“Listen!” Ehmish said again, more forcefully.
He held his chin up and head tipped back, as if sampling the moist breeze. But he wasn’t tasting the air. He had his eyes closed as he strained for some distant sound.
But Kern heard nothing but the scuffling and grinding shuffles of footfall on debris and grunts of exertion as more of his warriors clambered over the treacherous footing. The tapping of swollen raindrops against rock. The slap of leather against flesh. Ringing steel.
Steel!
His eyes snapping open, Kern saw a similar look of recognition on the faces of Daol and Ossian. It was there. Right at the edge of their hearing, carried on the air as a kind of distant echo over the hard rock flow. Steel clashing against steel. And—he thought—the shouts of men and the screaming of a wounded animal. Something that would upset a predator like the dire wolf.
The sounds of battle, and prey. Which usually meant Vanir raiders and clansmen fighting for their lives. Somewhere ahead on the wide lava flow.
No time for plans and not much idea of what they would find regardless, Kern stood and waved at his warriors who were yet struggling forward over the uneasy trail. No sign of the Aquilonians, and no time to go searching for them. He slashed his arm wildly overhead, getting the attention of those he could. They stopped, stood, and watched. He raised a fist overhead, held it a moment, then stabbed his hand forward in the direction of the danger. There were no answering calls or cries. But everyone suddenly picked up the pace, scrabbling forward at their best speed. Staying low and fast as they raced after the leaders. Hands slapping at sword hilts and shields coming off shoulders.
The hunt was on.
IT DIDN’T LAST long. Another league, perhaps. Sound had a strange way of echoing over the rock flow. Distant one moment. Up close the next. Kern knew before they ever saw the battle that there were no Cimmerians up ahead. South men. Aquilonians, perhaps, by the shouts and curses he recognized.
Then he stumbled over a steam vent, the scalding jet burning him right behind his left-leg greave. He jumped aside, getting his shield between his leg and the terrible heat.
The lava flow wasn’t as old, or as dead, as they had believed. The ground fog he had spotted in the distance was steam as it turned out. Drifting out of cracks and, at times, seeping from porous rock faces as if the land itself threatened to catch fire. He recognized the touch of sulfur from time spent in Callaugh. But there were no hot springs nearby. Only a scarred, half-formed landscape that had lost even the small touch of growth of only a short way back.
Rain continued to plop down around and against them in fat, irregular drops. But it brought little in the way of relief. The severe heat radiating from the ground had less to do with soaking in the day’s warmth and more, Kern suspected, with underground activity. He had never seen any of the fire mountains in the Teeth pour lava onto the ground, though he had heard stories and tales from western travelers, in which such a sight was more common. Of liquid rock, glowing orange and bright as it pushed out from deep, deep below where—many said—some gods still wrestled for power. He had never paid much heed to the stories, though, as such struggles were beneath Crom and, therefore, unimportant to Cimmeria.
Or so he had believed then.
But the reddish glow ahead, the shrill brays of a wounded horse and curses of men’s pain, made him wonder again about such easy declarations. Often, he was finding, things mattered more to the Cimmerian clans than most bothered to think, or admit. And it was easy to feel betrayed by that loss of certainty. Of safety.
Then he led his pack of rogues over a sharp-edged crest, and there was no time to worry about such things anymore. A wave of heat slammed over the exposed ridge with a baking intensity, robbing breath and stinging the eyes with a touch of sulfur. There was barely time to drink in the sight of the nightmare spread around them before the Vanir began shouting for their deaths.
“Crom’s blood,” Ehmish whispered, piling into the back of a tight knot forming around Kern.
It did look like blood. Small veins, glowing reddish orange in the gathering dark. Washing the faces and bared arms, the shields and swords, of the struggling men in a wreath of unnatural light. Turning them into demons. A long finger of moving stone trailed along one large flat expanse. The sporadic rain struck at it, drops hissing away in quick bursts of steam. It slowly swirled and pulsed as a thing alive. Something that seemed so very wrong to Kern, though he barely had time to acknowledge that as the first arrow smashed itself into splinters near his feet.
The battle had spread itself out over a wide expanse, broken into tight knots and a few larger clusters and many single fights. The raiders wore the banded skirts and leather cuirasses so common among the northerners. Horned helmets. Bronze-faced greaves and silver bracers. They swung great blades and called out in the flat, nasal tongue of Nordheim.