Evening the Fourteenth — The Wolf-Road, the Aviary of Bat-Demons, and the King Beneath the Swamp

You there — yes, you, the one dripping on my floor. Shut the door. The wind off the dunes has teeth tonight and I have only the one eye left to lose.

Hjalti. You know me. Cup's empty; you know what that means.

Good.

Two nights past I gave you the horned king and the stone-eaters, and the night after that the legion that made no sound and the two men who both answered to Will. Forget them. Those are told. The dead in that telling stay dead. Tonight I have something worse and something warmer both, and they happened in the same stretch of days, which is the way of the Cimmerian's life — he cannot bleed without also feeding someone.

Draw close. The fire's low and I intend to keep it that way. Some of what I say sits better in the dark.

The Woman Who Kept Coming Back

It starts small, as the big things do.

There was a woman on a rope. Carlotta — a tavern-woman, hands still smelling of sour ale and other men's cups, wrists gone black-purple where the cord had bitten. He found her in the grey hours with the frost still on the scrub and the elk moving like smoke on the ridge above.

He did not speak. That is his way. He put his blade between her wrists and the rope, and he sawed, and the fibres popped one by one — tk, tk, tk — and when the last one went her arms dropped and she made a sound like a woman punched in the belly, because the blood came back into her hands all at once and that is its own kind of burning.

She stood there a long while, flexing. Learning her fingers again.

Then she asked him where the fire was.

Hear this, because it matters for everything after: he did not answer. He turned and walked. And she followed — not because he pulled, not because there was a rope, but because a woman who has been on a rope knows exactly what the absence of one feels like, and she wanted more of it. She followed him up the scree with her ruined wrists tucked under her armpits, cursing him, keeping pace.

That was the first day.

Here is the part the ale-sodden find funny and the wise find heavy: she came back to him again. And again. Days apart, seasons apart, at the far end of everything I'm about to tell you. The road took her away and the road brought her home and each time she chose the same rough shadow to walk behind. Whatever men mean when they say loyalty, it is a smaller word than what that woman did.

And she was not alone. A barkeep with a broken nose that never set straight. A blacksmith of Cimmeria — his own blood, that one, found kneeling in another man's dirt, and when the iron came off his ankles he looked up and saw the grey eyes and the black hair and there passed between them not one single word. A cook of the Votaries, a sect that had taught him some things about serpents; the man's hands shook so badly he could not hold the ladle for three days. Figaro. A tanner. An entertainer out of Hyrkania who sang the whole first night and would not stop, and nobody told her to, because you do not silence a woman who has just remembered she has a throat.

They took the rope-scars with them. You can still see them, some of them, if you know where to look at a wrist.

The Wolf He Could Not Kill

Now. The wolves.

You want to understand the Cimmerian, you understand the wolves.

There is a thing that lives near the northern water-channels — that great stone gutter the old dead built to carry a river across the sky. A wolf, they call it. That is the way of tongues: a small word for a large horror. It stood at the shoulder higher than a man's chest. Its skull was wrong, too long, too heavy, and the fur along its spine had gone the colour of an old bruise.

He killed it.

Nine days later he killed it again.

Don't look at me like that, boy — I'm not drunk enough for that face yet. I said what I said. He came back to the aqueduct and the thing was there, hackles up on that same stretch of stone, and he put it down a second time. And a third. And at Lian's Watch, which is a different place entirely, a full three days' walking, another one waited with the same wrong skull and the same bruise-coloured back.

Four times. Five. More.

I have counted the times he killed that wolf on the fingers of both my hands and I ran out of fingers.

So here is the question I have carried since I heard it, and I put it to this room: is it that the grey hills make more of them than a man can kill? Or is it that some things in this world do not accept a death when it is given to them, and simply stand back up out of the dust and walk to where they last saw the man who wronged them?

He never asked. That's the thing. Anyone else would have gone grey with it — would have started leaving food out, or drawing signs on the stone, or praying to whatever answers. He just went back. Sharpened the iron and went back. The wolf was there, so the wolf was killed, and that was the whole of the transaction, and Crom does not care whether it is the first time or the ninth.

That is the creed, you soft southern men. Not that a man wins. That a man goes back.

And while he was going back, he was taking wolves the other way too. Pups. He carried them under his cloak with their claws in his ribs and let them go fat by his fire, and one grew into a great pale alpha that ran at his left knee ever after. So he was killing wolves at the aqueduct and raising wolves at the hearth in the same week, and if you can hold both those thoughts at once without your head hurting, you're a better man than the one telling you this.

Crowns in the Western Reach

The west was full of kings.

Not kings with halls. Kings the way a beast is a king — the biggest of a wretched kind, wearing its crown in scar-tissue.

There was an elk-king that came within sight of his own hold. Understand what that means. A man builds walls, and a thing walks up to the walls to look at them. Antlers like a dead tree walking. He went out through his own gate to meet it, and he came back through his own gate afterward, and that is all that need be said about that.

There was a rhino-king in the western reaches — a grey wall with a horn on the front of it, and he broke it, and it came again, and he broke it again, and a third time after that. Same as the wolf. This world does not stay killed.

There was a scorpion king and a scorpion queen in the same reaches, and I want you to picture this properly before you drink: a thing the size of a plough-ox with its bones on the outside. The tail comes over the back like a mast falling. The sound is the worst part — not a roar, nothing so honest. A dry clicking. Ten thousand small hard things touching each other. He went into that clicking with the sun off the salt-flat cooking him in his own leather, and he came out of it, and he went in again on another day, and a third, and a fourth, because the queen too refused to stay in her grave.

And then he did the thing that put a chill in me when I first heard it.

He didn't only kill them.

There is a scorpion queen that walks at his side now. He struck the crown off one and took the next one living. Whatever holds in that armoured skull that passes for a mind — he reached into it and turned it around. A lion walks with him. A stag. A small scorpion, which is the sort of joke the grey hills tell. He has a rider on a horse, a man out of the far east who came to him in irons and now rides ahead of the column with a spear across his knees.

Think on it. The man walks into the desert with a woman who poured ale, a cook whose hands shook, a Cimmerian smith who never thanked him, a white wolf, a lion, a stag, and a scorpion the size of a cart.

That is not a warband, friends. That is a procession. And every single one of them was on a rope or on the wrong end of his spear before it chose otherwise.

The Swamp King and the Cave With the Bad Name

Now the wet country. Cup, boy. This next part needs it.

There is a cave down in the green rot that the locals call the Executioner's Entrance, and they call it that for a reason, and the reason is that people go in and the cave does the rest. He went there twice.

First for the spider.

You in the corner — you've killed spiders. In your bread-box. Under your bedroll. Hold that little thing in your mind and now grow it until its body is the size of a wine-tun and give it a skull for a face. Not a face like a skull. A skull, white and grinning on the front of the sac, staring out at whatever it is about to wrap. The legs come down out of the dark before the body does. That's what does it to men. You see the legs land, one, two, one, two, and you understand that the thing they belong to is still up there in the roof.

He came out. The webbing burned off him for a day and a half.

Then he went back in for the King.

The Swamp King. He is not a story, whatever the crocodile-eaters say — he is meat, he simply has more of it than any single thing should. He rules water that has forgotten how to move. He smells like a battlefield three days after. When he comes at you he comes low and fast through the muck and the muck goes up in a brown wall and you cannot see, and that is when he has you, because he can.

The Cimmerian went into black water up to his hips to fight a thing that was born in it.

He came out the other side of that day carrying a stink he could not scrub off. He freed two men in the same stretch — a fighter of the Forgotten Tribe, an archer out of the north — and neither of them would sit near him at the fire that night, and he took no offence, because he wouldn't have sat near himself either.

Somewhere in that country too there is a kappa, and this one was blue. He had met their king before, as some of you were here to hear. He looked at this one. This one looked back. Neither of them made anything of it. Even in the mud there are days off.

The Aviary

And now I come to the part I'd rather not tell, and will, because you paid.

There is a dead city.

Not a ruin — a ruin is a thing that stopped. This is a thing that kept going after it stopped. Bones walk the streets with armour still strapped to the ribs. Archers made of dregs and dry sinew stand at the corners and loose at anything with blood in it, and their arrows are still true, which tells you something about how much of a man is in his eyes and how much is elsewhere.

He walked in with the serpent-men behind him already dead — three of them with swords, met on the road out of the jungle, standing upright as men and hissing as no man does, and he had left them in the leaf-litter.

In the dead city there is a library. In the library there are lizard-things that were men once, or men-things that were lizards, and the scholars can argue that in a warm room; he met four of them among the shelves and the rotted scrolls and he left four of them on the floor. There is a commander in a place they call the Aviary, and a red mother in the spawning-pools that is the size of a cottage and full of children, and he went to both.

And then there was the flock.

Six times in one day, friends. Six bat-demons in the Aviary, one after another, and I want you to know what that is. A wingspan across the whole hall. A face like a rat's and a man's argued out in the dark and neither one winning. They do not land. They come down out of the ceiling in a hard drop with the wind of it slamming your ears shut, and the sound they make goes into your teeth rather than your ears, and the smell of that place — old guano, ammonia so thick it strips the water from your eyes — is a thing men remember longer than the wounds.

Six. And then the winged death itself, which is what you get when the demons have a queen.

And in the pools beneath, three young dragons, red as a forge-mouth, no bigger than ponies and already carrying fire in their gullets — and every one of you who ever wondered where dragons come from now knows the answer, and the answer is that they come from somewhere a Cimmerian can reach.

And a serpent by the Triumvirate's citadel, so vast that the men who tell it argue about whether it was one snake or a river with scales.

Two days. That was two days of his life.

I have known men who lived eighty winters and did not fill two days like that.

What He Is Now

So. Where does that leave him, this Strabo, with the black hair and the grey eyes and the crossed marks he carries?

He has a hold. Real walls, and a forge inside them going day and night — a smith of the Black Hand at the anvil, a Hyborian, taken off a rope and now making the iron that guards the gate he was dragged through. There's an armourer. A tanner. A smelter out of Shem. An alchemist of Hyrkania mixing things in the corner that the rest of them walk wide around. A sorcerer — yes, a sorcerer, a Black Hand man, and the Cimmerian trusts nobody who mutters, but he freed him all the same and let him choose, and the man chose to stay.

There are sherpas who carry, and berserkers who don't, and hunters with bows out of the northern heirs, and a taskmaster of the Relic Hunters — this very city's people, understand — who now keeps the stores.

Some of them he freed twice. Some of them, three or four times over. The road is long and it takes people and he goes and gets them back.

That's the whole of it. That's the man. He walks into the dead places and he comes out with the living.

Look around this room. Half of you have worn a rope. The other half have tied one, and you can put your hand down, I'm not naming you tonight.

He was on one too, once. That's the thing I keep chewing. Everything he does — every strap he cuts, every scarred stranger who ends up walking behind him with a spear he was given rather than one he was threatened with — it all comes from that. He remembers the rope. Most men who get free of one spend the rest of their days making sure they're the ones holding it.

Not him. Crom gave him strength at birth and never gave him another thing, no comfort, no counsel, no hall of songs to be remembered in — so he took the strength and he spends it on other people's ropes. That is not kindness. Don't call it kindness where he can hear you; he'd walk out.

Call it the only arithmetic a Cimmerian knows. He was held. He is not held. Therefore.

The fire's dead and so is my cup.

He's still out there, though. Northward, I hear — and there's a thing they're saying about him and a mountain, and something under it that has never once come up into the light.

But that is not tonight's telling.

Come back. Bring silver. I'll bring the rest.