Rurik's Arc

Chapter 19 of 22

Rurik came down off the rock. The fresh column crossed the far ground, hard for the pass. Both his wyrms bled here in the cut. His men leaned on their bows and could barely stand. Eleven arrows would not turn horses. He counted the hands he had and knew the number was too small. He needed more before that column reached the throat of the pass. "We can't hold two fronts," Thorin said. The old dwarf wiped his father's axe on his sleeve. "Not with this many. Not tired." "Then we find more hands," Rurik said. Bjorn spat blood into the mud. "There are none. We spent them all." Rurik's belt-knife still hung at Bjorn's hip, the hostage against gold not yet paid. Bjorn met his eyes and did not look away. "The wild folk stayed back. They wanted proof." Rurik looked north, past the crest, toward the low ground where the stone brewing hall sat. He had passed it going in. Kjell's group had gone that way at dusk, into the enemy camp, hunting the master under the mountain. If any of them lived, they were close. "Kjell," Rurik said. "Send the wyrm." Gunnar frowned. "It's cut half through." "It can fly once more." Rurik knelt by the wounded creature and pressed his hand to its neck. "Find the hunter. Bring him." The wyrm dragged itself up and beat into the sky, listing on the torn side. They waited in the cut. The column grew larger on the far ground. Then boots came up the slope, and Rurik reached for his axe. Kjell climbed into the gap first. His braided beard was short one troll tooth, the space raw where it had ridden thirty years. Blood crusted his armor. Behind him came men Rurik had not sent out and did not know, hard mountain fighters with soot on their hands and enemy weapons in their fists. A dozen of them, then more. "The master under the mountain is dead," Kjell said. He did not soften it. "We opened the deep roads and killed what sat there." He looked at the column across the ground. "These freed themselves when the binding broke. Their homes are gone. They'll fight the ones who burned them." Rurik counted. Thirty hands, maybe forty. Fresh. Angry. "They fight for pay?" Bjorn asked. "They fight for the men who torched their fields," Kjell said. "That's the ones coming now." Rurik stood in the throat of the cut with the number he had needed. He looked at the fresh fighters, then at the column bearing down on the pass. "Gunnar. Reset the door," he said. "Kjell, put your men on the high rock. We choke this column the way we choked the last." He had found the hands. But the north column was closer now than it had been, and it did not slow. The fight for the pass itself had not yet begun.