Called to Darkness Read online

  It knocked the wind out of her, but she didn't dare let it slow her down. She scrambled to her feet just as Eovath grabbed the long, heavy tabletop between them. With a grunt, he flipped it up off the trestles and sent it spinning at her.

  She flung herself backward, and the makeshift weapon just missed her. Unfortunately, it couldn't miss all the incapacitated Blacklions sprawled on the ground. A woman cried out as the weight smashed down on her.

  Kagur resisted the urge to look down and find out who it was. She kept her eyes on her foe.

  Who, intentionally or not, had just cleared a larger space for the two of them to fight in. With bodies, severed limbs, benches, trays, drinking horns, and chunks of roast meat strewn about, the footing would be treacherous. But that was true of the rest of the tent as well, and maybe with a little more room to maneuver, Kagur could use her speed and agility to at least hold out until Dolok returned.

  She glanced at a table next to the open space. She grabbed a long carving knife—it verged on being a proper weapon, even though it seemed like a bad joke compared to Eovath's axe—for her right hand and somebody else's eating knife for her left. Then she edged forward.

  Her foster brother snorted. "Truly?" he asked.

  She didn't bother to answer with words. She simply rushed in, and the axe whirled to meet her. She ducked the horizontal stroke and kept coming.

  The low ceiling was already awkward for Eovath, and getting in close seemed the best way to further turn his size into a handicap. At that distance, big warriors had difficulty hitting smaller ones.

  Or at least that was how it was supposed to work. But Eovath was an expert combatant, and after the hundreds of times they'd practiced together, he understood exactly what she was doing and why. He strove to keep his distance and, when she got close anyway, met her with elbow strikes and jabs with the butt of the axe. Meanwhile, his vest of boiled leather stopped her stabs and slashes from reaching his vitals. As often as not, the attacks failed to penetrate at all.

  Eovath chopped at her head. She stepped back out of range, caught her ankle on something, and staggered, struggling not to fall.

  The giant charged. The axe flashed at her, she twisted, and the weapon passed so near that it snagged in her mantle and ripped free.

  Eovath hesitated, as if he imagined he'd actually struck her. Kagur recovered her balance and darted in. She stabbed his hip where the vest didn't cover and lunged on by.

  He roared and whirled with blood already welling from the puncture. They glared at one another, circled, and then he let go of the axe with his left hand and gripped it with the right alone.

  Evidently, Kagur decided, the knife still jutting from his left forearm was bothering him. At first, he'd scarcely seemed to notice the wound, but now it must be painful enough that he needed to let the damaged limb dangle.

  Which meant Kagur should attack his left side. It would be harder for him to swing the axe across his body to hit or block her there. Only a little bit harder, but little advantages were all she had.

  Pivoting, fixing her gaze on the crook of his right arm, she raised the carving knife as if for a throw. He sneered but also poised himself to bat the blade out of the air.

  Instantly, she charged at his left flank. She'd cut even lower this time, hamstring him and dump him on the ground, then slash his throat as it came within reach.

  She could see the sequence of events so vividly it was like it was already happening. Perhaps that was why it caught her so completely by surprise when Eovath's left arm, the one she'd thought useless, snapped into motion.

  She tried to stop short, but it was too late. Looking like a sliver in his enormous hand, Eovath's dagger drove into her midsection. It didn't exactly hurt, but she felt a kind of shock all through her body, like she was made of shattering ceramic. She stumbled back and fell with the blade still buried inside her.

  She struggled to understand what was happening, but it didn't make any sense. She was supposed to outwit and outfight Eovath, and he was supposed to fall down. Everything was the wrong way around.

  She looked at the hilt of the dagger and realized she knew it well. Her father had fashioned it himself, carving it to look like a crouching cave lion and staining the pale bone dark. Then he'd presented it to Kagur to give to Eovath as a token indicating that the tribe now trusted him with weapons.

  The giant gazed down at her with tears running down his cheeks, washing away the specks of gore that had splashed that high. "I'm sorry," he said.

  She could see he meant it, that he truly did love her. Insane though it might be, she felt a surge of love in return. Somehow the emotion managed to well up inside her without in any way diminishing her horror, grief, and rage. She'd never known it was possible to feel so many different things at the same time.

  She was still marveling at it when she glimpsed Dolok creeping up behind Eovath. Her lover had armed himself with a longsword and a round shield of wood covered in leather.

  The sight of him cut through the daze her injury had engendered. She struggled to control her expression lest it change and so warn Eovath of the peril at his back.

  Apparently, she managed it. Her foster brother just kept looking down at her and weeping. She felt a kind of vicious eagerness—another emotion to add to the stew—to see Dolok cut him down.

  But the toe of Dolok's boot bumped a wooden cup lying amid the gory litter on the floor. The cup rolled and clicked against a platter.

  It was a tiny sound, and Kagur insisted to herself that Eovath wouldn't hear it over the wail of the wind outside the tent. But he plainly did, for he started to pivot.

  Dolok charged, and his sword flashed yellow in the firelight. Eovath finished turning just in time to parry the cut with his axe.

  The giant struck back, and Dolok blocked with his shield. He had it angled to make the axe glance off, yet even so, Eovath's strength knocked him backward.

  Eovath advanced and struck again immediately. Step by step, he pushed his opponent back. The relentless pressure kept Dolok from making many attacks of his own, and when he did, the axe deflected the sword with a clang of steel on steel.

  I have to help, Kagur thought. I have to! But when she tried to stand, agony ripped through her middle and paralyzed her.

  With his back nearly against the wall of the tent, Dolok finally landed a cut to Eovath's wrist. Then, at last, the frost giant faltered. At once, Dolok bellowed, feinted to the knee, then spun his sword up for a slash to the torso.

  Undeceived, Eovath stepped in and brushed aside the true attack. Then, not even bothering to chop with the edge, he simply rammed the top of the axe into Dolok's face. Bone crunched, and the human flew backward into the wall of the tent, bounced back, and collapsed. Blood flowed out around his head.

  When Eovath turned back around, his face was once again a mask of malice, without a trace of the love, regret, and perhaps even guilt Kagur had seen there previously. He was ready to finish off the rest of the tribe, and she was helpless to prevent it.

  Or nearly helpless. She couldn't save anyone else, but if she played dead, perhaps he wouldn't feel the need to hack her to pieces.

  She tried it, and rather to her surprise, it worked. Eovath didn't hurt her any further. But she still had to endure the thuds of the axe striking home, to listen to the occasional truncated cry or whimper without crying out and giving herself away.

  She felt like the slaughter would never end. And in fact, she passed out before it did.

  Chapter Two

  Stand Up and Walk

  In good weather, following game, the Blacklions often didn't bother to pitch their tents. Maybe that was why, lying on the soft summer grass, Kagur could hear the prisoner weeping.

  Father said the blue-skinned giant boy needed to cry, and that they should leave him alone to do his grieving. He'd said, too, that for the time being Kagur shouldn't go near him by herself. But the choked sobbing pulled at her. It bothered her that someone was so sad.

 
Quietly, to avoid waking her parents, she rose and crept past other sleepers snoring on the ground. But when she neared the captive, she hesitated.

  He was a boy. A person could tell it from his face. But he was also as tall as a grown man and had broader shoulders and bigger muscles than any warrior in the tribe. Father was right; he could hurt a little girl if he got his hands on her.

  But Father also said Blacklions didn't balk in the face of danger, and anyway, the giant seemed too wretched to muster the resolve to hurt anybody. Kagur continued her approach.

  The grownups had the boy tethered with a braided rawhide rope to a bone stake driven into the ground. That seemed cruel, but it gave her something to say: "Father told me you'll only have to be tied for a little while."

  He didn't answer, just peered back at her. In the dark, she couldn't really make out the color of his eyes, but they still looked pale and strange.

  "Did you try to get loose?" she asked. It was what she would have done in his place.

  He looked at her for a while longer. Then, haltingly, he said, "I got ...no place go no more."

  She hadn't anticipated he'd have difficulty talking to her. Human speech must be his second language.

  That seemed strange, too, but in an interesting way, not a scary one. Now that she was up close, there was nothing menacing about him, just abundant evidence of the aching misery that made her want to comfort him.

  "It's nice here," she said. "My father—our father, now—is nice."

  He stared at her like she'd said something crazy.

  "I'm your sister Kagur," she continued, determined to break through, "and I'm nice. I'll show you."

  She slipped her hand inside her deerskin shirt with its dangling fringe, brought out a cloth bag, and shook out a round piece of candy. In the dark, she couldn't tell if it was a red one or a purple one. She offered it to the prisoner.

  He looked at it like he suspected it was something intended to hurt him. Or maybe like a part of him wanted to slap it away.

  "They're good," she said. "Father got them from a trader. They're like berries, only hard. Suck on them, and they last a long time."

  Or so the merchant had claimed. Kagur didn't know firsthand. After a little while, she always succumbed to the urge to crunch them up.

  The giant boy took the candy and put it in his mouth. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked, and then, for just an instant, his lips twitched into the slightest of smiles. "Good," he said.

  With a twinge of reluctance, but only a tiny one, she said, "You can have the ones I've got left."

  "I have something for you, too," he said, and suddenly he was neither tethered nor a grief-stricken child anymore. He was so huge she felt like a mouse in comparison, and he lunged at her with a knife and stabbed it into her stomach.

  She looked down at the stained bone hilt and said, "This isn't right. I don't give you the dagger until winter."

  Then a stab of pain tore the dream apart. Kagur gasped, and her eyes flew open to a reality more horrific than the nightmare.

  Her wound throbbed, and the air was cold. The fires in the pits had burned to embers. With Eovath gone and everyone else chopped to pieces, there hadn't been anyone to feed them.

  The dead stared at Kagur. Your fault, they whispered. Your fault.

  No, curse it, it wasn't. She'd done her best to save them, and they weren't really accusing her anyway. It was just her wound, her pain, her impending death playing tricks on her mind.

  For a moment, the thought of death enticed her. It would end all the pain, the searing pulse in her guts and the anguish of loss and betrayal.

  Then a spasm of anger revealed the temptation for the contemptible thing it was. Weakling! she thought. Coward!

  She had to live. There was no one else to avenge the tribe.

  She hadn't been able to leap up when Eovath and Dolok were fighting, but maybe she could haul herself to her feet now, before she bled out or froze to death. She strained to flop over onto her side.

  That small motion spiked even fiercer pain through her midsection, making her gasp and blurring her eyes with tears. But she was halfway to shifting herself onto her hands and knees. Teeth gritted, she heaved herself over the rest of the way.

  The dagger hanging straight down from her abdomen, she crawled to the nearest table. She gripped the edge and dragged herself to her feet.

  The stress of that exertion was so great that the tent spun around her and the dimness grew even darker. She held onto the table with what little strength remained to her to keep from falling back down or passing out.

  After a few moments, the dizziness and faintness abated, although she could sense them hovering close, like beasts waiting to pounce. Still holding onto the table, she inched toward the nearest tent flap, past one corpse after another.

  A part of her didn't want to look at them, but she forced herself. She needed to know exactly what Eovath had done. The knowledge would feed her outrage, and her rage would give her strength.

  As she should have expected, Eovath had desecrated their father's body more thoroughly than any of the others. All four of Jorn Blacklion's limbs were severed, and even his torso lay in multiple pieces. The fragments of his cloven head sat in a splash of blood and brains.

  Seeing him that way was unbearable. Kagur yearned to go to him, tend to him, and somehow restore some measure of his dignity. But she couldn't spare the strength or the time.

  Eventually, she neared the tent flap. She drew a ragged breath and took her hands off the table. She swayed but didn't fall back down. Careful not to trip over anything, she shuffled to the wall of the tent.

  Her trembling hands were as weak and clumsy as the rest of her. She fumbled with the knots securing the flap for what seemed like forever. Why hadn't she picked up another knife from the table? She was nearly convinced she'd have to turn around and get one, even though the prospect of taking even a couple extra steps was ghastly, when the lashings finally came undone.

  Now for the hard part.

  She shuffled out into the night. Shrieking, the frigid wind slammed into her and tried to knock her down. She staggered and kept her feet, but again the effort made the pain in her guts even more excruciating.

  She wondered if the dagger shifted in the wound and cut her a little more every time she moved, then scowled the demoralizing thought away. Even if it was true, she couldn't do anything about it. She knew better than to pull the blade out. That was apt to kill her on the spot.

  Hunched against the wind and the drumbeat of agony in her middle, she stumbled onward to find that forcing her way through the snowdrifts was like wading through a freezing quagmire. The snow wasn't really trying to clamp tight around her numb feet and calves and lock her in place, but her feebleness and addled senses made it seem that way.

  In fact, her progress was so torturous that it soon became impossible to think of anything but the next step, and then the one after that. When she lifted her eyes and found the mammoths looming in front of her, it took a moment to remember they were what she'd been laboring to reach.

  "Lift," she croaked, not caring which of the huge shaggy beasts responded. Unfortunately, none of them did. They hadn't heard the puny rasp of her voice over the wail of the wind.

  She staggered closer. "Lift! Lift!" She was still wheezing, not shouting like she wanted.

  His curving tusks ringed with the dyed leather bands she'd placed there, Grumbler padded forth from within the herd. He and Kagur were fond of one another, and he evidently hadn't needed to hear her call to come to her. It had been enough to catch her scent.

  Curling, his trunk sniffed and nuzzled at her. For a mammoth, he was gentle about it, but the nudging still nearly dumped her in the snow. He made a low, querulous sound when he sensed that she was hurt.

  "It's all right," she said. "Lift!"

  Grumbler raised his right foreleg.

  Kagur took hold of the mammoth's ear. She tried to step up onto the animal's fetlock, but couldn't heave her l
eft foot high enough.

  No! She could. She would. She hadn't made it this far only to fail at the final task.

  Snarling against the hammering pain in her middle, Kagur strained and finally got her foot planted. Grumbler immediately lifted his leg higher. It was what he was supposed to do, but she still nearly lost her grip on his ear and spilled back onto the ground.

  Nearly, but not quite. She hauled herself onto his back, turned him to the north, and bumped him three times with her heels to start him running.

  I'm coming for you, brother, she thought, and then fell unconscious again.

  Chapter Three

  A Guest of the Fivespears

  Near the pond, the summer grass was tall, and the saber-toothed cat had found a low place in the ground to hide. Despite his skill at hunting and tracking, Kagur's father failed to notice the spotted beast. Nor did he hear it when it broke cover at his back.

  Thirty paces away, Kagur had paused to admire little pink bog rosemary flowers growing intermixed with stringy white reindeer moss. Still, she saw Jorn's peril, and she had an arrow fletched with goose feathers already nocked. As the saber-tooth started its charge, she drew and loosed.

  Her arrow plunged into the cat's shoulder. It stumbled but then kept running.

  Kagur drew another arrow even though it was too late. Quick as she was, she didn't have time for another shot.

  Fortunately, she didn't need one. The cat staggered again, although she couldn't tell why, and then fell down thrashing.

  Father heard that. He pivoted, pulled back his own longbow, and drove an arrow into the saber-tooth, whose convulsions then subsided.

  Kagur ran toward the fallen beast while Eovath did the same from the opposite direction, his long legs eating up the distance. He must be the one who'd stopped the cat.

  Along with their father, they scrutinized the animal, making sure it was really dead. Then Kagur asked, "How?"