Age of Conan: Cimmerian Rage: Legends of Kern, Volume 2 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  UNHEEDED ADVICE

  “Kern? Kern! WOLF-EYE!” Ros-Crana’s voice cracked like a whip.

  Kern waited, looked back. She stood over the bench, face flushed red in anger and a dangerous gleam in her twilight eyes. But finally she came to him, pushing one of her guards back with a quick shove.

  “Leave off, Kern. Do not attempt this. We have the spring, perhaps part of summer, to heal. And there is Clan Conarch to worry for. They are heavily weakened, and there is no more dangerous clan than one that is vulnerable.”

  “Grimnir pushed south with the core of his army,” he reminded her. “South. That is not the retreat of a defeated leader. He will return sooner than you think. I mean to discover what he is about and to put myself in his path.”

  “Fool. To throw yourself into the jaws of the beast is not courage, Wolf-Eye. It is madness. And rage.”

  He counted his warriors, saw them all drawing close now, protecting his path back to the lodge entrance. Kern swallowed dryly, knowing that his next step would be the first on another long path with little rest or relief. And he took it. Moving away from Ros-Crana and her last-minute entreaty. Madness. And rage.

  “That,” he said, “may be all we have left.”

  Don’t miss the first adventure

  in the Legends of Kern

  BLOOD OF WOLVES

  and the next . . .

  SONGS OF VICTORY

  Millions of readers have enjoyed Robert E. Howard’s stories about

  Conan. Twelve thousand years ago, after the sinking of Atlantis,

  there was an age undreamed of when shining kingdoms lay spread

  across the world. This was an age of magic, wars, and adventure,

  but above all this was an age of heroes! The Age of Conan series

  features the tales of other legendary heroes in Hyboria.

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CIMMERIAN RAGE

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with Conan Properties International, LLC.

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass market edition / July 2005

  Copyright © 2005 by Conan Properties International, LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

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  eISBN : 978-1-440-67818-9

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  this book is dedicated to

  Fredrik Malmberg,

  Theodore Bergquist,

  Jeff Conner,

  Matt Forbeck

  fellow barbarians

  Acknowledgments

  Following up the story from Blood of Wolves was a difficult but rewarding task. Mostly because I knew what terrible things I’d have to do to characters I’d grown to really like and admire. But, such is life in harsh, unforgiving Cimmeria. And such is the life of a writer. I’d like to thank the following people for helping to point that out to me and for doing their part in keeping the saga going:

  Everyone at Conan Properties International—Theodore Bergquist, Fredrik Malmberg, Jeff Conner, and Matt Forbeck. Also Ginjer Buchanan at Ace Books, for her tireless work and efforts on my behalf.

  Don Maass, my agent. Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch for their continuous support. And Randall Bills, who acted as one of my chief sounding boards.

  And as always, my family. My children—Talon, Conner, and Alexia, who are always there when Dad needs a break. Heather, my wife and my partner, who again read every word and offered valuable comments. And the animals, who in their own way contribute to the process by providing lots of attention (if on their terms)—the cats Chaos, Ranger, and Rumor, and our neurotic border collie, Loki.

  Thank you.

  1

  ON THE SHADOWED side of a Breakneck ridgeline, Kern Wolf-Eye scrambled along a narrow switchback, clawing for purchase among cold, sharp-edged hardscrabble and granite boulders, fighting his way upward over the treacherous ground. Frozen slush. Loose stone. Thorny brush.

  The ends of his fingers bled where he’d cracked several nails down to the quick.

  His chest heaved as he gulped the cold, thin air. It tasted of ice and felt like a dull knife stabbing into his chest.

  No slowing down. No rest. Even the thought of it was driven from his mind as another arrow sliced in close—tight enough he felt the whisper of its passing—and shattered against the sharp wall of gray shale looming over his left shoulder. The arrow’s heavy, broadleaf head skipped off the rock with a strike of sparks. Splinters showered the side of his face.

  The shout from behind, in a language nasal and flat, sounded closer. Too close.

  A fresh fall of rock, calved from one of the many overhangs, piled up on the trail ahead. A true Cimmerian would hardly have questioned any need to climb a sheer cliff face or slippery clay shelf most days. But with a pack of four .
. . five Vanir jackals racing up after him, the head-high slide might as well have been a fortress wall.

  Kern’s growl of anger died in his throat. His muscles ached from this Crom-cursed uphill sprint, but still he gathered himself and leaped up the side of the pile, hands reaching and grasping, feet churning as he powered his way up the fall and halfway over the top, where he risked a single glance back.

  Five. Five invaders who raced up on his trail, giving chase after discovering the raider campsite Kern and his small band of warriors had attacked—butchered—that morning before the springtime sun even peeked over the Teeth. All but one raider had the flaming-red hair so common among Vanir. The other was more of a reddish gold, telling of Aesir blood somewhere in his past, curly and hacked short over the shoulders. To a man they wore the heavy, leather skirts preferred in the north’s deep mountains and wastelands. And boiled-leather cuirasses banded or studded with metal. Bracers and greaves. Helms decorated with the horns of many different beasts.

  All of them wrapped up in their own furious bloodlust.

  All with large swords strapped over their backs or sheathed at their sides. Broadswords. War swords. None kept a naked blade in hand, but they could draw them fast enough if he slipped too close.

  Two raiders also held Vanir war bows, and that was bad. Hard to outrun an arrow. One of the raiders nocked a new shaft and drew back, sighting along the polished ashwood. He let fly with a smooth release and a thrumming bow-string.

  Kern threw himself over the far side of the rock fall, ducking beneath the whistle. He half climbed, half slid down the pile, rocks scraping his arms and gouging at his chest through a tattered leather jerkin. Rough edges of frozen slush cut at his face as he collapsed into a rough pile at the bottom of the fall.

  “Ymirish!” one of the pursuing raiders shouted after Kern. And a long string of guttural curses that turned their name for a Vanaheim war leader—one of Grimnir’s faithful—into a mockery.

  And that was exactly what Kern was to them. A savage mockery. Sharing northern blood just as certainly as he shared the appearance of a true Ymirish—a “Son of Ymir.” The dead-frost color of his long hair, so strange to Cimmeria and Vanaheim both, and the feral, golden eyes of a wolf. It was an appearance many raiders had been taught to fear.

  Yet they would see him dead all the same.

  Him, and any Cimmerian who dared follow him.

  Untangling his legs from around a stunted bellberry bush, Kern picked himself up and checked the short sword at his side with a quick slap. Part of him wanted to draw the blade, charge back into the teeth of his attackers. Tired of running. Angered at being hunted. But he pulled his feet beneath him and raced onward, gaining the next turn without trouble as the northerners clambered up the rockslide behind him. A shelf peeked out above him, over a muddy bank. Child’s play. Leaping from foothold to foothold he got above the broken path, onto the shoulder of the ridgeline.

  And there, squatting over a thin layer of melting snow, Kern picked up a large rock big as his own head. He raised it high in the air. Waited for the first raider to make that last dogleg.

  Crouched in the ridge’s shadow, facing into a northerly breeze that still held a last touch of winter, Kern shivered. Cold. Forever cold. Exertion taxed his body but did not warm him.

  A trickle of sweat sluiced down from his brow, running into the corner of his right eye, burning. His labored breathing sounded heavily in his own ears, all but drowning out snatches of distant birdsong, the grunts of nearby exertion, and the grinding clacks of rock against rock. Then the stomps of boots against the lower path.

  More shouts. The sound of swords—more than one—rasping free of metal-clad sheaths.

  A glimpse of white horn, metal, and a red fall of hair.

  With a savage grunt Kern heaved the rock down with all his strength. It glanced off a ledge of gray shale, then slammed into the side of one Vanir’s face where his helm stopped just above a high cheekbone. The impact knocked the raider back, stumbling him from the narrow trail. With a bellowing yell the raider plummeted over the edge, screaming a short-lived curse cut short as he smashed into a spread of boulders several lengths below.

  Four.

  He took his victories where he found them.

  Before one of the Vanir archers swung around with a readied arrow, he abandoned his perch for an all-out run along the ridge shoulder. Pumping his arms. Finding the best footing by instinct more than anything else.

  Kicking through the last vestiges of the long winter’s blanket, he sprayed a gray sheet of wet snow and muddied slush between each stride as he struggled up onto the exposed ridgeline. There the sun found him, still low on the horizon but already spreading warming rays over the knife-edged hills. The Breaknecks. A fitting name for the rough land spread between Clan Conarch’s northwestern territory and the lower Eiglophian Mountains, full of canyons and clefts and jutting escarpments.

  A narrow crevice split the ridgeline, but he easily jumped it. Stumbled forward. Picked up speed again as his fists and legs pumped and lungs struggled for more air as he ran.

  Racing up onto a dead-end drop.

  Steep falls on three sides. Patches of thorny brush ringing a small, circular landing, then out over several lengths of open air the tops of some tall pine and redwood cedar. From there he looked out over the tops of a thin forest, or back along the narrow ridgeline with four Vanir raiders running up behind him.

  Kern did not hesitate. Running between two clumps of the thorny, deadwood brush, he leaped out over the deadly fall, arms and legs flailing, eyes squinted nearly shut and with a blood-hammering yell . . .

  ... to smash into the upper branches of a tall pine. Grabbing hold of the narrow trunk with frantic strength, Kern saved himself a long, bone-crushing fall through the tree. As it was, the evergreen’s top bent far over, dangling him above the ground at a dizzying height. Then . . . slowly . . . it straightened enough for him to hook his feet into lower branches.

  Surrounded by the sharp scent of the evergreen, Kern managed to climb a few lengths down the pitch-sticky tree before the Vanir invaders crashed through the same break in the thorny brush he had, hauled themselves in, and spread to a short line across the edge of the cliff. Then he waited. Holding on. Barely protected by the narrow trunk and a few thin, needle-covered branches. Watching as the raiders glared and grinned.

  One brayed a short laugh at his expense.

  Heavy gusts of chill, northern winds whipped at their hair, their cloaks. Two pulled new arrows from leather quivers. Nocked them into their war bows. The others didn’t even bother to draw swords.

  Easy meat.

  For Kern’s warriors.

  Like trapping spiders, springing from camouflage to snare their prey with long, hooklike legs, five men suddenly erupted from beneath the dry-stick brush behind the Vanir. Kern watched as Reave and Daol threw off their blankets first, shaking themselves free of a light covering of dirt and rock, kicking aside the thorny brush they had carefully stuck in the ground to deter the raiders from walking over the top of them. Ossian, as well. Then Garret and Aodh.

  Reave held his greatsword across his massive chest like a staff, left hand carefully gripping the edged blade as he shoved the nearest archer forward. Daol, never quite as physical, used a short javelin. He took his man in the back, ramming the steel tip out through the Vanir’s broad chest, then kicked him forward, off the spear.

  Both raiders screamed as they fell.

  Aodh and Garret Blackpatch were both older men, over forty summers, but warriors still. And they had the advantage of teamwork. Seizing the second archer between them, they simply yanked him around awkwardly, shaking him like camp dogs on a rat, then threw the raider far out over the drop. Nearly far enough to catch a tree, as Kern had done. But not quite. He smashed violently through a few lower branches before his cries were ended by a meaty thud.

  Ossian was the only one to run into trouble. One of the warriors Kern had picked up from the village cla
n of Taur, he was always easy to pick out of a group. He scraped his head bald almost every day and trimmed his facial growth into a goat’s beard as had his father, the Taurin chieftain. One of Kern’s best men, usually, this time he moved too slow or his victim too quick. The Vanir warrior turned and grappled with Ossian, getting one hand curled into Ossian’s beard while the other seized a handful of wool cloak. Together, they wrestled for several long heartbeats, twisting too quickly for Daol to thrust home with the javelin.

  Then Ossian simply made a decision of his own and drove forward, throwing both himself and the Vanir off the cliff.

  Kern’s heart leaped up into his throat, even knowing the precautions his warriors were supposed to have taken in laying the ambush. Five to one odds—there had been better ways. Saner ways.

  But it was hard to argue with results. Both warriors fell in a flailing embrace, with Ossian trailing a length of stout rope anchored into the ground up top. The line snapped taut after only four lengths, raking the loop of braided line up beneath Ossian’s armpits and bringing him to a sudden halt. The raider jerked once, hard, then broke loose from the other man’s grasp with a tearing sound.

  Kern winced. He hoped the tearing had been the cloak. Not the beard.

  Ossian slammed back against the side of the cliff. The raider made the same, short trip his brethren had made, and with the same ending: a weighted thud, then a final, heavy silence.

  “Kern?” Daol stood at the edge of the bluff, hanging dangerously over the drop. Rope notwithstanding. “You all right?”

  Ossian dangled and twisted at the end of his anchor line, bumping against the rock wall. “We’re fine,” he yelled up the cliff face. “Yea and all’s good down here!”

  Kern raised one hand from the sticky tree trunk, gave a weak wave.