Another quick survey. Just as empty as the first, but for a pair of golden deer in the distance, which Brig immediately trekked after in hopes of adding to the band’s meager stores. Kern almost wished there was a distraction to take him away from the rising smell of death, the arguments of the scavengers.
There wasn’t, and he climbed down to lead his warriors into the killing field.
The battle had taken place right where the stream they had followed out of the foothills emptied into a larger river. A triangle, framed on two sides by water and a third by the woods, which stood a silent vigil two arrow shots distant. Kern counted three fire pits.
One side of the battle encamped for the night. Set upon in the dark, or at morning’s light? The other likely lying in wait at the edge of the wood. Run out hard, run down on the sentries if there were any set outside of the camp, or at least get into arrow range so that archers could cause a great deal of death and damage before any alarm could be sounded. But eventually it was draw swords and have at them!
Blood and curses.
Bodies strewn across the fields.
The ringing clash of steel on steel and the slap of blade against bone.
He heard the far-off echoes of this battle, how it must have been. Like a maddened pulse, beating inside his head. A dull pounding, which stayed with him as he studied the corpses, making certain that there were no familiar faces littering the battlefield. No survivors from Gaud, come to their final end.
No one he knew. Still, Kern understood at last that he wouldn’t—couldn’t—make the phantoms go away. He’d seen enough battlefields of his own in the past month to never forget the sounds and sensations. And he’d seen enough of Grimnir’s handiwork for any two lifetimes, by Crom. The brutal savagery. Pain and anguish inflicted for the sake of sport, or as a lesson to others.
In fact, if there was one good thing to be said of the battlefield, it lacked the sense of horror that seemed to follow the Vanir raiders and their Ymirish masters. Perhaps this one had been too evenly matched for one side or the other to gain an overwhelming advantage, and it was simple butchery for hate’s sake. But even as he thought it, looked for the signs of it, Kern had a deepening suspicion that something was not quite right. That he had overlooked a telltale sign, and it was lurking on the battlefield . . .
Waiting to stand up and club him senseless.
What was wrong here? He stopped and turned a slow circle. Brow furrowed.
Aodh noticed. Strong, stalwart Aodh, who had not had much to say since Gaud, especially to Kern Wolf-Eye. But his grief and the previous night’s outburst notwithstanding, he obviously noticed Kern’s consternation, and it set him immediately on his guard. Hand on sword. Eyes sweeping the near horizons while Kern looked at the nearby corpses.
“Kern?”
He circled again. “Something . . .”
Finally, he had to push it out of his mind, weighing it on the side of his midnight jitters. The aching head. The pounding of his blood that never seemed to quiet these days.
He let it go before his shortened temper threatened to get the better of him once again.
The others scattered out, though he gave no order. Didn’t have to. To survive, his warriors had learned how to scavenge off the dead, like carrion birds themselves. Now they walked among the dead, looking for weapons better than they already had, a piece of clothing or a warmer blanket. Always, always for food.
No reason to look for survivors. The flies, the odor that was strong enough to leave a rancid taste burning at the back of his throat . . . they were days too late for any kind of rescue. Any help.
Or for much in the way of salvaged gear. The field had been picked over fairly well. Sacks dumped out. Clothing sliced open. One side or the other had used horses, too—either as pack animals or chargers. There were several carcasses, field butchered for the biggest hanks of meat. Well, some Lachiesh clans were known to tame wild horses, and after watching the Aquilonians, Kern could appreciate, at least, the value of good horsemen.
Though it confused him, a moment later, to see what looked like a horseman’s lance run through the back of a dark-haired Cimmerian. A crust of blood stained the man’s lips, and Kern all but tasted its metallic taste far back in his throat as well as he imagined that the hand guiding the lance had been a clansman as well. Imagined it.
Knew it.
A mistake. In the night or predawn gloom, this could happen. A charger running down his own man. Maybe one that ran in too close among a good-sized target of Vanir swordsmen.
But then . . . where were the Vanir?
That, he suddenly realized, was what the itching thought nagging at the back of his mind had been. There were nay flame-haired Vanir raiders littered across this field!
Not one that he’d seen. And the Vanir did not collect their dead. They stripped them as they would an enemy corpse, plundering their own, and moved on. While Kern’s group had, with an advantage, often come out of a bloody fight without loss of life, the size of this one—fifteen . . . twenty men laid out for the crows—argued against the thought.
Which was when the sinking sensation dropped down through his stomach. Left him reeling from one corpse to the next, looking for any sign of the northern raiders, or their Ymirish masters, and remembering all the while the caution of the Galla chieftain. That Kern would not like what he found.
Aodh looked over, never having wandered far. And Nahud’r paused in his search into the bottom of a leather sack. Both men looked askance at the other, and at Kern.
“Tell me,” Kern said, his voice thick and heavy.
He stood in the middle of the death ground, surrounded by bodies, and did not want to believe that such trouble was happening. Now of all times.
“Tell me that this battle was nay Cimmerian,” he said. “On both sides.”
24
NO PROVING IT was or wasn’t, but Kern knew. He knew. Two Cimmerian clans, large ones by the looks of things, had gone to war. A feud, spilling over from raids and thieving, and into bloody conflict.
The echoes of that battle hung with him through the night and most of the next day, and might have plagued him further if the real threat to Cimmeria had not made itself felt again. No burned-out huts. No abused corpses. He had nearly forgotten the danger of Vanaheim.
But as early twilight fell over Murrogh Forest a host of insects swarmed in the sudden coolness, drawn by body heat and fresh blood. Kern, sword bared but held easily, pushed his way through the drooping branches of an old willow. The ground squelched underfoot. Marshy. Smelling of rotted wood and stale water. And something else he tasted on the very edge of the heady odors.
Something metallic.
Brig Tall-Wood and Reave stood over the Vanir’s body, which lay propped back against the willow’s thick, silver bole. It might have been that the flame-haired raider had simply fallen asleep there except for the open, unseeing eyes. The two men watched as blood stained the front of his tunic, around the arrow shaft sunk into his gut. More seeped from the deep cut in the side of his neck, running off his shoulder to stain the tree’s bark.
Kern swiped his way past the last few branches and joined them at the willow’s secluded heart. A few spiders had fallen out of the curtain, black orb weavers that skittered across Kern’s shoulders and arms, clung to his hair and the back of his neck. Patiently, he brushed them aside. Harmless spinners. And once one faced the giant mountain spiders of the Pass of Noose, hardly worth more than a passing thought.
This raider, however, was worth that and more.
“Now we know for certain,” Kern said. He kicked at one of the splayed-out legs. “They’re here.”
Brig nodded. “Hardly a surprise. The Galla. They did say that raiders had pushed through the pass.”
“An’ come around north,” Reave added.
Finding the death grounds the day before, Kern had wondered about that. What clan went to war against its neighbor when raiders threatened all? After several months of hard fight
ing against Vanir and Ymirish, he had not looked to walk in on a blood feud. It made as much sense as slaughtering your own cow for meat as a neighbor is stealing its milk anyway. You killed the neighbor first, or at least beat him within a hairbreadth of his life. Then you considered the other decision. Right?
The question had rolled around in Kern’s head, taunting him and distracting his attention, riling him, until he had all but given up understanding.
But Vanir, on the hunt—that gave him a direction to focus his energies, his anger, and whatever force inside him was pushing so hard to be released that he now worried at times for the safety of his own people should they be near him when the pressure became too much for him to bear.
“He should have kept still,” Kern said.
Anger boiled near the surface, and no little fear that he had nearly lost a man this night. He spat, striking the dead man between the eyes. The dead northerner. A long beard the color of fresh copper, braided with silver thread into a half dozen locks, he’d kept his hair chopped short, barely reaching his ears on the side and well away from his eyes. The better to hear, to track?
“Should have let us move past, then circled behind to warn his people. But he nay thought of it.”
He’d seen it before, how the Vanir so often refused to work together. All of them looking out for themselves, and themselves alone. Which was how Kern’s warriors managed so well against them.
And the raider’s urge to kill? The drive that had pushed this one to break cover and try for at least one life before fleeing?
Kern was beginning to understand that. Relied on it more and more, as the odds piled up against him and his “pack.” It was a strong part of why he swore to hunt them, and kill them, wherever he could. It was what he had left in his life. What he had chosen.
What he was born as.
“Hydallan all right?” Reave asked, reminded of the ambush.
Daol’s father had been up near the front when Ehmish suddenly turned and shoved the elder roughly aside. The arrow had sliced in against the side of the old man’s head, slicing through ear and scalp and spattering a great deal of blood across the forest floor. Gard and Kern had leaped to Hydallan’s aid. Most everyone else charged ahead, after the assassin.
They worried for each other. Kern recognized that it was a strength as well as a weakness.
“Kern?”
But he was saved from any answer as a string of soft curses chased up from behind him, and the branches parted for Hydallan and Gard Foehammer. Then Wallach Graybeard behind them. Hydallan held one hand with a thick, sopping ball of woolen blanket against the side of his head. With the other, he swatted at one of the small orb weavers that clung to the side of his face.
“Crom-cursed spinners! A muck-fed nesting tree for them, that’s a-what these piss-smelling willows are. Nay!” Hydallan shook Gard’s hand off his arm. “If’n you need someone to hold you up, lean on that fornicating great hulk over there.” He nodded curtly at Reave, whose face froze in a careful mask. Leaning in he studied it for one smirk, one sign of a smile.
“Someone needs to sew that up,” Kern said, drawing the old man’s attention away from Reave. He’d seen the wound. Hydallan had lost a good chunk out of his right ear, and was lucky not to have had his skull cracked open. So much blood. “Another finger’s width to the left,” he said, “and you’d have taken that shaft through the eye.”
“Another finger’s width to the right, and mebbe the arrow would have passed me by for your ugly face.” Hydallan hawked, and spat to one side. “Don’t go a-borrowing trouble, pup. It is what it is. And we have enough of a problem a’ready.” He kicked at the raider’s splayed legs.
They did at that. Kern had already noted the lack of a cuirass or bedroll. And an empty provisions sack. Just a war bow and an arrow case full of hunting shafts, and a good knife on his belt.
“More where he came from,” Kern said, nodding. Then he glanced around at the men with him. “Sure there was just the one?”
Gard shrugged. “Ehmish thought so. And this one, he looks as if he was out looking for game stirring before night’s fall. Hunters like to work alone.”
Brig nodded in silent agreement. Then, “The rest of them, though, they won’t be far off.”
“I spread the others forward and to either side,” Wallach informed Kern. “Just in case they were close enough to hear, and come running.”
“Good. As needs be, we fall back toward the river or push deeper into the woods.” Running? Only as a last option. “If we can scout them out before nightfall,” he thought out loud, “we might hope to surprise them in a quick attack.”
“Evening comes on fast, this close to the Black Mountains.” Brig, again. He tried to find a sliver of sky through the massive spread of branches. “Mayhap we have time to search, but only in one direction if’n you want more than a league out of us before nightfall hems us in. Guess wrong, and we could be put at a disadvantage come morning and they find us first.”
Then they were all trying to talk, arguing for the size of patrols, and the number of them. Wondering aloud if it wouldn’t be better to find a good stretch of ground—dry ground!—for sleep and a hard defensive stand come the daylight. As needs be. If they did not want to run on luck, which so often was a fickle choice to rely upon.
Kern heard their arguments, their passion. He spoiled for a fight, not wanting to give the raiders a free pass, but it was the worst timing. Especially with one of his warriors already badly hurt—though he was too stubborn to admit it or let it slow the pack down for even a moment. Kern saw no way to ease the problem. An unfamiliar land and no friends as yet. Could he let his own bloodlust make such a decision?
It was a touchy choice, and one Ehmish saved him from making. A rustle of branches announced him, and he slipped up to the group without much more than a nod to Kern and a warm clap on the shoulder by Hydallan. He listened a moment, then smiled. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant grin, but it did raise a light behind his eyes that caught Kern’s attention.
“Ehmish?” he asked. “You have something to add?”
He nodded. Then shrugged with obvious pride to have jumped one step ahead of the others.
“I know where they are,” he promised with such easy conviction there was no doubting him.
And that decided it.
AS EHMISH TOLD it, when Wallach’s call reached him—the sharp, fierce barks of a coyote, which warned them the danger was over and they should all regroup—he had been set in place beneath a tall ponderosa with an arrow nocked and ready. He’d guessed pretty close to correct, and had placed himself right along the path of the raider’s retreat. Only Reave and Brig got to him first.
“So I started thinking about what would come next. And I—” He’d paused in his explanation. Waited until Kern nodded for him to continue. “I heard Kern’s voice in my head. As if I already knew what he’d say, and how he’d say it.”
Kern knew more than he wanted these days, about living with other voices in his head. He didn’t want Ehmish to dwell overlong on it.
“What did I say?” he asked.
“You said, ‘Get up a tree, boy, and tell me what you see.’”
Ehmish said this last in a rush, as if wanting to get through it. Bad enough, apparently, that he’d tried to second-guess Kern. Worse, the way “Kern” had said it.
“It was the right idea, no matter how you came about it,” Kern said, with a strong nod.
What Ehmish had seen was smoke from a campfire set a little too early for the gray wisp to be lost against a darkening sky, and a little too late that he couldn’t also pick out a few bright wisps of flame in the distance. Which was how Kern’s warriors came to be skulking through the nearby forest well after dark, guided in by the light of their enemy’s fire. They must have felt extremely confident, to set such a lax guard.
Kern smiled grimly. He intended to make them pay for that with their lives.
Thirty warriors or more, men and women, spr
ead their campsite through a thinly sheltered glade. A small stream gurgled along one side, providing them with fresh drinking water. Several of the men had staked a skinned fawn over their cooking fire, and the warm scent of savory game drifted out into the forest.
For fresh meat, they had made such a mistake.
He had already counted five guards set out near the forest’s edge and a huddle of six or seven prisoners near the center of camp. With his night vision, Kern scouted briefly around the entire area before returning to his men and setting out a plan. Now he waited for his part in it, huddled down next to Reave and Nahud’r. Waiting. Watching.
Startled when a scuffling step behind caused him to whirl about with a ready blade, nearly leaping at Frostpaw.
The dire wolf so rarely showed itself at so close a distance. Near enough that Kern might almost have cut him with a longer sword. Though the animal jumped back a full length and set itself in a low crouch, growling at Kern’s sudden and violent movement, it did not attack and did not bolt for the trees. Its golden eyes flared in the night as it caught a stray piece of starlight, or perhaps a spark from the campfire. It bared its teeth, and waited.
“Just wrong, that,” Reave whispered. Not to anyone in particular. But he lay back across the soft forest floor, turning his back on the large animal.
Though Kern had also gotten used to the dire wolf’s hesitant company, he never turned his back on it so easily. His chest still had angry scars from that dead-winter morning when the wolf first attacked him. Since then they had shared kills, and victories. But it was still a wolf. One of the most massive and terrifying of breeds. And a warrior who forgot to respect that might find those teeth at his throat and the foul, carrion reek of the animal’s breath the last thing he ever knew.
Carrion . . . Kern leaned back, sniffing the air. “Smells the fawn. Crossing the pass so quickly took some weight off him as well.”
“Whatever reason,” Nahud’r whispered, staring wide-eyed at the wolf. He had seen it many times, but never so close. “I will take him at my back than at my throat any day.”
Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Page 26