THE HORUS HERESY

It is a time of legend.

Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by his elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under his control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful champions.

First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

SKJALDS

Nick Kyme

Baerelt smacks the ice from his fur-wrapped boots. It’s tough and takes three or four blows from the side of his axe before it yields.

‘We need to keep moving,’ Baerelt tells his kinsmen, cinching the cloak of pelts tighter around his shoulders. His lips are numb, his cheeks abraded.

Torvur is blowing into the cup of his hands then rubbing the palms together, trying to get some feeling back. ‘Just as soon as the ice in my veins turns back into blood.’

Ulfvye doesn’t comment. He watches the snow-choked darkness, listening to the wind for the howling of something other than the breath of the Fenrisian winter.

‘Or when we have flame to see by,’ Torvur complains, jutting his chin at Laggenuf.

Their scout is crouched in the lee of a rocky outcrop, chipping away with flint and steel, trying to coax the fire to life in his oil-swaddled torch. It flickers, barely, but the spark is snuffed by the wind.

‘Almost there…’ Laggenuf calls back, still chipping. The click and scrape of his flint is like a bell chime, lonely and desolate.

‘Hurry it up then,’ says Ulfvye, gruff and nervous. Frost clings to his bushy eyebrows, stiffening them like frozen fox tails.

‘You hear something, Ulfvye?’ asks Torvur, and goes to stand with the tall Vusslenk. The double-edged sword scrapes from its sheath as Torvur draws it. Baerelt smells the oil on its blade that keeps the weapon from sticking in the scabbard.

‘Something…’ Ulfvye replies. His eyes haven’t left the same spot in several minutes.

Baerelt follows his gaze to the same patch of darkness, out in the fathomless tundra of the Hvitir.

Torvur unslings his shield, a wooden circle wrapped in leather with a heavy knuckle-like boss. He looks eager. Afraid. The cold forgotten.

‘Laggenuf…’ says Torvur. He wants the light and doesn’t want the light, Baerelt realises. If he sees what’s out there, he can fight it but then he’ll also have to acknowledge that it is something and not just a trick of the wind. This deep, this bad a storm. Nothing sane wanders these wastes.

Well, nothing sane except four Vusslenk clansmen on the hunt.

It took a village. Just one at first. Slaughtered the inhabitants and left them steaming amidst the ice. Lying on red snow.

Then it was two villages, and then a third. The ferocity of it. The sheer speed. Its trail was baffling. Vusslenk has stockade walls and a broad river on its northern border. Hills shoulder the south, watchmen posted amongst their crags. They had offered some protection. A warning. Still, it had taken several of their kin. Slain six watchmen and another six warriors of the clan before it retreated from their spears. Baerelt’s only son. Torvur’s brothers. Laggenuf’s grandfather. Ulfvye lost his wife. He had been grim before, but now he cuts a fell figure in the ice and frost.

‘Leave the fire, Laggenuf,’ says Baerelt, unslinging his spear and standing by his clansmen.

The wind is rising.

‘Can’t hear it any more…’ murmurs Ulfvye, clutching that spear of his. A fine spear. His best, he said.

‘Hear what?’ asks Torvur, glaring at the dark from behind his shield. ‘Skitja! I can’t hear a damn thing.’

Baerelt gently lays a hand on the warrior’s shoulder, and presses a finger to his own lips as Torvur turns to regard him.

Listen, the gesture says.

The wind howls, reaching a fever pitch that sets Baerelt’s teeth on edge. He grimaces. It isn’t just the wind.

Laggenuf gives up on the torch, leaves it gathering snow behind him, mounding up like a grave. He joins Baerelt, spear held in both hands, and shares an anxious look with the veteran hunter.

It comes then, resolving through the sleet and snow. A wizened thing, it looks female, naked to the bone and grey as old ice. Straggly hair hangs across its face, though only as far as the eyes and nose. Its mouth yawns, too wide, the teeth like nubs of coal. The tongue is black and dry as cured leather.

‘Draugr…’ Torvur almost drops his shield. It slips marginally in his grasp and he has to look down a moment as he retightens the grip.

The draugr is upon him in seconds, claws raking at his hastily upheld shield, splinters flying like the sparks Laggenuf failed to ignite on his torch. Baerelt wishes they had it now, for the winter is blacker than hel ice and the wailing wind disorientating. His spear throw arcs wide, the draugr wriggling from its powerful trajectory, but at least she’s off Torvur. The hunter’s shield is badly rent. Laggenuf attacks with a thrust, two-handed to keep the foe at bay. A defensive fighter, is Laggenuf. The draugr snaps his spear haft in two. She opens her maw, the gaping chasm of her mouth stretching until a gruesome wail peals from it.

Baerelt feels his teeth shaking, his jaw clenching shut. He resists the urge to clamp his ears, and manages to draw his axe. Laggenuf falls, bright red blood flecking his hair and beard, drooling from his nose and ears. He cries out, agonised, but the wailing smothers it. The draugr sweeps down at him, limbs bending in the opposite direction as if the joints are reversed. Needle-like fangs extrude, glistening with poison saliva. One bite and Laggenuf is bound for mardrom, the pain-dream. The spear jutting from her back prevents her finishing off her prey, Ulfvye having made the throw. Any mortal thing would be dead from a throw like that, Ulfvye’s arm as thick as an iron-trunk.

It barely slows her down.

But Baerelt sees the ichor dripping and hissing as it melts the snow where it touches. She’s wounded. A wild swipe of his axe and she’s lost a hand. Another shriek fills the air, but this one is galvanising.

It can die, Baerelt reminds himself as the draugr whips around the ice storm like a tossed flake of snow, flitting here and there, wary of her prey now.

Laggenuf has rolled drunkenly to his feet. Torvur helps him and they stagger to where Laggenuf dropped the torch.

Baerelt and Ulfvye try to herd the draugr between them as she weeps and wails and curses in a language no one has spoken on Fenris in centuries. A claw strips the pelts from Baerelt’s shoulders. It’s so fast he barely sees it, though that could also be the snow in his eyes. The pelts stop her from tearing through his arm. He backs off, his axe braced in both hands, loosely gripped and ready.

Meanwhile, Ulfvye has retrieved Baerelt’s cast spear and holds it at his shoulder like a harpoon. The storm thickens, ice and snow congealing in a white miasma. She’s close. Baerelt can smell her corpse stench. Hear the click and rasp of her bones…

The wail nearly fells him and he cracks a tooth as he grimaces. Instinct makes him lash out, a broad sweep of the blade that hits something brittle and embeds itself. The draugr is screaming, thrashing at the end of Baerelt’s axe, frantically clawing. It’s all he can do to keep her at bay and stop her from ripping off his face. A spear impales her right through the breastbone, down through the other side and into the frost-bitten earth. Ulfvye roars, driving the spear with such ferocious strength that he pins her.

She’s still not dead, even when Torvur plunges his sword down her gullet and severs that black worm of a tongue.

A flare of light draws Baerelt’s attention – Laggenuf with his torch. It gutters in the wind then the oil catches and the wood burns brightly. He douses the draugr in fire, letting it flicker over her corpse-dry skin. It might as well be parchment for the way the flames devour it hungrily. Her stifled screams are the things of nightmares but they die away as she dies, slowly burned, even her skeleton reduced to ash.

Baerelt is breathing hard, belatedly aware of the cold seeping into his bones and knowing he must recover his pelts from where the draugr tore them loose. Torvur has sunk into a crouch, his sword held at arm’s length as hot ichor drips from the blade. Ulfvye is coping better than most. He has retrieved both his and Baerelt’s spear. The haft of one is scorched but still serviceable. Laggenuf lingers over the corpse, which is now a black silhouette of ash rapidly disappearing under falling snow.

‘Was that it?’ asks Torvur, not just the question but the manner in which he asks it making it obvious his taste for the hunt has ebbed considerably.

Ulfvye hawks a gob of phlegm onto the ground. ‘The beast that massacred Ilvik and Stepnir, and killed more than twenty men…’

Baerelt shakes his head. ‘That’s not it.’

Laggenuf still hasn’t moved, as if expecting the draugr to reconstitute itself and rise from the dead again. It takes Baerelt’s hand on his shoulder to rouse him from his fear.

‘Told you I was almost there,’ he says and holds up the torch to the storm.

Baerelt smiles, nods. ‘I see a path ahead.’

The others see it too.

‘And you’ll be dead before you reach it without this,’ says Ulfvye, proffering a cloak of furs. ‘Always picking up after you, eh, Baerelt?’

‘Looks like,’ Baerelt replies, gratefully taking the pelts.

Ulfvye curses as he sees Laggenuf’s broken haft on the ground. ‘We needed that spear. It’ll be harder without it.’

‘You think this was easy?’ asks Torvur, gesturing to gouges in his shield.

Ulfvye betrays the faintest hint of a smile. ‘We’re alive, aren’t we?’

They leave the ashes of the draugr behind, just another of the many ways Fenris has to kill the weak. It’s no place for the weak, for there are wolves on Fenris.

Baerelt had not thought it possible for the storm to worsen but worsen it does. They are standing at the foot of a narrow pass through the mountains, roped around the waist, one man tied to the next in train.

Laggenuf’s torch is still flickering, though much of its vigour is diminished. He has the front, hand held above his eyes to keep out the snow as he tries to see what’s ahead.

He turns, calling over his shoulder to Baerelt. ‘No way through.’

Baerelt looks back the way they came, at the winding and treacherous slope, the chasmal plummet on one side.

This is where the trail has led them. They swore to find the beast. Kill it if they could.

‘Skitja!’

He scowls and Ulfvye, who is next in line, quickly catches on.

‘A cave…’ he says, after casting about, pointing with a fur-wrapped hand. The fine spear in his other hand is more a walking staff than a weapon. It’s a poor use for such a thing but a necessary one.

Baerelt sees the cave, a little farther down and tucked in from the side of the cliff.

‘How do we know it’s empty?’ shouts Torvur, his voice muffled behind the pelts swaddling most of his face.

‘We don’t,’ answers Baerelt, ‘but you are welcome to trek back down the mountain, if you wish.’

Torvur grumbles something under his breath and heads towards the cave.

It’s dry inside the cave and mercifully sheltered from the wind. If a beast has laired here, it has not done so for some time. There are no bones, no spoor. The cave is deep enough to admit all four hunters and allow a fire. Laggenuf gathers scraps of wood, detritus blown in by the storm, and enough kindling to get it burning. He keeps the fire low, just enough to stir the blood back into the hunters’ bodies. Not enough to draw unwanted attention.

Soon, it is warm enough to pull off their cloaks of furs and wrapped pelts. The hunters crouch around the fire, watchful but glad of shelter. Frost melts, garments dry, a little meat and drink is shared between the men. A little humour returns with it.

Torvur’s eyes are sharp and bright. Young.

‘How long will it last, do you think?’ he asks.

Baerelt drags his fingers through his short black beard. He’s tending a piece of dark meat on a spit. ‘Hours, at least. Maybe even a day?’

Laggenuf pokes at the fire, sending little sparks flurrying. His beard is as wild and red as the flames. ‘Long time. Long enough for a tale or two,’ he says, ‘take our minds off the storm.’

‘And what’s out there…’ Torvur remarks. Fair-haired, less grizzled than the others, he both looks and sounds the younger. ‘Assuming it still is,’ he adds, hopefully.

Vim and vigour are just fine until one is called to use them for something dangerous, thinks Baerelt and pities the youth for his fear.

‘It’s out there,’ Ulfvye confirms. He is standing at the mouth of the cave, just out of the wind, leaning against the rock. He chews a piece of uncooked, toughened meat. One hand is on his sword pommel and his grey locks whip like kraken tendrils. His spear is leaning too, and within reach. Not for the first time, Baerelt thinks he is a grim watchman.

‘You can’t be sure, Ulfvye,’ says Torvur. ‘It could have wandered off.’

‘It wants us to find it.’

‘Perhaps, after the storm,’ Torvur ventures, as if he hasn’t just heard what Ulfvye said, ‘we should turn back?’

Ulfvye turns. He turns so sharply and so fiercely that Torvur near jumps up in fright. There’s flint in the old watchman’s gaze and that blade of his has slid two finger-widths from its scabbard.

‘Speak of your cowardice again,’ he says to Torvur, his mouth a barricade of teeth, ‘see what happens.’

Torvur thinks to speak but Baerelt holds up a hand to silence him.

‘Come…’ he says. ‘Ulfvye, sit down by the fire with us. Laggenuf,’ he turns to the red-haired hunter, ‘give us a tale then. Let us be skjalds, sharing stories.’

Torvur sits back down, wary.

Ulfvye glares but joins them, deciding he’s seen enough of what lies beyond the cave. Baerelt passes him a skewer of meat, a cup of mjod, and the old watchman’s mood thaws enough for him to be civil.

‘Takk,’ he says, and gives a shallow nod in return.

Baerelt turns to Laggenuf. ‘Well then?’

Taking a heavy draught of his mjod and wiping the spilled drink with his sleeve, Laggenuf begins. ‘Do you know how the long winter came to Fenris?’ he asks.

‘Was it the frigid reception to your inane stories?’ growls Ulfvye.

Laggenuf ignores him. ‘He is called the Russ… A legend of old Fenris. Is he friend to man, or foe? I heard tell he is a giant with skin as white as the tundra, a beard of frost and eyes like chips of ice. Look upon them,’ says Laggenuf, ‘and even the stoutest warrior shall know fear. He stalks the old places still, the wind is his voice and the great snowdrifts his breath. And he is the last of his kind, for it is said the Russ once had a wife, a child and they were snow and frost like him but that the sun did slay them. In his grief, the Russ forged a spear of ice, so long and so deadly that it did wound the sun and so forever does winter reign upon Fenris. And this is the legend of the Russ,’ Laggenuf concludes, sitting back proudly.

Torvur frowns and then wags his finger, remonstrating.

‘Close,’ he says.

Laggenuf scowls. ‘Close to what?’

‘The truth, but you have not got it right, skjald.’

‘It is the legend of the Russ,’ says Laggenuf, incredulous at being challenged.

‘Perhaps it is a legend, but it is not right,’ says Torvur. ‘My old afi, he knew of the Russ. Said he was not a creature at all, but a storm. Jata… his voice is the wind, his breath the snow, whatever. But he is the storm. He is the winter’s bite, the eternal cold. He is the last storm. An elemental. The world spirit of Fenris itself. That,’ Torvur declares triumphantly, ‘is the Russ.’

‘Skitja…’ murmurs Ulfvye, shaking his head. He wears a disdainful look, like he wants to spit.

‘What do you say, brother?’ asks Laggenuf.

Ulfvye near shouts. ‘I say it is shit! Swine’s balls! Skitja!’ He leans back, an indulgent smile creasing his old scars. ‘Pair of goat rutters,’ he says, quieter, calmer as he settles into his tale. ‘Everyone knows that Russ is neither storm nor giant, shit for brains. He is a black wolf, a vargr. He is death and judgement. He follows men through underworld paths, unseen by mortal eyes.’ Ulfvye looks around the cave theatrically, taking in the shadows. ‘He might be here… right now!’ he whispers, half hiding another smile as Torvur glances over his shoulder and even Laggenuf shuffles surreptitiously closer to the fire.

‘It is said, by those who speak the truth,’ Ulfvye continues, ‘that men will see the Russ when death is upon them, that his howl is the harbinger of endings. For if the black wolf marks your scent, your fate is assured.’ He rummages in his woollen coat, takes out a long-handled smoking pipe stuffed with angelikarot and lights it. Yellow-green smoke curls from the bole, wreathing his wizened features, the fire giving his eyes a feral cast. ‘And that,’ he says, leaning back against his pack, smoking, his feet pushed towards the flames, ‘is the story of the Russ.’

Torvur scowls, regarding Ulfvye from under downcast eyes, but says nothing. Laggenuf grumbles, and pokes at the fire. It is fading, the hunters sharing the last of its heat. They will not light another. As it turns to embers, their last glow lighting the cave, Baerelt speaks.

‘My father told me he was a man, like us.’

‘That is not much of a legend,’ remarks Laggenuf, ‘or a story for that matter.’

‘Perhaps it is not storms or giants or dread wolves, but I believe it has a greater ring of truth. Russ was a king, a clan lord, though none know of his provenance or why he is no longer seen on Fenris.’

‘Maybe he is dead?’ suggests Torvur, ‘slain by his rivals or by wolves.’

‘It is said that Russ is a wolf,’ Baerelt continues. ‘Not some lycanthrope or changeling, but rather in spirit. Feral, proud, fearless.’

‘And no doubt never bested in battle,’ says Ulfvye. ‘A peerless warrior and a just king?’

‘So my father told me,’ answers Baerelt.

‘Bah!’ sneers Ulfvye and gestures to Torvur. ‘Your story is no better than that clod’s. Fine kings and noble warriors… Skitja!’ He rolls onto his side, his pack a pillow for his head, and promptly begins to snore.

Laggenuf is coaxing the last scraps of warmth from the fire’s embers. ‘At least you could have made it good, Baerelt. Some skjald you make.’ He sounds disappointed as he reaches for a blanket.

‘Just for that,’ says Torvur, getting wrapped up again in his furs, ‘you can take first watch.’

Baerelt smiles as his companions go to their rest. He doesn’t mind the silence and the solitude.

They’re right, he thinks to himself as he sits facing the mouth of the cave, his eyes on the white darkness before him as the wind howls and winter vents her fury, I am not much of a skjald.

They find the next village just after noon. By morning the pass had thawed enough for the hunters to reach the uplands beyond. The landscape is flat, and the village’s name is Onka, or rather it was.

Devastation has torn through it, flattening huts and leaving bodies in its wake. If Baerelt did not know any better, he would have said raiders had done this but even raiders take cattle or prisoners. In Onka nothing has been spared. Man and beast alike lie butchered, torn apart like offal. Blood drowns what remains, a great lake of it edged with glistening hoarfrost in the heart of the village. Huge splinters from the sundered huts stick up from the red like rotten bones.

A man has crawled several feet from the slaughter. Ulfvye drops to his haunches to inspect gouges in the man’s back that have torn through leather and ringmail like sail cloth. A broken shield lies nearby, flung from the dead man’s grasp. A shattered sword is clenched in his frozen-corpse fingers.

‘Hel…’ murmurs Ulfvye as he turns the dead man onto his back and they all see the way terror has contorted his face.

He is not alone. Others are armed too, several strewn about the perimeter. Some are missing limbs. Heads. More still have been gorged upon, the horror slowly unravelling the longer the hunters look. Glistening entrails piled alongside rope, one barely distinguishable from the other. Fingers gnawed upon. A foot without its boot, without its leg.

‘This one has been split open,’ offers Laggenuf, standing a metre away from Ulfvye, ‘liver, stomach, heart, lungs… all gone. Eaten.’

Somewhere in the background, Torvur is violently sick.

Ulfvye has barely moved but to turn the man over. He observes, measures, concludes.

‘They were ready for it,’ he says in the end. ‘See how the warriors made a line?’ He gestures to the dead, to their broken, mutilated forms, but Baerelt sees it in their arrangement.

The air reeks of cold copper and salt sweat.

‘A shield wall,’ he utters.

Ulfvye nods. ‘And it did them no good. Must be twenty warriors here… bondsmen, shield maidens, huscarls.’

‘We should turn back,’ says Torvur, wiping the bile from his mouth.

Baerelt doesn’t meet his gaze. ‘We cannot.’

‘It is maleficarum,’ Torvur whispers, as if scared to say the word aloud. ‘Onka, Stepnir… how did it slaughter so many, so quickly? Only a baleful spirit could do such a thing.’

Ulfvye stands and faces the young hunter.

‘Your brothers died to this beast. Laggenuf’s grandfather. Baerelt’s wife…’ he says, before rasping, his voice thick with grief, ‘My own son…’

Torvur has tears in his eyes. He wants to run.

Ulfvye grips him hard by the shoulder, old fingers digging in like claws and making the young hunter wince.

‘Our kin…’ utters the watchman. ‘It is no spirit, you fool. It is flesh and blood. And death. And we have to face it or it will keep on killing until there’s nothing left to kill.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Torvur replies, and bows his head. Shamed.

Ulfvye’s voice softens but not so much it loses its edge. ‘You think I’m not?’ He gestures to the others. ‘That Laggenuf is not? And Baerelt?’ The others look on, their silence answering for them, so Ulfvye continues. ‘This is our fate, Torvur. Our thread is drawn. It cannot be unmade or pulled anew. A man has his wyrd and that is all there is to it,’ he says firmly but not unkindly. Perhaps he believes what Torvur said, that the beast is no natural thing but something else, some old monster, many times worse than the draugr. An eater of men, flesh and soul. Some fell spirit.

‘You could flee,’ says Ulfvye, ‘but your wyrd would find you all the same.’

‘I don’t want to die out here,’ Torvur confesses in a small voice. ‘Not to some nameless horror of the Hvitir.’

A metre away, Laggenuf makes a warding sign with his hands.

Baerelt’s jaw clenches.

Ulfvye looks forbidding as the shadows play across his wizened face. ‘And yet death will claim you anyway.’

A cold breeze stirs, bringing with it a scent that makes Baerelt’s nose prickle. He sniffs, scowls. Laggenuf has already turned, his hunting bow in hand, his instincts sharper than most. The bow is for game, not monsters, but he’s forced to use it to defend himself now that his spear is gone. He sinks low, into a crouch. Nocks an arrow. His eyes flick to Baerelt, who slowly draws his axe.

There is something alive, deeper in the village. The scent of sweat and animal musk thickens the air, carried on the breeze.

Ulfvye puts a gnarled finger to his lips, spear held ready, and urges the others to advance.

They circle around where they caught the creature’s scent: Baerelt goes with Laggenuf to the left, whilst Ulfvye and Torvur range right. More bodies are strewn further in, not fighters but children and old folk. Rent and gored just the same. Flesh is flesh to the belly of the beast.

A great hall lies at the heart of the village, the doors broken open and reduced to splinters. Across its threshold the shadows deepen, stretching like long, thin fingers. Half the roof has fallen in, a profusion of tumbled straw and wood. It looks burned, as if it were afire at some point. Baerelt glances down at small bones that crunch underfoot. He’s relieved when he hears Laggenuf’s muttered wardings against maleficarum behind him.

He doesn’t speak aloud. Neither of them do. His breathing is a bellows pull, heaving in his chest. He tries to stay calm, but his hammering heart won’t let him. It feels hot in the great hall like warm breath, though the hearth fire is cold and dead like everything else. Grey light spills in from somewhere other than the broken roof. A second doorway, also smashed, stands opposite the first. It’s a gaping arch of stone, shards of shattered wood jutting from it like rough spears. It puts Baerelt in mind of a toothed maw.

Ulfvye and Torvur edge through the second doorway, the old watchman taking the lead, only looking back to scowl at the youth as he snags his jerkin on a large splinter and lets out a yelp of pain.

It’s in here. Baerelt can feel it. The great hall is large and cluttered with debris. Plenty of places to hide, but he doubts very much it’s hiding. A lair, he thinks…

Statues of old gods, the deities of Fenris, line the hall. Armour and pelts fashioned in wood. Blood-flecked, chipped. Two have fallen, one onto its face, the head broken off as if having rolled from the executioner’s block. The other is shorter, fallen from its plinth. It takes Baerelt a moment to realise the second statue is not a statue at all.

‘Skitja!’ Laggenuf looses an arrow, fingers slipping in fright as the huge thing rises from a crouch before him then… It plucks the shaft from the air. Ulfvye falters; his spear is aloft and over his shoulder but he doesn’t throw it.

Torvur stays his ground but goes no further. Baerelt can see in his eyes that the fair-haired youth is close to bolting. He tries to urge him not to. Hold fast, he thinks, the words echoing desperately in his mind, and not just for Torvur. The axe feels slick in his grasp, like there’s oil on the haft. It’s not oil, it’s fear-sweat as he faces down the creature.

It towers over the hunters, muscular body shining like dark marble. Thick fur swathes its head and shoulders. Its eyes are bright and sharp like cut amber, the pupils so large and wide that Baerelt knows it must see as clear as day in the dingy hall. See them. Smell them.

Hot breath ghosts the air, like thin smoke pluming from its mouth. Fangs glisten. The mouth curves, curling into a feral grin as it regards the hunters.

‘Here…’ it says, tossing the snatched arrow back to Laggenuf, ‘loosed by mistake, I think, Fenryka.’

Baerelt is struck by the depth of its voice and the fact it uses language at all.

The feral grin deepens and there’s threat in it, masked behind that humour. ‘At least I hope it was.’

It stoops to retrieve a huge pelt, draping it across its massive frame. And as the light touches it, Baerelt realises it’s not a beast, at least not the one they seek; it’s a man. A huge man.

‘It’s fled, or rather moved on,’ says the man.

A massive axe sits embedded in the hall floor. An old weapon, master-forged and wrought by an artisan. It looks stout, the haft smooth and well worn. The runes on the blade briefly flicker like captured fire. Like star fire. It must be as long as a man, and twice as thick.

The man grips the haft and wrenches it loose with a desultory jerk of his wrist.

‘You can lower your weapons, Fenryka. Unless you do wish to fight…’ It brandishes the axe. ‘It would be over quickly.’

Torvur takes a backward step. Ulfvye’s knuckles are white and his arm is shaking as he struggles to keep his spear raised.

‘What are you?’ rasps Baerelt. As he lowers his axe, the others follow his lead.

‘Ah, so you can speak…’

An icy fist seizes Baerelt’s chest as the man’s gaze falls upon him. It seems to measure him, gauge his worth, and in those few seconds he hopes to all the gods that he isn’t found wanting. He turns away, about to move on.

‘Are you jotun?’ asks Laggenuf, finding his courage and his tongue.

‘A giant?’ The man stops and laughs, loudly, his bellow echoing around the great hall. Outside, carrion crows scatter. Then he grows more serious, as if actually contemplating whether he is or isn’t. In the end he decides, ‘I suppose I am. Of sorts. Jotun.’

‘Are you from a tribe?’ asks Laggenuf, his timbre a little higher-pitched than usual.

‘A great tribe.’

Ulfvye steps forward, having regained his composure. ‘You hunt the beast…’ he declares boldly. ‘We also hunt it.’

Jotun turns his fierce gaze on Ulfvye, and Baerelt sees the old watchman tremble despite all his vast experience.

‘Go home,’ Jotun tells them, turning away again and stomping through the shadowy hall. ‘Back to your kin.’

Baerelt steps into Jotun’s path. His breath almost catches but anger pushes out the words for him.

‘Our kin are dead. We want to kill it. Avenge them.’

Jotun glares at him for what feels like ages but in fact is only seconds. The tension in the hall is thick as hoarfrost.

‘Then hunt with me, and we shall see it done. You’ll have your vengeance.’

Ulfvye calls out from the other side. ‘Its spoor ends here. I saw no tracks. Nothing. The snow has covered it. How will we find the beast?’

Jotun smiles, and it’s a deeply unsettling expression in the circumstances. ‘We follow the wolves.’

Baerelt hears the howling before he sees them. Onka is far behind, lost to the thickening drifts spilling off the high mountains as they track further into the uplands. The Hvitir is somewhere below, hidden by banks of iron-grey cloud that promise sleet. Ahead are the slow, padding silhouettes of beasts. The herravargr, a pair of grey wolves. Even from distance, with the flicking tongue of Laggenuf’s torch offering its light, Baerelt has never seen wolves this large. They are monstrous, but they are misplaced out on the rocky scarp.

‘Something has driven them out,’ says Ulfvye, spear clenched to his chest.

Follow the wolves. The words return to Baerelt as a pair becomes four, becomes six, an encircling pack that surrounds the hunters on the sparse plateau. No vantage, no place to hide or defend.

The howling deepens, turns into a united growl that suggests hunger, the killing urge.

‘Make a circle,’ barks Baerelt, ushering Torvur around and pushing Laggenuf into position.

The herravargr are wary, and loiter at the edge of Laggenuf’s torchlight. But it’s not the fire that’s keeping them at bay, it’s Jotun. He is ahead of the hunters and not within their circle. They only caught up to him because he had stopped to read the spoor of the wolves. He had followed it all the way from the village. Or perhaps he could scent them. Baerelt cannot tell, he is too exhausted. And now he must fight.

Jotun has drawn his axe, a sickle smile of a blade catching the fire’s shimmer and making it dazzle along the metal.

‘Back to back, Fenryka…’ he tells the hunters, with nary a sideways glance. His eyes are on the grey wolves. Perhaps they recognise a kindred spirit, thinks Baerelt as the circle of hunters shuffles this way and that, as the predators slither and slink around them.

The largest beast has a mane of pure white hair running down its back, and snarls a challenge.

Jotun snarls back. And the herravargr attack.

Four, including white mane, leap for Jotun together and he is lost to a flurry of fur, fang and claw. The axe rises, falls. A spray paints the icy bluff dark red. A plaintive yelp echoes.

Baerelt loses sight of the battle after that. The other two herravargr come for the hunters. Ulfvye thrusts with his spear as Laggenuf flails with sword and flame. Torvur cries out, near mad with terror as a beast rakes his shield. That redoubtable shield, half split but still clinging on. He stabs, thick hide turning the blade, a glancing blow that skids harmlessly across a grey wolf’s pelt. A second lunges for Ulfvye, batting the spear tip aside with a huge paw, teeth bared until Laggenuf’s flame sears its snout. The wolf recoils, snarls. Ulfvye’s spear impales air. The first comes again, a blur of teeth and claw. Baerelt grips Torvur’s shoulder, holding the hunter steady but keeping Torvur’s shield facing the wolves. A claw tears new furrows in the abused leather and wood. Baerelt catches it with his blade, hacks off a hooked claw nail with his opportunistic slash. Red beads scatter upon the snow-frosted scarp like little rubies.

Ulfvye cries out, the first wolf upon them again. He falls back, spear extended like a banner pole, carrying the herravargr as it arcs over his head and scatters the hunters’ defensive circle. It’s wounded but deadlier now. The spear still impaled in its flank, it crushes Ulfvye’s arm in its jaws and throws him bodily across the bluff. Laggenuf is struck by the old watchman’s trailing leg and drops the torch. The fire snuffs out, doused by the ice in an eye-blink. Darkness descends, a disorientating shroud. Baerelt heaves his axe into the grey wolf’s skull. It mewls, now dying, whimpering. The second wolf hits him, knocks him skidding across the slope, scattering Torvur too. His shield skips away, a skimmed stone flung over the edge to be swallowed by the iron-grey cloud.

An arrow finds its mark in the second wolf, in its hindquarters. A second shaft scrapes its ribs, drawing blood.

Baerelt is dazed, numbed. Ulfvye has not risen. Torvur is staggering, sword loose and wandering like a diviner in his punch-drunk grip. Laggenuf faces down the wolf. A last arrow nocked to his bow. A gash jags across his forehead and the blood slowly runs down his face.

The herravargr emits a low growl, rising in pitch to an anguished whine at its dead mate now slumped upon the scarp.

Baerelt’s booted feet dangle over the edge of the cliff, right where Torvur’s shield went. He scrambles, reaching for the axe he dropped, reaching for Laggenuf. But it’s already too late.

The arrow flies in tandem with the wolf, but the shaft skitters away, the aim poor, the hide too thick.

Laggenuf seems to sag, eyes closing as he accepts his fate…

A slab of muscled meat intercepts the death lunge. Ribs break audibly, a spine snaps as the grey wolf is carried away in a steel-sprung grip. Baerelt has only just climbed to his feet when he sees Jotun and wolf, locked in an embrace. A savage twist, as the giant stares calmly into its eyes, and it’s all over.

He murmurs something, Jotun. It takes Baerelt a moment to realise the words are not for him but for the dead wolf. The rest of the pack lies slumped in the shadows at the edge of the ice scarp. They almost appear as if they’re sleeping, for he hasn’t butchered them.

Blood-flecked, steam rising off his bare skin, Jotun turns his stormy gaze to Baerelt.

‘Follow the wolves…’ he says, and gestures with a crimson-slick axe to the lowlands beyond the bluff. Iron-grey cloud parts just enough for a forest to reveal itself a few kilometres below. ‘They should never have been out here. It is not their place.’

‘I do not think,’ says Baerelt, breathless but alive, ‘that it is our place either.’

Jotun replies with a sad smile, turns and moves on.

The descent into the lowlands, over the ice scarp, is slow and hard. Ulfvye lives but his left arm is a ruin, flesh torn but hastily bandaged, the bones likely broken and held together by an improvised splint.

The old watchman doesn’t complain but all can see his pain in the grim set of his jaw, his ever-paling skin. Baerelt calls a halt about halfway down the slope, where the foliage has thickened and the sleet hits them like knives of ice.

‘He needs rest,’ he calls to Jotun, who has ranged ahead of the others. The giant turns, grunts something and then rejoins the hunters.

They take shelter, spare cloaks strung over a copse of trees to keep out the worst of the wind and the sleet. It’s already laden with slow-melting snow, the roof bulging as Laggenuf manages to stir a fire to life.

None speak. They stare into the wan flames, all except Ulfvye, whose eyes are closed.

Wrapped up in cloaks and pelts, the hunters huddle close and contemplate what might remain of their journey.

‘Do you not feel the cold, Jotun?’ asks Laggenuf, a slight shiver in his words as he breaks the solemn silence.

Wild eyes glint like gemstones from the edge of the firelight, glittering in penumbral darkness.

‘Not as you do,’ says Jotun in a wet leopard growl.

‘Will you join us though,’ presses Laggenuf, ‘here by the fire? If you don’t need to share its warmth then perhaps you would share a story as each of us have?’

Jotun’s eyes narrow, curious then amused. He rises from a crouched position and sits by the fire. Up close, he is immense and the stillness of him feels temporary, just a prelude to violence. His skin is leathern but almost numinous and a flaxen mane spills across his shoulders. A canine stink pervades but does nothing to lessen the aura of power. And there is something else too, something unidentifiable. Oil, metal, frost? Baerelt cannot tell which.

‘You are skjalds as well as hunters,’ remarks Jotun, exuding a little warmth in response to Laggenuf’s bonhomie. ‘What story would you have me tell, Fenryka?’

‘What about one of the Russ?’ says Laggenuf, handing Jotun a cup of mjod. ‘Have you heard of him?’

Jotun nods as he takes the proffered cup, and Baerelt swears he detects a slight curling at the edges of his mouth as the giant licks his lips.

‘Aye, I have heard of him.’

Torvur speaks up, the first words he has uttered since they set up camp, the first time in a while his eyes have not been far away, rooted in fear.

‘Laggenuf says he is a frost giant, as big as a mountain.’

‘I never said he was as big as a mountain!’

‘And Torvur here believes he is a storm, the fiercest of elementals,’ remarks Baerelt.

Jotun laughs, deep and unearthly. The hunters laugh back nervously.

‘And no doubt this one,’ he gestures to Ulfvye with his empty cup, ‘tells a tale of a black wolf, the largest ever known to Fenris.’

The hunters pause, stunned. Ulfvye still sleeps fitfully, so Laggenuf answers for him.

‘Yes,’ he says, bemused and a little awestruck, ‘that is exactly right.’

‘All false,’ says Jotun with just a hint of iron in his eyes. ‘The Russ, he was raised by wolves.’ He holds up two thick fingers. ‘And had two wolf brothers. He did not know the world of man, but he came to know it. To know their iron and stone. One harsh winter, when food was scarce, Russ and his kin raided a village so they could eat. But the villagers were starving too. They fought off the wolves, but Russ protected his brothers so fiercely that none fell to spears or swords. They fled, back into the wild, but the king of these lands sent warriors after the wolves. He harried them, hunted them and killed the pack.

‘Russ, he was struck many times by arrows and spears but refused to die. Weakened, he was bound in thick ropes and brought before the king. But upon seeing a man and not a wolf before him, the king spared Russ. He took him in and gave him his name, Leman, and made him a part of his tribe. From the king and his people, he learned the ways of axe and spear, of man’s world. He never forgot the wolves or the wildness of Fenris, for each was a part of him.

‘When the king died, as all kings must eventually, Russ assumed his throne and his mantle. And there he remained, a great king, until one day a stranger came to his lands proclaiming himself the “Master of Mankind”.’ He laughs, though there is no humour in it. ‘Can you imagine that? Claiming such a thing? Disdainful of the stranger’s arrogance, Russ challenged him and said he would not bow down to any master.’ Jotun’s eyes flash. ‘He bested the stranger in all but one contest. Thus defeated, Russ saw the truth in the stranger’s words, that He was indeed the Master of Mankind, and swore to serve Him loyally until the universe grew cold. And so Russ learned again, of worlds beyond Fenris, and of the far reaches of the stars. And sometimes he travels those stars, fighting for this master, but he has never forgotten Fenris and returns to her often for the winter, for the wolves. To remember who he was and from where he came.’

A hush descends…

Until Laggenuf bursts out laughing. The others follow, emboldened by his recklessness. Then Jotun laughs, and it is a deep and booming mirth that echoes around the lowlands like thunder.

‘Aye,’ he says, stilling his chuckling, ‘it is a far-fetched tale.’

‘Very imaginative…’ says Laggenuf, wiping tears from his eyes. He stretches and yawns, scratching at his armpit as he settles down to his bedroll.

Torvur nods awkwardly, the old fear returned, as he goes to his rest too.

It leaves only Baerelt, as Ulfvye has not stirred since they made camp. He’s rebinding the leather haft of his axe that came loose during the skirmish against the herravargr. It’s painstaking work and as he silently goes about his task, he watches Jotun from the corner of his eye. The giant has retreated from the fire again, as if a part of him is wary of its light, and sits alone, lost to his thoughts.

‘What was your tale, skjald?’ he asks, and Baerelt looks up, into those feral eyes. He sees the wildness there but also something more, something… noble.

‘I said that Russ was a king with the heart of a wolf.’

Jotun sniffs, and scratches his nose.

‘Not as fantastical as your kinsmen… What makes you think that?’

‘My father.’

‘Ah… Fathers and their sons, eh? Never simple. My own father told me stories, great stories, fantastical stories, of my brothers and their ways, of my place in the world.’

‘Are your brothers much like you?’

‘In some ways they are, in others… very much not. But I love them, despite our differences, as all siblings should love each other. Do you have brothers, skjald?’

Baerelt shakes his head. ‘No, it was just my father and I. My mother, I barely knew. She died when I was young.’

‘And what of your father then, does he live still? You speak of him like he is dead. Did the beast slay him?’

‘He died, yes, but three winters past. I lost my son to the beast. His name was Juvik.’

‘I’m sorry, skjald. That’s no fate.’

Baerelt nods as if that makes it any easier or more fathomable. ‘Do you have children, Jotun?’ he asks, ‘A wife?’

At this Jotun gives a shrug of the shoulders. ‘No wife, but I have sons.’

Having stumbled upon some common ground, Baerelt edges closer, ‘Two, three?’

Another smile, this one half-hidden but not very well. ‘More than three,’ Jotun says, and there’s a glint of something in his eyes that Baerelt mistakes for rakish pride.

‘And you love them?’

‘Some more than others, but, yes, I love them.’

Baerelt’s expression hardens then, day turning into night. ‘So you know why I must hunt this beast and kill it.’

‘I do,’ says Jotun. ‘I would do anything for my sons. Anything. We want so much for them, our sons. Don’t we? In them, we see ourselves reflected. Our virtues magnified, our flaws hidden. So much is bound up in them. So much,’ he says, almost melancholy. Then he suddenly leans forwards and the firelight catches his face, haunting it with shadows. He looks almost lupine in the half-light. Predatory. ‘Tell me though… Did you see it? The beast?’

‘I only heard it. I was too late to face the creature.’

‘But it was a creature?’

‘I can only assume.’

‘What did it sound like? Was it…’ he pauses, as if carefully measuring his words, ‘like a wolf?’

‘Like no wolf I have ever heard. I know of no beast or creature like it. It sounded… unnatural.’

Jotun retreats back to the shadows, as if satisfied with the hunter’s answers but not alluding to why. He seems deep in thought and as he muses on some dark imagining, Baerelt is struck by Jotun’s sheer otherness.

‘You’re not looking for the beast, are you?’ he realises suddenly.

Jotun stares back, as if deciding what to say. In the end he simply utters, ‘No, but I will.’

They say nothing further and after the haft of his axe is bound tightly in leather, Baerelt tries to stay up and keep a watch. On the dark beyond the camp or on Jotun, he can’t say. Fatigue takes him eventually, the lids of his eyes drooping like lowered shields. And through the last cracks of fading firelight, he thinks he begins to dream and sees Jotun watching him intently. But it’s not the figure of a man at the fire’s edge, but rather that of a huge black wolf…

The outskirts of the forest loom like an unspoken threat, a place of arboreal shadows and primordial gloom. It is old, this place, and thick with briars and firs. Bracken snaps underfoot, scaring off some distant rooks roosting in the dense canopy above. They skitter off, their bird cries like human screams.

A thin mist carpets the forest floor, hiding its debris and spoor but not the man slumped against a deep bole. At least, Baerelt thinks it is a man. He is hirsute along the arms, chest and back, and naked from the waist up. His face and scalp is festooned with thick, dark hair. His chest is torn, the savage rips in his flesh like ghastly red smiles. He’s barely breathing, and as his heavy-lidded eyes flicker they flash the same amber hue as Jotun’s.

The giant crouches by the dying man’s side, a hand laid gently on the slow rise and fall of his body to calm him.

‘What manner of creature is this?’ rasps Ulfvye, and Baerelt hears the frailty in his voice.

The old watchman had risen stiffly at dawn with the others, his face as pale as winter ice. He took a little broth, that which Laggenuf had prepared, but nothing else, eager to be back to the hunt. He stands by Baerelt’s side, leaning heavily on his spear.

‘It’s an ulfwerener,’ says Laggenuf in a hushed whisper. ‘Half man, half wolf…’

‘The beast that massacred Onka…?’ murmurs Torvur.

‘This isn’t what ripped through Onka,’ says Ulfvye, ‘or Ilvik and Stepnir.’

‘Then what is it?’ asks Torvur in a sharp hiss.

‘My kin,’ growls Jotun to the hunters ringed around him, apparently having heard every word. They stand a few paces back, wary of the hirsute man that Jotun claims as kin. Laggenuf and Torvur exchange an uneasy glance. Baerelt notes the ulfwerener’s hands, the clawed fingers thick with blood. Tufts of hair jut from under the nails.

‘He fought it,’ he realises, ‘the beast that slaughtered Onka and the others.’

Jotun nods. ‘It’s close,’ he declares, rising, ‘and wounded.’

Laggenuf frowns, his gaze unmoving from the ulfwerener. ‘How can you be certain of that? There are many creatures in the forest.’

‘Not that can do this. Besides…’ Jotun growls, ‘I can smell its blood.’

‘What should we do with him?’ asks Baerelt, gesturing to the grievously wounded ulfwerener.

Jotun unhitches his axe. ‘Nothing. Either he lives or he dies. That is for his wyrd to decide. I cannot make or unmake his fate.’

‘You would just leave him like this?’

‘Stay, leave, it doesn’t matter in the end,’ says Jotun, not answering the question, but his gaze lingering on the stricken ulfwerener before he stalks off into the darkness, the hunters forgotten.

‘Should we go after him?’ asks Laggenuf, wavering at the threshold of action, nervous at the half-dead lycanthrope in their midst.

‘In there…?’ asks Torvur, fearful.

‘It’s a forest, Torvur. You have seen a forest before,’ utters Ulfvye. The old watchman is already moving, stiffly, his spear a crutch in his bone-white hands. ‘You can’t escape your wyrd,’ he calls, slowly disappearing into the foliage, ‘none of us can.’

Baerelt moves to go after him but Torvur’s hand on his arm stops him.

‘Nothing good lives in there, Baerelt,’ he says. ‘Can’t you feel it? A wrongness…’

Baerelt feels it right enough. He feels it in the cold sweat on the back of his neck, the sick dread in his gut, the prickling of his skin like little disquieting sparks of fear.

‘Let me go, Torvur. We made oaths, our wyrd is spun, the thread made.’

‘We should return to Vusslenk,’ says Torvur.

‘And do what, exactly?’ Baerelt snaps. ‘Cower in our beds, hide behind our walls and hope the beast is slain? Is that it?’

‘Jotun and ulfwerener… monsters and myths, Baerelt,’ says Torvur. ‘It is not the realm of men. We have no place in it.’

‘And yet here we are. We do not get to choose, Torvur. I have no wish to be out here in this godsforsaken forest, charging into darkness, but I will do it because I swore to do it and when there are gods and monsters abroad, when our worlds are no longer separate, what has any man really got but his oath?’

Torvur lets him go, but shakes his head.

Laggenuf goes after him as he heads back up the slope before Baerelt calls him off.

‘Let him be, Laggenuf.’

For a moment Laggenuf looks like he might follow, but then he nods and he and Baerelt plunge into the forest gloom.

They find Ulfvye leaning against the trunk of a thick tree. His spear appears to prop him up on the opposite side, and he seems to be staring at something in the darkness.

Baerelt slows to draw his axe. He had cleaned the blade when he’d rethreaded the haft, and it glints in the hazy shafts that pierce the thick arboreal firmament.

‘Ulfvye…’ he hisses, wondering how he will pick up Jotun’s trail once the hunters are reunited, but the old watchman doesn’t respond. It’s darker here in the heart of the forest, and the soft chirruping of its fauna has faded to an abject and unsettling silence. A breath held, but for what?

Baerelt slowly edges towards Ulfvye, his gaze roaming the shadows for any sign of movement, any betrayal of a nearby presence. When he’s close enough, he reaches for the old watchman.

‘What is it, old man?’ he asks. ‘What have you–’

Ulfvye slides against the tree, his legs collapsing the moment a little pressure is placed upon him. Eyes grey as flint and just as dead stare out. Dried blood has seeped from under his tunic, his wounding more serious than any of them realised.

‘Laggenuf,’ he says, ‘it’s Ulfvye, he’s…’

As Baerelt casts a glance over his shoulder, he sees Laggenuf bolting through the forest the opposite way. The sight of the dead watchman has broken him.

Baerelt considers following him, heeding Torvur’s urging and heading back to Vusslenk. A roar from deep in the forest hardens his resolve. He has heard it before. At Vusslenk, echoing above the screaming, then haunting his dreams with the ululating of the bereaved. It had taken Stepnir and Ilvik and Onka, slaughtering more than eighty. And now he thinks on it, alone, as that roar shakes the forest in its primitive fury, Baerelt cannot conceive of how it managed such a feat. Its meandering spoor, the sheer speed and ferocity of its kills… Impossible. Unless it is a supernatural thing after all, some revenant creature birthed into the realm of man. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters now. Gently laying Ulfvye’s body against the tree, he closes the old watchman’s eyes and takes up his spear. Ulfvye has left it for him, his finest spear. Baerelt is determined to honour it with the hunter’s gift. A kill.

The roar echoes again, deep and booming like the crashing of waves or the bellow of a storm wind. Leaves shake as the forest recoils.

Heart thudding like arrows hitting a shield, Baerelt sets off after the sound. His axe is sheathed, the spear held high up the haft and in one hand as he ploughs through bracken-threaded darkness. He’s bleeding when he emerges on the other side, tiny gashes in his flesh as he stands breathless in a gloomy clearing. What he sees defies belief.

It is huge. A monstrous, colossal thing standing legs astride and upon its hindquarters as it faces off against Jotun. The giant is bleeding too, and his axe lies far away, smashed from his grasp and embedded in the earth.

His opponent has the rough shape of a bear, only far larger. A patchwork of saurian scales litter its back and shoulders. Thorny antlers sharper than swords and longer than Baerelt’s borrowed spear protrude from its sloping brow. It has claws, and its muscular body is swathed in a thick hide the colour of dark ash. It bleeds too, and emits an angry roar from its flat-snouted mouth as it bears down on Jotun.

A second roar joins the first, a little farther off, and Baerelt understands at last as he sees the beast’s mate burst through the forest wall. Not a spirit… a pair.

Jotun backs up a step, glances to his axe then back to his foes.

The male charges, the one Jotun has already bloodied. The beast collapses onto all fours, legs pounding the earth, shaking it. Jotun jumps aside before he is crushed, then lunges back as the beast barrels past, seizing the razored antlers. Blood oozes down Jotun’s wrists but he holds on, twisting and pushing, veins bulging like corded rope. The strain is evident in the flush of his skin and the grunt of effort that follows as he wrenches the beast down.

The female is on him before he can finish the task, a claw swipe opening up Jotun’s shoulder to the bone. He cries out but holds on still, pulling at the thrashing male and keeping it prone as he twists. He barely evades another swipe, a glancing blow shredding his cheek and turning it red.

Then Baerelt is running, thought and action untethered as instinct takes over. He turns his headlong dash into a charge and throw, using his momentum to cast Ulfvye’s spear as hard as he can. It strikes the female, the finest cast he’s ever made, sinking a foot deep into her shoulder blade and tearing an agonised bellow from her malformed snout.

She turns, searching for the gnat that has bitten her, and finds Baerelt unslinging his axe and preparing to die.

Jotun cannot intervene. He wrestles the male, the bucking becoming more violent and desperate the further he turns the neck.

The female comes for Baerelt, her mate forgotten in the red haze of anger. She charges, head down, not with antlers but a thick plate of bony nubs that will smash the hunter into jelly. Baerelt readies his axe in the seconds he has left. He hopes his sacrifice is not in vain. He hears howling, just on the edge of the breeze and wonders if it is a presage of the afterlife.

He says a prayer to the gods, and promises his son that he will see him soon.

Inevitability closes, a hurricane of tooth and claw smothering the light behind fur and sweat and wrath. Baerelt’s head is thick with it, a cloying, dizzying stench. His axe is rising, slow as glacial ice. The beast’s eyes swallow him, an infinity of blackness and hate.

My boy… Soon, Juvik…

She staggers, hit in the side by something strong enough to throw off her balance. She pulls up, her charge faltering and wild, her bowed, bone-plated head ploughing a deep furrow in the earth. Lightning cracks, a storm that was building, now breaking. A ragged silhouette stands outlined. As the flare fades, the ulfwerener is revealed. Half-healed, half-dead, yet he fights. He leaps onto the female’s back as she is rising, slashing and biting. Baerelt attacks, swinging in with his axe. He hacks at fur, at bone plate. He cuts and swipes until his arms burn. A wild swing catches him and he’s flying, his weapon spinning away before a battering ram punches the air from his chest and he’s gasping on the ground.

Blearily, he rises, stumbling. She’s bleeding, dying, ripped open and all her defiance spilling red across the clearing. The ulfwerener is in her jaws, slowly being crushed, his death screams an awful refrain to the storm’s thunder. He’s torn in two, bone sheared, legs and body separated, and she throws both halves aside like rotten meat. A bleat escapes her ruddy maw. Her fur glistens with fever sweat. She heaves her bulk towards Baerelt, who’s on his feet again, the upper half of Ulfvye’s broken spear in his hand.

He doesn’t speak. He hasn’t the breath. He clutches the spear like a thrusting dagger and decides to go for the eye.

She takes another pace, then another, every effort laboured, the blood from her wounds sheeting. Then she jerks, hard, turns and slumps dead. A war axe juts from her back. The runes upon its blade flare in a sudden crack of lightning.

The male is dead too, his neck snapped. As Jotun stands over the female’s corpse, he wrenches the axe loose and holds it aloft.

Baerelt knows then. He sees but he is still unprepared for the revelation.

‘Brave…’ says Jotun, staring sadly at the dead ulfwerener, ‘so very brave.’

‘I’m sorry,’ rasps Baerelt, his voice trembling.

‘He died in battle, fighting for his king,’ says Jotun, turning to face the hunter. ‘What better death is there? But I shall mourn him all the same.’

‘King…’ utters Baerelt.

Jotun does not reply. Instead he looks up into the black bruised sky, and Baerelt realises that not all the thunder is coming from the storm. As he follows the giant’s gaze, a shape begins to resolve.

At first he thinks it a giant roc, a great hunting bird of prey. But the bird’s wings have the firmness of iron. They are painted slate grey. Sigils like those on the shields of his clan colour the hull and Baerelt realises it’s not a bird, it’s a boat. One that sails the skies.

The boat touches down in a whirlwind, dirt and forest detritus sent spinning in its powerful, noisy wake. The roar of it fades, settling into a low purr like that of a sleeping predator. A hatch opens and two tall armoured warriors step forth, one in black and festooned with bone fetishes; the other in grey, a broad wolf pelt draped across his shoulders. They are huge, formidable but they pale next to Jotun.

And kneel before him.

Baerelt cannot understand their words, but he knows fealty when he sees it.

‘You are a king…’ he utters.

The warriors rise, the one in black regarding the hunter through a wolf-skull helm on his way to the dead ulfwerener.

The other glances at Baerelt, muttering something to Jotun, who replies with a nod.

‘You fought here, Fenryka?’ asks the warrior. He is unhelmed. His beard and fangs give him a feral appearance, and Baerelt realises that Jotun is perhaps more than just their king.

He nods, finding it difficult to speak in the presence of the gods. For what else could they possibly be?

The warrior gives him an approving look.

‘Perhaps he should return with us,’ he says to Jotun, but the king laughs. They joke. The gods joke.

‘No,’ says Jotun, ‘he must go back. To his clan, to his people. He has a story to tell, don’t you, skjald?’

Baerelt only stares.

Jotun’s eyes narrow. ‘Of a giant, or a storm perhaps? Of a black wolf… A king?’ He grows sombre. ‘I have a story too, of Baerelt the Hunter. A brave man, a loyal man who honoured the memory of the dead and served his king.’ He smiles then, a nod to acknowledge his appreciation.

Baerelt says nothing until the gods have returned to their boat, until it has cast off into the sky, until he is alone and staring up into the storm.

A story to tell…

‘Of the Russ,’ he says, ‘of the Lord of Wolves and Winter.’