T
he wailing of Mörgain’s female warriors set Mörget’s teeth on edge. For six hours they had sat outside the dead Great Chieftain’s tent, tearing their hair and howling at the sky. They followed an ancient custom that hadn’t been practiced in a hundred years, making that horrible noise to drive away the hungry ghosts that might come and snatch Mörg’s soul before Death could claim it. Some of them beat on tabrets, while others clashed swords together to add to the din.
Alone among them Mörgain was silent. She sat in the snow outside the blood-splashed tent, Fangbreaker naked across her knees. She kept her eyes closed—everyone knew you couldn’t see the ghosts when they came, you had to hear them dragging their bloody feet along the ground—and the paint on her face had never looked more like a real skull.
“She thinks to sway the chieftains by this show of loyalty to a dead man,” Mörget said, brooding in his tent. He got up frequently to peek through an opening in the flap and see if his sister had moved at all. She had not.
“She’s trying to make you look bad,” Balint agreed. “Stop letting the cold in, will you? I could cut my meat with these nipples already.”
“You think she does this to shame me? I did nothing wrong. I acted on the will of the clans,” Mörget insisted.
“You told me this ritual is never used for warriors who die in battle.”
“No, of course not. Everyone knows Death comes directly for such. After all, she’s already on the battlefield, walking with her children.”
Balint sighed. “You easterners are so transparent, yet you always think your motives are so well hidden. What she’s doing is as plain as your mother’s face. Your sister’s claiming you cheated Mörg out of a proper death, by slaughtering him when he wasn’t ready for you. She’s trying to ruin your chances of being chosen as the next Great Chieftain by insinuation.” The dwarf shook her head. “You just don’t understand women at all, do you?” She got up and put another knot of wood on the stove. It was one of the last pieces on the pile—fuel was getting scarce. If Mörget didn’t take the city soon, frostbite would start mutilating the clans camped outside.
He stared at his dwarven scold for a while. “Shouldn’t you be digging a tunnel right now?”
“I have a team of twenty of your best men doing it for me. They had nothing else to do.”
Mörget’s blood surged in his veins. He jumped up and grabbed Dawnbringer and his axe. “Damn you. And damn her. If she thinks she’ll be chosen instead of me—”
“She has a chance at it,” Balint interrupted. “Half the clans are loyal to her, and she’ll have all the chieftains who remained loyal to Mörg.”
Mörget narrowed his eyes. “Not if she’s dead. They can’t choose her if she’s dead.”
He did not like the look on Balint’s face then. It was far too smug. Was he really that predictable? He thought of what Mörg had said about him, right before he died. That he was under the influence of a
wyrd
. Such a fate could drive a man headlong, like a horse wearing blinders, until his bloodlust took him right over a cliff.
It could also drive him to everlasting glory. Often at the same time. He stormed out of the tent and across the camp toward where his sister sat vigil. “Get up,” he told her.
“Brother,” she said without opening her eyes. “I heard your feet dragging in the snow. Have you come to sit in my place and protect our father’s soul?”
“You know damned well I have not,” Mörget told her. “It can wander the world forever, for all I care. Let him haunt me if he feels I acted wrongly. No real man would agree with him. I said, get up.”
“I am quite comfortable. This snow is soft as any pillow in a westerner’s bedchamber. And my grief keeps me warm.”
Mörget growled. “You and I need to talk. Alone. If it comes to an election between us, the clans will never be properly united again, no matter who wins. We need to choose for ourselves.”
“You mean, we two must choose you.” She opened her eyes and stared up at him. Her pupils were two different sizes. He realized she must have been drinking black mead until she could feel nothing at all. Yet her voice had none of the manic pitch associated with the delirium-inducing drink. “I am not done yet with my vigil. Nor is this the place to talk. Do you know the place a mile from here, where a gallows stands at the crossing of two roads?”
“We tore the gallows down for firewood a week ago,” Mörget told her.
She watched him without blinking.
“Yes, I know the place,” he told her.
“I will meet you there in three hours,” she said.
Mörget looked for the sun. It was already low in the sky, a bright patch behind roiling clouds. The time she’d chosen would be well after dark. Perfect.
He turned and left without another word. Then he went to the blacksmith’s tent and had a new edge put on his sword.
When the time Mörgain chose for the meeting came, he was at the place she’d named, ready for anything. Perhaps she thought to ambush him with her cadre of woman warriors. Perhaps she wanted only to talk, as she’d suggested. Regardless, he intended to bury her there, and say she had run off because she knew she could not bear losing to him.
Yet when she came, he did not see her arrive. Nor did she reveal herself so he could strike her down. He only heard her voice, carried along by the wind.
“Brother,” she called. “I would know—what did he say to you, before you slew him? Or did you strike fast, so as not to give him a chance to defend himself?”
Mörget turned around slowly, looking for her. If she wanted to kill him, she’d picked the right place. He could see no farther than the blade in his hand by the little moonlight that cut its way through the clouds. The wind made it impossible to tell what direction her voice came from. There was even a good hiding place, a cluster of rocks at the exact intersection of the crossroads.
He faced the rocks and lied to her. “He said I should be the next Great Chieftain. And that I should think of some great reward for you, as compensation.”
Mörgain laughed, a noise like funeral bells chiming.
“I know what he said to you,” Mörget announced. He took a slow step toward the rocks. Was that hiding place too obvious? “He said he loved you.” He put as much scorn in his voice as he could muster. “What did you make of that?”
“I thought to slay him myself for the affront. And to steal your glory.”
“You didn’t, though,” Mörget said. Another step closer.
“In the end I decided to do him honor, in a way he would understand. So I swallowed my bile and told him I loved him, too. It was what he wanted to hear.”
Mörget grinned wickedly. “It is good for a woman to think of what a man wants, and give it to him.”
Mörgain laughed again. “Let us speak of what you’ll give me, in exchange for my chieftains. A great reward, you said.”
“Yes,” Mörget replied. “What will you have? You asked me for dwarven steel once. And gold.”
“I can have those things now for the effort of stooping to pick them up,” she told him. “You’ll have to do better.”
Where was she? He was close enough to see the rocks as more than shadows now, and to realize they weren’t rocks at all. They were tombstones. None of them bore names or dates, but they had the round-topped shape of western grave markers. He recalled that in Skrae, suicides and traitors were buried at the crossroads so their ghosts could not find their way back to haunt the living. Another subtle message, Mörget thought, that Balint would make much of.
“I have another gift I can give you. I can give you all of the East. The land where we were born. Be a great chieftess there, while I rule Skrae.”
That was enough to shut Mörgain’s mouth. Mörget cursed silently. He had hoped to shock her into showing herself.
“That land is not yours to give. It belongs to the chieftains.”
“You think they will gainsay me?”
“No,” she said. “They would never dare. They are afraid of you. But I
know
you, brother. You would never give up so much power.”
“Unless I know I cannot hold it. When this war is won, when Ness is taken and Skrae belongs to us, the clans will be spread too thin. No one man—or woman—could rule it all. I’ll share it with you—if you bow to me now.”
That made her laugh.
Was she hiding behind the tombstones? Mörget knew if he stepped in between them, she would have him at a disadvantage. He would be too aware of the danger of tripping over one of the stones to be sure of his footing. Interesting.
“So you do not want power. Then tell me yourself! What do you want? In exchange for not opposing my candidacy as Great Chieftain, what will you take?”
He struck Dawnbringer across the top of a gravestone, a ringing blow with the flat. The blade lit up as if it were white hot, light searing through the darkness for a moment. It was enough to show him that Mörgain was nowhere among the stones.
Then she answered him, her voice coming from close by. Even before she finished talking he felt her presence. She’d been behind him the whole time, throwing her voice on the wind.
“Vengeance for the only man I ever loved,” she said. He had time to see she’d darkened her furs and face with soot to make herself nearly invisible in the dark. Then Fangbreaker came up and glinted in the paltry light, distracting him.
By Mother Death she was fast with that blade.
Before Mörget could even raise Dawnbringer, she slashed a line across his throat. Blood spewed from the wound, dark venous blood, and he knew she’d cut his jugular.
It was a hasty stroke and the sword failed to bite very deep—yet it was placed perfectly, and any other man would have fallen on the spot. Mörget was not just any man, however. Surprised, hurt, even with Mother Death’s hand on his shoulder he still had the strength to bring his axe down with one of the mightiest blows he’d ever struck.
The weight of the axe drove down hard and bit through old iron. Mörget’s bones rattled but he did not flinch.
For the third time he cut right through one of the Ancient Blades, and sent half of Fangbreaker’s forte spinning into the snow.
He turned, intending to stab Mörgain through the heart with Dawnbringer.
But she was already gone. As fleet of foot as a deer, was Mörgain.
“Coward!” he called after her, his voice full of bubbles.
Once that word would have burned her heart and forced her to turn back and finish the fight. But he knew she had no need to prove herself to him now. Not when he was going to die in a few seconds. He found the broken piece of Fangbreaker lying at his feet. In its polished surface he could see the wound across the front of his neck and the blood that was pouring down his cloak. He was bleeding to death.
He dropped to his knees in the snow.
You will not be able to stop yourself
, Mörg had told him.
You are too weak to defeat your own strength. Someone else must stop you, and you should hope they do it soon.
His own strength—strength Mörgain shared. So this was what the old man meant, he thought. This is my ending. I found the foe I could not beat, and she was there all along. His
wyrd
was complete.
So why did he still seethe for more death, for another chance to prove himself?
“You’re a mess, boy,” Balint said, hurrying out of the darkness. She had a piece of cloth in her hands, and a needle, and some thread. He had not known she’d followed him. Now he stared at her as if she were a ghost come for his soul.
“Don’t try to thank me,” she told him. “If you do, your head will probably fall off, and while even that probably wouldn’t kill someone as stubborn as you, I don’t carry enough thread to go all the way ’round.” Then she started mopping at his wound and digging her needle into his flesh. “Don’t ask me why I’m doing this either, because it’s pure folly. I’d be leagues better off without you.”
But Mörget thought he knew. The dwarf had her own
wyrd
, didn’t she? She needed to make mischief in this world, wherever she could. It was what she lived for. And he would give her every chance to do it.
He started to laugh, and didn’t care that it made dark blood jet outward from his veins.
“C
ome forth! Step up, and receive Sadu’s bounty! Food for all, a feast from your God. See the miracle He has wrought!” The red-dyed priest handing out loaves of bread in Godstone Square was not one who Malden recognized. The Bloodgod’s ministers had been ordaining more of their kind every day. They’d been busy in other ways, too. They had established formal churches in many districts of Ness, and clearly they’d been baking night and day to prepare for this. After Malden turned over the last paltry stores of grain, the priests announced a citywide prayer fast. He’d thought they wanted to hoard the remaining food for themselves. He had put up with the complaints, and with the pangs of his own belly, because he believed he’d given the priests just enough rope to tie their own nooses.
Now, however, he could not be sure.
The priest stood on a wooden platform, as high as a gibbet. Behind him, stacked neatly in enormous wicker baskets, were hundreds of loaves of bread, enormous crocks of pottage, and dozens of meat pies. Meat! Where had they gotten meat?
There could only be one answer, of course. The priests must have been hiding an entire herd of animals somewhere, a herd of livestock they were saving for their sacrifices. Now it seemed they thought food more important than the ritual shedding of blood.
He knew them too well to think they would just stop making sacrifices. They must have some other source of blood hidden as well. Or maybe they were just preparing for their first human sacrifice.
“Come forth! Food for all! Sadu heard your prayers, He knew your hunger, and He has provided. A loaf for every man, pottage for every family!” The starving people of Ness jostled and pushed each other trying to get closer to the bounty. Acolytes in tunics stained pink handed out the loaves, each time saying a little prayer over the bread before they let it go. “Enough for all! None of us are forgotten in His mercy!”
Malden turned to speak to Velmont, but the Helstrovian thief had slipped away. Malden scanned the crowd and found Velmont bowing his head over a pie, while an acolyte whispered in his ear. If he was praying, it was an especially long and fervent prayer he shared with Velmont.
The Helstrovian thief finished with a nod and a sly gesture, then came running back to Malden’s side. He already had the inedible crust off the top of the pie and was picking out morsels from inside with his fingers. The look on his face was one of sheer ecstasy. How long had it been since Velmont tasted meat? Malden wondered when the last time he himself had eaten any flesh. He’d made a point of taking no larger a ration of food than he allotted to any of his citizens.
He found himself licking his lips as Velmont sucked and chewed at each dainty in turn. “Blind me, it’s fresh piglet,” the Helstrovian said, tears in his eyes.
Malden fought off the urge to run up to the platform himself. “What did that acolyte say to you? Did you learn anything?”
Velmont blushed but didn’t stop eating. “Nothin’ you’ll want to hear, boss. I asked him if this was a one-off, you know, did they have more where this bunch came from. He just told me his god would provide, like, which is what priests always say, ain’t it?” Velmont looked away.
“That’s all he said?” It looked like they’d shared far more words than that.
“That,” Velmont said, shrugging, “and a lotta holy babble I ne’er really heard. When the stink of this meat hit me nostrils, I was a trace distracted.”
Malden nodded. He had an uneasy feeling about this. He was almost completely sure that there was no supernatural element at work here. The priests had simply used up every last bit of food in the city for one big banquet, and when these pies and loaves were gone, there would be nothing left. They had bought themselves a day’s grace, but in the end it would hurt them still.
Funny how he wanted them to fail. He was willing to let people starve, if it meant the priests suffered in consequence. A pang of guilt stabbed through him, driving away his own hunger. Had he come to that point where he started thinking of people as tokens on a game board, as Cutbill said he must?
He’d never wanted that.
He’d never wanted any of this. Not the title, not the responsibilities. Certainly not the duty. Duty was Croy’s province.
“Come on,” he said. “We need to go check in on Slag. You can eat while you climb.” He led Velmont up the side of a house and then across the rooftops, jumping nimbly across the narrow streets, climbing cold chimney pots to scout out his next leap. He still had the rooftops. He could still travel across his city, near as free as a bird. They hadn’t taken that from him.
“What’s the mood of the city?” he asked as he paused atop a steeple in the Spires. His vantage point was near the top of the arsenal. Ahead of him lay the university cloister. Slag had set up a new workshop in its courtyard, claiming he needed thick stone walls around him, for some reason. The cloister was abandoned—the university’s students, young, strong, and idealistic, had been among the first to join the Burgrave’s Army of Free Men.
“The fear’s been ebbin’ away since the bastards stopped throwin’ stones,” Velmont told him. “And the priests’ve been makin’ merry, spreadin’ cheer. There’s been some grumblin’, mostly about food. That’ll be quieted today.”
Malden grunted assent. Tomorrow would be a different story, when the food ran out—but for today at least his position was secure. He’d been given a little room to breathe in. If Cutbill was right, it wouldn’t last. As soon as Mörget and Mörgain settled their differences and elected a new Great Chieftain, the siege would turn bloody. And still the sappers progressed inch by inch under the city’s walls, and still Slag could not find a way to stop them.
If he had been given a moment to think, he needed to use it. He needed to plan, and prepare, and make ready. He needed to—
Down in the university cloister, the Bloodgod’s pit opened up and a ball of hellfire burst through into the mundane world.
Orange flames shot through with purple sparks leapt toward the sky and a wave of smoke and force blasted past Malden, knocking him off his feet. He just managed to grab onto a gargoyle with one hand. Velmont went skidding past him, and in a frozen moment Malden watched the Helstrovian’s face open in a gaping parody of surprise, as the remains of his pie floated around his hands and chest.
It was a fifty foot drop to the street. If Velmont fell he would be shattered like a porcelain doll. Malden grabbed at the man with his free hand and missed. Then he felt a heavy weight jerk him downward, and his grip loosened on the gargoyle. For one sickening moment he was falling, and death rushed toward him.
Somehow he managed to catch a carved balcony railing on the way down. With both hands he clung on for life. Smoke boiled around him, and debris pattered down on his head and back, some of it big enough and falling hard enough to knock the breath out of him. He nearly fell again.
When he could see—if not breathe—he looked down and saw Velmont clutching fast to the glass-lined scabbard of Acidtongue. The Helstrovian was pulling him down, and Malden considered kicking Velmont away, kicking him to his death.
No. He was better than that. Using every ounce of strength he possessed, he got one elbow over the balcony, then pulled his chest over the stone. That freed up his hands enough that he could reach down and help Velmont clamber up beside him.
Neither of them could talk. They could do nothing but cough and wheeze. Malden broke through the stained-glass window that opened on the balcony and threw himself inside, away from the falling detritus.
He found himself inside the arsenal, on a gallery overlooking racks of old polearms and crossbows whose strings had rotted away. Down on the ground level a dozen workers had been busily polishing and scraping rust off old iron blades. They stared up at him now as if he was a demon come to claim their souls.
There was no time to reassure them. Once he had a good clean breath in his lungs, he grabbed Velmont’s arm and hurried him down a flight of stairs to the level of the street. Outside, the cobbles were thick with dust and ash. He raced toward the university just as a second blast rocked the entire city on its foundation.
One whole wall of the cloister had come down. Inside, in the courtyard, he saw nothing but fire and destruction. “Slag!” he called. “Anyone alive in there! Call out if you hear me!”
The smoke was so thick it made him gag on his own words. It stank of rotten eggs and brimstone—the breath of Sadu Himself.
“Lad,” he heard someone call. The voice was weak and distant, and he realized he could barely hear anything other than his own heartbeat. The noise of the explosion must have partially deafened him.
He raced toward the voice and found Slag buried under broken stone, only part of the dwarf’s face and one arm visible. Malden grabbed Velmont’s arm and pointed, and together they began clearing the rubble away. When Slag was mostly clear, Malden pulled at his body to get him out of the wreckage.
The dwarf’s left arm came off at the shoulder as he came free. It had been hanging on only by a shred of skin and then it was gone. The rest of Slag wasn’t in much better shape. Malden cradled the small, skinny body in his arms, certain the dwarf would die at any moment. Slag’s face was scorched and his beard was burnt away. His eyes were yellow and red and gelatinous tears clung to what remained of his eyelashes. Blood slicked down the entire left side of his body.
“Lad,” the dwarf croaked, “I finally got the ratios right. Fucking . . . right. It works! It works! It will fucking serve!”
And then the dwarf started laughing, laughing for joy.