Bones of the Dragon Page 16

  Ogres were deemed lazy by humans, but the truth was, as Norgaard had said, they lacked stamina. Ogres were practical-minded, with no concept of honor. Unlike the Vindrasi, they did not consider dying in battle a glorious end. They liked a good fight, so long as they didn’t have to expend too much effort in order to win. These stubborn humans, who were apparently made of iron, not flesh and blood, were taking all the fun out of warfare.

  The ogres were not ready to give up yet. Or rather, their godlords were not, and the ogre warriors were more afraid of their commanders than they were of the enemy. The Torgun, locked in a desperate struggle for their lives, greeted the dragon’s arrival with ragged cheers. The ogres gaped at the dragon in openmouthed amazement that swiftly devolved into horror. Most had never seen a dragon or even known such creatures existed.

  A dragon took on the appearance of the elements from which he was created. If the Dragon Kahg had been formed of seawater, he would have been glistening blue green with a white crest, like foam-spattered waves. Created out of dirt and desperation, he was an earth dragon. His scales were a dull brown mottled with green. His crest was the gray of jagged mountain peaks, his tail the red color of clay. He was hampered by the fact that he’d come to the battle late. With warrior battling warrior, the dragon dared not use his fiery breath, for fear of harming the Torgun.

  Kahg’s first concern was for the ogre who had possession of the Vektan Torque. The dragon saw Skylan running to confront the ogre, and Kahg might have intervened, but Skylan shone with a holy radiance, and Kahg realized the young man had given himself to the god. The Madness of Torval was upon him. Kahg decided to leave the ogre to the human warrior. He swooped down on three ogre warriors fighting Norgaard’s bodyguards and snatched them up in his clawed feet.

  Kahg soared skyward, clutching the howling ogres. When he was high above the trees, he opened his claws and dropped two of them. The screaming ogres plummeted to the ground, their heavy bodies landing on their comrades, smashing them into a jellied mass of blood and bone, brains and blubber.

  The third ogre hung on to Kahg’s claw for dear life. Annoyed, Kahg shook his claw, trying to dislodge the ogre. The ogre clung to the claw, wrapping arms and legs around it. Kahg at last stuck the claw in his mouth, sucked up the ogre as though he were a splinter, crunched him to pulp, then spit him out.

  Some of the ogres decided they’d had enough. They were already weary of this fight, and now they were being attacked by a fearsome monster, a creature from a nightmare. These ogres threw down their heavy weapons, turned, and began to lumber back toward the sea. The others fought on, but they were rapidly losing heart.

  The dragon’s body blotted out the sun. His fierce eyes glared down at his foe. He made another dive, snagged several more ogres, and hurled them onto the ground. Their bodies split wide open, spewing blood and guts. Even the godlords, who had been urging their warriors to stand and fight, were appalled at this gruesome sight. The godlords fled Kahg’s fury, and they took their warriors with them. Within moments of the dragon’s coming, the entire ogre army was stampeding madly for their ships.

  Skylan saw none of this. The Madness of Torval was upon him.

  CHAPTER

  15

  The ogre godlord watched the human warrior come charging at him across the battlefield and stood waiting for him, not because he relished the idea of a battle of heroes, but because he was bitter, angry, and frustrated. What should have been a resounding victory was turning into a disastrous rout. His men were thundering past him, running for their miserable lives. The only ogre who was staying with him was the shaman, and the godlord wished he would get swallowed by the dragon.

  The godlord considered the shaman with his black feathers and his stupid gourd bad luck. He ordered the shaman to go, but the black-feathered bastard remained rooted to the spot. The godlord planned to retreat with his men, but he had not made any kills this day; he’d been too busy trying to beat some sense into his warriors, and he could not leave the field of battle without having drawn blood. The other two godlords, who were always watching for a chance to demean him, would report such “cowardice” to his superiors the moment they returned home.

  This young human with the sun-gold hair and the sky-blue eyes was the Chief’s son. He was the one who had wanted to fight them all at dinner. The one who had sneaked aboard the dragonship and slain two ogres and escaped. The one who had killed the boar. This would be a good kill. The godlord would bash in the young pup’s skull and then depart.

  The godlord cast a dark glance at the dragon. The ogre was fifty years old, and he had faced dragons before. He knew that the dragons of the Vindrasi had something to do with their famed dragonships, though he was not entirely sure what. He had the vague idea that the ship turned into a dragon, and so he had made certain that the Torgun dragonship was safe in ogre hands.

  Then had come the daring raid in the night. The surviving ogre guard could not say exactly what the Torgun warrior had removed from the ship, but it must have had something to do with the dragon, for the ship was still surrounded by ogre vessels, and here was the dragon carrying off his warriors as the eagle carries off rabbits.

  Seeing that the dragon posed no threat to him, at least for the moment, the godlord turned his attention back to his foe. The young human advanced on the godlord unafraid, carrying his sword and a dented shield he had taken off a dead man. His long fair hair shone in the sunlight, seeming to surround him with light. His blue eyes were hard and glittering with battle rage.

  Some god must love him, the ogre thought sourly, and he strode forward to do battle.

  Skylan was caught up in the Madness of Torval, and he did not see the dragon, or the ogres, or his own men. He saw only his foe—the ogre godlord who wore the Vektan Torque around his neck. It seemed to Skylan as if Torval had lifted the two of them up off the earth and dropped them both down on some distant shore where they could fight together, isolated and alone.

  Some thought the Madness of Torval sent men careening headlong into battle, witless as raving lunatics. That was not true. Torval had more sense. The madness opened a warrior’s eyes, gave him insight into his foe—how he thought, how he would react, which way he would move.

  Ogre and human used far different fighting techniques. Ogres had little use for developing weapons skills. They saw no need. Ogres counted on strength and brute force to strike down an opponent, generally with a single blow. Their weapons of choice tended to be war hammers and battle axes.

  Skylan, by contrast, had started learning to fight at the age of four, when Norgaard put a wooden sword into the child’s hands and showed him how to use it. Not a day had gone by since that Skylan did not practice, first with a wooden sword, then with a real one, learning the Vindrasi technique of dividing an enemy’s body into quarters and striking first at one quarter and then another, forcing the enemy to constantly shift position.

  He and the godlord squared off. Skylan had to remain constantly on his guard, not allow his foe to hit him. A single blow from the godlord’s war hammer would bring the battle to a quick and bloody end.

  Skylan adopted a balanced stance, left knee forward, right leg braced behind, his shield held parallel to the shield of his opponent. Skylan raised his sword above his head, blade pointed down. Fighting a human, he would have been prepared to strike at the face. With the ogre, he was going for the chest.

  The ogre held his shield roughly parallel to Skylan and slowly swung the hammer, giving Skylan no indication where he meant to strike. Skylan shifted his weight and made a quick sword thrust at the ogre’s chest. As he had hoped, the ogre raised his shield to block the blow, leaving his legs exposed. Swiftly Skylan lowered his sword, stabbed the blade into the ogre’s unprotected thigh, swinging his shield outward at the same time to sweep aside a blow from the hammer.

  If the ogre had struck Skylan’s shield with full force, he would have broken his arm. As it was, the ogre’s leg buckled when Skylan drove his sword into the thig
h muscle. The ogre didn’t fall, but he was thrown off balance, and the hammer swing hit Skylan’s shield a glancing blow. Skylan’s shield arm tingled from wrist to shoulder, and he fell back to catch his breath, expecting his opponent to do the same. This was how humans fought. A flurry of five or six attacks and counterattacks and then a fall back. Skylan was astonished, therefore, to see the ogre godlord come after him. Blood flew from the ogre’s wound; saliva drooled from his mouth. The hammer swung at Skylan’s head.

  Skylan aimed his sword again at the ogre’s leg. The godlord, anticipating this attack, lowered his shield to block. Skylan kicked the shield aside, which left the ogre wide open, and drove his sword into the ogre’s hip joint, severing tendons and muscle. The ogre godlord crashed to the ground. Howling in pain and rage, he rolled about in agony, wallowing in his own gore.

  Skylan flung aside his shield. He shifted his sword to his left hand and bent over the ogre to wrest the Vektan Torque from the godlord’s fat neck.

  Pain lanced through Skylan. The godlord had stabbed him in the shoulder with his knife. Skylan slammed the hilt of his sword into the ogre’s face. He felt and heard bone crunch, and the ogre quit moving. Skylan’s fingers closed around the golden circlet that was half-buried in the ogre’s flesh and yanked it free.

  He saw, out of the corner of his eye, the shaman flapping his black-feathered arms like an irate bird, waving his gourd at him and chanting strange words. Skylan paid no attention to the shaman. He heard Norgaard’s voice shouting to kill the shaman, but he paid no attention to his father either.

  With the torque safe, Skylan drove his sword into the ogre’s neck, cleaving the head from the body. He raised the torque into the air in triumph. He was about to shout a prayer of thanks to Torval, when he was suddenly deluged with warm blood. Blood flew into his eyes. Blood filled his mouth. He tried to wipe the blood from his eyes, but he couldn’t. He tried to spit the blood out of his mouth, but he couldn’t do that either. He couldn’t move his lips or his tongue. He couldn’t move his hands. He couldn’t shift his feet. All he could do was stare at the black-feathered shaman.

  The shaman had known better than to try to stop the fight between the godlord and the human. The shaman was permitted to bless the warriors before the battle, but he was strictly forbidden, on pain of death, to take part. In the old days, not so long ago, shamanistic magic among the ogres was known as “death-magic.” Ogre shamans did not necessarily have to kill something for their magic to work, but they did have to make a sacrifice of some kind. Ogres were pragmatic. They knew that life was hard and you never got something for nothing. In the dark days, when they worshipped dark gods, ogre shamans who wanted to raise a dead ogre did so by killing off one of his relatives. Ogres healed sickness in one by inflicting the illness onto another.

  When the Gods of Raj took over, they had been appalled by such behavior. Pragmatic themselves, they saw that their worshippers were eventually going to kill themselves off. The Gods of Raj persuaded the shamans to use symbolic sacrifice to replace blood sacrifices. Break a gourd, not a head. The shamans were still in the practicing phase of trying to learn this new magic, which meant their spell-casting tended to be erratic and unreliable, resulting in some spectacular failures. Ogre warriors feared their own shaman far more than they did the enemy, and so shamans were not permitted to join the fighting.

  The shaman now had nothing to hold him back. The godlord was either dead or dying, and the human was about to recover the Vektan Torque.

  The moment the shaman had seen the torque around Horg’s neck, he had sensed its power. He was the one who had urged the godlords to accept Horg’s bargain, take the torque, and leave him and his people in peace. The shaman had been irate when the godlord claimed the torque for himself. The shaman wanted the torque as he had never wanted anything in his life.

  And now it was going to be his.

  The shaman drew a knife and lopped off the top half of the gourd. Mumbling the words to his spell—or at least what he hoped were the words to the spell—he scooped up the dead godlord’s blood in the gourd and flung the blood into Skylan’s face. Somewhat to his amazement, the shaman saw the spell work. The young human was paralyzed, unable to move. The shaman reached out, plucked the Vektan Torque from Skylan’s frozen fingers, and turned and ran for the sea.

  Disaster struck so swiftly that the Torgun had no idea, at first, that disaster had struck at all. Elated by their victory, the men laughed out loud to see the ogre shaman fling blood on Skylan and then run off, his feathers flapping around his bony knees.

  Norgaard was not laughing.

  “Stop him! He has the torque!” Norgaard thundered.

  Garn saw the flash of gold in the shaman’s hand, and he realized what had happened. He gave a shout and dashed down the hill in pursuit. Torgun laughter changed to curses as the others joined Garn in his frantic chase.

  Ogres could move fast when there was need. Terrified of the dragon, the ogres had surged through the water and were swarming up ladders to board their ships. By the time the shaman reached his ship, his fellow ogres had already pulled up the ladder and were raising the sail. They lowered a rope, and one of the godlords helped drag the shaman aboard.

  As Garn and his men reached the sea, the ogre sails caught the wind. The outraged Torgun flung off their armor and plunged into the waves, intending to swim to their dragonship and sail after the ogres in pursuit. The Torgun learned then, if they had not learned before, that ogres were not stupid. Those waiting onshore cried out in anger and dismay to see clouds of smoke rise from the Venjekar, accompanied by orange tongues of flame. Unable to steal the dragonship, the ogres had set it ablaze.

  “Kahg!” Norgaard bellowed at the dragon, who was circling above them, glaring at the ogres. “Go after them! Sink them! Burn them!” He jabbed his finger at the departing ogres.

  The Dragon Kahg only shook his head and continued to fly above them in gloomy circles.

  “He cannot,” said Treia. “The Dragon Kahg fears that if he attacks, the ogres will destroy the Vektan Torque. He dares not risk it. According to the dragon, the ogres spoke the truth, at in least part. There was a great battle in heaven, though only one of the gods, Desiria, was slain. Unfortunately, she was the Goddess of Life. With her death, we have no ability to heal.”

  Norgaard stared at the woman, unable to grasp the enormity of what she was saying. Bewildered and still angry, he lashed out at her. “You are awfully calm about this, Priestess!”

  Treia shrugged. “I am just glad to know it wasn’t my fault.”

  Having lost the chase, Garn returned to Skylan, who remained spellbound, unable to move. Taking off his helm, Garn dipped it in the seawater. He washed the blood from Skylan’s face, and the spell was shattered.

  “Get out of my way!” Skylan cried, almost knocking Garn down. “I’m going after the torque.”

  “Skylan, stop,” said Garn. “The Venjekar is on fire. There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I can swim!” Skylan said, wrestling with his friend. “I’ll swim around the world if I have to—”

  “We cannot recover the torque,” Garn said swiftly. “But we can avenge its loss. And we can avenge our dead,” he added with a grim glance at the bodies strewn over the bloody battleground.

  Skylan relaxed. His muscles twitched. His lips compressed. His blue eyes met Garn’s, and he spat a single word, “Horg!”

  BOOK

  2

  THE VUTMANA

  CHAPTER

  1

  The Norns spin the threads of our wyrds on the day of our birth. This does not mean that a man’s wyrd—or a woman’s—cannot be changed. Each man’s wyrd is affected by the wyrds of others, when their threads cross his. Not even the gods remain untouched.

  The morning the Torgun fought for their lives against the ogres, their clansmen, the Heudjun, gathered at Torval’s Rock. Draya joined them.

  After her disastrous confrontation with Horg over the Vektan Torque, she had sp
ent the night praying in the Great Hall of the Gods. She had not returned to her dwelling. Horg would be off somewhere, grunting and sweating with one of his concubines, but when he was finished with his lovemaking, he would return to his own bed to sleep.

  This night, he would find his bed empty. She would not be there. Not this night. Not any other night. She loathed him. She could not stomach the sight of him. Her hatred was so deep, it drowned fear.

  That said, what was she going to do about him? Horg was not fit to be Chief of Chiefs. He was not fit to empty the pisspot of any brave warrior. Yet she dared not challenge him openly.

  Horg was cunning. If he went through with what he had threatened, telling the people that the Gods of the Vindrasi were dead, the entire Vindrasi nation would be thrown into turmoil. People would come to the Kai Priestess, demanding answers, and what would she say? The gods lost a great battle, one of their number is dead, Torval is lying low, and Vindrash has gone into hiding. The people would be thrown into despair.

  Draya would have to tell the Vindrasi some version of the facts eventually. They were already starting to wonder why the Bone Priestesses had lost their ability to heal the sick and injured. But as a mother keeps a brutal truth from a child, so Draya wanted to keep the worst of what she knew from her people for as long as possible. Which meant she had to find a way to deal with Horg.

  Draya spent the night in agony, restlessly pacing the length of the Hall, seeking answers to her dilemma. She prayed to the goddess, but Vindrash did not respond.

  Day dawned. Across the fjord, the Torgun were forming their shield-wall, each warrior aware that he might not live to see the twilight.