Cimmerian Rage(42)

No one responded. Eleven men and one woman, staring silent and furious but holding their peace in the face of his anger. Though two or three were so red in the face as to match their hair, and looked ready to grab for blades to come at him.

Lodur turned his back on them, muscles quivering with pent-up rage and the taste of blood at the back of his throat. Let them try. Let any or all of them draw a blade against one of Grimnir’s faithful, the sons of Ymir, if they dared.

None did. Puling weaklings.

They waited. Watched him storm through the shattered campsite, waving the bark skin about like a club while his bastard sword remained sheathed, slapping against the side of his leg. His bronze-faced cuirass gleamed dully in the fire’s orange glow, as if it had soaked in some of the sun’s faded light. His eyes, he knew, would be bright and firelit as well, filled with the hatred he knew for only one other.

“He was here! The corrupted blood of our blood.” Lodur could smell him. Sense the other’s presence the same way he knew when his brethren among the Ymirish were nearby or had walked the same ground ahead of him.

Or when Grimnir summoned his faithful, or cast them aside in disgrace. As Lodur had been called back after his failure at Taur. After his first run-in with the dark-blooded one. It was a moment he could never forget. On the crest of that glorious winter—what Grimnir had promised would be a never-ending winter of blood and ice—he had felt something that morning as his warrior band laid siege to the Taurian village. A corrupted presence he had not understood at the time, and had written off to the warming blanket of bloodlust and death that had all but smothered his usual senses.

Then the arrows fell, and a few of his men yelled in pain. Two Cimmerian archers, foolishly standing out on a hillside above the village. Then four. Then others. Enough to call down his rage. Just enough, as it turned out. Just.

A handful of his warriors rushed the hillside, and were struggling halfway up when a second band of Cimmerians crested the rise with a log held across their chests. Hurling it down into the face of his raiders. Then a second log was grabbed up. And the Cimmerians—by then better than twelve strong—rushed down the hill with their battering ram to smash his line and fall on the back of his small war host like savage, starving wolves. Lodur remembered swinging away from the lodge hall defenders, coming at the fresh challenge with his sword in hand and shouting to his warriors for blood, and heads. And that was when he had seen the dark-blood for the first time. Recognized him at once with his golden eyes and dead-frost hair, the mark of Ymirish blood. Heard his name shouted for the first time by one of the Cimmerian warriors with a greatsword in hand and a wild, savage spark in his eyes.

Kern.

Young. Not even thirty summers. Small for their blood, their brood. Tainted by Cimmerian flesh—his mother’s blood—which Lodur had tasted in a leathery flavor beneath the purer, cold ice they shared. It caused him to hesitate, just for that moment, and the battle was lost. The Ymirish and his war host suddenly found themselves trapped, battling between the rescuers and a rallying drive from the lodge hall.

He used the Vanir hunting horn to sound a retreat, a command he had never expected to give. Ever. Lodur claimed one final head and threw it back at his dark-blood brother before finally quitting the field. But quit it they did. To save the strength of Nordheim for Grimnir and to return and report what he had seen.

And Grimnir nearly killed him for it.

Instead, the giant-kin war leader sent Lodur away. He was not there for the final, pitched battle above Conarch. Did not see Grimnir fall. He had gone south again, rallying the flame-haired raiders around Venarium to form a second war host, over which Grimnir had come to take control. And then, after gutting the lower half of Connall Valley, Grimnir had sent him back to bring in more raiders, more warriors.

More death.

“He was here,” he said again. “And you let him escape!”

More thunder cracked and rolled over the hills surrounding Venarium. A sheet of violet lightning bathed the land in a sharp flash.

Lodur tasted the storm’s electrical charge. Welcomed it. Accepted it within him as his anger built, and the fury burned in his golden eyes.

And one warrior was first to step into his path. Hand on the hilt of his sheathed war sword, the flame-haired Vanir shook long braids back over both shoulders. “Three dead,” he said. It sounded as if he reported nothing so severe as some rusted blades found among the armory. “We kill easily as many. Could be we kill the blighted one.”

Easily as many. Easily? “Then where are the bodies?” he yelled, in the face of more dry thunder. And he stiff-armed the barkskin shield directly into the raider’s face.