gain some room.
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