Cimmerian Rage(20)
Lodur waited for Grimnir to tear the man’s throat out with his own great teeth. Or for the saber-tooth to sink its massive fangs into the sorcerer’s side.
Neither happened. The cat remained watchful of Lodur, and Grimnir growled, a deep rumble that rolled around in his chest, but did not move for the pain. The sorcerer grimaced, bent to his task. Lodur could not see the change, but he felt it. Sparks of pain lighting off behind his eyes and a violet wash of energy that all but flooded his vision for a moment. Something beyond the dark that waited when he shut his lids. Formless. Powerful. And, it seemed, pouring from the sorcerer and into Grimnir’s wounds.
His vision swam, as it seemed for the moment as if he might actually pass over with faint. But then the anger returned. The rage he had come to know again in the brief but bloody assault on the village, which could warm a Ymirish and sustain him through the hell of a northern blizzard or on the most brutal of battlefields. Something more than bloodlust.
Something pure.
When he straightened up, he saw the one sorcerer reeling back from his efforts, exhausted, and the second staring straight at him. There was no derision, no judgment at all in his brethren’s eyes. Only cold, brutal calculation. And the bandage around Grimnir’s side was caked-on in a kind of partial cast. Cemented against flesh and broken bone. The paste hardened over in a kind of ivory-yellow crust.
The violet haze clung to the edges of Lodur’s vision. It wrapped around his brain like a wire mesh, cutting and compressing. Rising up in an ache that threatened to split open his head.
“What would you have of me?” he asked. Detesting any sense of weakness he might have shown, his voice was clipped and harsh.
Now Grimnir leaned forward into a crouch, his axe held up threateningly. The eyes blazed, golden and furious. He suddenly looked every measure healed and ready for battle, and his great cat snarled to sense the disturbance. Lodur could not tell if it was weakness that stayed his leader’s hand or the remembrance of the task at hand. But the giant-kin relented, dropping his weapon though the fury never left his eyes, his voice.
“Pick four fists good men and leave mountain. Now.” Grimnir spoke in broken Nordheimir, the flat-sounding language mangled by his powerful voice, pushed out with the force of an echo of thunder. “Take. Give to Magni.” Another of Lodur’s Ymirish brethren. “Then back to Venarium. Bring more.”
Twenty men to his brother. After which Lodur was ordered to collect more of the scattered Vanir raiders who flocked around the southwestern camp.
And where would the others go? North, at Cruaidh again? Across the valley, and up onto the Hoath Plateau? Where could Grimnir not roam at will, loose in Conall’s Valley with a horde of Vanir raiders? While Lodur was left behind, to live with his shame.
The insult was almost too much to bear. Almost.
“I serve, Great One.” They were the hardest words Lodur had ever had to utter, even into the bestial face of so magnificent a leader as Grimnir. They choked him and left behind a foul, flat taste. “Of course, I serve.”
But he could not take much more. His blood called for vengeance, and murder. The cold touch of winter that dredged deep down through his gut, and spiked slivers of ice in his bones even under the strongest sun, would not be denied much longer. He thirsted for the same release he’d found in the day’s assault. Now that he had been allowed to touch that heat again, he would not—could not—let it go for long. His shame at Taur notwithstanding, Lodur knew this. As he knew that Grimnir was nay fooled by the hard-spoken words.
The war leader knew how he felt. Just as Lodur had known he was summoned and that the sorcerers had been on edge this entire time, waiting for him to raise a hand to his master, upon which they would have killed him. That was part of the Ymirish blood as well. Was it not?
The terrifying leader grinned, showing savage, sharp teeth. And then rested back again, no longer worried for Lodur. He had the Ymirish man’s allegiance still, even balanced against that growing rage. Lodur did not begrudge this descendant of First Blood that knowledge. In fact, he reveled in the open secret.
He would return to Venarium. Eventually, he would. And he would bring back a final host, to hammer into Conall’s Valley like a sledge into soft wood. This he would do.
But he would not be sent away again.
By the blood of Ymir, he would not!
6
KERN DID NOT believe in omens. Even so, he kept one wary eye on the treacherous sky as his warriors prepared to depart Callaugh the next morning.
Dark thunderheads had rolled in over the night, socking in the Broken Leg Lands and piling up over Callaugh Glen like a blacksmith’s anvil ready to drop. A low rumble echoed down off the side of the Teeth like Crom’s own growl. Kern wrapped his gray wolf fur tight around his shoulders. There would be a hard rain come before the day was out. Cold and bitter as only a Cimmerian spring knew how to be.