Kjell's Arc

Chapter 2 of 27

Kjell reached the ridge above the road and stopped. Below him, the dead walked. He counted twenty at least. They had been villagers once. Now they shuffled in a loose line, blocking the only path to the mound. His axe could carve one down. Twenty would pull him apart before he cut the third. He crouched in the frost and knew he could not pass alone. Thorin came up beside him first, his father's rune-axe already in hand. Iron rings clicked in his gray beard. Gunnar followed, breathing hard from the climb, his forge-hammer slung across his broad back. They had walked with Kjell since the brewing hall. Thorin trusted no stranger, but he trusted a fight he could see. Gunnar watched the dead with a smith's cold eye, measuring them like bad iron. "Too many," Thorin said. "We won't burn twenty in the open." "We don't have to," Kjell said. He pointed to the coin in his palm. "The binding rune. Cut it into bone, then fire. But we need them still first." A third dwarf climbed the slope behind them. Thorgar, wide as a door, two bearded axes crossed on his back and a bear pelt across his shoulders. He had joined them on the road two nights past, hunting his own monsters. He looked at the dead below and named it plain. "Trap them," he said. "Drive them where the ground pins them." Gunnar nodded. "The gully." A narrow cut split the road ahead, steep on both sides. "Push them in. They can't climb fast." Kjell drew the iron traps from his belt and set them along the gully mouth. Then he stood in the open and shouted. The dead turned as one and came. Thorgar met the first with both axes, splitting it wide but not killing it. He drove it back with his shoulder. Thorin hooked another and shoved it into the gully. Kjell's traps snapped shut on cold legs. The dead fell, tangled, unable to rise together. They worked down the line. Kjell knelt on each pinned body and carved the binding rune deep into the breastbone, blade grinding through. Gunnar and Thorin held the thrashing limbs. When the marks were cut, Thorgar poured lamp oil and Kjell struck flint. The gully filled with fire. The dead stopped moving. Kjell watched them burn to ash, twenty leashes broken at once. His arms shook. The road ahead lay open. Gunnar crouched by the last corpse and pried something from its mouth. A second rune-stamped coin, but the marks ran different from the first. "This one's deeper," he said. "Older." He pressed it into Kjell's hand. "The lord marked his own soldiers. His binding will be stronger than these." Kjell closed his fist around both coins. The road was clear. But the draugr lord waited at the mound, and its runes would not break so easily.