Conn Crowhand's Last Oath by Graham Thomas Wilcox

Author:Graham Thomas Wilcox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FMT
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2025-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

VI

My eyes opened, and a sword swung for them.

I leapt back, drew my own steel in time to parry the backcut, feinted a cut of my own and thrust instead. My greatblade sank to its quillons in a broad man’s belly. He coughed bloody foam in my face, and died. I kicked him off my blade and stepped back into a guard, heart racing, eyes scanning.

First, I saw Syve standing beside me, her own blade drawn and bloody, and that was good. But then I saw where we stood, and among whom.

We were at Godstide Feast, aye, and at its climax too. There, Crowhand and all the other chieftains gathered round his Hag aelf cauldron. In it, they mixed their blood for the god’s own brew while below them, in a pit of skulls, champions and prisoners fought.

‘Crowhand!’ Syve shouted, pointing with her greatblade to the cauldron perched on a dais above us. In her eyes glimmered a killer’s light, fiery as Aqshy itself, and it kindled in my breast a lust for blood, for souls, for red raw death.

But I remembered that rune upon Doghide’s person – among other places – and though it was the barest glinting of a plan, I realised I possessed a plan nonetheless.

‘Manacles,’ I shouted back at her, and her brow knit in confusion. I gestured at my wrist. ‘The prisoner. Manacles.’ I groped for the right word, sweeping my sword out towards our surrounding melee. ‘Runes!’

Syve’s eyes conveyed her understanding. Yet, her brow did not unwrinkle. ‘Crowhand,’ she growled.

I shook my head. She scowled and pulled away, but I looped an arm around her and drew her near and set my mouth against her ear and whispered, ‘Trust me.’

And whatever rejoinder she held for that, I do not know, for it was in that moment that a man barrelled between us, a hammer fisted in each arm and Sigmar’s name bawling from his lips. Thus did the battle come upon us.

The hammer wielder thundered a wide stroke at my head. I dipped below it and cut an upstroke at his hand, felt my blade bite home, heard him cry aloud in a foreign tongue, and then I was away, running through the melee as well as I could. What I remember, I remember only in fits and snatches. A longaxe hewed for my legs, and I jumped it like a chariot jumps a ford. A shieldmaiden, blonde of braid and broad of stance, barred my path and we swashed blows back and forth for a breathless moment before a spearman stuck her through the back. I slew the spearman – it can be a dastard’s weapon, the spear, and thus I always relish a spearman’s slaying – and then I was onward again, slipping on gore and trailing gut, my eyes combing, always combing, for the bright glare of a rune-marked manacle amid the din.

Above this all floated the chanting of the druids and the singing of the chiefs at their cauldron, and only once did I glance up from my red work towards Crowhand and his ilk.

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