03 - God King (6 page)

Govannon felt the metal and clamped it hard, drawing it out and placing it
upon the anvil.

The stink of hot iron burned the air and its orange-yellow colour told him it
was just right. His sight was all but destroyed, but his sense for the metal was
just as strong.

“Looks good, da,” said Bysen. “Forging heat right enough.”

“Aye, I can tell, lad,” nodded Govannon, handing his son the tongs and
feeling on the workbench for his fuller. Its curved, walnut grip slipped into
his hand and he hefted it to get the weight right before bringing it down in a
short, powerful arc onto the iron bar. He struck several blows, swiftly
establishing a working rhythm as Bysen turned the bar and drew it out, gradually
lengthening the metal. They’d done the hard work earlier, working with strikers
and other apprentices to work the cold lump of iron into a long bar from which
to shape the blade.

It was to be the sword of the Empire’s Grand Knight, for Alfgeir had earned
great accolades in his defence of the realm in the Emperor’s absence.

“Turn it again,” said Govannon. “Once with each strike.”

“Aye, da,” said Bysen. “Once each, aye, da. Like you say.”

Govannon worked the fuller along the length of the iron, working by instinct
and earned skill. The bar was a blurred outline of yellow gold before him, and
he could only tell Bysen was turning the bar by the sound of the hot metal
scraping on the anvil. Counting his strokes, he adjudged the iron to be the
right length. He had taken Alfgeir’s measurements and tested the weight and
balance of his currently favoured blade before laying a hammer to the metal. The
Grand Knight of the Empire preferred a weapon with the weight slightly towards
the tip, requiring a stronger arm to wield it, but delivering a more powerful
blow when it landed. The ore that formed this sword had come from the mines of
the Howling Hills, Cherusen land, which meant it was freer from impurities and
should produce a blade of great brilliance.

“Look long enough?” he asked.

“Aye, da,” said Bysen. “Just right, da.”

Govannon wiped a meaty forearm across his brow, blinking away salty beads of
sweat as they dripped into his eye. Just for a second, he could see the outline
of his son clearly, a giant of a boy, nineteen summers old, but with the mind of
a child.

Grief and guilt welled in the smith’s heart.

It had been at Black Fire when everything had changed.

Govannon and Bysen had been fighting in the heart of the Unberogen lines,
smashing greenskins down with powerful strokes of their iron-headed forge
hammers. After hours of fighting, the day was almost won, and the warriors of
the Emperor’s army were hot and close to exhaustion. Victory was so close, they
could almost touch it, and that alone kept them fighting beyond the limits of
endurance.

A shadow fell over their sword band and an abominable stench rose up as a
monstrous, rugose-skinned troll crashed into their flank. Taller than three men
and growling with a throaty roar of idiot hunger, it swung a tree branch as
thick as an oaken beam. Six men were bludgeoned to death with a single blow.

Many ran from its horror, but Govannon and Bysen stood firm, their hammers
feeling woefully inadequate to face such a towering mass of muscle and fury.
Warriors rallied to their side, for they were men much respected amongst the
Unberogen, and together they charged the hideous creature. Its leering grin
split apart in a mass of broken teeth and half-chewed flesh, but it was not in
anticipation of feeding. A burbling heave spasmed through its stomach, and a
caustic flood of acidic bile spewed from its wide mouth.

Govannon was one of the lucky ones. Leading the charge, he was spared the
agony of being eaten alive by the deadly acid. His helmet took the brunt of the
splash, but after three hours of fighting in the punishing heat, he’d pushed the
visor up. Droplets of the viscous stomach bile dripped into his eyes, and the
fiery agony as it burned into them was the worst pain in the world.

He remembered Bysen leaping to face the hideous beast. Its heavy club had
smashed him to the ground and left him lying with his skull caved in like a
broken egg. That had been the end of their battle, and the next Govannon had
known was days later when he awoke in the surgeons’ tents at the mouth of the
pass. Bright light hurt his eyes and only the dimmest outline of shapes and
contrasts were visible to him.

Though his sword brother, Orvad, had splashed water into his face moments
after his wounding, the damage was done. His sight was virtually gone. Orvad
died later in the battle, but with the help of one of the surgeons’ runners,
Govannon had sought news of his son. It took two days to find him among the
thousands of wounded, and though he still lived, the lad left the better portion
of his brain in the dusty sand of the pass.

Govannon could not weep, his eyes ruined by the beast’s venom, but he sat
with his son until they were set upon wagons for the journey back to Reikdorf.

Black Fire had taken away his sight and his son’s mind, but there wasn’t a
day went by he wasn’t glad he had stood in the line and faced the greenskin
horde.

“Da?” said Bysen. “What the matter, da?”

Govannon snapped out of his melancholy, squinting through the gloom at the
blurred outline of his son. He held the sword metal in the tongs, and Govannon
shook his head at his foolishness. The metal had cooled too far to work, and
would need to be reheated. That was careless, for the quality of the blade would
suffer after too many reheats.

“Nothing, son,” said Govannon. “Let’s get this metal heated up or this sword
will be no better than a greenskin club.”

“Aye, da,” grinned Bysen. “Heat it up, aye, heat it good.”

The metal was thrust into the fire and the process began again.

Govannon watched the seething glow, wishing for the thousandth time that he’d
kept his visor lowered.

“Damn you for a fool,” he whispered, the words lost in the roaring of the
furnace.

They were getting close now, too close. Cuthwin moved as fast as he could
with the injured dwarf stumbling alongside him. He bore the bulk of Deeplock’s
weight, which was slowing him down and making it much harder to keep their
passing secret. The forest had closed in, thick and ideal for getting lost in,
but Cuthwin had travelled this way many times.

The forest was a harsh companion, a friend to those who understood its
rhythms, a deadly enemy to those who didn’t give it the proper respect. Cuthwin
knew how to make his way in the wilderness, but the goblins were equally at home
in its shadowed depths. Their pursuers were, at best, a mile behind. The wind
carried the yapping barks of the wolves and though Cuthwin tried to angle his
course so that it wouldn’t carry his scent to them, it was proving to be
impossible. He’d kept to the hard packed earth and stony ground where he could,
wading through shallow streams and leaving false trails to throw their pursuers.
That had bought him time, but hadn’t shaken the goblins.

He’d stopped every now and then to give the wounded dwarf a rest, and had
used the time to set traps on their back trail. At least one snare had caught a
wolf; he’d heard its plaintive cry of pain. The breath heaved in his lungs and
he knew he couldn’t run much further. At some point soon he’d have to turn and
fight. There hadn’t been time to pluck his arrows from the goblin and wolf
corpses, but his retrieved pack had a spare quiver with a dozen arrows. He
didn’t want to face the goblins and their wolves with only his bow and hunting
knife, so any ambush would have to be planned carefully.

Cuthwin looked up through the high branches of the tangled canopy, trying to
judge how far it was to the river. He could hear the distant sound of it and its
cold, clear scent was a crisp tang over the mulchy greenness of the forest. If
they were going to get away from these creatures, he’d need to have plotted
their course correctly.

Deeplock stumbled and almost dragged Cuthwin down with him.

“Up, mountain man!” he hissed. “Use those damn legs of yours!”

“Must… go back…” gasped the dwarf, and Cuthwin saw there was blood in his
beard.

“Not if you want to live,” he said, hauling the dwarf to his feet.

Deeplock muttered something else, but Cuthwin couldn’t make it out. He set
off again through the trees, but the dwarf fell before they’d managed ten yards.
Cuthwin fell with him, rolling to keep his bow from touching the ground.

“Damn you, but you’re trouble,” he hissed.

The sound of a howling wolf drifted through the trees. It was east of him,
and another answered it, this time to the west. There would be more behind him,
at least four, and he knew they were racing to get ahead of him, to close the
circle around him and leave him nowhere to run.

How far away were they? Listening to the echoes through the trees, he guessed
they were no more than half a mile from him. He cursed and gripped the dwarf’s
tunic, hauling him over his shoulder.

“Ulric’s balls, but you’re heavy,” he told the unconscious dwarf. Though much
shorter than Cuthwin, the dwarf was at least as heavy as a tall man. Bowed under
the dwarf’s weight, Cuthwin set off again, following the building swell of river
noise, hoping that he’d emerge from the trees where he’d planned.

He ran on, sweat dripping into his eyes, losing track of time and distance as
he fought to keep going. At last he saw a break in the trees and heard the
rushing sound of falling water. Despite his exhaustion, he smiled, knowing the
forest had steered him true. The sound of wolves was louder now. They knew they
had him cornered, and were howling to get the fear pumping in his veins.

“We’ll see about that,” he hissed, emerging from the trees onto the banks of
a fast-flowing tributary of the Reik. Tumbling from the high peaks of the Grey
Mountains, it wended its way through the uplands of the forest, gathering speed
as it fed into the basin of the fertile southlands of the Empire.

Perhaps fifty yards wide, the river poured northwards in a tumbling froth of
white spume and swirling black pools. The riverbed was only a yard or so down,
but it would take all his strength to keep his feet against the speed of the
water.

Greasy rocks slicked in moss jutted from the river as it widened towards a
crashing waterfall. A glittering rainbow arced over the edge of the drop, the
water falling to a wide pool of upthrust rocks far below.

Cuthwin set down his burden, leaning the dwarf against a boulder at the side
of the river. His pallor was terrible, and Cuthwin doubted that even the best
healers in Reikdorf could save him. To be killed rescuing a dwarf that likely
wouldn’t live out the day. That would be a poor way to meet his end.

Heavy tree branches drooped over the water, willows, whip-limbed birch and
young, supple saplings. Cuthwin shucked off his pack. He strung his bow and
unsheathed his hunting knife, moving quickly to the treeline and testing the
longest and thinnest tree branches.

A wolf howl came from the forest, and Cuthwin knew he didn’t have much
time.

Sweating and breathing hard, Cuthwin looped Grindan Deeplock over his
shoulders and waded back into the river. Swollen with mountain water, it was
bitterly cold and the breath caught in his throat. It threatened to snatch him
from his feet and send him hurtling over the waterfall, but thanks to the
additional ballast of the dwarf, Cuthwin was able to keep his balance. He waded
out into the river, biting his lip to keep the pain of the cold at bay.

A dozen yards to his right, the waterfall boomed and roared like a hungry
beast, and he tried not to think of how much it would hurt to be dashed to death
on the rocks below. He reached the halfway point of the river, shuffling his
feet through the mud and stones of the riverbed. Just ahead of him was a jutting
boulder, its surfaces worn smooth by the passage of centuries of water. He slid
Deeplock from his shoulders and propped him up against the rock, pressing his
own back into the dwarf to hold him in place.

The wolves emerged from the trees, seven of them, each with a goblin perched
behind the blades of their shoulders. Chittering laughter giggled from beneath
the goblins’ hoods, and hooked noses twitched in anticipation. They spat curses
at him in their foul language, and many lifted their short horn bows from their
backs.

Cuthwin pulled back on his own bowstring and let fly, sending an arrow into
the mouth of a snarling wolf and dropping it instantly. The goblin fell from its
back and plunged into the waters of the river. It squealed in fear before being
carried over the waterfall. The roar of the water swallowed its cries. Four of
the wolves entered the river, the flesh of their jaws drawn back over their
fangs. A black-fletched shaft skittered off the rock and Cuthwin flinched,
swinging his bow around and sighting down the length of his arrow.

He exhaled and loosed, watching the arrow as it slashed through the air to
sever the thin knot of bound saplings he’d wedged in the soft earth before the
bent branches of a long-limbed willow. Its branches whipped around, like the arm
of a catapult laid on its side, and slashed into the wolf-riding goblins. Two of
the wolves in the shallows were smashed from their feet and howled as they were
swept downriver towards the falls. They and their riders vanished over the edge
and as the other goblins watched in dismay Cuthwin nocked and let fly with
another arrow.

It punched through the chest of the goblin whose wolf had leapt back quick
enough to avoid his trap. Another goblin arrow spun up to slice the skin of his
forehead. Blood streamed down Cuthwin’s face, and he shook his head clear as the
remaining four wolves leapt into the river, their lean bodies powering them
through the water as the goblins held on for dear life.

Cuthwin waited until they were a dozen yards from him and sent his next shaft
into a branch he’d wedged beneath a precariously perched boulder further
upriver. His arrow thwacked into the wood, but the branch didn’t move. The
wolves snapped in the foaming water, and Cuthwin saw their feral hunger to tear
him apart. He loosed another shaft into the wood, and this time it fell from
where it was wedged into the soft mud he’d dug out of the riverbed.