“So be it,” he whispered. “A small price to pay.”
That was when Lodur finally sagged to his knees, his strength totally spent.
And remembered Kern.
“Nay!” he screamed, reaching again for that terrible strength of will he had known only a moment—heartbeats—before. But if it had ever been there, truly there, it was gone. The ice-driven winds lashed at him with indifference, and the thunder rolled with no more or less overtones of dark power than they ever had. The bonfire had settled back into a dying bed of coals. There was no further display of lightning. No sense of being wrapped into the storm.
Only twelve dead bodies splayed around him, and a distant howl of anguish hanging in the air.
“Where”—he panted, then paused as his labored breathing pulled much-needed air down into his lungs—“are the bodies?”
They would be in Conall Valley. Kern and the rest of the “wolves.” That’s where they would have gone from Venarium. Where they would see Grimnir’s work, spread out ahead of them, drawn in ashes and blood. And where Lodur would find them. Or, at least, their trail.
12
A COLD, CONSTANT drizzle fell from dark, swollen skies. It had chased Kern’s warriors along their hard-driving push into Conall Valley. Hounded them. Washed away the sweat of their hard run and left with them a damp, shivering sleep that brought little rest.
The thin, stinging droplets had been their companion through two nights and a handful of small, desperate skirmishes. Now the rainfall spattered against broken thatch. Pooled on the hard-beaten floors of huts and homes. Turned the village paths muddy.
Bloodied and bruised, aching deep in every muscle, his lungs burning as they pulled in great gasps of air, Kern stomped through what was left of Gaud.
Of home.
Burned-out shells and bloody slaughter for the most part.
The odor of stale smoke and wet ash and blood.
His hands bunched into tight fists, nails biting into his palms. Too late. Too late by several days, at the least. Grimnir’s wrath had been as terrible as Kern had feared. Moving too swift to catch, though his pack had tried, slogging along the valley trails with more thoughts for speed than caution. Raw bramble scratches on his legs burned something fierce, and a day-old knife wound on his right arm bled freely where he’d scraped away a crusted scab against the door to his old hut—his home of many summers.
Someone else had started to live there. And had died there.
Kern had not recognized the youth. There hadn’t been enough of a face left.
The rain plastered down his frost blond hair. Trickles of water ran through his beard stubble and trailed icy fingers down the back of his neck. He swiped at the long hairs hanging down over his eyes. Blinked his vision clear, and tried to clear the thudding of his own heart from his ears. The rage of bloodlust and pain.
His warriors had already spread through the dead village, counting up their fallen kin. Kern found Reave at a larger dwelling where the other man’s sister and her husband had lived, raising three children. The door had been torn off—leather hinges sliced away—and hurled aside. Reave filled the open doorway, large hands gripping the overhead lintel, his back to the common room as he stared straight out into the rain as if not wanting to turn and face what might wait for him inside.
Those pale, glacier eyes, usually so full of emotion, were flat and dead.
“I can go in for you,” he offered. “Maybe Ros wasn’t here.”
But he mistook fear for an even rarer expression on Reave’s face. Shock. Numbness. The large man brought a hand down to scrub over his face, and curled fingers into his brushy, black beard.
“She was here, Kern,” he said. And stepped back out into the rain. “She was here.”
Slowly, the two slogged their way through soupy mud and over a few runoff streams that cut between some of the homes. Heading toward the lodge. Around and past them, others walked, or ran, searching the village, calling out for survivors. Anyone. Not caring if their calls brought more Vanir.
Kern actually hoped they would.
Not that they hadn’t seen enough fighting. Running through several days had brought Kern’s pack up into Conall Valley, where Cimmerian clans long ago carved out a few small, tough villages. The valley was infested with Vanir raiders. As one battle left off, another began. Patrols and picket camps and small, roving packs. Flame-haired men and a few women as well, charging forward with Berserker howls or to the low, mournful bellow of a Nordheim hunting horn.
Fortunately, they came in small numbers, so convinced of their superiority, so used to an easy string of victories. It was the horns that bothered Kern the most. Because it drew other raiders like vultures to carrion. And he had no time for the zigzag path forced on him and his warriors. Not when they were so near Gaud. So close to the village that had once been home to most of them.
Evidence of the large war host preceding them was easy to find. Campsites with Vanir-style slaughter pits. Burned-out huts and hovels, and one village the Gaudic warriors had known well—Maran, at times a formidable enemy—razed to the ground. Left a charred ruin. There had been no clansmen around. No bodies, either. Which meant enough had survived to eventually care for the dead before abandoning the lower valley to the Vanir jackals. What direction they had gone, though, not even Hydallan could decide.
There had been surviving villages as well. Missed by the Vanir, or at least not in Grimnir’s direct line of march. Clan villages full of angered men and women who were held off from swarming Kern with blades only by the ferocious set of men and steel at his back.
Not even the bloody spear Kern held carried much weight. No tales of Grimnir’s campaign and defeat in the northwest territory salved their pain. They trusted no one. Especially an outcast with the blood of wolves in his veins.
Even when his pack came upon the village of Baur, and helped rally the beleaguered defenders to throw off a small Vanir raiding team, there had been no thanks. Nothing but a sword tip pointing their way out of the Bauric region.
Kern remembered swallowing back the acid taste of fury and pushing forward.
They hadn’t been a half day’s run from Gaud when the latest Vanir patrol struck at their ragged line. Half a dozen tall men, well fed and well armed, without a trace of winter’s lean months on them. Good, bronze-faced shields and heavy blades. And a Berserker’s fury.
If his warriors had not outnumbered the Vanir three to their one, there was no telling how desperate the fighting might have turned. As it happened, all he had to do was fall back on the defensive until Strom’s small cavalry force rode over two of the Vanir patrol, then Reave took a third with one swipe of his greatsword. Then he and Daol and Nahud’r swarmed a fourth while Brig and Wallach Graybeard each battled another to a standstill.
Out of the battle spoils, Kern traded his beat-up target for a new shield with hardly a scar on its golden-bronze facing and a wicked-spiked boss sharpened to a fresh point. He’d also dug a good-fitting vest of armored chain from one of the raider’s packs, and discovered a good blanket of shaggy mountain ram, which he rolled into the felt mat he carried as part of his own bedroll.
Foodstuff was scavenged.
Weapons traded for stronger blades.
Which was when Ehmish found it.
A blue-iron war sword with a cord-wound handle. Tied with a strip of woad-dyed leather at the end—dark blue, with the brand of a bear paw burned into it.
The war sword of Cul Chieftain!
“Nay!” Brig shouted at Ehmish’s yell. If Ashul had not been tying closed a shallow cut, Brig would likely have rushed Ehmish and beat a refusal from him. “It cannot be.”
“It is, I’m telling you.”
The young man held the sword reversed so that its tip pointed at the earth and everyone could see the hilt. The leather tag was tattered and blood-soaked, but there was no mistaking it. Only Cul Chieftain of all warriors in Gaud had carried a blue-iron war sword, so rare a find in the lower va
lley. And the brand was familiar to anyone of Gaud, made known by Burok Bear-slayer, chieftain before Cul. Chieftain for seventeen summers.
Maev’s father.
“I fetched it for Cul one day,” Ehmish said. His voice was still changing to a man’s strength, and it cracked on the last word. “I took a few practice swings with it when no one could see. And I noticed these three chips on the lower edge of the blade. I made up a story in my head, of cutting through slave chains to free . . . to free Conan, who had been captured.” The younger man flushed, and swallowed hard. “I know this sword, Brig Tall-Wood.”
Hydallan snatched the blade away, glanced at it, passed it to Reave, who then handed it through Desa to Wallach Graybeard. All nodded, convinced for themselves.
Kern believed it the moment he saw the brand.
“We all know this sword,” he’d said.
The last time he’d seen it, in fact, he had been certain that Cul Chieftain was about to draw it on him. Camped at the foot of the Black Mountains, counting up losses to the Vanir attack that had stolen Daol and Maev, Kern had challenged the new leader of Clan Gaud. Stolen away (in Cul’s mind, at least) five able warriors to pursue the raiders. But Cul had let them go, though with a warning that Kern should never cross paths with him again. Ever.
Which was precisely what Kern had aimed to do. But seeing this sword, and with the distant call of so many screams echoing inside his head the last few days, he felt down deep in the pit of his stomach the awful truth. Knew what it was they’d find at Gaud.
Still, he had hoped. He even caught himself asking Crom for his protection over Maev and the others. Knowing that gods did not listen to the complaints or calls of mortal men did not stop him from asking. Just this once.
And it did not stop Crom from ignoring him. The Cimmerians’ maker had no obvious interest in Kern. If anything, he likely looked on the wolf-eyed warrior as the blood of Ymir, Crom’s sworn enemy, and so why would he ever listen to such a man?
Certainly he hadn’t. Gaud was dead. A dead village to a dead people. Like Maran. Like the massacred community they had discovered on the Hardpan Flats. And on every sharp gust of wind, in the creak of every swinging door, Kern heard the name of the one responsible.
Grimnir.
The Great Devil himself.
“Kohlitt was nay there,” Reave said, as they approached the center of the village. His sister’s husband. “Or Bayan or Cor.”
His niece and older nephew. So young Kale had been there, and died with his mother.
Quickly, Kern hoped. It was the best prayer to offer anyone caught by the Vanir.
Both men remained quiet as they tramped through the mud, making their way through the cold, quiet village, passing the shack that had once belonged to Old Finn, then the small wattle-and-daub home in which Daol and Hydallan had lived together. They followed a meandering path; Gaud had never been built to any plan. No wide streets and tall buildings crowded close together, as Nahud’r described the “civilized” cities of the southern kingdoms. Places where so many people crowding in close meant more disease, and needed so many rules—called “laws”—to teach them how to live together without killing each other.
Such foolish need was not for Cimmerians. Gaud had grown only as large as it ever needed to be, with a few main paths that snaked around clusters of homes and isolated huts, with the village lodge hall built near the center, where everyone could gather as called.
And that was where most of Kern’s small band waited, drawing together again by common consensus. Noting the changes that had taken place in their absence, Kern suddenly understood why it was likely he could never have recognized the youth living in his old hut. Though Ossian might.
After coming to Taur’s rescue, during his first week as an outcast, Kern had suggested it to both Liam Chieftain and Maev. That the two villages—so often rivals, but both facing the same enemy now—combine their strength (and their stores) to weather out the unnaturally long winter and fend off the deadly Vanir raids. Maev had taken a huge chance in that discussion, offering to challenge Cul. As Burok Bear-slayer’s daughter, her voice would be heeded, she promised. And when Kern’s band of warriors left, it had seemed that Taur was firmly considering such an alliance.
Apparently, it had gone much further.
The Gaudic lodge hall was made to resemble something of what the Taurin had learned in fending off raid after raid. A breastwork of earth and stone had been piled up around the lodge, with a tangle of sharpened poles set in the breastwork to stick out at all angles, making any charge against the lodge a dangerous and costly one. There was one gate, solidly built and reinforced with posts set deep in the earth. And behind the defenses, some V-shaped walls where warriors could hunker down in some protection, popping up or to the side long enough to fire arrows at anyone trying to breach the breastworks, then ducking back.
Good, solid work. Certainly it must have given even Grimnir pause, as the giant-kin threw away lives in vain attempts to breach the walls.
A pile of Vanir corpses lay off to one side, with two of the larger, frost-haired Ymirish thrown atop. The Gaudic defense had claimed its share of blood, and the metallic, spoiled smell was strong.
Too strong, in fact, to come from the stacked bodies. And beneath was a bitter, latrine odor. A slaughter pit’s odor.
He knew that it came from the ransacked lodge hall. Knew what he would find inside.
No one else had ventured close, though the breastworks gate had been ripped aside and the lodge hall entry stood open. One of the doors was missing. The other bumped back against the wall as a cutting breeze gusted through the village ruins. A slow and irregular thump, like a dying heartbeat.
Strom, Valerus, and Niuss walked up, their horses tethered back away from the slaughter. The Aquilonians wore identical expressions of obvious disgust and horror.
“Senseless,” Strom said, breaking the uneasy silence that had gripped the Cimmerians. “Like carrion jackals throwing up on what they can’t eat, to spoil it.”
Kern suspected it went deeper than that. Grimnir had proven time and again that he was not beneath such a massacre. The Aquilonians, in their time at Conarch, had not witnessed such willful destruction until these last few days.
But Kern’s warrior band had. Maran and Gaud were not the first dead villages they’d walked through.
“Anyone?” he asked Hydallan, who waited nearby with his son and a handful of others.
The veteran hawked and spat to one side, as if clearing a foul taste. “Nay.” He shook his head. Drops of rainwater fell off the brim of the old tracker’s peaked cap. “A-waitin’ for you.”
Kern stared up into the sky a moment, letting the brittle-cold drizzle wash his face clean of any show of weakness. Not in front of “the pack.” Not if he wanted to keep them focused, now, in the most desperate of times. He waited, letting the rain beat back the warming rage that flushed his face and crawled angry, biting hornets across his scalp. Violet sparks of power lit off behind his eyes, nearly blinding him with a sudden and intense ache that stabbed into his brain. But he tightened down against any incoherent madness as well. This was not the time.
Then, scrubbing the water away with a rough-callused hand, he nodded and strode forward for the ruined gate and the lodge hall compound.
A dozen clansmen followed.
How the Vanir finally broke their siege of the lodge hall was clear enough. Fire arrows had scorched the walls but failed to catch. The pile of bodies outside the breastworks proved that Cul—or someone—had set a solid-enough defense. But a little war craft ingenuity went a long way. Kern stopped just inside the gate to study the near side of the lodge, where two giant lengths of timber rested up against the half-caved-in wall. Young watchtower trees, stripped of most of their thick branches and hauled in from several leagues away by his guess. Six times as tall as a man. By foul sorcery or superhuman strength the two timbers had been stood up on one side of the lodge hall defense, and then let go to tip and
fall over the spiked palisade, earthworks, and all.
A bridge.
He could easily picture in his head the Vanir raiders, whipped into a frenzy by Grimnir and the Ymirish, climbing onto the thick boles and racing a quick gauntlet of arrows and spear thrusts to make it over the deadly breastworks, then leaping down into the compound.
Heard them all yelling their savage battle cries . . .
Smelled the blood as it began to flow, pooling against the ground . . .
There were three more raider bodies laid out beneath the timbers. And another of the large, frost-bearded Ymirish. This one had shaved the top of his head in an uncommon manner, leaving a bald stripe down the center.
He also had at least a dozen arrows stuck into his chest and through his gut. He had not gone down easily.
“Some ran the entire length of the long trunks,” Kern said in a hoarse whisper, feeling out those last few moments of battle.
His throat tightened up until it was hard to breathe. He wanted to yell, to scream his frustration at the sky, but he held down and smothered the rage with desperate strength. Thunder rolled through the overcast heavens. And a flash of violet-tinged lightning brightened the dark clouds for an instant only.
“Clambered up onto the lodge hall roof. A few bowmen crouching atop the lodge could have caused far more damage than their short numbers promised.”
There was one body up there, though Vanir or Cimmerian it was hard to tell as it had half sunk into the thatching.
Another handful, hacking into the thatch, created the ragged holes he counted along the roof. “Dropping down inside to set themselves loose among the young and the wounded. Or to then come flying out through the front entrance.”
He could almost see it. A riot of violent pictures in his head, pounding at his temples for release. The shouts and desperate calls for help echoing in his ears. And the scent of blood. Blood everywhere.
More thunder rolled across the sky. Kern felt its raw power ripple across his skin, standing the short hairs on his arms up like wiry bristles.
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 13