The Chronicles of Caylen-Tor Page 13

  “This ends here,” hissed Caylen, raising the reddened axe reverentially for the deathblow.

  Ebonfyre uttered a cruel and mirthless laugh. “Zyrashana,” he seethed. “Curse your ophidian soul!”

  The dark giant bowed his head and let his horned helm fall to the heather. Slowly, he looked up at Caylen-Tor, his cruelly regal countenance unwavering, his eyes still aglow with a fathomless inner radiance. “Pitiful king of savages,” he rasped gutturally. “You have won naught. Your rule is like mist upon the sea. Your mongrel people shall fade from memory. You shall be dethroned and your insignificant kingdom shall fall.”

  Caylen’s grey eyes narrowed. “Mayhap,” he growled. “But not this night.” And with that, he swept the great axe at the head of Talus Ebonfyre. The blade clove through the neck of the dark giant, an iron prow rending a sea of bone and sinew. A heartbeat later, the head of Ebonfyre toppled from his body and fell to the earth, rolling to a stop at Caylen’s feet. The kneeling corpse remained unmoving, a voluminous red tide of blood issuing forth from the cloven neck. Suddenly, a nebulous cloud rose from the seeping stump and swiftly coalesced into a pulsating mass of black mist. Two rutilant orbs of crimson fire were faintly visible within the depths of the writhing vapour and for a long moment the tenebrous eidolon seemed to stare balefully at Caylen, silently seething with a maleficent hatred. Then the wraith-cloud darted away into the stygian sky to be swallowed by the night.

  Slowly, painfully, and with a great numbing weariness beginning to snake through his muscles like poison, Caylen-Tor dropped the bloodied axe and picked up the severed head of Talus Ebonfyre. Then he crouched to the giant’s body and dragged free the hilt of Caled-draca, securing the ruined blade at his belt. Scant seconds later, he retrieved Wolf’s Tooth from the red heather and rammed it home into its scabbard.

  “Well fought, Wolf-King,” came a faint voice from the gloom.

  Caylen spun and staggered to the prone form of Oughtred Bearsark, kneeling to survey the clansman’s wounds.

  “I’ll live,” Oughtred rasped. “Go now. Finish it.”

  Caylen nodded and rose, moving to where one of the standards of the imperial army lay trampled upon the heather. Taking up the banner, he spied a lone imperial steed, its eyes white with fear, its ears flat against its skull. Calming the lathered beast, he secured the imperial banner in the saddle’s cinch strap and vaulted to its broad back. The horse reared once, then yielded to Caylen’s control. Grimacing with the pain which coursed through his broken arm, Caylen gripped the rawhide reins, and with his free hand lifted Ebonfyre’s severed head high.

  “It is done!” he bellowed. “The Witch-Queen’s champion is dead!”

  Caylen spurred the horse on to a gallop across the battlefield where sporadic skirmishes between Iron Jackal legionaries and clansmen were still raging. The surviving imperial troops gaped at the grisly trophy in Caylen’s hand. The clansmen roared in triumph as their king proclaimed victory.

  Dragging his shortsword clear of an imperial corpse, Wulfric called out to the surrounding tribesmen. “Victory! All hail Caylen-Tor!”

  The chant was taken up by the clansmen as the depleted legionaries, their morale shattered, disengaged and wearily threw down their weapons.

  Caylen’s steed cantered to the centre of the battlefield and he dislodged the imperial banner from his saddle, hurling it to the blood-churned earth.

  “My people!” thundered Caylen-Tor. “Wolves of the north, raise thine steel to the skies! Revel in the pride of your wounds! Let our victory-song ride the winds of this blood-gorged eve! For on this night of red swords, we have wrought a legend, forged in the fires of our rage, and tempered with the spilled blood of the slain!”

  “By all the gods,” whispered Wulfric. “We’ve actually done it!”

  And the triumphant chants of the clansmen echoed the length and breadth of Blackhelm Vale.

  * * *

  The first light of dawn had begun to illumine the valley as Caylen and Wulfric traversed the corpse-mounds. Ravaged bodies littered the battlefield and already the crows and worms were feeding.

  “Will Oughtred survive?” growled Caylen as he gazed forlornly at the cloven corpses of the many clansmen strewn about the heather.

  “Most probably,” Wulfric replied. “The wound is deep, but the surgeons say it will heal, as long as infection does not take hold. How is your arm?”

  “I too will live,” muttered Caylen, glancing at his myriad wounds. The blood of the fray still clung to him, now dark and crusted. “I want a count of the slain. The names of all our dead. We will leave none behind. But the foe may stay as they lay.”

  “It shall be so.”

  “And you, wolfshead?” asked Caylen. “What scars will you bear?”

  Wulfric prodded his midriff and winced as the pain of two broken ribs lanced through him. “I’ve suffered worse. And you know, old Grimm suffered nary a scratch in the battle. I swear that hoary bugger’s immortal!”

  “Thank the gods,” smirked Caylen. “That will spare me the lash of my wife’s tongue, at least!”

  A leaden silence ensued, punctuated only by the cries of the wounded as they were tended to by field surgeons and the harsh voices of crows as they hovered blackly about the slain.

  “Was it worth it?” Wulfric asked suddenly.

  Caylen fixed him with a baleful stare. “The foe has been driven back. I knew the price would be high. I was prepared to pay it.”

  “And pay it we did,” breathed Wulfric.

  A solemn expression crossed Caylen’s face. “Grist for the mill of regal ambition,” he whispered.

  “What was that?”

  “A truth I once learned,” sighed Caylen. “Concerning the hubris of kings.”

  “Woeful is the burden of power,” said Wulfric. “Yet it has not corrupted you, as it would a lesser man. You’re no tyrant. You did what was required.”

  Caylen’s brow furrowed as he stared at the ravaged body of an Iron Jackal legionary sprawled upon the heather. “My memory of the final clash is clouded.”

  Wulfric frowned, recalling the closing moments of the battle. “Our shield wall was breached and the Iron Jackal Legion had engaged our ber-serkr reavers. By the gods, I’ve never seen such sublime carnage as that! And you... you fought with the strength of twenty. Every one of your strokes was a killing stroke. You were pitiless... like a war-god from the sagas of old. You clove through the Iron Jackal like a scythe at harvest. Then, Ebonfyre found you in the fray.”

  Caylen sighed wearily. “That, I remember.”

  “It was over when you slew that vile devil,” said Wulfric. “The legion broke, its spirit crushed. And yet, even at the end the foe still outnumbered us. Had they not disengaged, they could still have won.”

  “No,” enounced Caylen grimly. “With their shamans slain, the Witch-Queen’s host fought without the aid of black sorcery. In the end, it came down to a test of faith and steel. And in that test, we prevailed.”

  Wulfric nodded silently.

  Suddenly, Drogha Tul emerged from the fading shadows to stand before Caylen-Tor. “The blade is broken,” the aged man rasped.

  “It will be reforged,” gnarred Caylen, dragging the shattered remnants of Caled-draca from its scabbard.

  “Yes, but it will never again be wielded by you, Caylen-Tor. Strange bedfellows do wolves and serpents make. Give me the hilt.”

  A sudden anger flared within Caylen’s grey eyes and he held the jagged tip of the broken steel to Drogha Tul’s throat. “No more cryptic words, old man. Speak plainly, for my patience is spent.”

  The old shaman did not move, and a crooked smile slowly creased his rugose features. “The Three Tongued Serpent shall be given up to the embrace of the waters. There, in the deeps of the sylvan pools shall it be reforged. Stronger, keener, more deadly shall the blade become. Destined for the hand of your progeny, this sword is. Now, give it to me.”

  Caylen eyed the ruined hilt for a moment before thrusting
it into Tul’s grasp with such force that the shaman was almost knocked from his feet. “I grow weary of your games, old one. You would do well to avoid me for a while.”

  Tul concealed the weapon within the folds of his darksome cloak and disappeared silently into the dawn mist.

  Brodir Finn and two bloodied clansmen then moved before Caylen, flanking a captured imperial officer whose face was battered and swollen. One of the clansmen held the sundered imperial banner which Caylen had seized during the battle and the other carried a round bundle of sackcloth which was stained with dried blood.

  “Hail, great Tor,” said Brodir. “As you instructed, we have seized one of the imperial heralds.”

  The beaten man was thrust forward, and he gazed trembling at the towering figure of the Wolf-King looming before him.

  “You speak the Northern dialects, I assume?” rumbled Caylen.

  “I know your primitive tongue, and all the other tongues of the barbaricum,” the herald sneered.

  “Good,” said Caylen. “That alone has saved your outlander hide this night. Now hearken to me, dog. I’m giving you a few things to take back home to your queen.” At Caylen’s signal, the clansman duly proffered the sundered banner to the herald. “This is one of them. The sigil of her army. Broken, routed, defeated.”

  The herald nervously accepted the tattered standard, his knuckles white as he clutched it tightly to his chest.

  “And this,” growled Caylen, taking the bloodied sackcloth from the second clansman. “She may recognize the object which rests within.”

  Caylen threw the stained bundle at the herald, who only barely caught it in his trembling hands.

  “Also, relay unto her these words,” hissed Caylen, leaning close to the man’s ashen face. “If ever again she deigns to strike against my people, the slaughter this night will seem as naught compared to the havoc I shall visit upon her then.”

  The herald grudgingly nodded his understanding.

  “Now, get the hell out of my realm!” thundered Caylen as the two clansmen dragged the man roughly away.

  Brodir Finn smiled coldly. “You were right, Wolf-King. We were destined to know victory here.”

  “United, we are strong,” said Caylen somberly.

  “Ah, but unity is a fleeting thing, like mist at the break of dawn,” said Brodir, moving away to where his tribesmen waited. “But mayhap the other chieftains will come to regret their refusal to fight with you. We shall yet see what the Web of Wyrd has in store for the Nine Clans.”

  Alone again, Caylen and Wulfric watched the sun slowly rise from behind the eastern slope of the valley. It was the colour of blood.

  “The Battle of Blackhelm Vale,” mused Wulfric. “A tale for the skalds to tell around the hearth-fires, I think.”

  “Aye,” replied Caylen, turning grimly to the west. “The bards will sing of this battle. And for a time, the clans will remember the names of the honoured dead and give thanks for the freedom which was safeguarded by their noble sacrifice. But in a thousand years those names will be forgotten and all that history will recall is that here an empire fell before the resolve of greater men.”

  When news of the rout at Blackhelm Vale reached the Imperial capital of Mytos K’unn, Zyrashana’s hold on power inexorably waned. Her many acolytes and courtiers, no longer held in thrall by the ever-present threat of the Imperial army, plotted against their empress, until ultimately Zyrashana was driven from the royal palace by the captains of her own personal guard, her throne duly seized by an ambitious vizier loyal to the former ruler King Ahaziah. Her spells of regal dominance broken, the dethroned empress Zyrashana fled to the eastern satrapies with a small entourage, including her three daughters and one son. At length, the conquered territories regained their sovereignty and the First Great Empire of Mytos K’unn was no more.

  Following his victory, Caylen-Tor enjoyed a modicum of civil contentment within his kingdom. However, the grand tribal alliance remained at its heart a fragile and tenuous entity and exactly two years after the defence of Blackhelm Vale, following a disastrous harvest and a foiled assassination plot against the king, five of the nine tribes seceded from the union, declaring their independence once more. A period of bitter intertribal warfare ensued, and although Caylen-Tor ultimately gave up the mantle of Over-King, his adventures were far from over...

  Book III: The King Beneath the Mountain of Fire

  Following the dissolution of the tribal alliance, Caylen retained the chieftainship of the Wolf Clan and endured years of internecine conflict, prevailing in numerous tribal civil wars and firmly establishing the People of the Wolf as the mightiest of all the Old Clans. At length, a tenuous peace was brokered throughout the territories and the balance of power remained relatively stable. And yet, the old wanderlust still burned within the Wolf of the North’s heart and the lure of adventure ultimately proved too great to resist. And so, Caylen gathered a crew of grim-eyed reavers from amongst the northern clans, and each spring they embarked upon a voyage of plunder and piracy, sailing the redoubtable dragon-ship White Wolf the length and breadth of their tribal homeland’s mighty rivers and prowling the great ice-bound sea, then traversing the glacial waterways of the Snow Kingdoms to reach the perilous Bay of Serpents and the well-travelled route to the southern oceans in their pitiless hunt for treasure-laden prey. And no vessel that sailed the Nine Seas, not merchant sloop nor martial warship, was safe from the ravening blades of the Wolf-King’s northern reavers…

  Chapter I

  The Isle of Black Sands

  Caylen vaulted over the longship’s gunwale and planted his feet firmly in the jet-black, basalt sand of the desolate beach. He was clad in a golden scale-mail hauberk, dark leather breeches and buckskin boots. Studded leather vambraces bound his forearms and a large wolfskin cloak was draped about his broad shoulders, secured by a single knotwork-encarved pauldron crafted from the hide of a bull tundra-mammoth. Scabbarded at his waist was his well-worn broadsword Wolf’s Tooth, and in his calloused hand he bore a long-hafted battle-axe which sported an elaborate wolf’s head motif engraved into the chalybeous steel of its great curved blade. Caylen’s blond hair fell unfettered to his shoulders and a voluminous, grey-flecked beard adorned his scarred and weathered face.

  “What a blighted isle this is,” the clansman muttered sullenly, striding farther along the stygian shore to survey the terrain of the grim atoll to which his perilous voyage had borne him. The black sand stretched for some fifty yards before eventually yielding to an expanse of low hills strewn with jagged volcanic rocks, while in the distance loomed a range of colossal atramentous mountains, their peaks shrouded in cinereous mist. Turning his gaze skyward, Caylen scowled at the endless vault of brooding grey clouds which all but obscured the mid-morning sun. Scant seconds later, the first flakes of snow began to fall from the sombre heavens.

  The sound of men wading ashore behind him abruptly summoned Caylen from his solemn ruminations. He turned slowly and cast an appraising glance at his great drakkar White Wolf, which was drawn up on the sloping black beach. The shallow-keeled ship was sixty-five feet long and boasted sixteen oar-ports on either side of its slender hull. The vessel was expertly crafted of ash and oak and an array of colourful shields adorned the rack along its top strake. The ship’s vast, storm-battered sail was furled and the lofty mast and seal-skin ropes groaned faintly in the icy breeze. The prow was ornamented with an intricate figurehead carved of pinewood and fashioned in the form of a dire-wolf’s toothsome, snarling head. As the fearsome effigy suggested, the great ship was a pitiless predator which had prowled the myriad seas for half a decade, preying upon the merchant sloops and military triremes of every kingdom of the antediluvian world which dared boast a naval presence upon the charted oceans. It was a grim fact known by every mariner, privateer and pirate from the jarldoms of the north to the satrapies of the south that to be hunted by the White Wolf upon the open seas was to face naught but death and red ruin.

  A burly, grey-bear
ded man clad in a chainmail hauberk and a long woollen cloak moved laboriously up the beach to stand alongside Caylen. “Thank the gods we made it through that damned storm!”

  Caylen frowned. “It was raw courage and well-honed skill that saw us through that tempest, Eirik. The work of men, not gods.”

  “And yet I’ll wager you still court divine favour, great Tor.”

  “Do not call me that,” Caylen growled. “The alliance is dead. I am king no longer.”

  Eirik smiled wearily. “To your tribal brothers, you will always be the Wolf-King.”

  Caylen sighed. “Stay with the ship, old friend. If I do not return by dawn two days hence, sail her back to Ulfheim. Make sure the skalds sing the tales of our deeds around the hearth-fires.”

  “We’ll not set sail without you,” grumbled Eirik.

  “Heed my words,” said Caylen, clasping the older man’s shoulder firmly. “Be wary and guard the camp well, for we know not what manner of men or beasts haunt this cursed island.”

  Eirik nodded. “Good hunting, Caylen-Tor,” he said as he trudged despondently back to the beached longship.

  “Guthlac!” barked Caylen, turning to a group of warriors assembled by the shoreline. “Prepare the scouting party. We’re going inland.”

  In response to Caylen’s command, a stocky, russet-bearded man armoured in a hardened leather cuirass signalled to three heavily armed reavers to follow him and strode briskly to Caylen’s side.

  “What can we expect, Wolfclan?” asked Guthlac, donning an iron helmet with an intricately embossed eye-guard and securing his longsword in its leather scabbard.

  “Dire peril and certain death, I should think,” replied Caylen, a gleam in his eye.

  “The usual, then,” said Guthlac mordantly. “In truth, I still don’t like the notion of relying on that old mariner’s lotus-addled visions.”