The sharpened stakes loomed from the murk and Raith slipped sideways between them and crouched in the darkness beyond, straining into the night.
He saw the humps of the fresh barrows, or at any rate the spoil of Yilling’s mines, firelight at their edges. Gorm pointed with his sword and the men split, scuttling silently around the nearest hillock. Not a word spoken. Not a word needed to be spoken. They all knew their work.
Two men sat beside a campfire. The way Raith and Rakki used to sit. One working on a belt with a needle, the other with a blanket around his shoulders, frowning off towards the faint sounds of Uthil’s diversion. He turned as Raith rushed up.
‘What are-’
Soryorn’s arrow took him silently through the mouth. The other man started to scramble up, tangled with his belt. Gorm’s ash-black blade hissed and the warrior’s head spun away into the darkness.
Raith sprang over his body as it toppled, slithered down into a trench between heaps of spoil, squatting beside a dark entrance flanked by torches.
‘Go!’ whispered Gorm, as his warriors spread out to form a crescent. Rakki muttered a quick prayer to She Who Lights the Way, then he was down into Father Earth’s guts with the jar of southern fire over his shoulder, Soryorn and Raith just behind him.
Darkness, and the flickering shadows of the crooked logs that held up the earth above, roots brushing at Raith’s hair. He was no miner but he could tell it had been dug hastily, trickles of soil falling as they worked their way down the passage, his eyes fixed on Soryorn’s bent back.
‘Gods,’ he whispered, ‘this is apt to fall without our help.’
Hot, and growing hotter, sweat trickling from Raith’s brows, sticky under his clothes as he laboured on. He slid his axe through the loop at his belt and drew his dagger. If it came to a fight down here there was no room to swing. They’d settle it close enough to smell your enemy’s breath.
They scrambled into a chamber lit by one guttering lamp. The earthen floor was scattered with picks and shovels and barrows, roof held up with a clumsy tangle of timbers, others stacked in heaps. Two more shadowy tunnels went deeper, towards the roots of Gudrun’s Tower, no doubt, and Raith hurried over to one, peering into the darkness.
Could he hear scraping somewhere in there? Digging? Rakki was already fumbling the stopper from his jar, starting to slosh what was inside over anything made of wood.
‘Careful o’ that flame!’ snapped Raith at Soryorn, who’d brushed the flickering lamp and set it swinging on its hook. ‘One slip and we’re all buried.’
‘Fair point,’ croaked out the standard-bearer, tipping up his own deadly jar in the crook of one long arm, other hand across his face. Gods, the stuff stank in the stillness, a burning stink that set them all to coughing. Raith stumbled to the other tunnel, rubbing the tears from his stinging eyes on his forearm, looked up to see two men staring at him. One held a pick, the other a shovel, both stripped to the waist and smeared with grime.
‘Are you the new diggers?’ said one, frowning at Raith’s shield.
The best fighters don’t think too much. Not much before the fight, not much after, and not at all during. Tends to be the one strikes first that still stands in the end. So Raith knocked the man’s pick away with his shield and stabbed him in the neck, blood spraying across the passageway.
The other miner swung his shovel but Raith was carried forward, stumbling into him, shrugging the blow off his shield, shoving the man against the wall so they were left snarling in one another’s faces, so close Raith could have stuck his tongue out and licked him. He stabbed under the rim of his shield, wild, vicious, punches with steel on the end, and the digger gurgled and snorted with each one until Raith stepped back and let him drop, left him sitting with his hands clutched to his ripped-up belly and his blood black on Raith’s shield, on his fist, on his dagger.
Rakki was staring, mouth hanging open, the way he always did when Raith set to killing, but there’d be time to pile the regrets up later.
‘Finish it!’ Raith scuttled to the passage they came in by to snatch a breath of clean air. His head was spinning from the reek. He could hear the sounds of fighting coming faint from outside. ‘Now!’
Rakki tipped up the jar, coughing, soaking the props, the walls, the ground. Soryorn tossed his jar down, oil still gurgling from it across the floor, pushed past Raith and into the passageway, the shouts coming louder from above.
‘Gods!’ he heard Rakki croak, and spun around.
One of the miners was staggering across the room, mad eyes bulging, still clutching at his torn guts with one red hand. He caught Rakki with the other, growling through his clenched teeth, spraying red spit.
By every rule he should’ve been gone through the Last Door. But Death is a fickle mistress and has her own rules. Only she could say why it pleased her to give him a few more moments.
Rakki’s jar tumbled down as he wrestled with the wounded miner, shattered against a timber, oil spattering the pair of them as they stumbled back.
Raith took a step, jaw dropping, but he was too far away.
They blundered into one of the props, and Rakki pulled his arm back for a punch, and his elbow clipped the lamp and knocked it from its hook.
It fell so slow, leaving a bright smear across Raith’s sight, and not a thing he could do. He heard his own breath whoop in. He saw the light from that little flame bright across the oily floor. He saw Rakki turn, caught one glimpse of his face, eyes wide.
Raith dropped down huddled behind his shield. What else could he do?
Then the narrow chamber was brighter than day.
Brave Work
No doubt a woman should be tearful with relief when her betrothed comes back alive from battle, but Skara found herself dry-eyed when the Breaker of Swords was the first through the little gate.
His great shield had a broken shaft stuck in it near the rim, but otherwise he was unhurt. He slapped the arrow out, looked around as if for someone to hand the shield to, then frowned.
‘Huh.’ And he set it down against the wall.
Skara forced a smile onto her face. ‘I am glad to see you returned, my king.’ Though there were others she would rather have greeted.
‘In truth I am glad to be back, Queen Skara. Fighting at night is little fun. We brought down their mine, however.’
‘Thank the gods. What happens now?’
He smiled, teeth white in his ash-blacked face. ‘Now they dig another.’
Men were straggling back into the fortress. All exhausted. Several hurt. Mother Owd started forward to help, Rin squatting beside her with some heavy pincers, already cutting a man’s bloody jerkin open around a wound.
‘Where is Raith?’
‘He was with his brother in the tunnel when the oil caught fire.’ A thrall had brought Gorm water and he was wiping the ash from his face.
Skara could hardly speak her throat was suddenly so closed up. ‘He’s dead?’
Gorm gave a grim nod. ‘I taught him to fight, and kill, and die, and now he has done all three.’
‘Only two,’ she said, with a surge of relief that made her head spin.
Raith came shuffling from the shadows, his hair caked with dirt and his bloody teeth gritted, one arm over Blue Jenner’s shoulder.
‘Huh.’ Gorm raised his brows. ‘He always was the tough one.’
Skara darted forward, caught Raith by his elbow. His sleeve was ripped, scorched, strangely blistered. Then she realized to her horror it was not his sleeve, but his skin. ‘Gods, your arm! Mother Owd!’
Raith hardly seemed to notice. ‘Rakki’s dead,’ he whispered.
A slave had brought Gorm a bowl of meat fresh off the spit. The similarity between it and Raith’s arm as Mother Owd peeled the burned cloth away made Skara’s gorge rise.
But if the Breaker of Swords had any fears at all, he did not keep them in his stomach. ‘Fighting always gives me quite an appetite,’ he said around a mouthful of meat, spraying grease. ‘All in all, Mother War favoured us tonight.’