Cimmerian Rage(41)

Mayhap he no longer belonged to Cimmeria. Mayhap he never had. But he refused kinship with the northerners, he did, with every scrap of being. Blood of Ymir or nay.

There were worse disgraces than being outcast.

“Kern?” Reave asked, as a silence drew out long and thin, like a dagger’s blade.

He nodded. “Tear that animal apart and pack up the meat. Cut out the larger bones. Strip and sand the hide and roll it for now.”

He stepped over to the dead woman Ehmish had stood over, and prodded her legs together with his boot. Reave moved to help, taking one arm and Kern the other. Together, they easily lifted her ruined body and carried it toward one of the empty and intact huts.

“Get them into the huts and lay them out. Break a wall down to cover the entry. Let the scavengers work for their meals. We will be on top of the next mesa before dark,” he promised.

He stared north and east. Something pulled at him. Drew him onward faster and harder. Warning him that it was already too late.

“We do not stay here.”





11

A BITTER-COLD WIND lashed at the ground, bending over tall grasses and shaking the trees that surrounded Venarium. Lodur stalked about the base of the hillside, beneath the ruined fort town. Chewing through his own anger. Feeling twelve pairs of eyes on him—filled with hate, and fear, every one. His lessers, who waited on the hillside amid the ruined camp with its burned-out tents and supply sheds. Rooted in place by his command.

Night came on fast, but his golden eyes held enough northern light in them that he searched among the brambles and bellberry brush. He found a barkskin shield discarded inside the small copse of shattered pine; a pair of broadhead arrows stuck into its facing. Inside a nearby wood, behind a thick-boled cedar, he sniffed out a rough wool blanket: forgotten, or lost; the coarse fabric stuck through with twigs and a few slender branches; pasted with a coating of dried mud and leaves.

Beneath the blanket, a pair of sticks and enough scrape marks in the dry mixture of dirt and cedar sheddings to help him understand what had happened.

How the outpost guard had been tricked.

By him.

The large warrior shouted in naked rage, letting the growl build into a long, savage yell that echoed against the hillside.

The show of temper warmed him, as it always did. It filled the cold void deep within, smothering all but that one frozen spark all Ymirish knew. The shivers that took them on the best and hottest of summer days. The breath of winter that always blew across the napes of their necks.

He threw off his great bearskin cloak of polar white, leaned back, and yelled again. And this time the sky answered back with a peal of cracking thunder.

Lodur tasted the storm’s building charge. Acrid and bitter. Felt it in his tightening skin. He had cut his mane of frost blond hair very close to the sides of his head. A few strands were long enough to whisper across his gaze. The rest bristled up like a saber-tooth with its hackles raised. It felt like a thousand tiny needle pricks racing across his scalp, his face.

He wanted to scrub at his skin, using his blood-caked nails to scrape away the sensation. Wanted to take great fistfuls of his unruly, hoarfrost beard and pull it out in great clumps.

Wanted to rend.

To kill.

He would. The bloodlust of Ymir’s Call demanded it.

With the filthy blanket in his one hand and the sleeve of thick bark in his other, Lodur stomped his way out from the thin wood and back up the hillside. Venarium wasn’t much more than a handful of shadows. The sun had already slipped across the horizon, lost to the Pictish wilderness. Barely enough light—in pale, dying sheets of salmon and spun gold—streamed out from the western skies to outline the dark bank of storm clouds gathered overhead. Like Ymir’s own target drawn over Venarium, the clouds, which had been streaked with dark greens and purples in the failing sunlight, now massed dark and black and heavy.

“A filthy blanket,” Lodur stormed. He brandished his find overhead as he came up on the ruined outpost. Icy winds caught at the tail end, flapped it back like a dark pennant.

There were new tents, and a small pile of gear and foodstuffs scavenged from the ruined shelters. A single fire quickly falling into embers and ashes. And twelve men left of the sixteen who had been there during the raid. Two men killed. A third dead of a septic wound. And a fourth run away like a frightened Nemedian! Run away!

For that alone he had not allowed any more raiders on the hillside. From this vantage, he could—if he wanted—find three or four more campfires burning on nearby hills or down in the narrow dales. And there they would stay.

Waiting for him to deal with these useless curs.

“A blanket and a skin of thick bark,” he railed, tossing the filthy cover at one of the nearby Vanir. “With this, they beat you? Cost us warriors? Weapons?”