Evening the 15th — The Wine Cellar of Standing Bones, and the Grey King of the Plain

Hjalti One-Eye came in out of the rain with his cloak steaming, and he did not sit until the cup was in front of him. The Broken Tusk smelled of wet wool and old fat. He drank, and the rain ran out of his beard onto the table, and he looked at the puddle it made as though he had seen it somewhere before.

"You want the Cimmerian again," he said. "Aye. So do I. There is a thing in me that has no rest until this one is told."

You there — the one who came for the swamp-king last time, and the bat-hall before it. Forget them. Those were open air. This is a hole.

The stair that went down under the vine-lands.

In the north and east, where the land goes wrinkled and the roads forget their names, there is a house built over a cellar, and the house is a lie. It fell in a hundred winters ago and left only the throat of it. Strabo went down that throat with the wet coming off the walls and the cold of it settling in his teeth. Down where they kept the wine, before whatever ended them ended them.

The wine was still there. He said the smell of it hit him first — sweet gone to sour, a thick breathing sweetness like fruit left in a shut room — and under that, the other smell. Dust that has been a man.

Hear now what stood up in the dark.

Bone. Just bone, held together by something that was not sinew and not string and not anything a butcher could name. One came first with a bow in its hands, and it had no eyes, and it drew anyway — the arrow went past his ear so close he felt the wind of the fletching. He said that was the moment his belly understood before his head did. Then three more with rusted blades, standing up out of the wine-muck in a row, their jaws hanging loose the way a drunk's hangs loose. Then a big one in the corner in the rags of good armour, and that one knew what it was doing. That one had been somebody.

They came in a wave. He set his back to a wine-tun the height of a horse and let them come, and the fighting in there was ugly work — no room to swing, so he broke them. Shoulder and boot and the flat of the iron. A skull will come off a spine if you strike it right and stay off the road if you strike it wrong. He struck it right eight times, twelve times, more than a man keeps count of. The bones went into the wine-slop and lay there twitching like a crushed spider's legs, and he stood in the black of it breathing through his mouth, and something down the passage was laughing.

Not laughing. He said it later, quieter: not laughing. He only had no better word.

The green things and the shell-backed dead.

They were down there too — the river-devils with the bowl in the top of the skull, the ones the eastern folk name water-children and will not name twice. He had met their king before; you heard that night. These were not kings. These were what a river-devil becomes when it has been dead a long while and nobody told it. Five of them, in the wet dark, in one long night. The shell on the back had gone soft and the bowl in the head had gone dry, and a water-thing with a dry bowl is nothing but hate with hands. They came off the walls at him. He put down five, one after the next, and the last one had his forearm in its mouth and would not let go until the head was off, and even then the jaw held.

The lizard-men came dead too. Two of them — flat-eyed, snouted, walking wrong, the tail dragging behind through the muck like a rope somebody dropped. In life they are bad. In death they do not tire, and a man does.

And three more things down there that I will not shape for you, because he would not shape them for me. He said only: they had been made, not born. He said the third one had too many arms for the number of shoulders it owned. Then he asked for wine, and I gave him ale instead, and he did not complain, which is how I knew.

The smoke that had a will.

At the bottom, past the last door, the thing that was keeping them all standing.

It had no body to cut. That is the whole of it and the horror of it. Grey smoke off a fire that was not burning, thick as a fleece, and it moved with purpose — it came around him and into him, in the nose and the throat, and it burned like breathing a forge. He went down on one knee. He told me that plainly, and a Cimmerian does not decorate a thing like that. Down on one knee in a dead man's cellar with his lungs full of a thing that wanted them.

What does a man do against smoke?

He stood up. That is the answer and there is no other. Crom gives strength at birth and nothing after — no mercy, no sign, no hand out of the cloud — and Strabo Nagi has never once asked for more than he was given. He stood up in it and found the black heart of it where the smoke was thickest and swung into that, and swung again, and again, and the sound it made when it came apart was the sound of a shutter tearing off a house in a gale.

Then quiet. Then the drip of old wine off a broken tun. Then a man alone under the earth with his own breath rasping, and eight-and-forty winters of strength in his arms, and every one of them earned.

The grey king of the western plain.

He went west after that, to get the smell out. Out where the grass runs to the edge of the sky and the wind never once stops moving.

There is a beast out there — grey as a storm-cloud, hide like cracked river-mud, and a horn on its face where a face ought to be. He had seen its kind before at a distance, and the scorpions out there too, big as a hunting dog, which is a thing that ought not be. But the king of the grey ones is another matter. It stands the height of a man at the shoulder and goes the weight of a longhouse door and it does not turn aside for anything that lives.

It came at him across open ground and the ground shook. He said you feel it in the soles of your feet a long moment before it matters, and that moment is the whole of your life.

He stepped aside at the last. Not far — a hand's width, the width of a decision. The horn took the air where his ribs had been and the wind of it staggered him, and then he was in at its flank with the iron going in behind the shoulder where the hide runs thin. It turned to kill him. It got half turned. He was still cutting.

When it went down the grass went flat under it for ten paces around, and the little birds that ride such beasts went up off its back in a white scatter, screaming at him. He sat down against its warm side and laughed until he coughed, and there was cellar-smoke in the cough still.

The road at his side.

Now hear the part I like best, because it costs me nothing to tell and it is true.

There was a man in the north-east called Shinkan — a Nordheimer, one of the Black Hand, and he had been somebody's property. Strabo struck the iron off him and stood back and did not say a word, which is the only honest way to do it. Shinkan looked at the open door a long while. Then he picked up a blade instead and fell in behind the Cimmerian, and he has not left since — three nights running, back at that fire, back on that road, by his own choosing every time.

Others came the same way. A Kushite who works armour, out of the Dogs of the Desert, whose hands had been making things for men who owned him and now make them for men who don't. An archer of the Lemurians. A berserker of the Forgotten Tribe, twice over — he went off and thought about it and came back. A hill-guide of the Shemites, who knows the passes. A Zamorian bowman. And Madji, of whom I know only the name, and that she chose.

Strabo has worn a rope on his own neck. He knows the weight of it to the ounce. He does not put it on another and he does not ask for thanks, and the men and women at his fire are there because the door was open and they walked past it.

They built. Fifteen things made in one day out of that camp, and four the next, and the day after they went out and took what the land would give — the tall grass and the hard root and whatever hangs off a tree in that country. A fire, a roof, meat on it. You may think that is a small thing after smoke-demons and grey kings.

Ask a man who was chained a month ago what he thinks of a roof.

That is where he stands tonight. A Cimmerian with a scar on his forearm shaped like a dead thing's teeth, a hall of free folk who could leave in the morning and won't, and a horn from the western plain that no wall in this city is strong enough to hold.

And somewhere out past all of it, he told me, there is a mountain that smokes.

My cup is dry, and so am I, and the rain has stopped.