Blood of Wolves (34 page)

“Both of you?” he asked, scarcely believing it. If he'd had to be rescued, having it be by the leaders of two strong villages seemed too good to be true.

“You made it hard to resist,” Ros-Crana said. She hefted her trophy, letting blood and gore drip from the neck to spatter into the snow and slush around her feet. “The entire Crom-cursed land is stirred up behind you. And ahead. You've painted a target that no one could refuse.”

A victorious chill washed through Kern as he read into her words, her tone. Something in the way she spoke. “No one?” he asked.

Sláine Longtooth crossed arms over his chest, stared off into the night as if already looking at the next battle. “Finally,” he promised. “After all this way and so many lives.”

Kern did not doubt that Longtooth thought of his fallen son, Alaric, first among them.

It was Gard Foehammer, though, who finally gave him a straight answer. Perhaps he thought of the many lives lost at Cruaidh, and again over the Pass of Blood. But he was a warrior born, and knew how to keep his target in sight once it fell beneath his gaze. “Grimnir, Kern.” The protector of Cruaidh reversed his pike, jabbing it point down into the frozen earth. As if driving the finishing blow into his enemy. “He's drawn together his war host near Conarch.

“You've lured out the great beast himself.”

A CLINGING FOG, damp and cold, cloaked the following morning. It rolled over the Cimmerian encampment before dawn, cutting visibility down to not much better than a stone's throw. Draping shadows over the warriors who slept or sat quietly, or walked about alone as they prepared themselves for the coming day.

Kern shook himself into action slowly, with heavy deliberation. The eve before Ros-Crana had promised they were but a short march away from Conarch, and the promise of battle had kept Kern awake most of the night. Back against a tree and huddled beneath his blanket, staring into the dark and cold as his breath plumed before him. Hearing Frostpaw's strong howl as the wolf patrolled the edge of the encampment. Watching the change of sentries.

Not caring so much what the battle would bring to him, but suddenly at ease that his long march seemed to be over.

For better or worse.

There was no call to assemble. No order to move for Conarch. Men and women simply started moving about with more direction, more energy. They drifted off in clumps and clusters. Kern checked on Ehmish—alive, but one of those being left behind that day among other wounded—and kicked a few of his own men awake. Then he set about preparing. Pulling his tattered poncho overhead and belting the iron-shod greaves around his legs. The heavy broadsword of Burok Bear-slayer he strapped across his back. Arming sword at his side, its sheath tied around his wide, leather belt opposite of his long hunting knife. Winter cloak draped over his shoulders, with its tattered roll of wolf's fur matted and filthy.

His extra weapons and the foodstuff he carried went into his blanket roll, tied with a few lengths of braided horsehair, then a long leather cord he slung over his shoulder. Kern slung back his new shield as well, then squatted near a dead fire pit as he watched the rest of his warriors gather to him.

Nahud'r rolled out of his bedroll with scimitar already naked in his hand. Finding a good whetting stone, he set to sharpening the curved length in long, rasping strokes. Aodh and Doon passed around shanks of dried beef and crusty flatbread. Old Finn rose cursing his stiff joints and the damp chill.

Reave and Desagrena arrived together, Kern saw. From a semisecluded patch of stunted cedar. Her acid glance burned Kern's cheeks with a touch of blood. Then she nodded sharply and turned to bash a fist against Reave's shoulder. “Watch his back, Ox-heart.”

Reave swatted her on the ass as she went for her gear.

“Ox-heart?” Kern asked his friend, as Daol and Hydallan stumbled out of their bedrolls and readied themselves.

Daol's ears perked up, and he eyed Reave with his gray hawk's eyes.

“Yea, well.” The large man shrugged. The gold hoops in his ears jangled together. “That was nay the part that interested her before.”

The three men all managed tight grins, but not at Desa's expense. What wasn't being said was actually the more important. For the moment they were simply friends and could have been back in Gaud discussing the hunting or the prospects of a summer raid. And when they suddenly nodded at one another and turned north in tight step, no one even thought to step between them. Kern's warriors simply formed a heavy fist around them as the pack thrust themselves to the fore of the march.

For better or worse.

They would see the day through together.

 

EVEN FROSTPAW DARED show himself closer to the assembled war host than Kern would have thought, waiting out in the trees. Sometimes running ahead of them as if eager to hunt with the pack, or trailing behind to pick up scraps from their passing.

Kern worked his sword arm through the exercises Wallach Graybeard had taught him before Taur. Jab, block, and lunge. The swordplay and the march quickly loosened his muscles, but, down deep in his bones where not even summer's high sun ever reached him, winter remained Kern's constant companion. Even as the army rose up above the fog, tracing the edge of a high, peaked bluff and looking into a clear sky devoid of clouds, Kern shivered and mopped away a cold sweat only.

He caught more than one in his band casting longing glances south and east. Where the early-morning sun peeked over the western Teeth of Conall Valley.

Home.

But Hydallan, Kern saw, tasted the air with short, ferretlike bites. Like his son, the aged tracker and hunter knew the tastes and smells of Cimmeria. Senses as keen as any wolf's.

“Smoke,” he said, glancing down into the dirty gray fog that socked in the lower valleys and glens.

The wisps that tore loose of the heavy blanket were dark and sooty, and obvious once the older man pointed them out. Ros-Crana didn't waste any time when called up to the front of the march, nodding as Hydallan pointed out to her what her own nose had already told.

Conarch was burning.

If there were any doubts, the stragglers confirmed it as they came across first a displaced family, carrying their children to high ground and safety, then some few warriors sent on a dead run to call for aid from the nearby villages. Surprised to find a war host of Cimmerian warriors already on their way, the warriors quickly folded themselves into the ranks and let word spread that Grimnir had stormed down from the ice caverns of the nearby mountains, calling together a host of raiders and Ymirish warriors and sorcerers. They had struck at Conarch first, determined to set the Cimmerians back on their heels before raiding south for Callaugh, and the great war chief of the north had called down mighty beasts. Creatures of great strength, and others that struck out of the fog with lightning reflexes and sharp claws.

The tales grew in the telling, and rather than worry over them, Kern pressed his people harder, faster, kicking through the icy crust of snow, ready to come to grips with this terrible legend.

Eager for the end.

The trail widened as it turned down toward Broken Leg Lands and Clan Conarch, dropping toward a narrow bluff that overlooked the deeper glen. Rock outcroppings chewed their way up from the ground like teeth through meat. The snow made footing treacherous, always hiding a loose stone or a small hole where a leg could be snapped like dry kindling. In some areas, the snow had drifted up in knee-high piles.

The fog slowly burned away under the pale sun, thinning even as the war host descended into it again. The curtain swallowed them back up, reducing the rising sun to nothing more than a dim light in the sky and the Cimmerian warriors to ghosts among the shadows of rocky mounds and sparse trees. Soon, there was no trail at all. Simply a wide slope down which they pushed toward the besieged village. Without being ordered, Kern's people stepped up to a brisk walk, then an easy jog. Behind them, the Cimmerian war host fanned out into two lines. Valleymen on the left. Callaughnan and their allies on the right.

And ahead, a wild, banshee trumpeting and the mournful blasts of Vanir horns rolled together to wail like demons loosed over the land as the two armies drew together. More stragglers fell back onto the army's position, seeking a new strong line, drawing the Vanir after them and away from the village stronghold. Swordsmen and archers. Pike-bearing guardsmen. Shield maidens.

A fist of Aquilonian lancers rode up on their war-horses, wheeling around Kern's small band with their long lances lowered and faces wary beneath conical helms. They didn't recognize the Cimmerians, that was certain, but they also knew that Kern's people were no Vanir.

Kern gave them a heartbeat's pause, until Ros-Crana ran forward to wave them aside. “With us,” she called to the Aquilonians. “Wolf-Eye!”

It was enough for them. The leader of the trio raised the tip of his lance in salute, and they reined their mounts in next to Kern's pack. Kern saw a few uneasy glances, and heard one man say to his captain, “Wolves.”

“From Conan's
em-bass-y
to Clan Conarch,” Ros-Crana told Kern, falling back toward her own people as they shook out into a ragged battle line. The Aquilonian word sounded strange in her mouth, but Kern took its meaning to be something like a gift of men.

More yells and shouts from the thinning fog. The slope lessened, running down onto the bluff's small plateau. There Frostpaw discovered the first Vanir, the wolf jumping through a sheaf of winter-dry brush and flushing the raider out from his own spiderhole. The animal growled and snarled, rolling out of the brush and in a pile of fur and leather and steel.

Snapping jaws tasted blood as the Vanir howled in pain. He kicked out with one foot and dazed the large animal enough to scramble back to his feet, sword raised overhead and ready to smash his blade through the wolf's skull.

An arrow took the raider in the chest, right through his breastbone.

Brig Tall-Wood lowered his hunting bow, having beat Daol to the mark by mere heartbeats. “Wouldn't do to have them claim first blood on us,” was all he said.

Not that it would be much longer.

There were sounds of battle reaching them now, with clashing steel and the calls and cries of warriors in the grips of bloodlust. An arrow flew out of the gray curtain raised before them, at random no doubt, and stuck into the earth not far from the Aquilonian horsemen. A horse reared, but its rider clung to its large back without being thrown.

Kern slowed his people from their trot back to a walk, then to a stop as a large shadow moved through the gloom at them. At first he thought it was another of the large granite rock columns that stood out like petrified trees on some ancient dry wash. But this one moved. And when it lifted its head, there was another banshee wailing of trumpets and horns. Lithe shadows patrolled around its feet, blending into the fog, moving with a hunter's grace.

One of the smaller shadows leaped forward, suddenly revealing itself. A saber-toothed cat. White as the snowy pelt of an ermine.

The snarling yelp of Kern's dire wolf rose up alongside the cat's high-pitched, savage scream. The saber-tooth had found Frostpaw trapped between the two armies, and now the two creatures fought their own prelude to the battle to come. They dodged and slashed at each other, and the Cimmerian advance stalled, waiting as the larger shadow lumbered out from the gray curtain and made itself known.

A mammoth, covered in ropes of shaggy, coarse hair and strong as ten oxen. It plowed forward with a large form astride its neck, raising weapons overhead in challenge. A giant form. A true beast that walked upright, like a demon with blazing eyes of golden fire. The tales had not been so tall, after all.

At last, Grimnir stood revealed.

Giant-kin!

Frost-giant. One of the legendary true sons of Ymir. Easily half again as large as a regular man, with a thick hide the color of old, rotten snow and heavily muscled arms that could tear a warrior in two. His eyes did spark like yellow fire out of a face more bestial than human.

But this was no mindless creature of the deep, deep north. There was intelligence there, and purpose in the way he held his weapons. He raised a warhammer overhead with his right hand. In his other, he wielded a battle-axe one-handed and pointed it at the Cimmerian line.

“Crom's blood,” Brig Tall-Wood said aloud.

From deeper in the gray swirls and sworls of fog, more shadows suddenly darkened into distinct outline as a large host of Vanir raiders massed to either side of the wooly mammoth. Large burly men, with dark, flame-red hair or the more golden touch of captured sons from Asgard, almost all with thick beards, which helped protect faces from the harder, icy winds of the Nordheim wastes. They wore full tunics and kilts banded with leather and studded with tiny metal spikes. Shaggy cloaks made from goat's wool, and metal caps with the horns of any number of beasts.

And Ymirish. Grimnir's faithful. A dozen . . . two! Two dozen. Frost-haired and heavy, deep-set features, with the same yellow eyes Kern knew from staring into summer ponds or silver-polished steel. They came to battle bare-chested to the elements. Some of them handled large mastiffs, being held back at the moment while waiting for the snow-cats to draw aside after killing Frostpaw. Others pumped weapons overhead, encouraging the Vanir.

Two of these frost-bearded men hunched together near the mammoth's side. Crom take Kern if the shadows and the fog didn't congeal around them to form a dark, heavy band. An unnatural appearance that twisted a small rope of fear somewhere deep within the mind. Each had two large orbs tattooed over his chest. Too far to make out detail, Kern already knew. Glowing, feral eyes.