by Vox Day
“You’re a lucky one, lad. A man can’t lose a battle that’s already lost. If the Choosers turn up their noses at us, I’ll see you in the high hall of Hel.”
Steinthor nodded, suddenly unable to speak. Horse-Bjorn laughed and stepped to the side as four men, their eyes bright and fey, rushed past them up the stairs.
“Never you mind, Steinthor Strongbow. The Skullbreaker would be proud of you. Not every man could turn a collection of half-dead old men and dying boys into a proper fighting force.” He waved to his men. “Come on, lads! With just one arm, I can’t hold them off by myself!”
Steinthor nodded at him and looked to Ottar the Grævling and his five men. They alone were still sitting, knowing that there was no need for them to hurry. The Grævling was the most intelligent of the four captains, so Steinthor had put him in charge of their weapon of last resort. Ottar was of an age with Steinthor, approaching his fourth decade, although his grey head made him look older. Steinthor knew Skuli had considered putting the Ulvdræber expedition in the Grævling’s capable hands, but a sword-thrust through his thigh had made Mord Redcheek the obvious choice.
“Go,” the Grævling said calmly. “Have no fear. If you don’t make it back to the keep, I’ll see it’s done.”
Steinthor nodded. He paused for a moment, until he realized he had nothing to say to the man. In a different time, Ottar the Grævling would have likely been his enemy. Now they were brothers-in-arms, to the bitter end. But that didn’t mean they had to love each other.
He could hear the familiar howls as soon as he walked out upon the ramparts of the North Tower. The night air was cool and dry. Most of their meager forces were arrayed there; a man could hardly miss the Half-Giant in his position well behind Horse-Bjorn and his rambunctious, half-drunk men. The wind was cold and still blew from the east; the Skullbreaker and Mord Redcheek would be at least six leagues away already. The cries of the wolf-demons filled the night, seeming to come from the north, the east, and the west, everywhere but the vast dark ocean to the south. He could see the enemy fires dotting the land below, although there were far fewer of them than one would expect from a similarly sized army of men.
The Aalvarg had little use for fire, as they neither forged their weapons nor cooked their meat. And unlike a human army, they devoured their dead, which made them particularly deadly opponents in a siege. Even when the nights of the heaviest battles finally gave way to dawn, the only corpses in sight, human or wolven, were on the battlements of Raknarborg. Blood on the ground below and a few scattered remnants of weapons and armor too damaged to be worth scavenging were the only signs there had even been any activity the night before.
The wolf-demons’ grasp of tactics was rudimentary at best, which why Steinthor only stationed a skeleton force on the East and West Towers to alert him in the unlikely event either of them turned out to be the focus of the enemy attack. In fourteen of their seventeen previous assaults, the wolves had stormed the North Tower; one young warrior, dead these last ten or eleven days, had told Steinthor that the bricks on the North Tower protruded more and were therefore easier for the creatures to climb.
He walked over to the ramparts, chipped, blood-stained, and worn down from the repeated attempts to storm them. Four spotters were spread out standing watch across the curve of the tower, all of them young men with sharp eyes. The howls below were rapidly growing louder and closer. He couldn’t see the Aalvarg yet, as they were comfortable attacking in darkness and the few torches that were already flickering on the ramparts ruined his night vision. But no matter. They all knew. The wolf-storm was coming.
He turned around and reviewed his front line. The Horse-Bjorn’s men were mostly armed with spears and axes, the better to deal with wolves climbing over the walls. He counted six, no seven, big warhammers, as well as two or three makeshift wooden ones made to simply sweep the attackers from the heights. Four men bore torches, ready to light the unlit ones set in the brass fixings as soon as he gave the command. Another twenty stood beside large baskets, in pairs. The baskets were full of rocks and bricks, as what little oil remained was reserved for other purposes and boiling water had proved to be of limited utility against the thick-furred foe. Behind them, on a knee-high platform, were fifteen of the best remaining archers.
The night considerably limited the utility of the bowmen, but the torches let them pick off the occasional wolf, and more than once they had proven themselves useful in turning the tide when the Aalvarg briefly established a hold on a section of the ramparts. One of them now held Steinthor’s own bow and quiver; he would join them when the battle was joined.
The men were quiet now, their faces white against the night and set with determination. Even Horse-Bjorn was silent, although he cleared his throat and stepped forward to spit off the ramparts more than once.
Steinthor said nothing. There was nothing more to say. He simply walked along the front of the line and nodded to each man. He knew they would stand, even to the end. The howling continued to grow louder, and now the lower-pitched snarls could be heard as well. The moment was nigh.
One of the young watchmen cleared his throat. “Captain, ah, I think–”
“They climb, Captain, they climb!” A second watcher was less hesitant. “They climb!”
Steinthor sighed. To think that his whole life had been aimed at this night, this very moment. He said a silent prayer to the Hjaldrgoð, asking only for strength enough to prove himself worthy of the Choosers he knew were circling invisibly overhead even now. Then he took a deep breath.
“Watchers, join the line!” he roared with a voice that drowned out the howls. “Fire! Light the fires! Light the torches!”
Two torches tumbled end over end through the air, hurled at the firewood spread out across the entire base of the tower this afternoon. It had been drizzled with the last remnants of their precious oil, so that it would catch easily. And catch it did, as the two torches set the wood alight and quickly spread from one end to another. Several wolves were caught up in the rapidly spreading flames and as their fur blazed, they added their agonized screams to the demonic chorus that filled the night air.
The fire did no harm to most of the wolves, but that was not his object. Between the fire below and the fixed torches that were now blazing, the creatures climbing the tower were no longer cloaked by darkness. Steinthor leaned over the ramparts and looked down. What he saw resembled a mass of huge, gray, hairy spiders as they clambered up the stones, their long, clawed hands reaching out and pulling them rapidly upwards with the help of the purchase provided by their clawed feet. Despite the clamoring of their fellows, they climbed in silence, and several of them trailed long ropes behind them.
“Rocks!” he shouted, urging the men with the baskets forward. They rushed towards him as fast as they could, weighed down by the heavy burden of the baskets they carried between them. By the time they were in position, the lead climbers were more than halfway up the tower, and he could clearly see their bared fangs in their long, wolf-like muzzles. A foul odor rose before them, so musky and so acrid that it nearly made him retch. The smell wasn’t unfamiliar to him, but it hit him hard nevertheless.
Then a large boulder bounced off the wall and struck one of the wolves at front of the assault just under its chin. The force of the blow flipped the creature backward and it howled in dismay, its arms and legs flailing wildly in the air. A second stone, aimed more carefully, smashed into a wolf’s head and caused it to lose its grip. It fell crashing into the wolf below it; three in all were swept from the side of the tower and sent plunging towards the surging masses.
More projectiles rained down on the climbers. Steinthor saw one wince as it was struck in the shoulder by a brick. It stubbornly pressed itself against the rocks and turned its head just in time to evade a second one, but when third brick smashed into its hand and a fourth crashed into its face, it slowly fell away from the wall, flailing its limbs and screaming in helpless fury all the while.
The
hail of stones was brutal. Dozens of Aalvarg were scoured from the tower, and yet for every climber fallen, there were twenty eager to take its place. The foul-scented wave of grey continued to surge higher, as if the ocean was sweeping in over the fortress from the north.
The rocks slowed the attackers down and thinned their numbers a little, but Steinthor knew the Aalvarg would not be dissuaded so easily. He stepped back from the ramparts and found Horse-Bjorn.
“Another five man-lengths,” he told the old warrior. “Hit them as soon as they crest.”
Then he made his way through the four-deep lines to the archers, where Rennir Longeye was waiting for him with his bow. It was his favorite and his best, its beautiful ash limbs having been artfully carved by his grandfather long before he was born. He picked up a quiver filled with more than twenty shafts and tied it to his belt, then took the bow from Longeye, who had been stringing it. After withdrawing a shaft and attaching it to the string, he took his place in the center of them.
“Remember, lads, it’s the hairy ones we’re aiming at,” he said, provoking an amount of laughter among the men on either side.
Then Horse-Bjorn shouted a battle cry. “Raknarborg!”
In response, the line surged forward to attack the Aalvarg that were finally reaching the top of the battlements. A battlehammer arced high above the press of men before flashing down fast and hard, followed by a second, and a third. They were striking at the hands of the wolves attempting to pull themselves up over the merlons, crushing them between stone and iron. Despite their efforts, a first wolf managed to pull itself atop the stones, where it was instantly transfixed by two spears.
It fell backwards, as did the next wolf to surmount the parapet, nearly cut in half by the Horse-Bjorn’s axe. But the third one launched itself forward even as it was impaled, and by entangling the men in front of it, bought just enough time for three more monsters to climb over the wall and throw themselves on the front lines. All three were quickly killed, but they were rapidly replaced as the grey wave smashed into the Horse-Bjorn’s suddenly hard-pressed men.
Steinthor pulled the string to his chest and loosed. The shaft flew true and hammered into the throat of a howling wolf standing on the edge of the ramparts. The rest of the archers loosed as well, and nearly ten wolves dropped or staggered backwards, wounded, as at such short range, the arrows slammed into them with enough force for some of the arrowheads to pierce their backs. The moment’s respite gave the men at the front just enough time to slaughter the wolves in their midst and reform their shield wall.
In the brief pause, Steinthor saw one man step forward and slash away the rope that one cunning monster had slipped over a merlon before he was killed; with a single blow he likely killed as many attackers as all the archers combined.
The wolves came on, but they seemed vaguely disheartened that their initial attempt to storm the tower had failed. The attack was almost desultory in comparison with the earlier rush, and the Horse-Bjorn and his men fell into a murderous rhythm, smashing the clawing hands, and running through or cutting down any monsters that somehow managed to clamber over the wall. It was hard to tell in the shadows of the flickering torchlight, but as near as Steinthor could tell, only three or four men had fallen, compared to more than one hundred wolves.
The men waited, scratched, bitten, panting, and bleeding.
“Water,” he heard someone cry.
“Damn water, bring me beer!” Steinthor recognized the Horse-Bjorn’s voice. “Strongbow, looks like they’re giving us a breather.”
He unstrung his bow, handed it to Rennir, and went to have a look at the situation for himself. At the Horse-Bjorn’s command, his men were dragging the dead to the ramparts and hurling them down below, while three of the torches that had been knocked out of their holders were replaced. But the glow from below was gradually fading, and when Steinthor looked down, he discovered why. Not only had a considerable quantity of the wood already burned, but the wolves were methodically extinguishing it by pulling the piles apart and urinating on the flames.
“Pity they’re not quite as stupid as they look,” Horse-Bjorn said. He had somehow magically transformed his dripping axe into a flagon of ale, which he offered to Steinthor.
Steinthor took a long draught, savoring the cool bitterness in his too-dry mouth. With some reluctance, he returned it to Horse-Bjorn, who drained the remainder, burped long and low, then hurled the empty vessel from the tower.
“Maybe it will brain one of the bastards,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Think that’s too much to hope for?”
“They’ll be coming again soon.”
“At least they had the decency to let a man get a drink. Give them that.”
“Wish the moons were out to tonight.”
But the untimely clouds hid Blood and Bone away. It was as if the gods had turned their faces away, unable to bear watching the carnage to come.
The demonspawn attacked again, snarling and growling in the darkness. The young men with the baskets had replenished their supplies of bricks and stones, but it was harder for them to see the climbers approaching without the fires burning below. They hurled the missiles down blindly, knocking dozens of Aalvarg off the tower and prompting scream after terrified scream from the darkness below. Even so, in less than half the time it had taken first wave, the first clawed hands began to appear above the merlons and the Horse-Bjorn’s men moved into action. Hammers once more splintered bones and axe blades flashed red in the torchlight.
But these wolves were wearing armor and more of them were carrying swords and daggers. Some of the weapons were of the crude Aalvarg construction, but more were of Dalarn make, captured over the years. They fought more intelligently too; the men holding the torches were their first targets and the front line rapidly disappeared into the shadows of the night.
Steinthor cursed. They needed more light! He and the other archers were rendered useless without the torches and they couldn’t simply loose into the mass of screaming, snarling, struggling combatants. They would hit three or more men for every wolf. The wolves could see better in the dark and judging by the sound of the battle raging in front of him, Horse-Bjorn desperately needed the archers to sweep the walls as they come over. He handed his bow to Rennir and ran over to the Half-Giant.
“We need light! I need five men.”
The big man nodded and pointed out the men he was to take.
“Follow me,” Steinthor ordered them. He led the five to where the spare torches were piled, then lit them and handed two to each man. “Push forward to the front. Leave your swords sheathed. We fight with fire!”
He charged forward into the chaotic mass, thrusting one flaming torch into the open jaws of the first wolf-demon he encountered. The fire set its fur ablaze, and the howling, panic-stricken beast reeled back just in time to be disemboweled by an upthrusting backswing from an axeman. Two more wolves, their red muzzles dripping with the blood of their victim, retreated before him as he swung his pair of torches in a rhythm that didn’t give them an opportunity to attack. One was impaled by a spear jabbed from behind him, the other crumpled as an arrow pierced its eye.
One of the torchbearers had fallen, but his torches were picked up by two of the Horse-Bjorn’s men. Between the ten torches, there was now enough light for the archers to see and their deadly shafts flashed past Steinthor’s helm and once more swept the parapets clear of the wolves. Seeing this, the Horse-Bjorn shouted his battle cry.
“Slagtetid!”
Their hearts emboldened, his weary men echoed his cry and pushed forward again. They slew, and slew, and slew in a seemingly endless morass of blood and fire.
Steinthor ducked under a slashing dagger and smashed a torch over the wolf-thing’s head. But the beast’s skull was too thick to crack. Instead, the torch broke in two, and the flaming end slid through a crenel to fall useless downward. Steinthor stared at the broken end for a moment, swung his other torch at the wolf’s face to keep its snapping jaws
away from him, then stepped in and jammed the jagged wood into the creature’s unarmored chest as if it were a blade.
It screamed, fell back and was immediately placed by a large black Aalvarg that roared as it leaped at him with its claws outstretched. He tried to block it with his remaining torch, but the big beast collided with him and sent him sprawling on his back. The torch flew out of his hand, leaving him defenseless. His armor protected his insides from scrabbling claws that tried to rip them out, and he jammed his chin down towards his chest just as the wolf tried to bite his face off. Despite the noise of the raging chaos surrounding them, he could hear its teeth break on the metal of his helmet, followed by a howl of infuriated pain.
Then the beast suddenly spasmed and slumped motionless on top of him. His arms were pinned, he was trapped under its dead weight and the horrific wolf stench made him fear that he might soon drown in his own vomit. Then a boot came down and kicked the dead wolf just far enough off his chest that he could free his arms and wrestle the limp corpse off him before another of the demonspawn tore his throat out.
A pair of legs was standing over him; it was Horse-Bjorn, he realized, defending him while he was down. He scrambled backwards on his elbows and pushed himself to his feet. Then he drew his sword. The veteran warrior killed another wolf with his axe, bringing it down so heavily that it split the creature’s bear-like skull. The man was prodigiously strong, even with just one arm, Steinthor marveled.
But even with the shield strapped to his useless left arm, Horse-Bjorn was vulnerable. Each swing left him slightly off-balance, and a mistimed swipe that missed his target clean caused him to stumble forward. He was only a few steps from the parapet already, and an alert dark-furred wolf that had just climbed over the merlons caught his shield in its claws, twisted, and hurled him high over the merlons. Steinthor heard Horse-Bjorn curse, more in anger than in fear, and then he was gone into the darkness below.