Cimmerian Rage(49)

It happened during the funeral march, taking Burok’s body to the Field of the Chiefs. Cul cut Kern loose, banishing him from clan and kin. Then news had come back, first by Morne, then Cul himself, returned early. Not only had Vanir raiders thwarted Cul’s plan to show respect for Burok Bear-slayer, but Kern had returned to aid his former clan, then had run off after Maev and the other captives. That was when Cul ordered Brig to track after Kern, to bring Maev back to him safely, if she were rescued.

And, above all else, to kill Kern Wolf-Eye.

“See him dead,” Cul had ordered. “Bring me the blade or arrow stained with his blood.”

None of them—Cul, Talbot, Morne, or Brig—had ever trusted the strange, feral-eyed man. Casting him away was only in the clan’s best interest, and to send Brig to finish the job properly, to end the disgrace and plague of Kern’s life for all time, had seemed a reasonable command. Then.

Now anger welled up inside Brig, unfocused, making him wonder if the death of Gaud was some kind of punishment for failing his chieftain. For leaving Kern Wolf-Eye alive when he’d had chances—so many chances—to put an arrow into the outcast leader. And once, in fact, he’d even saved Kern’s life, when the frost-haired man had been seized by a snow serpent over the Pass of Blood. He’d stayed his hand time and again, seeing in Kern a measure worth respecting. A leader. Reluctant, certainly. Doing his best to survive, but also putting his life behind the welfare of the pack.

Was it wrong to respect an enemy? Even admire one?

It was Brig’s acknowledgment of this near-complete reversal that finally moved him. Blade out and ready to meet whatever he might find inside the lodge, including Kern, he strode through the open door and into the darkness.

It was darker inside than the lodge hall had any right to be. Not with the door standing half-open, and gray light peeking around the edges of shuttered windows or filtering down through the shattered thatch roof. His eyes were slow to adjust.

Or mayhap he just did not want to see.

Snick. And then another heavy, sliding sound.

The scent of death assailed him. Much stronger than the bare hints of blood and offal that had filtered outside. A stench of raw sewage and drying blood and that greasy, spoiled-meat odor that only came from a dead body. Shadows jumped out at Brig: piling up in the corners, swinging from the overhead rafters. A dry groan scraped across his mind, raising the small hairs on the back of his neck.

He kicked into something soft and wet. It stopped him.

Fortunately, just in time. Before he ran headlong into the blood-encrusted body suspended before him, hung from the overhead beams by a short length of rope tying the feet together.

Stunned, Brig stared into an open chest cavity, brutally hacked apart to let entrails and heart and lungs spill down in a rotted tangle. Arms dangled toward the ground. No hands at the end of them. No way to recognize the face, which was covered in the spill of gore.

Then Brig looked down, and saw his foot stepping into the bloody offal spilled over the beaten-earth floor.

He stepped back and away, his shoulder brushing hard against another body hanging nearby. The rope tying its feet together scraped and groaned against the beams as the body swayed. Brig spun around, sword coming up and ready before him as he jumped back, farther into the lodge. Stepping back onto a small, loose object, he saw that he had stepped on someone’s severed hand and, with a sharp gasp of rotten air, shifted aside, between two more bodies, glancing about wildly as he checked one way, then another—bodies all around him—looking for the threat, the enemy, the twist of ghastly shadows leaping and dancing at the edges of his vision.

SNICK!

An arm’s length away, one of the hanging bodies slumped toward the ground. Wrestled down by a large shadow standing to one side of it. Having already cut through the bit of rope tied between the ankles, Kern let the body fall as carefully as he could, scraping against the floor.

“Knife’s easier,” was all the other man said.

Brig fought his short, hitching breaths back under control. Realized he stood in a fighting crouch, broadsword raised between himself and Kern. Never a better moment. The wolf-eyed leader with nothing more than his belt knife in hand. Hardly looking his direction. A quick thrust, and a twist to core open the wound and let the cold one’s blood spill out among those who had suffered here. And Brig would make good on his chieftain’s final command to him. Didn’t matter that it had finally rubbed raw against Brig’s personal sense of honor. Or that the command hardly mattered now.

Gaud was dead.

The clan was dead.

Someone had to pay for that!

Kern gave Brig a sidelong glance as he shuffled past, within easy reach of the naked blade. The man’s golden eyes caught a shaft of gray light just right, sparked in the gloom as if backlit by an unnatural fire. Brig remembered how strong Wolf-Eye’s night vision was. Wondered how much better he was able to see the eviscerated and tortured bodies of his one-time kin and clansfolk.