By the Sword
John C. Hocking

I leapt a steaming hot spring, hiked over a snowy ridge, and saw that the valley was full of corpses. King Egil’s camp was destroyed, and the bodies of my friends and brethren lay strewn on the ice, lit up by the long scarlet rays of the setting sun.

At first I could not credit my eyes and thought a fever had fallen upon me, or that the gods had struck me with madness. Either would have been a kindness compared to the truth.

I was halfway down the slope before I saw the looters, two men left behind to plunder the dead. They piled valuables and weapons onto a sled drawn by a shaggy pony.

I advanced upon them without caution or stealth or thought. My bow, and the hares I had taken with it, fell to the snow as I drew my grandfather’s longsword.

The first, a tall blond warrior with a bad leg, turned when he heard my boots on the ice. He shouted a warning to the other and groped for his sword, but I didn’t let him draw steel. The longsword took his hand before it gripped the hilt, then stopped his mouth before he started to scream.

The second, a stout redbeard, seized an ax from the sled he was filling with goods plundered from my murdered people. He hurled it at me as I stepped over the body of his comrade. The ax was well-thrown, but I stepped from its path as the redbeard drew his sword and caught up a shield from the sled. I recognized the shield as the work of my mother’s uncle even as I hewed into it.

I drove him backward with a blizzard of blows, and I heard from my own throat snarls like those of a wolf in a trap. The redbeard would have been overmatched even if I hadn’t been afire with battle-madness. He held up the shield and I beat down upon it until he staggered, then I dropped to one knee and slashed the longsword beneath the shield and through his ankle. He squalled, dropped the shield and fell to grasp his wound. Blood sprayed the white snow in the failing light. I smote the sword from his hand.

“Who did this?” I said.

He wept and tried to staunch the wound with his fingers.

“Who?” I shouted.

“Mercy!” he cried. “Quarter!”

“Prince Volmark?”

“Yes! Yes, I am Volmark’s man.”

“Where is he?”

“At the chamber! He goes to meet King Egil for the ceremony!”

I lifted the longsword over my head.

“Wait!” he screamed and held up hands painted red by his wound. “Wait!”

“Wait?” I said. “Wait for what?”

I brought the longsword down and his hands couldn’t halt it. It took three blows to silence him, then I was alone on the ice.

I staggered to where my tent had stood; now burnt rags spread over the ice. There, on her back, breasts red with blood, lay Uvol. My wife was dead with our child fresh in her womb.

I fell down beside her and laid my hand on the frozen blood over her still heart and I wept and cried to the gods to spare me, to unmake what had happened, to take my life instead of hers. I held Uvol, and I kissed her frozen mouth as if she might somehow take warmth and life from my lips. But she was dead and stiff, and all the life that had been within her, that had brought light and life to me, was gone for all time. I raged like a rabid wolf, tearing at my breast as if grief was a dagger I might wrench from my flesh.

In time I got up and reeled away, unable to look upon her any longer. I saw bodies of friends and family, and it seemed to me that I staggered through hell. I thought to throw myself upon the longsword, but it came to me how few of the fallen were men. I recalled that King Egil had left the camp with a retinue of chosen warriors to meet Prince Volmark at the chamber.

I ceased to weep and stood pondering among the dead as night swept in on a frozen wind, and a deep chill rose within me to replace the red heat of my grief. Volmark had fallen upon King Egil’s camp and destroyed it, and now he went to the chamber to complete his murderous treachery.

The moon was rising. By the time it fell behind the Mountains of Horn, the ceremony in the chamber had to be over. I did not know if I had the time to warn King Egil. I did not know if my warning would help even if I could deliver it. But there on the ice I came to understand that though my old family was gone, I had found a new one. Loss and madness were my brethren now, and I would make vengeance my bride.

I cleaned the longsword, strapped the redbeard’s ax to my back, and left King Egil’s shattered encampment behind me. I knew the way to the chamber, but even had I not, Prince Volmark’s men had left a broad path in the snow for me to follow.

The lowlands opened before me, lit up by the corpse-pale moon. Black rock thrust through the snow, and steam rose where hot springs bubbled up from the earth. I walked beside a dark stream that cut a smoking path across fields thick with ice. Pools of pallid mud burbled and spat, stinking of brimstone.

As I advanced the steam and stench grew thicker, and the moon fell slowly from its starry perch. The earth would heave when the moon finally dropped behind the Mountains of Horn, and the stench and steam would redouble for a few moments. So it was every night in the lands my people called the Foundry of Ice.

I moved more carefully as the earth rose and the path sunk into a narrow ravine of volcanic stone. Small caves pocked the walls, each a miniature version of the chamber. Sulphurous fumes wafted from their dark recesses, fumes that would turn to geysers when the moon fell. At the end of the ravine stood two standing stones, grim guardians flanking the path, helmed with snow and streaked with ice that glittered like silvered mail in the moonlight.

I pressed my back against a standing stone and peered out of the dim ravine, across a snow field, to the shore of a boiling lake. I crouched. There was a guard at the bridge.

When my grandfather was a stripling the two clans fought a great battle here. They fought until they became so weary and war-sick that they could fight no more, and then the leaders of both clans swore an oath of loyalty. They honored one another’s bravery and made a great treaty that has served the clans well ever since.

Both the last great clash, and the signing of the treaty, took place within the chamber. In those days the chamber sat atop an island of stone in a lake of black ice. But in time the Foundry of Ice grew hotter, and the earth surged more strongly at moonset, so that now the chamber sits atop an island in a roiling hot spring. The lake of ice has become a lake of fire.

Every two years the leaders of each clan made a pilgrimage to the chamber to meet their old foes and renew the treaty. Now Prince Volmark had broken the treaty at last and meant to take King Egil’s holdings for his own.

I heard no sounds of battle and could not know if Volmark had already set upon my King or not. Leaning on the stone, a hollow weariness bloomed within me and I might have sat down and let the ice take me, but when I closed my eyes I saw Uvol’s frozen face. And I heard our unborn child, denied its first breath, cry piteously for revenge.

I unlimbered the redbeard’s ax and moved out from the ravine’s mouth, keeping to the deep shadow of the standing stone.

The bridge was built years ago, when the black ice around the chamber began to melt. It was wrought of rope and rawhide, for wood was dear in this clime. On my side of the boiling lake the bridge was tied to two tall steel spikes driven into the black stone shore. From there it stretched, sagging low into the rising steam, twenty-five paces to the opposite shore.

The chamber was a cavern, a hollowed dome of rock perched like a carbuncle atop the little island in the boiling lake. In my grandfather’s day men of the warring clans had met and fought here when each thought to use the chamber for shelter. The ice ran red that day. I meant to see it run red again.

Through the moving haze I could see a man standing guard at the chamber’s entrance, a few paces from the far end of the bridge. I could tell he was tall, bare-headed, and carried over his shoulder the golden ring of a large hunting horn.

I cursed the gods for their cruelty. A blast on that horn would bring Volmark’s men swarming out of the chamber to cut me to rags. I stole forward anyway, hefting the redbeard’s weapon and trying to recall the last time I’d thrown an ax.

A tide of voices rose on the wind. Men within the chamber were cheering. It took a mere moment to grasp with grim certainty who was cheering and why; then I saw the guard turn to face the chamber’s entrance. I broke into a run.

The snow ended in a band of slush on the naked rock of the shore. I ran through it, splashing, and drove between the steel spikes out onto the bridge. The thick cables of rope and rawhide were not meant to be leapt upon and sunk low into the mephitic vapors rising off the lake. Heat enveloped me and I staggered, grasping at the rawhide rail. The lake hissed and bubbled below my boots.

The guard turned and saw me. He scrabbled for the horn as I drew back the ax, and he seized the horn as the ax left my hand. The effort of the throw unbalanced me. The horn touched his lips the same instant the ax met his brow. The impact hurled him back against the icy wall of the chamber with the horn springing from his palsied hands.

I fell full length, desperately clawing at the ropes to keep from sliding into the waiting lake. The bridge jerked and swung. I lost my grip and my arm slipped out above the water. At once my hand was blistered from the spray. The pain was hard, but the thought I might die clumsily on the bridge and be deprived of my revenge was harder. I dragged myself to my feet and walked to the shore.

The sound of cheers and merriment continued to echo from the chamber’s entrance. I put a foot on the guard’s neck and wrenched the ax free. The portal opened on a low passage of rippled stone caked with ice. It was dim within, but the hall only reached a few paces into the rock before turning and opening into the hollow dome of the chamber. The voices within went quiet and I could tell someone was speaking to the rest. A moment of this and the cheers erupted again.

I turned back to the bridge. Beyond the pallid fumes of the lake, the white lowlands stretched away and rose into distant mountains, clear and cold by the light of the falling moon. It shone full and bright, a lantern for my path, lowering onto the jagged teeth of the Mountains of Horn.

The cheers continued and I hoped they would cover the sounds I made hacking the end of the bridge free from its supports. I worked hard and fast, full of fear that Volmark would come upon me before I was finished.

The job was difficult, but when it was done I felt no weariness. The tattered ends of shorn rope and rawhide slopped into the seething lake and sank from view. I stood up and thrust my weapons at the sky. Snow had begun to fall and, looking up, I could not tell the snow from the stars. Beneath my feet the earth trembled gently, then subsided.

It was a beautiful night and I had lost any right to curse the gods. They had shown me both sides of fortune’s coin and a man could not ask for more.

I turned away from the world and walked into the chamber with my grandfather’s longsword in my right hand and the redbeard’s ax in my left. Rounding the corner, I stood in an opening like a doorway and gazed across the chamber. It was round and bigger than a longhouse, taller than a tower. The walls were smooth, pale stone coated with a skin of ice that glittered in the torchlight. Countless black holes pocked the walls; torches were thrust into a dozen of these. The air was thick, warm, and stifling with the stench of sulphur and death.

The chamber was full of warriors, living and dead. The corpse of my King lay on the stone, spurned by the boots of his assassins. The crown was gone from his bloodied head. I saw it was now worn by Tontil, Prince Volmark’s son. He must have felt my gaze, for he turned to look upon me and cried out.

Silence fell upon the men in the chamber.

Volmark, in a great fur cloak with his gray hair tied back, stepped forward.

“Wolf the hunter, you are too late. Why come here now?”

“To take your life!” I shouted, brandishing the longsword and the bloody ax.

“Look about yourself, fool. All you have found here is your own death.” Volmark spread his hands, and his men, thirty strong and filling the chamber to its walls, shifted and hefted their weapons. “You are but one man, and too late besides. King Egil is dead, and my son wears his crown.”

“He’ll wear it in Hell,” I said. “I am one man, and too late to save my liege, but I am not too late to take vengeance for my family and my clan.”

“One man!” laughed Volmark, sure of himself, his son, and his power. “You’ll never know vengeance.”

“It is already mine!” I exulted. “I have slain you all!” Something in the timbre of my voice stirred some of them, so that they knew I was neither lying nor mad. I saw fearful looks exchanged by faces grown pale.

I laughed and it echoed like black chimes in the vaulted heights of the chamber.

“Come then, dead men! Let us trade blows as the moon lowers to the Mountains of Horn!”

“He’s mad,” said Tontil. “His words mean nothing.”

“My words mean much to those who truly hear them,” I said. “Have you seen the bridge?”

“What?” burst out Volmark, perhaps sensing the truth. “What have you done, madman?”

“Come and see, O King of Nothing. Walk past my blades and look for yourself!”

“Kill him!” howled Volmark, and his men surged forward to do his bidding.

I stepped back into the passage so that they could only come one at a time, but the first two were so eager for my blood that they bumped into one another, and both longsword and ax drank deep. I kicked them back into their fellows and called for more. They came on and I took a head with the ax, but paid for it with a gash in my thigh. The warriors clustered around me as I blocked and cut and thrust.

Below the shouts, screams and clash of arms rose a low rumbling that I felt in my guts. The chamber was hotter--where the walls had gleamed with ice they now ran with water.

From the hundreds of gaps in the chamber’s walls came the first jets of steam. There was a great outcry and I was attacked with redoubled force. A dagger drove between my ribs and my grandfather’s longsword split the wielder’s skull. When he fell I saw Volmark and cast the ax at him. A spearman lunged in and spitted me before I could see if the ax struck home. I hewed through the spearman’s forearm and the haft of the spear as well, then staggered back into the passage leaving a scarlet trail on the stone.

I screamed at them and the warriors drew back. I called down the curse of my blood and my family and my king upon them, and they hesitated before a beaten and bloodied foe.

Gouts of steam exploded from the holes in the walls. Soon they would become geysers of searing water. The ceremony in the chamber had never run this long before. It never would again. I took a fresh grip on the longsword, and leapt back among my enemies.

Above the cries of pain and fear came shouts that I be slain so that they might escape by the bridge. Warriors dodged past me, but it didn’t matter. None would ever leave the island.

I whirled, giving blows and taking them. My body had grown numb, but there came a sudden terrible pain between my shoulder blades, and I lost the strength to stand. I drove the longsword’s point into the floor of the chamber and leaned heavily upon it.

I shouted the names of my family and believed they could hear me. I called on my grandfather, on my mother and father and Uvol. And I thought I saw them rise up before me as I fell to my knees. They held out their hands as I choked on my blood and reached for them.

The earth shook and the chamber filled with a terrible roar, with the screams of dying men, and with a murderous, unendurable heat.

I fell, as my enemies fell.

Outside, the moon disappeared behind the cold peaks of the Mountains of Horn, and the Hell trapped beneath the Foundry of Ice rose, heaved, and burst its bonds.

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