Seven Kings

17

Tyro ran from the shadow of the leviathan as it broke the surface of the marsh. His broadsword slashed at greedy tendrils again and again. They shot forward quick as arrows, wrapping about arm, leg, and waist. The monster had already claimed his stallion, tearing it to pieces beneath him.

Men and mounts were snatched into the shuddering darkness, where uncounted mouths devoured them. Three times the oily arms lifted Tyro like a squirming rat, and three times he hacked his way free, plunging into brackish waters.

There was no name for the terror that guarded this swamp. Nothing like it in the legends of Uurz. A living mountain of flesh born of nightmares and madness. And still it keened, a screeching, wailing incantation that might have been some dead language spilling from the mouths of rotted corpses. The sound came from somewhere above, not from the many gnashing mouths that puckered and snapped across its bulk.

Tyro’s heart pounded beneath his golden breastplate, and the filth of the swamp stained every bit of his body. He strove onward through the muck, his boots heavy as iron. His feet made wet sucking noises when he raised them from the mud. He considered abandoning his bronze shield to make himself lighter; a warning in his gut made him keep it.

The next pair of tendrils took him by the legs, lifting him so that he hung upside down. The broadsword slipped from his slimy fingers. He watched it fall blade first into a mound of upturned silt.

He bellowed an animal cry.

I will not die here.

He took the round shield in both hands and drove its sharp edge into the tentacles gripping his legs. The fishy skin split and oozed a dark pus; a dozen more times he brought the shield’s edge down upon the coils, while Uurzians hacked and shrieked and died about him. The war songs of giants filled the night, and then the blast of a war horn. At last his shield broke through the coiled flesh, and he fell once more into the muck.

Raising his sodden head, he recognized the long note that rang through the night. It was the horn of Cerrois, one of the scouts sent to spy on the barbed watchtowers.

“Khyreins!”

Climbing free of the fen waters, he scrambled across the uneven terrain and found his sword. He sprinted toward a plot of high ground as the horn sounded yet again. Men’s voices shouted with fresh urgency. Warriors fled in both directions now, toward and away from the hungry leviathan. All sense of order among the ranks was lost.

“The Khyreins! They come!”

Instead of a battle plan, there was only chaos and terror. A cluster of blue-skinned Giants stood at the base of the leviathan now, making short work of its tentacles with axe, greatsword, and mace. This was a beast meant for the mighty Udvorg, not for the small arms and tiny blades of Men.

Vireon fought among the Giants, sinking his blade deep into a fanged mouth. A normal man’s arm would have been chewed off in an instant, but Vireon’s skin was harder than any bronze corselet. He carried the Blood of Vod in his veins, all the strength and power of Giants in the body of a Man. Tyro envied the Vodson his durable nature. Vireon did not even carry a shield into battle.

Let him lead this rear assault. Let the Giants find a way to bring down the leviathan. “Forward!” shouted Tyro. “Take the towers! No quarter for the Sons of Khyrei!”

A band of determined Uurzians rushed westward with their Emperor. Directly ahead, black figures raced from the treeline brandishing pikes and sabres: the front line of the Border Legions. A volley of arrows flew from the jungle like a swarm of buzzing insects.

“Shields!” Tyro shouted. All those who still had such protection fell to their knees in the mire, raising their metal to take the brunt of the falling shafts. Men bellowed as the keen darts found their way to flesh between the grooves of armor and over the lips of shields.

“Advance! Advance!” He did not stop to see how many warriors followed him, or how many lingered still in the grip of the leviathan. No doubt hundreds had already died, and the slaughter that was now beginning would not end soon. The first wave of masked and armored Khyreins now stood in a patient wedge formation, letting the northerners weary themselves by trudging through the bog. A second line lingered among the roots of the great trees, ranks of archers loosing another volley.

Again Tyro’s troops kneeled beneath raised shields. Sinking into the earth provided some defense for their lower bodies, and most of the shafts were thwarted. Tyro was the first one up and running again, and the soldiers took heart from his courage. They followed him, screaming rage and bloodlust at their faceless enemies.

Now even greater shadows emerged from the treeline, slinking into the marsh like Serpents. Tyro recognized them immediately as swamp lizards, at least a score of them. They scurried past the waiting Khyreins, who divided to let the beasts pass. On the back of each darting reptile sat a harnessed figure in black armor. The riders carried long lances, weapons designed for skewering enemies from the backs of their speeding mounts.

The great lizards moved faster than horses, splashing through the muck on webbed feet. The reptile riders were the first to meet the onrushing Uurzians; brave warriors died squirming on the ends of the long lances. Tyro sidestepped a killing thrust from a lancer whose scaly mount bore down upon him. Toothy jaws snapped at his head beneath its winged helm. He hammered its blunt snout with his shield.

These were the creatures that could bite Giants in half. Yet the enemy could not have many of them. Most likely they were a special detail meant for patrolling the swamps. His hopes sank when another score of lizard lancers glided into the fen from the treeline.

If he found a way to kill these beasts, the Uurzians could penetrate the jungle and take the nearest tower. Open a gateway to the red jungle and its black city. If he did not find a way, his righteous war would end tonight in this bloody quagmire. The Giants were too busy battling the leviathan; they could offer no help.

No, only a Man could do this thing.

Only an Emperor.

The masked rider thrust at him once more from atop the beast. Tyro’s sword knocked the lance aside. He leaped forward, aiming to reach the lancer with the point of his weapon, but exposed himself instead to the jaws of the reptile. It clamped down on his arm as he shoved the shield lengthwise into its maw. The edges of the shield sank into the lizard’s black gums, keeping its fangs away from his flesh. The shield quickly bent double under the power of that tremendous bite. Tyro pulled his arm free as the beast crushed the bronze disk between its jaws.

The reptile spat out his ruined shield as the lancer reached too late to unsheathe a sabre. Tyro launched himself forward and upward, clutching the saddle harness with his shield hand. He thrust the point of his broadsword at the rider’s throat. It sank deep into the exposed flesh below the visor.

Tyro climbed up the side of the bucking lizard as it writhed, trying to bite him off its own back. He took hold of the lance and kicked the dying rider from the saddle. Sitting unharnessed in the seat, gripping its leather with all the might of his beefy legs, he raised the lance high and plunged it into the back of the lizard’s wedge-shaped skull. The beast squawked and convulsed, whipping its tail hard enough to tumble Tyro into the mud.

He landed on his knees, and as the beast ran forward with the lance protruding from its tiny brain, he sank the length of his steel into its sagging white belly. Its own speed did the job for him. A mass of shiny entrails poured out of the creature, and it fell snout first into the mire.

Tyro climbed to stand upon the dead reptile’s back and shouted orders. Wild cries praised his kill, spreading word of it through the ranks. The Men of Uurz admired his savagery; they mobbed the lizards and their riders, opening the beasts’ bellies even as they died beneath fang, claw, and lance.

Glancing back at the battle of Giants and Swamp God, Tyro’s heart sank. The bodies of Udvorg lay torn and shattered about the massive creature, mingled with the viscera and pulped bodies of Men. Varda the Keen Eyes stood behind a ring of Udvorg swordsmen, casting blue flames that froze grasping tentacles and shattered them to bits. Giants died screaming in the grip of the horrid mouths spread across the demon’s bulk like palpitating sores. Tentacles wrapped Giants from head to feet whenever they could, jamming them into the fanged maws. It seemed the leviathan itself bore no wounds at all; for every tendril that axe or blade cut away, another one sprouted from the main bulk to replace it. The cries of dying Giants mingled with the growling war songs of their brothers.

Vireon climbed the monster’s side using the stubs of severed tentacles. He stood atop the hill of dark flesh with a pack of desperate Udvorg, hacking at the beast, searching for a vulnerable spot. Tyro lost sight of him. The beast sent more appendages coiling about the Giants upon its summit.

The Men of Uurz and Udurum both realized that this contest of titans was not their fight. They had taken Tyro’s lead and slogged forward to meet the advancing Khyreins, a horde of stained metal and terrified faces skirting the leviathan’s bulk to north and south. The oncoming legions stayed just out of reach of the tentacles, thanks to the quick blades of the Udvorg.

Lord Mendices was back there somewhere, commanding the legions to press forward and confront their true enemies. Tyro thanked the Four Gods for Mendices’ shrewdness in the face of carnage. The old veteran had endured great slaughters in his time.

Now the mobbing Uurzians finished the last of the great lizards, dragging the riders from their backs to die beneath a flurry of sharp blades. “Onward!” Tyro shouted as the forward ranks swelled. If the Giants had not been there to take the brunt of the Swamp God’s attack, they never would have made it this far. Yet the line of jungle and its precious solid ground loomed close now, and Tyro’s berserk cohort would be the first to take it.

He scanned the ground for a fallen shield, yet his eyes were drawn back to Vireon. Whipping tendrils lifted the King of Udurum into the moonlight above the leviathan. Tyro watched the greatsword fly from Vireon’s hands, and the Vodson screamed as he was stuffed whole into a grinding craw. Swallowed like all those before him.

Angrid the Long-Arm bellowed Vireon’s name. The Ice King hacked at the quivering mass with his great war axe, but Vireon was already lost in the creature’s deep gullet. The Giants fought more fiercely than ever, with cries of “Vireon! Vireon!” on their foaming lips.

Tyro had no time to mourn. He turned to the treeline and joined the mass of legionnaires. Now at last the Khyrein line rushed forward into the muddy shallows of the fen, eager to spill foreign blood. The first one to reach Tyro struck with a flashing sabre, nearly opening his throat. A shallow cut on his neck leaked hot blood across his corselet. Any deeper and he would have died in an instant. He had been careless, his mind occupied by Vireon’s tragic demise. No more.

His blade sang forward but the Khyrein’s shield turned it. The two blades met now with a spark. Tyro stared past the narrow slits of the fanged mask into the desperate eyes of his foe. He shouted a curse and rammed his left fist into the side of the black helmet. This threw the Khyrein off balance, and Tyro’s blade swung upward, biting deep into the man’s arm. The sabre fell and the warrior howled in pain. In the next second Tyro’s sword stabbed through his eye-slit and out the back of his skull.

Tyro took up the black shield with its painted crimson crown. He plunged into the mass of Khyreins filing out of the jungle. Impossible to say how many legions were stationed here, yet in the wake of the sprung trap he knew these towers had been fortified in expectation of the triple host’s coming. The numbers of Khyrein soldiers soon matched those of the northerners, and the battle at the edge of the swamp began in earnest. There would be no more advance until thousands of black-masked soldiers lay dead.

A timeless blur of steel, bronze, blood, and bone drowned his thoughts beneath a red haze. He was a deadly wind, blowing fierce through the bodies of his enemies. A creature of instinct, a killer set loose to rend and slay. Gashes on his arms and legs spouted blood across the greaves of his armor, and somewhere in the madness his gilded helm was knocked from his head. Crimson flowed into his eyes as he shook his tangled mane.

Somewhere in the midst of the melee Tyro found a massive log and sprang atop it for a better view of the field. Instantly a mass of Uurzians surrounded him. “Defend the Emperor! Save the Sword King!” The early rays of sunlight glittered on the bloody gold of his corselet and bracers.

To one side the Khyreins filled the deep jungle glades, whole legions waiting for the order to enter the fray. Masked generals watched from the backs of stationary lizards. On the other side, the heaving bulk of the leviathan steamed in the sunlight as the swarming Giants carved tirelessly and futilely at its flesh.

Tyro saw Angrid lifted in a profusion of grasping tentacles, just as Vireon had been torn from the leviathan’s back. A blue flame engulfed the Ice King, paled by the light of the morning sun, and he burst free of the brittle flesh. Varda grabbed him by the shoulder and rushed him away from the beast as a new mass of tendrils swept toward them both.

A fresh wave of Khyreins poured from the jungle.

There is no end to them.

Tyro tried to catch his breath.

Talondra. His mind’s eye traveled across leagues of trampled earth in an instant, down into the green bosom of the Stormlands, to settle on a vision of his wife. He recalled her eyes, a deeper blue than the Udvorg witch’s flame; he remembered the heat of her body against his own. His hand lay upon her smooth belly the day before he departed Uurz. She whispered a sweet secret in his ear. She carried now his first child.

A sudden darkness fell upon him in the glow of bloodstained morning.

He would never see her again.

Never know the face of his son.

Men died by the score and he stood frozen in the grip of this realization. In the back of his mind, Lyrilan’s voice pleaded with him. Don’t do this! All war is failure! His brother would never understand the realities of empire. The necessity of slaughters like this one. The need to face death and spit in its eye.

As the spears of Khyreins surrounded him on all sides and the soldiers protecting him were cut down, he lost all of these thoughts. He was no weak-kneed scholar, no cowardly wailer. He was the Son of Dairon. The Emperor of Uuz.

My son will know that I was a warrior.

He will read it in the scrolls of history.

This is how a warrior dies.

Howling and weeping, he raised his blade and leaped into a thicket of gleaming spears.

Climbing atop the mountainous bulk of the Swamp God, Vireon joined a cadre of Udvorg hammering and slashing at the beast’s slimy flesh. Only here, at the summit of its massive bloat, could he see the source of the terrible chorus that rang through the night. Seven swollen heads, each one tall as a Giant, grown in a tight ring at the center of the throbbing fleshmount. Tufts of hair grew from the desiccated skulls, little more than clumps of swamp weed and tangled moss, but they were much like the heads of dead Men or Giants.

Seven pairs of great blind eyes gleamed night-black and without pupils. Mouths hung slack and dribbling with noxious secretions, the teeth rotted to sharp stubs dark as charcoal. The flesh of each head was dark brown, splotched with green and gray lesions dripping pus. They were the heads of forlorn lepers, singing an ancient song of power. Serpentine tongues red as blood quivered inside their jaws, and the eyes rolled mindlessly. Yet they sang as one, an endless chorus of malformed syllables in a language that must have died long ago. The corruption of ages hung about the monstrosity, nowhere more evident than in these decayed yet living skulls.

Tentacles wound up from below, snatching Giants off the creature’s peak before any reached the ring of heads with mace or sword. Vireon leaped between the Udvorg, slicing at greedy coils, making his way closer to the ring of heads. The mystery of this beast lay within that ring. Perhaps therein lay the secret to killing it.

Leaping over a Giant whose battle axe dug deep into the scabrous flesh, he vaulted from the Udvorg’s shoulders and through the narrow space between two of the heads. He tumbled through scum and clinging vines toward the center of the ring.

Now the seven pairs of dead eyes fell directly upon him. It seemed they were not blind at all; or they saw with some deep sight born of nightmare and sorcery. Gripping his blade in both fists, he stared at the circle of leprous faces, caught at the midpoint of their sonorous wailing. It deafened him.

He shouted against the violence of their song, defying it with his own war cry, and rushed toward one of the idiot faces. He would slice all seven of those skulls from their perches one by one. Yet the strange song changed its pitch, and now the seven heads spoke to him as one. It was not his own language, yet he understood it. Their great spell did not cease, the terrible wailing continued to rise and fall, yet in some way they also spoke beneath the resounding chant. Stilled by words that hit him like iron hammers, Vireon could not bring his sword down upon the nearest of the twisted faces.

“You are not the King of Storms,” said the seven as one. Their mouthings reverberated between his ears, death cries torn from a deep catacomb.

He could not reply. His throat was an empty well.

“Long have we waited…” said the seven-who-were-one. “Since the White Panther plucked us from the smoking ruins of Omu and set us here to guard her border. She said the King of Storms would come to free us one day. We hoped that you were him… yet you are only a Man. Like we used to be.”

I am Vireon! he wanted to shout. The seven did not permit it. In silence, he struggled against the invisible chains weighing down his limbs. He refused to let go of the sword’s grip, though it had grown heavy as a palace gate.

“Where is the King of Storms?” demanded the seven.

Dead! Long dead!

He did not need to speak the words. They-it-understood. There were no more Giants atop the summit now. All had been cast down or devoured. Only Vireon remained on high, caught in the spell of the seven heads. A spider trapped in a web of sorcery. It was Vod the seven heads had expected, not him. Vod the Bringer of Storms, Breaker of the Desert, Slayer of Omagh. His father.

“Nooooooooo!” The great heads wailed. They rolled and convulsed atop fat necks. “There is no end to our suffering then. All hope of warm death and sweet oblivion is gone… dead like the King of Storms. So we must continue to serve Her. We, who were once the Lords of Omu, omnipotent in our glory. We were living Men-Kings! First she took our kingdom, then our souls. Our separate flesh she made as one with the soul of the swamp. Until the King of Storms comes to deliver us, she said. O, faint hope of a distant Age! Yet it was only another of her lies.”

I am Vireon! Vod of the Storms was my father! Still he could not move or speak. The sounds from below, Men and Giants dying, mingled with the horrid screech of the Swamp God’s song. It spoke one last time to him in seven cadaverous voices.

“You are not the King of Storms.”

It heaved a ragged sigh that rose into an awful howl.

A greasy tendril thick as his waist slithered about Vireon. It yanked him from the ring of heads with terrible force, and his blade went flying from numb fingers. Blackness engulfed him as the tendril stuffed him into a gnashing lower maw, a tidbit of raw meat to feed its bottomless hunger.

The stink of the Swamp God’s gullet was intolerable. Fresh blood and ancient filth. He sank through a narrow gorge lined with jagged fangs. The pulsing walls of flesh squeezed and clenched, trying to burst his stony skin. Since it could not break his flesh, it merely swallowed him deeper. He fought to breathe and got only a mouthful of noxious slime. He vomited and grabbed at the slippery chute, sinking his fingers deep into the raw flesh. The danger here was not in being gnashed to ribbons, but in suffocating from lack of air.

The beast pulled him deep into its bowels, some insistent tongue or tendril wrapped about his legs. He lost his handhold on the fleshy walls, nails leaving deep gashes as he descended toward the center of the leviathan’s mass. He kicked and tore and strove to burst through the inner flesh, but it was too thick and too spongy. He was a fly trapped in amber, a solitary mote striving to tear its way out of a living mountain. His heart pounded and he tried again to breathe, unsuccessfully. Then he plummeted, drawing air for a half-second as he fell through steaming vapors into a dark and cavernous space. He splashed into a bubbling reservoir of noxious fluid that was certainly not water. Water would not burn his thick flesh in such a way. He swam mightily upward, pausing only to snap the tendril that gripped his ankles.

He broke the surface but could see nothing in the putrid darkness. Bones drifted against him in the caustic slime, the remains of recent victims. His skin sizzled. Soon his bones would join these others, burned away by this liquid fire. He screamed, and his voice echoed through the fleshy cavity. The belly of the beast.

Splashes sounded the arrival of more Giant victims, already dead by the time their bodies reached this nether region. The Giants possessed great strength and endurance, but they lacked the density of Vireon’s compact body. Fate had distilled his gigantic strength into a human figure, making him quicker and more resilient than a true Giant. Yet even the best qualities of Man and Uduru combined would not be enough to survive this.

“I am the Son of Vod!” he cried into the sloshing dark.

A tremulous groan shook the immense gut, and the fiery fluid dissolved his skin slowly but surely. He swam about blindly searching for a handhold, something, anything to pull himself out of the corrosive lake. There was nothing.

He floundered, choking on the creature’s bile. Like swallowing the flaming oil of an upturned brazier. He wailed in pain, vomited again, and wondered how long his sturdy skin would last.

I am the Son of Vod.

His potent blood runs in my veins.

I brought the storms back to the Stormlands.

“Father!” he cried. “Father!”

I am the Son of Vod, who was both Man and Giant.

I have his blood. The blood of a sorcerer.

His burning skin shuddered, his eyes closed against the gloom. He screamed again, not in words, but with the guttural sound of a lost soul lingering on the edge of annihilation. Something long buried awoke inside him. A shock of fresh pain, unlike any other, erupted from his heart, spreading through his arms and legs. The pain of the monster’s gastric acid was less than nothing compared to the rending, stretching agony he now endured. His only awareness was of the scream itself, rising like the squeal of a war horn inside the cavernous gut.

He screamed, and the screaming changed him.

His chest swelled, and his shoulders. His legs grew like mighty oaks, lifting him above the lake of death. Inside his expanding skin, bones cracked and popped, lengthened and swelled. His corselet, belt, and sandals split apart, abandoned by his burgeoning mass. He grew tall as an Uduru, muscles flexing with unnatural torment. The echoes of his own howl came back to him, and he continued to rise. He raised his hands and found the roof of the bowel cavern. Still he grew, until his arms burst through that stubborn flesh like battering rams. He bent forward, doubling over, and his back met the ruptured roof of the cavern now, splitting it wide open.

A vision came to him as his body swelled and grew beyond all proportion: his father, beardless and young, standing tall as a mountain, locked in the grip of another leviathan, this one a great Serpent. No, the Father of Serpents, Omagh himself, whom Vod had killed and so changed the world.

Vireon watched the battle in the mirror of his mind as his mounting bulk shattered gristle, sinew, and nameless flesh, growing to match the size of the enveloping leviathan. Young Vod lopped off dozens of the Serpent-Father’s clawed legs with each swipe of his great axe, then wrestled the legless behemoth to the ground. Mountains shivered and the sky burst into a hurricane as Vod tore the Serpent’s head from its vast body. Here was the beast that had cast Old Udurum into ruin and wallowed like a pig in its smoking debris. And here was the Man-Giant who grew to the size of a God and ended Omagh’s ancient life.

Here was Vod the Giant-King.

My father.

My blood.

My inheritance.

Vireon’s fists burst into fresh air. Naked sunlight fell upon his gasping face. Still he grew, and his massive head followed his fists. His shoulders and torso came next, like a brutal infant tearing itself free of a mad womb. The leviathan’s countless tentacles quivered in the spasms of its destruction. The Giants below howled Vireon’s name as he burst through the summit of this hill of rancid flesh. The morning sun stung eyes and glittered upon the slime drenching his raw skin, red as that of a sunburned child. He lifted a great foot from the dying guts of the Swamp God and stomped down upon the seven bloated heads. They cracked like eggshells beneath his foot. The world shook beneath him. Again he stomped upon the putrescent hill of flesh, driving a legion of howling Udvorg away from the monster’s death throes.

Colossal and steaming, Vireon gazed across a carpet of crimson wilderness at the western horizon. He glimpsed a range of steaming volcanoes along the southern edge of the continent. He might even see the black spires of Khyrei if he stared hard enough into the northeast, but matters unfolding at his colossal feet demanded attention.

Far below his sopping head the quagmire seethed with armored Men rushing to kill each other. The black legions flowed from the jungle like a river of darkness, blending with the triple host in a swirling dance of death. A sea of tiny faces gazed up at Vireon, straining against the sun’s glare to admire the whole of his mountainous form.

These tiny Men and Giants.

They needed him.

He stomped the last of the leviathan’s bulk into a dark jelly, then raised his voice in a shout that sundered the heavens. A clap of earsplitting thunder shook the marshland. A vast wall of stormclouds sparkled with looming thunderbolts, and sheets of cold rain fell across the clashing legions. Men and Giants cheered as one about his heels.

“Vireon! Vireon, Son of Vod!”

He reached a massive hand down toward the swamp’s edge and scooped up a hundred Khyrein soldiers. They wailed and pleaded in his fist, some leaping to their deaths to avoid his cruel fingers. His fist tightened, crushing bronze, bone, and flesh into a red paste. It dripped like red clay from between his fingers. Again he bent forward, this time both hands capturing mobs of masked ones and a trio of great lizards. The scaly behemoths were less than flies to him. They died as easily as the shrieking Men.

Now the main force of Giants rushed forth to join the legions of Men. The tide turned quickly from despair to mad triumph. Vireon watched as the Udvorg rushed the red jungle, flattening trees and Khyreins alike. Their greatswords and axes drank deeply of southern blood.

The Khyrein lines broke and the northerners chased them through the jungle. Vireon saw clearly now the twenty black towers marking the border between marsh and jungle. He raised his great knee and took a single step. His bare foot fell upon the nearest tower like a toppled mountain. The edifice crumbled beneath his tread, a toy house built by tiny, soulless children.

After this symbolic destruction, the battle became a rout. Khyreins fled for the relative safety of the towers to north and south. Few of them made it as the northern legions pressed deeper into the wilderness.

A yawning weariness overcame Vireon. As the raging storm washed the slime and blood from his skin, he began to diminish. Lightning flared above a thousand scenes of slaughter, as Men and Giants avenged their fallen brothers. The dying screams of Khyreins were drowned beneath the noise of the tempest.

Soon Vireon stood no taller than his Udvorg cousins in the ruined swamp, surrounded by the twisted and torn remains of northmen, horses, and Giants. He fell to his knees in the bloodshot mire and fought the desire to lie down and sleep amid the ruined bodies. Instead, he raised his head toward the jungle and forced himself to walk forward.

The marshes had been crossed. The way to the black city had been opened.

The Blood of Vod had been tested and found worthy.

In the pouring rain he donned the clothing and armor of a Giant he found headless in the muck. He picked up a fallen greatsword. Through the driving storm, the songs of clashing metal and yowling Giants lingered in his ears. The cool rain soothed his chapped flesh.

A cadre of northern legions was already heading north toward a second watchtower. He wondered who it was that led them. Tyro? Angrid? Dahrima? What had become of his faithful Uduri and her sisters? He last saw her slicing tentacles among the ranks of Udvorg. Could her bones be among those he found inside the leviathan’s belly?

Across the littered field he saw a figure rising from the muck. A Giantess. He ran toward her. A lean face framed by tousled black hair turned to look upon him. Varda raised her black staff and clasped her bleeding forehead. He offered his arm, helped her to stand. She pulled away from him, then grimaced with pain. Her scarlet eyes scanned his Udvorg-sized body. She had no words to account for his new stature, or the miracle of sorcery he had performed. Crystal tears flowed along her cold cheeks.

“Where is Angrid?” he asked.

Her blue face twisted into a mask of anger. “You dare to ask me this? You who convinced him to leave the ice and fight in your mad crusade? You who are neither Man nor Giant?”

He glared at her, trying to understand the words. His head swam, but he refused to fall.

“Where is Angrid?” he asked again, louder. Thunder punctuated his question.

“Dead!” screamed the shamaness. “Torn apart! Devoured!” Her ruby eyes flared with rage and heartbreak.

Vireon blinked. Rain ran along the blade of his sword, dripping like translucent blood from its tip. What was she saying?

“You saved us!” Varda screamed. “Why could you not save him?”

Vireon stammered; the proper words eluded him. “I… I…” His body diminished yet again, until he stood at his normal human height. Varda towered over him now, her eyes burning redder than the poison jungle. She turned away and stalked toward the demolished tower, where Men were setting up a defensible camp. A blue flame sprang up once more to dance at the head of her staff.

Vireon raised a hand to call her back, but the cry never left his lips.

He fell back into the mire, and his boiling thoughts sank into darkness.