Evening the Eighth — The Anvil of Dead Kings and the Green Brood of the Citadel

Draw close. Aye, the same stool, the same one eye, and the same dry throat — Hjalti's throat, which will not pour a tale until someone has poured into it first. Good man. Set it there where I can see it.

You lot came back, which tells me something. Last we spoke I left the Cimmerian standing in green mist with a dead ape's blood cooling on his hands, and I saw a girl by the door press her knuckles to her mouth. That is all the payment a skald truly wants. But that was two nights gone, and the tale did not stop when I did. It never does. Men keep walking while we sit here spilling wine on the boards.

So. Where the marsh water lies flat and brown and stinks like a mouth that has never been washed — that is where we go tonight.

Hear now of the archer.

He came out of the eastern rope-lines, a Zamorian, thin as a wet cat, wrists gone the colour of old plums where the cord had bitten. Strabo did not ask him his name first. He asked him nothing. He set the man's hands on a stone, laid the iron across the rivet, and struck twice — and the second blow rang so sweet the birds went up out of the reeds. The Zamorian looked at his own bare wrists as if someone had handed him a stranger's arms. Then he bent, picked up a bow from the dust, and walked north without being told. That is the way of it with the Cimmerian's freed. He strikes off the rope. What they do with the road after is theirs, and every one of them so far has chosen to walk it beside him. You may make of that what you like.

The other thing that day: a lizard the length of a grown man, mottled and slow-blinking, jaw hung open in the heat. It moved like something bored with the whole world. Strabo watched it swallow a hare in three swallows and said one word — "foul" — and left it to its business. Not every beast in this tale dies. Remember that. It will matter.

Now empty your cups and fill them, because the next thing has no mercy in it.

Near the marsh there is a mouth in the rock that the local wretches will not name after dark. They call it only the cave, and they say the word quick, the way you say a word you want out of your mouth. Inside stands a thing that was once a lizard-man and is now something worse: a hangman. A headsman. Bones showing through the green hide, a hood of its own rotted skin, and in its fists an axe with a haft the thickness of my leg.

It does not die. That is the horror of it. Others have gone in with good steel and came out in pieces, and the thing was there again by the next moon, patient as a debt.

Strabo went in at the shoulder. Body first, thinking after — that is the Cimmerian way and it has kept him breathing where cleverer men have stopped. The axe came down and took stone instead of skull, and the sparks went up in the dark like a swarm of red flies, and in that half-heartbeat of light he saw the whole vault of the place: bones stacked to the roof, tidy, sorted by length. Someone had been keeping house.

He went under the second swing. He put his blade in beneath the ribs and turned it, the way you turn a key.

The thing that was deathless made a sound like a wineskin stepped on, and folded, and did not rise. Whatever gods keep such creatures wound up and walking — Crom is not one of them, and Crom's man was in the room.

He came out of that cave with rock-hided things and grey spiders and old bowmen of bone hunting his back the whole way, and he did not run. I asked him once why he never runs. He looked at me the way you look at a slow child and said: the hills I come from have no place to run to. Then he drank my wine.

Another day, another rope cut. A second Zamorian archer, a sandstorm that walked upright, a scorpion the size of a hound. Small coin, that day. I mention it only so you know the man does not rest, and so the next part lands the way it should.

Because the next part is the city that has no name.

You there, with the empty cup — you have heard of it. Everyone has heard of it, and nobody has been. Black towers standing in a bowl of sand, older than Stygia, older than the flood, and the streets of it are walked by dead lizard-men who still wear their armour and still remember their posts. Strabo went in through the library, where a thousand-thousand words rot on shelves in a tongue no living throat can shape. He killed a dead thing among the books. Dust came off it that smelled of pepper and grave-dirt. He killed another in the open street, and skeleton fighters and their archers came at him in twos and threes, clattering like a cart of crockery going downhill.

In the high place they call the Aviary, a commander of that dead host came down on him — a captain still, after all these centuries, still shouting orders at soldiers who are dirt. Strabo took his arm off and then his head, and the shouting stopped, and the silence afterward was the loudest thing in the city.

Then to the Citadel. And in the Citadel, brothers, there were snakes and there were dragons.

The serpent first: a giant, a coil thicker than a wine-tun, mouth going wide and wider and then wider still, past all reason, the way a purse opens when you tip it. He put his heel on its neck in the muck and worked the blade until the coils stopped.

And then the green ones came.

Little ones, at the start — hatchlings, if you can call a thing a hatchling that stands to a man's chest. Green as pond-scum, wet-looking, with eyes like a goat's and teeth set crooked in the jaw. Three of them came at him in the courtyard. One took hold of his forearm, and I have seen the mark it left — four white pits and one long furrow, and he flexes the hand sometimes without knowing he does it. He broke that one's neck against a pillar. The other two he did with the sword, quick, no artistry in it, the way a farmer does chickens.

Then the mother of them, full-grown, came round the wall.

Now. I have told you many things tonight, and some of them I have made prettier than they were. Not this. He did not shout. He did not pray — Crom hears no prayers and Strabo has never wasted breath sending any. He went low, under the jaw where the plate is thin, and he stayed there, in close, under the hot green stink of its breath, hammering at one spot until the spot gave way. That is all. That is the whole art. Find the seam and do not stop being there.

A sorcerer of the Black Hand went free that same day, a Hyrkanian with kohl round his eyes and a look in them like a man who has just woken from a fever. He asked the Cimmerian what price the freedom carried. Strabo said: walk or don't. The Hyrkanian walked.

The fire is low. Sit closer, you at the back; I am not shouting this next bit.

He went to the pools where the red ones breed.

A red hatchling died there, and then their mother — the Red Mother, they call her, and she is not the sort of mother you have ever had — and a brute of the dead city, a thing built like a siege-ram made of a man. All of them in the one day. He came out of the pools with his mail scorched brown down one side and his eyebrows gone, and he sat and ate cold meat with his hands shaking, and he let no one see the hands but me, and I only saw because I was pouring.

That is the truest thing I know about him, and I give it to you free, no coin: the hands shake after. Never during. Crom grants a man strength at birth and nothing else, no comfort, no company, no promise — so a Cimmerian spends it all in the moment and pays the price when the moment has gone.

And in the western reaches, in the place they call the Anvil, where dead men stand in ranks like a barracks that forgot to fall — there he found a dragon of nothing but bone. No meat on it. No eye in the socket. Nothing in it that could be killed, because nothing in it was alive. The ribs of it arched over him like the roof-beams of a burnt hall, and every one of its fallen soldiers rose up behind him while he worked — archers, elites, three sorts of fighter, a guardian of red stone with a heart that glowed.

He brought the skull down. They say the noise carried to the horizon and the sand went quiet for a mile.

And the next day, because the man does not know how to stop, he went back into that same Anvil and killed its king. A giant, crowned. He came at Strabo with a stride that shook the grit off the walls, and the Cimmerian met him the way he meets everything — hard, low, and without one word of ceremony. When it was done there was a crown lying in the dust and nobody in that whole dead country left to wear it, and Strabo stepped over it. Stepped over it. He walked out past a grey rhino grazing in the ruins and a striped hyena that laughed at him from a rock, and he did not look back at the crown once.

I have known kings who would have sold their mothers for that circle of gold. He would not carry the weight of it.

So there he stands, as of last I heard.

One more rope cut on the road home — another sorcerer of the Black Hand, another set of wrists gone free, another man choosing the road rather than being driven down it. There is a small company behind him now: bowmen from Zamora, sorcerers from Hyrkania, all of them walking because they decided to, and not one of them wearing iron.

And by a green pool, they say, he stopped to look at a red thing squatting in the water — a squat, wet, red-shelled creature with a hollow in the crown of its head, watching him with an old man's patience. He looked at it. It looked at him. Neither moved. Then he went on, and left it sitting there in the water like a thought he had decided not to finish.

That is where I leave him: a Cimmerian in a dead kingdom with a scarred forearm and a hand that shakes only afterward, having killed a headsman that could not die, a mother of dragons, a king of giants, and a dragon made of nothing but its own bones.

There is one more thing I have heard, and I will not tell it tonight, because my cup is dry and the tale has a shape and I know where the shape wants to end.

But I will say this much, so you come back.

Something in the north is waiting for him. And it knows his name.