Evening the Fifth — The Mother of Fire and the King Under the Ice

The rain came to Sepermeru that night — a thing so rare the whole city stood in the streets with its mouth open. Hjalti One-Eye did not. He came into the Broken Tusk dripping like a drowned dog, shook himself once, and held up his cup before he'd even sat down.

"Wet without, dry within. Mend one of those, and I'll mend your evening. You've heard from me of the man's waking, and of the eight-legged horrors that would not die. Tonight goes further. Tonight goes down — into a city the gods themselves stopped naming."

He drank. He began.

Hear first of the river-lord. South of the great stone Sentinels, where the water runs slow and brown, there lives a crocodile old enough to remember when men feared to farm there. Long as four men laid heel to crown, hide like wet slate, and a patience colder than any winter I've slept through. Strabo Nagi found it because he was not looking for it — that is how rivers work. It took his leg in its jaws and rolled, and the water went white, then pink. Most men end there, in the pink water. The Cimmerian bent double into the roll, found the soft flesh behind the jaw with his blade, and worked it like a farmer worming a stump. When the river went still, he limped out, wrung the water from his beard, and cooked a piece of the thing over its own swamp-wood. Crom gives strength. Supper a man arranges himself.

That same stretch of days he walked among the shalebacks' hollow, where a spider squatted whose back bore the mark of a skull — as if death itself had signed the beast and said this one is mine. It was not death's. It is nobody's now. And mark this, for it matters to the tale: on that road he came upon a wanderer of the exile tribes, roped and kneeling in the dirt, waiting for whichever slaver came back first. Strabo has worn that rope. He does not walk past it. He struck the irons off and said nothing, and the wanderer — free to run any direction under the sky — chose the direction the Cimmerian was walking. That is how his company grows. Not bought. Chosen.

Further south the land goes strange. He met a lizard there, pale as a fish's belly, big as an ox and twice as ill-tempered — a great komodo bleached white, as though the sun had given up on it. Its breath alone would rot meat. His breath, after, would rot nothing, for the beast stopped breathing. In the old broken ruins nearby, another skull-marked spider, and beneath the stones — I will say this quick, for it turns the ale — a thing of the deep tunnels, stitched from parts no butcher would own to. An abomination. He put it down like you'd put down a sick dog, without hate, and washed his hands twice in sand. Dead men walked those halls too, some carrying torches in fleshless fists, lighting their own graves like helpful fools. He unlit them.

Hjalti set down his cup here, and his one eye went round the room slow.

"Now. The eighteenth dawn of his exile. If you believe only one night of my telling, let it be this one."

There is a city in the west with no name. Not lost — taken back. The stones remember being proud and it makes them cruel. Its streets are patrolled by soldiers whose flesh quit the war ages ago and whose bones did not get the message. Among them stands a guardian of bloodstone, red rock walking, older than the walls it guards. And above it all, on wings that blot the stars —

Dragons. Aye, laugh. The man at the back laughed too, until I described the smell. Green ones first, near the cave men call Kurak's — a grown wyrm and its hatchlings, three of the little ones, each "little" the way an anvil is little. Strabo took the mother in the open, where a rolling beast cannot corner you, and the hatchlings came shrieking for their dam and joined her instead. A serpent lived in that cave too, thick as a temple pillar. It lives nowhere now. A wight walked those cliffs, cold coming off it like an open cellar door. It walks no more.

But in the nameless city itself waited the Red Mother — a she-dragon the colour of a wound, first of her fire, dam of all the flame that has ever crawled from that place. Her breath turned sand to glass. Strabo fought her in her own street, in her own heat, boots smoking, sword-grip searing his palm through the wrap — and here is the truth of Cimmerians, friends: pain is a message, and they simply do not read their letters. He worked her flank the way the sea works a cliff. Patient. Total. When she fell, the city shook, and the dead soldiers paused as if listening. Then he killed the winged terror men call death-from-above, and then their bone commander, still barking orders at troops eight hundred winters deserted. One man. One day. Three lords of a dead city. Crom did not applaud. Crom never does. But I like to think the old god looked down, briefly, which from Crom is a feast-day.

After the fire, the venom. In the western reaches he met the king of scorpions — a thing the size of a fisher's boat, tail arched like a gallows. It struck; he was elsewhere; it struck again; he was under it, and what happens under a scorpion I'll leave to your suppers. On that road he freed another — an armourer of the Blackhand corsairs, chained by her own reavers when her hands stopped being profitable. She walks with him now, and by her hands and his the camp rang for days — nine-and-twenty works of iron and hide off the forge in one stretch, for a man readying himself for something. What? Patience. That's the next line.

The Kinscourge. In the cold north country stands a black keep, and in it a warrior who was once a king's own blood — cursed now, a scourge upon his kin, wrapped in armour that a hundred blades have signed and none have opened. His guard is the Silent Legion, knights who took their vows so far past death that death gave up collecting. Strabo went through them like a man wading upstream — slow, planted, inevitable — and met the Kinscourge in his own hall. No words. Cursed kings don't talk and Cimmerians won't. Just iron asking iron a question, over and over, until the answer came, and the answer was the crash of a royal corpse finally allowed to lie down.

And then the ice answered. As if the mountains took offense, there rose against him kings of living stone rimed in frost — not one, not two, but three of the rock-lords in as many marches, each a landslide that had opinions. He broke all three. A monstrous wolf, too, big as a pony and far worse company. And between the killings, quieter deeds: another armourer freed, another wanderer's irons struck, meat and hide and timber laid in against the winter — for even a slayer of dragon-mothers must eat, and no one else in that camp has ever cooked a thing that didn't fight back first.

Hjalti turned his cup upside down and watched the last drop fall.

"So stands Strabo Nagi at the one-and-twentieth dawn: fire-scarred, frost-tested, a dead city's three lords behind him and a cursed king's hall left silent. Around his fire sit the freed — fighters, smiths, folk who chose him the way you choose high ground in a flood.

"But hear this and go home cold: a man who has killed the Mother of Fire starts wondering what else has a mother. And the north, my friends — the deep, white, howling north — has been listening.

"Next fire, next telling. Someone owes me for the rain."