Chapter XV : The Bleeding Apathy

  Half-handed, shoulder in a sling, and haggard under mummified breaths, Horral began his limp along the bridge, in fluctuant staggers. Eidrik aided, of course he must, by his lent and illimitably goading arm, which brought in the old fellow a jerking insurgence. Horral loathed the sly propounding of graces, accommodations that were the excerpts of patronizing wholes. His mind sought the Northman, in the very twitch that made the curious question jolt. There was a sizzling like deprivation, scalding and to any health of focus reductive, commandeering life’s new gratitude and the bleeds higher into the blasphemous, congested gate of Teroe’s false heaven. He needed a boot’s research, that could name only what it walked, and for Ulf, who saved and then discarded, unrequited he so coveted a title. A note to again recall him to the stranger and the wilds of his clemency, when in need of the rallying next step.

  Eidrik ducked the thought. In haste, had the butcher Ulf Eldric carried past their toiling. Elixirs were not amends for abandonment, for the scattering of an even fragile fellowship unto the slicing, dozen veils of indeterminable consequence. Mercy was his afterthought and flight his convenience, thought Corralain. There was a blink almost retaliatory, when Eidrik glimpsed the fantasies like shepherds loosed across Horral’s gaze. He could not mend the vision, so instead pictured an imperious snow at Teroe’s tip, where sat a patient frostbite, that gleamed in sunlight only to slur out grim malady. He dared not ponder reunion while by their loud comforts still so sweetened, so allowed in word.

  The haze of old Horral’s eyes was a guesswork, gambling on their finding of gold ingots as keenly as the Northman’s return. He had not for a long time awoken to victories. Of his defeat, he could hardly remember the acts. It was like a wind visible only to his eye’s inertia, scathing and formless under study. Eidrik spoke softly for the traveling since, thus Horral knew how near they both had come to losing a brother.

  Their bridge was ancient ore, as had housed the Baelgarth sect, queerly fastened amidst rock as if, for a treaty’s honouring, long ignored: rebel earth. Wide, without railings, the bridge was a pillar shattered from memory, shard to an unsalvageable greatness. Its sides were chiseled grievously, worn low by winds and fat steps. Its bottom was braided in jotahr, where celebrated was cold infection. They fled their battleground, came up its slopes, and there did the bridge span higher, boarding an urban hollow, where above the twin summits stood to guard, against the stars, the parched throat of the mountain. Its teeth were mighty stalagmites, its spits were scaling, snuffling creatures, its end was darkness. For the first time in their lives, the wind appeared to blow beneath them. Extraordinarily, they walked then above even the gales, as if Arakvan herself was surmounted. Footwork held its own melody, symphonies of a tried dawn.

  At its other end, Horral’s dismount from the stone top landed him on a weak foot, scrunched his gut and squeezed his wound. He groaned feebly and fell forward, but Eidrik caught him, laid him there upon a flat slab below a long, sharp overhang, where veins of ebony ore bubbled. There he rested. Horral watched, in his ailed slumber, starways of black, in the grey cosmos.

  “What a bleak sky…” he remarked, in odd jest, or delusion.

  It was clear he would come no further in no time near, and so Eidrik set himself scavenging for anything that could be turned to fire. Yet the land was barren and slain at such heights, hunted thrice over. Any burn that caught, the cold could snuff, as while wind did seem beneath them the air held a stagnant chill, ever rebounding out from nothing, lurking like grievance for a harsh, immovable mourning. Irritated, though with greater concerns, Eidrik sat at the foot of the slab and cast his cloak over Horral. Cold, hunched across his axe, the furrfiend waited for whatever might dare to test his guard, so intent on being sentinel that he could suffer a hundred shivers before considering escape. His comfort mattered none, for if upon that slab Horral died, Eidrik may as well have frozen to death as its foot.

  Night came and passed. For hours, he listened to Horral’s breaths and the twitch of his boots, gently scratching rock. While twilight reigned and its horrors howled in the surrounding heaps, Eidrik stared down darkness and let shade grow below his eyes. Even when his stomach teased him and his mouth ran dry, he did not lean back, savour a sprawl, or wake his friend. When the sun rose, his face gleamed, for in the light Horral could be warm again.

  Begrudgingly, uncertain of his whereabouts or even the time of day, Horral rumbled up from his lay and rubbed weariness from his eyes. A quick sting above his ribs recalled him to circumstance, and with a groan he rose to hurriedly return Eidrik his cloak then offer him good thanks, as he had when they first left the crypt. Already he tired of the stacking debts, the burdensome infirmity. He was opened and charred and failed to feel intact. Horral did not know his friend went without sleep for his sake, though if he had their journey would stall a day more.

  Up they went, tracing that ugly peak where the only path their eyes could make led on. It came to a walkway, a guileful curl, that shouldered abrasions like an avalanche in-wait and edged a great skid down into the splatters of void. Malformations in the rock lent crude roofs, though marred and split by returning sun. Old bits of columns and collapsed stairs laid about, buried by time. Further, they saw even skulls peeking up from below the mounds, and black eyes bade them onwards with haste. There was a sorry grave, but only worse to be shared. In the bones were chafings, as if once the decor were arms.

  At last, the way led down again, the land spread wide. Through a crack in the rock they crept, and beyond it laid a tundra; a well at the foot of the last summit. It divided the union of peaks and so far down and so cold was its plummet, that mists shrouded all the well swallowed. Disturbed, insatiable fogs.

  Each quarter of the great crater cut in, below storied carvings beyond the immensity of bluffs. Four they were, of dark ore. Giant, morose statues, full of ill-temper and doleful vigilance, as if before that chasm, under hoods, above beards, they had seen their loves released. Their wear was drab, found the waist then fell under fat belts, to mold unto mountain before legs could find form. In their hands were greatswords, held hilt-up, intricate with hacks glamorizing all from the grip to the pommel, demonstrating unending swirls and coursing vines and winged mutts. Each blade was awfully broad, and down the gut of each monument they rode until those robed bellies vanished into uncut rock, at which bridges blasted out near the hips, in the same hue and width as the blades before them. From each corner they shot to connect under a lone pavilion at the dead centre of the drop. It was embellished in ribbons of silver curving up its posts and gold trim that outlined the roof. A large, looming thing, to mortal folk its pillars could well be towers with stalls within. From its roof, by a brass chain, hung a massive bell. A hole in the middle of the X opened the clapper to that savage sink below. There coursed an air of sanctity.

  “All-Father’s eyes…” Horral breathed. “What is this wonder of man, to be pocketed so far away? Think, Eidrik, how we are one of a handful to ever lay eyes upon this treasure of stone. The world below has seen and left generations without ever knowing this laid here in the mountain—that Teroe was ever touched by man. Marvelous!”

  Eidrik tilted to that scored stone, uneasily. It seemed too quiet, and their watch too desolate, dejected. The winds below grated up through the final maw of the Cleft and climbing from its depths came a melancholic rumble, that startled and affixed as does a whisper from a stranger. It was unnerving, did not belong, but in sight of things so vast and mighty and old and refined, neither did they.

  “Yes, I see the stone,” he said. “Grand. And I see too how steep it drops. There must be another way, elsewhere.”

  Already did he search, but Horral whirled onto him. “This is the only way—the only route we’ll find before the Baelgarth discover our sin. There is not time to track backwards, Eidrik. They’ve been lost to good swords by our work, and trust that they will hunt us through every crag until Teroe sits far behind us.”

  “We’d find better odds against the blades of the Baelgarth than upon this walk,” said Eidrik, eyeing the onlooker giants. “If here, like before, you stumble, and I am not quick enough to catch you, it is a long fall into death. There are no guards to this chasm, no cover to shield us.” Already his calves quivered, atop the watch of that gravitating damnation. “Haste alone favours this, but I say a search will in time yield better walks.”

  “In time? Time enough has been spent by my lounging—my lazing through dumb, frivolous injury! You have been patient, my friend, but now we must take flight from this mountain, shed our reserve, before it can crumble down against us.”

  “Centuries have seen it intact.”

  “There is no furrfiend whole who still lends the wilds his faith.”

  “No, you must tell me, Horral. Beyond your wrong guilts… is this truly a risk you’re willing to take?”

  Eidrik did not need to mention his defeat to recall Horral to how close he had drawn already to oblivion. The old fellow was silent, in pure airs, astride at cloud-top. This was a bridge between other things, he knew. There was, in Eidrik’s appeal, embrace: yearned for comfort, soft-spoken camaraderies a dream could sate itself on. Then there was the bellow of fogs beyond. There was destiny’s charge, derived from the graveless.

  Down Horral gazed at the sparkling drifts and the glance challenged him. Whose shadows did he step across? Alive, otherworldly and spared, to bask again in glories. It was not dread or south imaginings that were the drummings of his collapse. He did not see paradise, amidst the crypt’s gores, when the gates appeared to him. Eidrik’s pleading had been a loiterer wisp in nirvana, yet it was a field he saw: A pasture, wheats in their bliss and bliss in their reel. There was an entity, blinding and eternal, checking its garden; the sunlight or the sudden storm or the prewinter pondering, lending its loose eye. Some gorgeous spectre, mildly engaged.

  It was such a serene respite, to lay in and seek slumber below. In a field, so akin to all he had conquered before. Under the last warmth, as it seemed, ungoverned but ensured. Yet it could not be so. The martyrs of every yesterday did not languish to raise a thrall, this he knew. The breath of Teroe Horral would take with him, but it was the caneblade that must sit forever tighter in his fist.

  “He will be beyond us if we tarry,” said Horral, in a soldier’s dour intonation. “Our path and his cannot yet split.”

  “Madness!” Eidrik barked. “That cur took his leave of us, readily, while your very spirit waned. Have you forgotten? Withheld all help as you bled, until at last in his twisted mind he stumbled upon some cause to keep you alive, if barely. He watched us writhe, Horral, studying our weakness, like the Cleft’s own ruinous little overseer!”

  “And yet I live,” said Horral, a shine in his gaze. “When first we joined him, Ulf warned he would discard us if we tarried. And I failed. I proved cumbersome indeed, Eidrik. A bleeding junk, and despite it he aided me still. There is a justness in him, fearful under the eye. For our charge, we cannot let it slip so meekly away.”

  “What justice did you realize, Horral? What justice seen, through your blurred eyes, as he left you to bleed?”

  “Have you not yet considered, that perhaps he abandoned us only to softer pursuits? He saw our unreadiness against the Baelgarth, oh yes, and let it fester—apart from those aims of his so dire as to unmake us. Name our pains the price of his mercy, my friend.” He bounded on with his cane, a heavy lean over each tap. “Nevertheless, we would be fools to ruin this spectacle worrying of what’s elsewhere. I am younger than you say, but old still, and I’ve learned that once you leave a place like this, all the worries you recalled in it seem small. How could anything of ours after all be large, Eidrik, amidst these mountains of stone?”

  Tap, tap, tap he went, Eidrik on his heels with a hand kept in wait just below Horral’s elbow. The old man breathed deep of that crisp, petrichor air. Pain ailed him yet, drastically, and no matter how hot his commitment came it could not be ruled apart from the follies of sickness. So Eidrik kept a stern watch over his friend, who wobbled less with each step but hunched lower every hour. There was a conflict within him, where his nerves succumbed to sloth, the appetite for rest of an enduring acrimony, and his mind, his love and dedication to its route, pulled him all the while to his feet.

  “I recall no time in our history where the homes of men possessed such artisans…” Horral said, eyes in suspicious marvel. “This is a feat from a world apart, surely.”

  “You think from below?” asked Eidrik.

  “I think nothing. It is in times like this, I find, where my eyes do things my mind cannot. Were I to doubt what I see, I would start to ponder, and say then that these stones hold black magic in them, or that the land was different, easier when the builders laid their hammers, or even that in the days this place was forged, there was no mountain here at all, and its architects stood on flat land,” he said, swinging his head. “But it is harder simply to see. It is greater.”

  “And so it is,” vouched Eidrik.

  They strode on. In approach, the furrfiends beheld a brass lacing, spiraling around each axis then seeking the monuments too. Swaddling their lower reaches and vanishing into the fogs of the Final Maw was dense and unruly moss, grown through by shuffling cistus. Nature’s tendrils as well weaved amidst the jotahr underfoot, albeit less rank, and rose then to swath their broad, open walkway in soft petals of white and pink. As they drew nearer, they found the moss was thorny, that its greens were sodden.

  Their earliest impression was all distrust and ammolite, and Eidrik did wager it was rain-wetted, though that paranoia of wayward souls and the fret of one with others to protect made him kneel by it, offer it his instinct. He swabbed two fingers against a patch of moss then raised his hand, to watch it drip its opaque ichor. Too thick for any storm to foster, it appeared more akin to a residue, like the slime from the belly of a great snake.

  Instantly, a suspicion fell over him. His face scrunched. Eidrik stood and caught Horral by the elbow, then dragged him faster towards the pavilion. The old man tried at his wit, though upon seeing Eidrik’s sternness quickly shared the severity, and made himself silent. The rumble from the fog sounded again, as if the earth moved under its mists.

  They stepped swiftly now, and came very near the bell when Eidrik realized another scheme the moss dressed: the stone was worn. It laid riddled in dents and creases too gargantuan for man’s feet or a brung’s paws, wounded once then many times over, by some great weight shambling across it. Stakes, he thought. Like massive stakes stabbed into the ground. Whatever residue he had spotted before, here was its throne. It slicked the pillars of the pavilion and sludged the bell. Every fine inch of chiseled stone was gunged over, and even Horral’s weary, sore eyes could see it clearly now.

  On the bell were murals of battle. Weaved through with brass and iron, it drew yellow spearmen and shieldmaidens battling and crying out against a hideous, gluttonous form. It dared the mind’s depravity, defied quick conception. In examination, they could see only a terrible giant; an arachnid, etched so in rust and lifelessly without colour. The furrfiends saw it both, then shared a last stewing glare, before hastening on.

  Then again, the rumble sounded from beneath them, though louder, more upset, like the earth below those mists was grating together, in an ire about to spew.

  “We need to leave!” ordered Eidrik.

  And the mists parted. The rumble came to a roar that pierced the sky. A great fog dashed up from the throat of the mountain, and through its silvery, smoky barbs was spat an infernal mass of spiked plates and pale blue scales, working ravenously up the side of the plummet, casting landslides with every step. The mountain bled as the beast came higher, and though they dared to think of it even then as only myth, Horral and Eidrik both knew, in all their awe and morbid fright, what emerged from the belly of damnation that maps named Teroe.

  Out from the Final Maw crawled S’va Kotai.

  No mural nor tale could encompass the grotesqueness that ripped up the rockface before them. It was four-legged, like a crab, with feet like spears that tore stone apart and heaved up centrefold a slab, with a hundred fangs to its trim. Its shell was bright, white blue, and nearly all of S’va Kotai’s wicked body was sheathed in chitinous plates, spiked and barbed by warts that came corralish. In the edges of each plate sat tufts of polar fur, that dragged long and wispily in its wake like clear fumes.

  Its underbelly was somehow most awful, and in that expanse the blue of its shell stretched no more, to emit a more gruesome terror. Limbs dangled and flailed there: little human limbs, wearing grimed nails and cold flesh. Its gut was a symphony of corpses, collected amidst stomps and devourings, by gnawings and ichors, over the ages to form one gelatinous horde. The wind of its speed brought them thrashing, as if they yet lived.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Hairs swayed behind its every step, though while white hairs rode its top, beneath it drifted black. So immense was its rampage through the Cleft and so ancient was its watch, that the blood of its victims had stained itself against S’va Kotai’s lower legs. Like moss did its fangs drip, though even its smallest piece could match the sabre of a man. The beast stunk of rot, carnage, yet its own maw did better to affirm it.

  At the front of the slab, the plates peeled outward and ushered forth teeth like tusks, numbering in the twin dozens, shielding a bottomless jaw that fell webbed under the string of flesh and human tendons caught between its teeth. From feasting on meats for so long, a bloody grime had melded against its gums and then bubbled whenever hunger’s spits again coursed through, which in turn dropped hot and clear. Eyes that were dips in darkness kneeled above that wide, ghastly breath, from under the folds of chitin that safeguarded them.

  A thunderous bellow echoed forth from it. It shook the Final Maw and made sprinklings from its monuments, and while S’va Kotai’s cry seemed only guttural and shattering, the roar soon twisted into something new. Its cry flaked, stole a human tongue to utter out a single word, gargled and playfully.

  “Run!” it and its corpse-hive bellowed.

  The stone quivered from its stampede. Dustings of the pavilion crumbled against the furrfiends beneath it. They beheld myth vindicated, feared, in that lapse of action and stink of thought, if the artisans that laired once in this mountain had never left, but been driven rather into extinction. Here rushed a worthy culprit, carving the cliff in voracious appetite. Eidrik was stunned, locked in place. He could not feel his legs before a witnessing so titanic. His lips stammered and his frame dwindled to a slump, but Horral, despite all illness, was wiser than shock.

  “Onwards, fool!” he cried, grabbing Eidrik by the elbow and hobbling in full haste to the end of the other axis, where the cave’s cut promised shelter once more. “Out from here! Out from death!”

  Snapped from his trance, Eidrik broke into a sprint, yet in doing so fell away from Horral. He tried to slow himself, whilst his every nerve outran them both. Eidrik pulled the old man forward but Horral’s pains dragged him right back, kept him to a disjointed stagger. His chest felt on fire, his knees throbbed, though he was left without fair change; forced to brave that mauling burn or suffer S’va Kotai’s insides. Fright benumbed them to the ache of their bodies, the exhaust of their staminas.

  S’va Kotai crawled up the rock, came level with them then ascended farther. In seconds of travel, it sprawled across the massive, robed gaze of a monument to ensnare its full face. Its legs bent inwards, lowered its core, then all four blasted out, lunging the great beast through the air like a comet of pale blue. Down it fell, to strike hulkingly upon the pavilion, and all of the Final Maw quaked from its plummet. Each axis rattled, rained rock. Eidrik and Horral tumbled sidelong. The roof beneath S’va Kotai crashed inward, the pillars snapped out. The power of its descent and the weight of its lurch sent shockwaves through the bell, and that chime fell to the drop below, ringing violently amidst smashed stone. The mountain was drowned, for all of the bell’s descent, in stentorian clangs.

  “It’ll eat us!” the monster bellowed, to the tune of a thousand stolen tongues that meshed together into echoing abomination.

  It scrambled up from the collapsed heart of the Maw and there a vast pitfall formed in its wake. In an eerie sprint that was both gallop and crawl, S’va Kotai fell after the furrfiends, who seemed like ants in that valley of giants. Each step with which it staked the bridge was a pounce in their flight. They wobbled, but Eidrik was relentless and his instinct unwavering. He took Horral under a firm arm and sped ahead, outpacing the rumbling. Still, the creature gained, and still was the way long, thus Eidrik, in a huff, heaved the old man into the air and slung him over his shoulder, then charged on faster feet than he had ever before donned. The weight did little to impede him. His mind was made.

  The cavern’s split laid afar yet, and though his will was indeed ceaseless, his thoughts did dip. Eidrik, in sight of that distance staving off salvation and hearing the hungry rampage at his back, felt doom creep up through his flying legs. Somewhere in his tire, the drip of dismay joined in his sweat.

  S’va Kotai neared. The rubble of its ram shot up by their feet like the sparks of wrathful flame. They were shrouded by its grandeur in stride, hearing lustful, heavy breaths at their necks. The bell continued to ring out far below them, still plummeting: a waning anthem of annihilation. Eidrik felt himself eclipsed under the ancient wretch, and in desperation and a last bid of strength, threw Horral forward as far as he could. It made a mere lunge’s gap, but decidedly Eidrik turned apart and against the creature. He brought his axe high.

  The old man barreled across the stone and rolled a sprint short of the exit, though could not make himself crawl through while Eidrik still manned the bridge. In a haze, horrified, Horral gazed back against his companion, who brought an axehead down against the creature’s charge. Horral’s skin tightened around his terror.

  S’va Kotai was caught unsuspecting. It prowled without predators, and to see tiny prey turn to the offence taught it shock, in the midst of a wide bite. Across its mouth, the axe ripped, pulling a shriek out from its maw. Eidrik gave the blue of its slab a red crevice that split both lips. Its charge reeled. His ammolite came soaked under spit and blood. Amidst the anguished stagger of S’va Kotai, Eidrik pulled thrice to loosen his axe from the chitin on which it caught.

  He readied another blow, but the sight of its underbelly struck first. He was enthralled in angst before those dead, swinging arms. They seemed to reach out for him, for aid or to condemn. They seemed alive, saveable.

  Only for a moment did his hesitance last, yet it was enough, and when his senses returned to him a great leg was found poised overhead. He shuddered, Horral cried out. A spur of impulse threw him back, toggled to a lunged knee, and the stake struck down to implode stone. It nearly tore off his lower half, but just barely did he evade it, and instantly the rest of those blue spears closed in, as if they were chopping up a fish trapped upon the cutting board. He scrambled on his hands and knees, dove and rolled while, just short of his heels, rock erupted. Eidrik leapt to his feet and ran again.

  He could feel the wailing nest of its guts stretch for him, so blindly, madly, he swung his axe to the rear mid-sprint. The chop caught its legs and bounced away to no effort. A spark shot. Chitin encroached. The swing had slowed him, so with a jump of its hind legs, S’va Kotai’s shadow took dominion of his flight. Looming above him, it stamped its legs to his either side. When he looked up, as trembling he did, he beheld a chorus of crying corpses. Human hair, child-hands, chewed feet swayed against him. He fell petrified before that mangled affray of trophied souls. They, in their limp swing and reek, cursed him. Eidrik was hardly aware when the creature bent down to throw its own sadistic gaze against him. He barely noticed as its teeth curved in.

  Yet Horral did, and, for his friend, he forwent his weakness.

  A whip of the caneblade pulled up its jaws, then split a cluster of fangs from their loom that had dared to divide the brothers of hunt. To its great mass however, that sharp tool was a wasp’s stinger, an irritant and unallowed. Angrily, impatient, the beast battered Horral aside as if he were refuse. A flat shin to his stomach took him off his feet. With his strength he might have evaded it, but ailed, Horral crashed out to a loss of breath and his blood. When he did rise, his gaze was foggy and his chest hacking. There was red over his shaking hands. His chest felt scorched beyond what adrenaline could tame, forbidding the rise of his feet again. It nearly took his heart too into its burn, and clutching his chest the old furrfiend fell onto his side, wailing and panting and useless. A wet eye searched out his brother.

  That distracted moment earned was enough for Eidrik to slip out from beneath the beast. He took with him an axe-worth of flesh, though cleaved only its underbelly, scored with claimed corpses, and so felt as if his heavy breaths had rewarded him naught. The creature turned to him, stomping ajar atop the bridge that could not fit it. Both its eyes broadened from their narrow channels, to reveal starry eyes of silver. They were massive, imperious, yet impossibly human, as in them lived a want and a reason, helpless to surmount its own hunger.

  “Can’t die!” it bellowed, borrowing words of the long-dead.

  Eidrik had neither the wealth of breath to elude it again nor the strength to stagger it back. The last relent soothed his lungs. Of course that was the end glaring unto him then, spitting and spewing and stamping its murder. Ammolite rose high. With only his axe, his drained spirit, and the resolve to not die unarmed, Eidrik stood against death. So my oblivion is the cost of his life, he guessed. I thought it more! His grip tightened and his knees came squat while the beast roared at him, playful as a child with its doll.

  “So be it,” said Eidrik, resolute at hell’s door.

  Through its great, shambling legs, he beheld Horral, crumpled on his side. He seemed a sacrifice then, with the bridge below him as a plate to offer the feast of his insides. Eidrik could not bear it. He could not stomach the thought. The furrfiend cried out his rage, shaking his axe in heavy fists, then met S’va Kotai readily at last. For a lone moment of targeting dooms, they were both monsters of that Cleft, both keen killers for fate, clashing at Teroe’s peak. In Eidrik’s final thought, it made sense.

  “Svarkahl!” screamed a voice, like grating anvils, pronouncing dismay.

  S’va Kotai veered suddenly away from the furrfiend, hearing a known utterance. It saw, before Horral, stood then a form of black, with a gnarled fang in-hand. It saw a phantom, crude and stark. It saw Ulf of the North, who spoke against it the Under Tongue, and challenged that mythic horror for dominion of the mountain.

  “Kae’rinn val darr!” he yelled. “Vas vol daerith!”

  It cried out at him in answer, thundered to a ram. All of its hungry, playful tendency was void. It heard in Ulf an intelligible challenge, a risk of ancient experience, and, in an instant, desired his slaughter. S’va Kotai leapt through the air and pounded at the earth where he stood, but the Northman was quicker, bolder, and under its lunge he darted forth.

  He stepped swiftly, yet his blade, carved of bone, was somehow swifter still. With each step, Ulf swung, and with each cut a knee’s tendon was nicked. Blood spurted out from its legs to chase the cloak that whirled between them, though none could catch his form, and Ulf emerged at the other side, between it and Eidrik with a scowl weighing his face.

  The moment he left its shade, Ulf leapt up and wrapped his hand around a hanging fang at its rear, then plunged his blade up through its bottom. The pain jerked it and S’va Kotai coiled into a scurry. Its spine forked and Ulf, keeping his grip firm, rode the momentum of its arch. It carried him off his feet, whirled him through the air and landed him on its plated back. Its pained rattle did not alter the course of his blade. His sword jumped then planted in the space between plates, where it lodged itself and where no shake nor stir could unlodge it.

  “Marrka’en ras dolas’sh!” Ulf cried, quickening the beast.

  His blade sank deep, bloodied its tufts. With both hands, Ulf wedged his steel like a lever, wrenching off its very hide. A hard heave popped out a chunk of its chitin, but before it could tumble away the Northman stole it in the lesser hand, then again did he stab at the wound.

  Agonized, S’va Kotai bucked. Ulf was kicked into flight, landed with a roll nearer to Horral. He found his feet, and it was upon him then with a vengeance in the silver of its eye and blood spoiling the clearness of its blue shell.

  “Vas sil’kan,” said Ulf, stepping forward.

  Whatever was uttered, S’va Kotai understood it well. First it recoiled, deterred, then bounded back with the frenzy of insult. In his wounded watch, Horral realized then that the outlander wanted it enraged. He wanted it clumsy, so that he could cut it apart.

  “All-Father’s eyes…” Horral breathed in shock. “He is mad!”

  It struck first with a left leg, though sparked off its own plate, that Ulf swerved shield-like. He again swung to its knee, slid aside its prod, then lanced the wound. An explosion of stone walled him and he eluded with a lunge, slipping through the scar and stealing its whimper with him. It was a heinous wheeze. S’va Kotai distanced then galloped forth, absorbing the width of the bridge in its slam. Ulf leapt just out of reach, already envisioning the counter, though the shock of ruptured stone bashed him farther to fall on his back. He embraced and turned the shove to a roll. With a wince and renewed hatred, he was on his feet again.

  The demon of the Cleft repeated the smash and Ulf scampered back, though while before it let him fall, then it filled the gap with its own teeth, and in a fearsome clamp of jaws sought to steal Ulf’s skull. The Northman could not evade it, so instead plunged his makeshift shield in between its teeth. Its eyes widened, appalled, while its own chitin wedged its mouth agape. S’va Kotai had brought its head low with eager appetite, and so Ulf seized the opportunity to cut at its eyes. In one fell cleave, he stole its left gaze from it and let red flood silver.

  S’va Kotai cried, gave a gruesome jolt. In its suffering, Ulf slashed out at its wounded front, while Eidrik tore across its back. Scraps of chitin bounced against the bridge. Cornered and half-blind, it gave a last roar of resent and sped off, crawling down to the underside of the bridge where they could not follow. Eidrik breathed relief, nearly grinned as it scampered, wailing on the ground below theirs, but Ulf gave no quarter.

  The Northman sheathed his blade and leapt from the bridge in pursuit. For a moment, he fell in open air, and in that moment the furrfiends gawked in horror as much as amazement, sensing a suicide, yet the moment died and Ulf vanished from sight. Eidrik sped towards the ledge to catch him, but saw that that outlander, in all his vile, fey prowess, had grappled to the jotahr rootings under the stone.

  Before him in his hang, S’va Kotai crawled, upside down, to elude them, to heal and hunt again. Its driving legs were anchoring pitons. Ulf could not allow it. He swung himself forwards, parted so boldly from the jotahr and, before he could taste the breeze of the plummet, landed on S’va Kotai’s upturned belly, on his hands and knees. He crashed into a web of dead limbs, but remained unperturbed. Ulf stood, swatted away that enveloping decay, and sped to the front of the creature, where a wounded knee laid in wait. Even upside down, the Northman’s givings brought about its limp. Ulf winded his sword back, gathered his power to his wrists, waited, balanced, until the right leg was lifted from its brace, then tore straight through the gash.

  The might of his swing severed the leg at its centre, and thus its tether to earth was split. Ulf ran up the bend of the intact front, kicked off into a leap, and with one hand caught the colds of the hanging jotahr, as below him the beast fell. It screamed out an execrable wail, with little human beggars accenting it, then plummeted into the mists of Teroe. Its hairs and bloods dragged behind it, but all vanished below the mountain fog. For a long while, the cry distanced, until its stakes found ground again, and S’va Kotai fell forever silent.

  Ulf sheathed his blade then gripped the jotahr in both fists. He swung, climbed to the ledge of the bridge and heaved himself up its side, though found Eidrik’s open hand ready for him, beside disbelieving eyes. Reluctant, but worn incredibly so and with either arm aflame, Ulf locked his hand with Eidrik’s, and together they brought him up.

  The furrfiend could not yet speak. He needed a moment to see and understand, guess at the rationale for such an awesome stunt, but realized by Ulf’s stern and dismissive demeanour that never could he fathom the breed of entity it demanded. He relinquished his efforts with a shake of the head.

  “You are not a man, Northman,” said Eidrik. “Thank fuck for that…”

  Then he was gone, speeding back to Horral’s side. As he had done before, he brought Horral onto his knees and inspected his injuries, eager to spot any slight that might infect or ail. Tenderly, he peeled back the bandages from his chest, readministered his foxbutter to the edges of the cut, then, with a needle out from his cloak and sterile linen from Horral’s, began to stitch the wound closed again. Horral’s eyes were removed from his own healing. They were trapped upon the phantom that had prevailed through devildom.

  “I might say a hundred things,” said Horral. “But I must settle for ‘thank you’. A conquering such as this… you are truly fascinating. I’d thank the All-Father too, for returning you to us, if I believed you were ever in his favour. You and that wretched blade, that I wager now could answer even the slights of deities!” Horral sighed out exhaustion, gratitude. “It is good to see you again, Ulf,” he said. “You might imagine so, but I am one for more endowed goodbyes.”

  “Aye,” added Eidrik. “There are not words for this salvation, unlikely as it looks in you. I believed this old rock our grave.” Eidrik glared around them, stomached the sight of ancient sacrilege and a grave fret, then scampered back to the grizzly craft that was cliffside in Horral’s breast. “I knew you to be a butcher, Ulf, when first in the wood and the death of the Gleemen we found you. Then again, as after the Baelgarth you scurried away.” He looked up from his stitching, tenderly, for only a moment. “Now, I know you to be one,” said Eidrik. “Only a right butcher could slay S’va Kotai and stand so unscathed.”

  Ulf’s share in that delight was its own dissuasion. He felt their affections grappling him and shook his head, shirked free of them.

  “This killing was no conquest, and neither was it for you,” he declared, hiding his panting under an affirmed jaw. “It has been a lifetime since last I slept indoors. The fiend would fetch as much.” He gazed off into the riled mists after the corpse, breathing the baleful aftermath of another lie. It was bile on his lips and with repugnance hexed him. “Now, the Cleft has swallowed it, and I will lay below the trees again.”

  “Dreamspeak, man!” protested Eidrik. “What delusions did the high snows leave in you? You have gone against myth and carved her apart. Somehow, you spoke and it heard you, Ulf. You gave warning to a damned Scourge-lord and found its heed. You see greater worth in a lump of gold or an inn’s season, then I see a fool.”

  “Myth?” asked Ulf. “What fell to the mists was a svarkahl, furrfiend. Mountain crabs. They prowl the Gargantan, in the half dozens.” He turned away, and the clamp of his glare left no tells as to its truthfulness. “What hunters are you, to not know your prey? One svarkahl escaped south, and here did Arakvan raise a monarch.” Again, he glared to the mists, cursing their trivial degradations. Was he, by his coming, claimed already for such tortuous accessions? “Too long, has this land been dying, furrfiends. Too long, has it eluded right judgement. Your home hosts killers, but they keep to their curtain no more.” His words went elsewhere. “I will make ash of your every myth, before I bow again to these tricklings of empty tyranny.”

  At that, the furrfiends shared their shock in each other’s eyes, while Ulf strode through them towards the cavern, as if their journey had never been stunted to begin with.

  “I go without reward or the distance earned in sparing it,” said Ulf. “You offered a debt of service, and in your own tour you bleed away.” He looked down at their lay and its stitching, those fragile powers of brotherhood again flexed. Somehow, impregnable. “We have ways left to this mountain. Show me now what worth you offer here,” he commanded. “Before the mountain is behind us, and your worth is gone.”

  _____

  A Flake of the Withered Root. At long last, we get to see Ander again. You might've guessed, but she's getting a little fed up of starving and swaying and hugging iron all day.