by Vox Day
The Redcheek nodded. “You want them to be able to bring back the news of whatever we find. I’ll be sure both crews have a good steersman.”
“We can’t exchange crews if we’re going inland,” Gudrik pointed out. “Will they both stay with the ship?”
Skuli and the Redcheek looked at each other. Skuli shrugged. “We can decide that when the time comes. We don’t know we’ll want twenty men going inland anyhow.”
Neither of them said it, but they both knew that they didn’t know how many men would be left by the time they decided to go inland. Even the initial raids in search of shapeshifters to interrogate would be dangerous and could well prove fatal. But regardless, Skuli was determined to keep Ulvdræber out of reach of Aalvarg claws, even if that meant dooming those left behind on land.
And this time, he would not let them take his death from him.
They spent one more night at sea, taking advantage of a southeasterly wind that brought them closer to the mysterious tower marked on the map. Jorund was convinced that it had something to do with the town of Thjovrer, which featured in two of the sagas he knew by heart. It had been a seaport, and one of the sagas referenced a bay, which could be seen on the map as well. As an obvious anomaly, the tower made for as good a starting point as any, especially since it was something they could approach at night by sea.
The village, on the other hand, they would have to come at from the land. As the wolves were creatures of the night, the chances that the ship would be spotted as it beached were too risky to run. On land, there was still the chance that the damned creatures would smell them, but Skuli had a plan for dealing with that too. He’d ordered the Redcheek to save the blood of the deer Skeggi had killed as well as the scent glands; given the powerful scent of the glands, he figured that crushing them and mixing it with the blood, then smearing the mixture on their hides and the soles of their boots would mask their scent enough to let them approach the village unobserved.
Halldor and Solmund, two of the youngest men, were standing just behind the snekkja’s dragon, their youthfully keen eyes focused on the distant shore, looking for signs of the abandoned human habitation. Skuli had just finished wolfing down the last of a rabbit he’d cooked over one of the ship’s brass braziers when Solmund suddenly lifted his head and called out a warning.
“I see… rooftops!” the young reaver announced. “And that point there, the land curves in. I think it’s the bay!”
“Tell the Redcheek to steer to port and take us out of sight of land,” Skuli ordered Gudrik, who nodded and immediately began making his way aft. Skuli threw the remains of his lunch over the side, and gestured at Engli the Black, indicating that he should do the same with the hot coals. The wind wasn’t likely to carry the scent of smoke and burned flesh towards the town, but there was no sense taking any unnecessary chances. Aalvarg noses were keen, as many a Dalarn chieftain had learned to his dismay.
He felt the longship shift underneath him, and before long it was apparent that the land was disappearing to their right. The Redcheek came forward, pushing his way past men who were pulling on their armor and digging out their weapons from where they were stowed underneath the rowing benches. The two of them had chosen the men for the shore party days ago, but even those who would be staying on the ship were arming themselves.
“With this wind, it won’t take long to make the three vika,” the Redcheek said, referring to the distance north they had agreed to leave between them and the village before landing. “It’s after high day, do you want to anchor and then land in the morning?”
Skuli had something else on his mind. “I’m wondering if we should send a pair of men north right away. To the tower.”
“They might be able to reach it by the nightmark.”
“If they withdraw and make camp once they find it, then they can investigate it in the morning and still be back before the sun sets tomorrow.”
“Who do you have in mind?”
“I don’t. Except I don’t want you going and I’m not in any shape for it myself.”
“Has wisdom finally broken through the thick skull of the Skullbreaker at last?” The Redcheek laughed. “Two of the older men, I think. Neither Eiliff nor Svan the Barkman are wounded, and Svan is good in the woods.”
“Tell them. And tell those staying on board that they can have until mid-even before pushing off again for the night. Except for the two hunting parties, no one goes out of sight of the ship.”
“I’ll see to it. When do you want us back tomorrow?”
“Come to within sight at first light. If we’re not there, pull back and return again at day mark. Try again between mid-even and night mark, and if we’re not there the following day mark, sail south.”
“For Savondir,” the Redcheek said, nodding. He looked in the direction of the coast, towards nothing Skuli could see. “I’ll get back to the steerboard now; I want to take us in.”
Skuli nodded and began digging into his own possessions, looking for the lighter of his two mail coats. He didn’t anticipate any serious fighting tonight, but one never knew, and he wanted to be able to move quickly if need be. His wounded shoulder ached as he pulled it awkwardly over his head, but it stopped hurting as soon as he was able to put his arm down again.
He pursed his lips as he debated the wisdom of carrying his axe or his shield. He decided to go with the axe; he’d learned that when fighting by moonlight, especially moonlight obscured by tree branches and leaves, it was better to be the aggressor. While not entirely useless, it was hard to use your shield to block what you couldn’t see.
Besides, with any luck they’d be up against unarmed bitches and wolf-pups. Their jaws and claws were still dangerous, but considerably less lethal than edged weapons in the long, muscular arms of the grown Aalvarg males. He slipped his scabbarded sword onto his warbelt, then stood up, keeping his legs spread wide against the rhythmic rocking of the snekkja, and buckled it before slipping his dagger inside the thick leather.
It wasn’t long after he sat down again that he felt Ulvdræber turning, although he had no idea what observation had informed the Redcheek’s decision. He’d never been a navigator. Gudrik came forward to sit beside him; although he was staying with the longship, he too was armored.
“Mord says you’re sending Svan and Eiliff to the tower?”
“North, anyhow. Who knows what’s really there.”
“You think that’s wise?”
“I think it saves us time. And if they run into something, better we lose two than twenty.”
Gudrik nodded. He seemed to be wrestling with himself. Skuli looked at the younger man expectantly.
“I’m better than Eiliff,” he finally said. “With the bow. Want me to go with the Barkman?”
Skuli stared out past the prow. The faintest hint of land ahead was beginning to appear through the sea mist. He grinned. This was truly a saga of the damned, even Gudrik Glum appeared to have found an adventurer’s heart.
“Don’t want them putting arrows in anyone. Stay with Ulvdræber and the Redcheek. We need someone with the ship who won’t get excited and come after us if we don’t come back.”
“I’m not afraid,” Gudrik insisted. The slight shaking of his hands belied his words, but Skuli ignored that and answered the younger man’s real question.
“We all die sooner or later, Gudrik Glum. But today is not your time, not yet. I promise you that.”
“You’re not afraid.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Of course I am.” Skuli laughed at the startled look on the other man’s face. “But I’m afraid of different things. I’m afraid for my wife, and for my children on the other side of the sea. I’m afraid for the clans, trying to find a place among the southerners. Honestly, having a damn wolf tear out my throat would come as a relief of sorts.”
“You don’t mean that!”
Skuli ignored Gudrik for a moment, studying the treeline of the approaching coast. He saw no signs of habita
tion, human or Aalvarg, and a glance to the south showed that they were well out of sight of the village the younger lads had spotted. The shore was dangerously rocky, but a lighter-colored patch slightly to the north promised dirt, if not necessarily sand, upon which the longship could be beached.
The Redcheek obviously saw it too, as the prow gradually edged portside until it pointed directly at what he could now see was largely rock-free shoreline. He patted Gudrik’s leg and gave him a reassuring smile. “Wait until you’re my age, when everything hurts, you’ve got scars from your shoulders down to your toes, and then decide if you’re still so reluctant to die.” He groaned theatrically.
That made the younger man laugh, and they braced themselves as Ulvdræber sailed inexorably closer towards a shore that struck Skuli as dangerously steep. He hoped the Redcheek could see it; if the snekkja beached head-on, it seemed to him they’d risk staving a hole in the bottom, or worse, actually breaking the keel. But just as Skuli was about to rise and shout for the men to take the oars and back water in a last-ditch attempt to slow the longship, her sail was abruptly furled and she adroitly arced to port on a path that brought her smoothly up on the shore almost perfectly sideways.
An impromptu, albeit subdued murmur arose from the men at the Redcheek’s impressive feat of steering, and then they were leaping down from the starboard side. More than a few of them tumbled to the ground, their legs stiff and cramped from days at sea. Skuli himself managed to stay on his feet, but he couldn’t repress a groan as a sharp spike of pain inexplicably ran down his spine, from the back of his head to the middle of his shoulders. He flexed his shoulders and lifted his arms, moving them back and forth until the mysterious pain disappeared.
Someone cleared his throat behind him and he turned around to see Svan the Barkman standing in front of him. The Barkman was a slender, dark-haired fellow with a long braided beard and sad, expressive eyes. He wore no armor but a thick wolfskin coat, and carried no sword. Instead, he had a longbow slung over his back, a large roll of arrows tied together suspended from his belt, and a thick spear that doubled as a staff in his left hand. “The Redcheek wants us to espy the tower, see if it’s there?”
“Have a look. Stay out of trouble and don’t take any chances. Follow the sea north and you should run right into it. Learn what you can and then come back.” He slapped the Barkman on the shoulder. “Be back here at dawn; I’ll mark that tree over there.”
The Barkman looked to see where he was pointing, then nodded. Skuli nodded back, picked up his axe, then walked over to the big birch and cut four sizable chunks out of the side facing the sea. He made them at eye height to make them easier to see.
“This is where we meet,” he called out loud enough to cause everyone’s heads to turn towards him. “Unless you want to take a wolf to wife, you damned well better be here by day mark if you get separated. Those with me, keep your mouths shut. Var and Engli, you’ll take the lead. Remember, we want to capture a sigskifting, so try not to kill any of them until you’re sure they can’t change.”
He glanced back at Mord Redcheek, who nodded coolly. Ulvdræber would be here on the morrow. The trick was to ensure that he and his men were as well. He raised his axe in a salute to the Redcheek, then began walking south. It was going to be a long night, and perhaps a bloody one too, but at least he’d get a break from trying to get to sleep on that damned boat!
It was not long after night mark when they heard the first howls. They were high-pitched, juvenile howls, considerably less frightening than the deep ones that used to come down from the hills above Raknarborg and echo off the stone walls. They had made good time through the forest, and before the sun had set, both scouts detected numerous signs of wolf spoor and even the well-gnawed remains of a recent kill.
They made a cold and silent dinner as the sky turned red, as Skuli dared not risk the scent of a fire so close to the suspected Aalvarg habitation. Engli supplemented his paltry repast of dried meat with a handful of blackberries he’d somehow managed to collect in passing, and their unripe bitterness did more to quench his hunger than the tørkød.
After Var located what looked like a well-traveled path, Skuli decided that they would try an ambush. He had Engli rub more of the musky blood-gland mixture on his soles, then had him walk a good ways towards the ruins of the village they’d spotted from the sea. He decided that they would wait until the Blood Moon had climbed as high into the sky as the Bone Moon before they risked venturing further towards the village.
“I hear something,” Halldor whispered in his ear. Skuli had kept the young man near him, partly to keep him safe, but also because young ears are keener than old ones, especially old ones that have long known the deafening din of battle. “They come… quickly, I think!”
Skuli nodded and gave out a soft owl call. He heard a faint rustling down the line in response; the men were ready. There was just enough light from the two moons overhead to see the far side of the clearing he had chosen for the ambush. He couldn’t see the eight men hidden behind the trees on the other side, but he knew they were there.
Then he could hear the softly-rhythmic buddadadum-buddadadum of the Aalvarg approaching as their pads drummed against the soft woodland soil. They were coming rapidly indeed, so quickly that even though he was waiting for them, their actual appearance still managed to take him by surprise. First one grey blur, then a second followed by a third, flashed in front of him. He almost leaped out at them instinctively, but restrained himself when, as he hoped, the combination of the clearing and the crushed gland he’d buried towards the far end of it brought them to a halt.
None of the three were in the pure wolf form, he was disappointed to see. No shapeshifters these, for surely one would have transformed itself in order to better follow the trail of scent. All three were in their twisted natural shape, half-man, half-wolf, with long, wiry arms and powerful haunched legs that were an obscene parody of a man’s limbs. They were obviously young; the biggest was only two-thirds the size of the average Aalvarg warrior, and they were fixated on the scent with their noses were pressed hard against the ground. As they ran, they made loud whuffling noises that sounded for all the world like dogs.
Skuli was just about to whistle when one of them looked back in the direction from which they’d come and made a sound that could only be described as a remonstrative, but friendly bark. A moment later, two more young Aalvarg appeared, followed, to Skuli’s astonishment, by what looked very much like a young woman wearing tattered rags that left her long white legs exposed. Sigskifting!
He took a firm grip on his axe, took a deep breath, raised his right hand to his lips, and whistled loudly. Two of the wolves whipped their heads around, then whirled in a circle as men leaped from the trees around them. Skuli himself sprang at the female shapeshifter, whose mouth had fallen open with the shock of the unexpected assault. She shrieked as he expertly swept her legs out from under her with the butt end of his long axe handle, then swung the head at the nearest wolf-demon as it leaped at Halldor with its claws outstretched and teeth bared.
He missed as the metal blade slashed through the air behind the creature, but it screamed in either pain or fury as it impaled itself on his young clansman’s sword. The force of its leap, combined with its weight, caused Halldor to stumble back and let go of his blade, but another Dalarn was already on top of the wounded beast and repeatedly stabbing it with either hand, almost as if he was beating a drum. Two-Dagger, Skuli realized, and he glanced down just in time to see the shapeshifter was trying to scramble away into the forest on all fours.
He leaped forward and kicked her thigh, causing her to collapse on her stomach, clutching at her leg and screaming. He dropped his axe and fell to one knee, grabbed both her arms and then lifted her up, twisted his upper body, and slammed her to the ground to knock the wind out of her lungs. Before she could recover, he was on top of her, pulling both arms up as he pressed his left knee into her back. Only when she was helpless and secured did h
e glance back to see how his men were faring.
Although he could not make out many faces or any other details in the darkness, he could tell from all the laughing and light-hearted cursing he heard, that all five of the other young wolves were already dead.
Halldor, having managed to find his blade in the corpse of the Aalvarg that Two-Dagger had killed, finished cleaning it off, sheathed it, and handed Skuli a long leather thong. He bent the shapeshifter’s arms together, looped the thong around her forearms several times, then tied it tightly enough to draw a gasp of pain from her. That way, even if she shifted, or grew claws, she wouldn’t be able to cut through the thong.
He stood up, turned around, and looked around the clearing. He didn’t see anyone on the ground except the dead wolves. “Anyone hurt?”
“Engli stabbed me!” he heard someone declare reproachfully. He thought it was Alrik.
“You got in the way, you clumsy snyde!” Engli the Black sounded entirely unrepentant.
“Are you all right, Alrik?”
“He’ll live,” the deep bass of Var rumbled. “I tied up his arm.”
“How am I supposed to fight with one arm?”
“You didn’t fight with two,” Engli said, which sparked no little laughter among the men.
Skuli smiled and turned back to the wolf-girl. He stuck his foot under her and flipped her over, revealing a tear-stained face that was unexpectedly pretty, even mottled as it was by the shadows and the moonlight filtered through the leaves above. Had he encountered her in different circumstances, he might well have thought her a young woman only a few years younger than Fjotra. He couldn’t tell what color her hair was, but it was neither dark nor light.