Kern never moved. He let the screams wash over and through him, his breath coming short as violet sparks flared and died in the darker corners of his mind.
Reave hawked and spat out over the blistering pool. Kern doubted the spittle ever touched the molten stone. “Not quite the hand up he was looking for, I’m thinking,” the large man said. He turned from the blistering heat, pulling Desagrena with him.
Gard Foehammer followed. Leaving Kern crouched alone above the fallen ledge of rock. His eyes pained him as they stared out over the bright, savage flow. Skin flushed and sweating. Muscles loose, except where his hand still wrapped tightly around the hilt of his short sword. And deep inside, where he had thought it banished, he found it, untouched by the savage heat or even his warming rage.
A sliver of ice.
8
NIGHT CAME DOWN in a dark curtain; held back only by the reddish glow of the open rock flow and a few acrid-smelling torches, Ehmish watched the Nemedian merchants pull out of oilskin wraps. Catching them afire was no hard feat, and they burned with near-smokeless fire even against the rain that continued to fall in ever-increasing strength.
Cold droplets stung the back of Ehmish’s head and soon plastered down his dark, unruly hair against his skull. He was soaked through. His coarse, woolen cloak a heavy, waterlogged shroud that pulled at his shoulders. The kilt he wore—dark brown with red sworls, some simple Cimmerian designs—stuck to his legs. His leather belt and leather boots were water-stained nearly black.
The young man wiped long strands from in front of his eyes and squeezed the water from his long, thick lashes with a grimy knuckle.
Then, with his other hand, he grabbed a fistful of damp hair and dragged a Vanir corpse into a half-sitting position. His silver-chased broadsword—taken several weeks earlier as spoils of battle—the weapon he’d been so proud to earn—dripped clotted blood and fresh gore as he brought it up and hacked once. Twice. Three times.
He wrenched away the severed head and carried it by the hair to a small pile set up on a nearby slab of the coarse, cooled rock flow. This one crowned the top of the grisly monument.
The final head of the twenty or so raiders slaughtered after the arrival of Kern’s “wolves.”
“Finished,” he called over to Desagrena, who had first pointed him at the job, which needed doing.
She was busy sorting through a large pile of weapons with Wallach Graybeard and the Nemedian merchants who had survived the attack on their caravan. The warriors would take one or two of the best weapons. All of the food carried by the raiders. And any other small pieces of plunder they cared for.
Ehmish had his eye on a thick, felt blanket, to replace the threadbare woolen spread he’d brought from Callaugh Glen.
“Make yourself useful somewhere else then.” Waving him aside, Desa pointed at Gard Foehammer, who stood off by himself, staring up into the dark sky. Into the rain. “See what Gard needs.”
Well, what he needed was a dry cloak and some meat in his stomach. Not that anyone asked. And not that he would complain. Ehmish knew he should have simply found more work. It surprised him every time, that cleanup after battle took so much longer, and felt so much more desperate, than the actual fighting.
Scavenging among the dead for useful weapons, for food. Seeing to the wounded.
Counting up what the pack had gained versus what it had lost.
They had not lost Mogh, though the clansman had taken a Vanir arrow in the side. For that, they could all be thankful. Especially the dour Taurian. The broadleaf head, thick as a Nemedian silver piece and shaved to a dagger’s edge along one side, had stuck in deep near the bony jut of his hip.
Bad enough to have dropped the Taurian, who had bloody scrapes up the right side of his face where he had struck the ground. Easy enough to pull out and bandage. Mogh would limp badly for several days, but it hardly compared to the near-fatal wound Ehmish had taken weeks earlier, which still pained him.
The young Cimmerian felt sorry for Mogh not at all.
All in all he felt he had handled himself with great experience. As a man should, who had four kills and had lived for several months now by his wit and his strength among such hard men and women. In fact, running forward with Kern Wolf-Eye and Daol and the others, listening to Frostpaw’s howls dying off behind them as the dire wolf abandoned its warnings, he had felt only a tightness across his chest. A shortness of breath. Maybe a twinge of pain beneath the twist of scar tissue that snaked along his side, but mostly just the tightness. Anticipation of the coming test.
That was how he had chosen to look on his new life as one of Kern’s rogues. Youngest among those Ros-Crana’s people had dubbed the Men of the Wolves. Tests. The constant struggle all of them had chosen as a way of life.