Evening the Thirteenth — The Silent Legion, the Kappa King, and the Two Men Named Will

Rain in Sepermeru. Three nights of it, and the dust turned to a red soup that sucked at your boots and would not let go, and every man in the Broken Tusk stank of wet wool and old fear. Then the door banged and there was Hjalti One-Eye with his beard dripping, wringing water out of his sleeve onto the floor like a man wringing a chicken's neck.

He did not greet you. He set his cup down where the light could find it.

"Fill that," he said, "and I will tell you where the Cimmerian went while you were all in here complaining about weather. You who sat through the wight-harrow and the horned king — good. You will need the stomach you grew."

The city that would not admit it was dead.

Draw close. Away east and north there is a city with no name left on it. The wind goes through the doorways and comes out the other side sounding like somebody was still in there, changing its mind. Strabo walked into that place at grey morning with the rain of the high country freezing on his shoulders, and the first thing that met him was a thing with a wet mouth — a defiler of blood, they call it, and I will tell you honestly I do not know what it was before. It was pale in the way a fish belly is pale. It came at him with its arms too long, and the Cimmerian took its jaw off at the hinge with the first stroke and never slowed his walking.

And then he saw them, and this was the sight of that morning: the Silent Legion.

Four of them, standing in a courtyard where the rain fell and made no sound on their armour. Big men once. Bigger now, in the way that dead men grow when you look at them too long. Plate the colour of an old cooking pot, helms with no gap for a face, and no eyes behind the gap they did have — and not one word out of them, hear me, not a shout, not a curse, not the little grunt a man makes when he lifts his shield. They fought the way a mill wheel turns. That is the horror of it. A screaming enemy tells you he is afraid. These told you nothing, and Strabo had to learn them the way you learn a bad ford — with his feet, in the cold, one wrong step at a time.

He broke them one by one and they went down clattering like a dropped kitchen. Behind them archers of bone were putting shafts into his back, and a fighter of bone with a torch was making a small brave sun in all that rain, and a thing of empty armour walked with nobody inside it — and I want you to hold that in your head a moment, you there with the empty cup. Nobody inside it. Crom does not explain such things. Crom does not explain anything. Crom gives a man strength at his birth and then goes back to his mountain and turns his grim back, and what you do with the strength is entirely your own affair.

At the heart of that city sat their commander in a chair of stone, and he rose when Strabo came, and he was not slow. There was a ghost that had made war and remembered how — you could feel it in the room before you saw it, the way you feel a horse behind you. There was another ghost that had kept the writings, and it was worse. War-ghosts want to kill you. The keeper-ghost wanted you to stay. Strabo did not stay. He put his cross-hilt through the cold of it until the cold stopped arguing, and he came out of that city at dusk with his hands shaking, and he sat under an overhang and made fourteen things with those shaking hands before he slept — rope, and iron, and bread of a sort. A man mends his gear or he dies of it. That is the whole creed of the north in six words.

The reaches, and what wears a body there.

Further north the ground goes white and the dead come up through it like bad teeth.

He met wights — the low sort that crawls, and the high sort that stands and is nearly a man and that is the trouble with it. He met lizard-men who had drowned and got up anyway, still dripping. He met hyenas, three of them, and hear me: a hyena laughs when it is alive, and a dead hyena still tries. The sound comes out of a throat that has no wet left in it. It is like laughter being sawed.

And he met the kappas. River-devils, squat, green as pond scum, with a hollow in the crown of the skull where the water sits — kill them and it spills, and that is how you know. Two came out of the black water at him and the water was cold enough to stop a man's heart on its own.

Then the soul-taker found him. A thing that reaches past the meat for the part of you that your mother named. It got hold of him. I have this from a Zingaran who saw the marks after. He stood there in the snow with something pulling at him from the inside, and he did what his people do — he set his feet, he shut his teeth, and he swung. No prayer. Cimmerians do not pray; they consider it begging.

And a priest-king out of some older, prouder grave came up to see the noise, wearing his crown still, and went down still wearing it.

The dragon, the king in the pond, and the gate.

Next day the mountains gave up a dragon.

Dead, mind. Long dead. The warmakers had it on a chain of their own devising and it came at him with its ribs open to the sky and the snow falling straight through them and out again. He fought a dead dragon in the wind, and lived, and killed it, and I have never once heard him mention it. That is the man. That is the entire man.

Then down to the water for the kappa king, fat as a chieftain and twice as insulted, and back up for the champion of the warmakers — a live thing at last, a joy, something that bled — and last the guardian on the eastern gate, which was made of stone and did not care about anything Strabo had done all day.

On the road that morning a mammoth had crossed in front of him, mountain-shaped, unhurried, minding its own great business, and he let it pass. And a black widow-spider the size of a war-hound came down on a thread and he did not let that pass. A man is allowed his preferences.

Two men, one name.

Now here is the part I sell the dearest, so drink first.

In the pens of that country he found a man in irons. Will, he named himself, when he could name himself. Strabo has worn rope, you understand — there is a ring of scarred skin around him that no shirt quite covers, and every time he sees another man wearing the same jewellery something in his chest goes quiet and cold. He struck the irons off. He did not say a fine thing. He held out the hand with the sword still in it, the other one open, and let the man choose the road. Will chose it.

And a night later — this is true, I have it twice — a second man came out of the dark with the same name in his mouth. A Zamorian, a priest of the relic-hunters, soft-handed, sun-ruined, who had been kept for what he knew. Him too the Cimmerian cut loose. Two men named Will now walk behind him. The gods are fond of a joke and rarely a good one.

Then south, to the house of hoarded words that stands out on the sand — and something came up under the floor of the world. The scorpion king. Big as an ox-cart, with a tail that came over its own back like a man swinging a hammer he has swung all his life. It took him low. He went down in the grit with the smell of hot stone and his own blood in his teeth. Then he got up. He always gets up; that is not courage, that is simply the only trick his people were ever taught.

And when it stopped moving, he found one more soul in chains behind it — a great slab of a fellow the road already calls Rhino. Irons off. Hand out. Road offered.

So that is where he stands tonight: a black-haired man from the grey hills with three freed souls at his back who owe him nothing and follow anyway, a cross-hilt worn shiny at the grip, and a habit of walking north until something objects.

He is walking north still.

And there is a thing up there in the ice that the dead themselves go around — and I know its name, and I am not saying it into an empty cup.