All but forgetting his sword, he cast out that dark mist again, and again. He saw past what his eyes noticed. That it was more than a simple scourge that bled over their eyes. He felt the blackness well from within, reaching through their eyes, their ears, and noses, to take their brain in a venomous drip. Poisoning the Vanir for their failures. Driving them to insanity, then into death.
They ran, but it was too late. The power Lodur had come into was fresh and raw, like a young man feeling his first rutting instinct, or a warrior the first call of the bloodlust. At that moment, he was the storm. The winds obeyed him. Lightning played in his eyes. The clouds themselves lowered in submission to his power. It might never run so strong in him again, he knew, as it did in the birthing of new power. But for the moment it was enough.
He slashed at the eyes and minds of two more men. Against a third he called down a violent-clad fork of lightning, which ripped through him from head to toe, seeking the ground, splitting skin and bursting flesh from bone along the entire course.
The last tried to bolt past him, spooked to flight but without the presence of mind to turn and run away.
Finally, he remembered his sword. His warrior’s reflexes. They seemed a bit dulled, but adequate. The blade flashed up, around, and through. Taking the last man in the neck, bobbling his head free of his shoulders and letting it roll off the wide blade to one side even as the body ran along for two more long paces before collapsing.
Which left one man only who had escaped Lodur’s fury. His vengeance. The Vanir who had run away after the battle, (wisely) for fear of his own life. No distance was so far that he could not reach the coward. No price too small to pay to punish such behavior.
Or so he believed at that moment as he bound the winds to him.
Then reached out for a bit of the oily, black smoke that roiled off the scorched body lying in the fire pit.
Whispering his dark message into a cradle of air to give birth to final, dark purpose.
The dark zephyr spun before his eyes, pulsing with an unnatural heartbeat as if fully alive, and aware. A tortured soul, which could be given a single, terrible purpose. A bit of Lodur’s life, his hatred and strength. Sent after the fleeing raider, wherever he had run to, with a final, thready breath.
The zephyr spun away into the storm, keening in pain and purpose.
And Lodur sagged forward, using his bastard sword for a crutch.
The weapon felt heavier. His body responding slower than he was used to. He was hungry, and tired, and altogether too light-headed. Though it wasn’t until a line of frightened Vanir walked up on him that he saw the confusion and terror reflected in their eyes and knew, then, how he looked.
Bedraggled and burned. Covered in soot from the raging fire. Splashed with blood and gore.
And thinner than he had been. Still tall and well muscled, nonetheless Lodur felt the loss in the way his body responded and how his cuirass fit. The looseness in his belt, and even in his boots. As if his body had cannibalized itself in that brief but tumultuous display of power.
“So be it,” he whispered. “A small price to pay.”
That was when Lodur finally sagged to his knees, his strength totally spent.
And remembered Kern.
“Nay!” he screamed, reaching again for that terrible strength of will he had known only a moment—heartbeats—before. But if it had ever been there, truly there, it was gone. The ice-driven winds lashed at him with indifference, and the thunder rolled with no more or less overtones of dark power than they ever had. The bonfire had settled back into a dying bed of coals. There was no further display of lightning. No sense of being wrapped into the storm.
Only twelve dead bodies splayed around him, and a distant howl of anguish hanging in the air.
“Where”—he panted, then paused as his labored breathing pulled much-needed air down into his lungs—“are the bodies?”
They would be in Conall Valley. Kern and the rest of the “wolves.” That’s where they would have gone from Venarium. Where they would see Grimnir’s work, spread out ahead of them, drawn in ashes and blood. And where Lodur would find them. Or, at least, their trail.
12
A COLD, CONSTANT drizzle fell from dark, swollen skies. It had chased Kern’s warriors along their hard-driving push into Conall Valley. Hounded them. Washed away the sweat of their hard run and left with them a damp, shivering sleep that brought little rest.
The thin, stinging droplets had been their companion through two nights and a handful of small, desperate skirmishes. Now the rainfall spattered against broken thatch. Pooled on the hard-beaten floors of huts and homes. Turned the village paths muddy.
Bloodied and bruised, aching deep in every muscle, his lungs burning as they pulled in great gasps of air, Kern stomped through what was left of Gaud.