‘What’s that?’ Fritha said, pointing at a dark object in the snow.

It was the new-forged sword, lying upon the snow, the tang, cross-guard and a handspan of the black blade poking from its sheepskin wrapping.

‘Nothing,’ Drem muttered, stooping and scooping it up, hastily pulling the sheepskin up over the tang.

‘Drem,’ his da shouted, voice muted in the snow-wreathed woods. There was a tone to it that set his skin tingling.

Drem ran, left the ponies, sword gripped tightly under his arm, the crunch of Fritha’s feet behind him. They didn’t have to go far. The smell hit Drem before he saw.

‘Think I’ve found what brought that hound into the woods,’ Olin said, standing and staring as Drem and Fritha stopped either side of him.

‘Asroth below,’ Fritha breathed.

Before them was a scene of carnage. The ground was stamped and churned, snow and blood mixed to a bloody sludge. Drem saw huge paw-prints amongst the pink mire. Lumps of meat were scattered all about the area. It took Drem a few moments to recognize them as body parts. A hand, half a leg, a shoulder and arm, flesh tattered and torn. A torso and head, the body almost eviscerated, guts strewn about like so much old rope.

‘No,’ Drem whispered, because the head staring lifelessly into nowhere had belonged to someone he knew, someone his da called friend.

It was Calder the smith.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: BLEDA

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

BLEDA

Bleda walked out through the open gates of Drassil. There were a dozen paces of near-darkness as he made his way through the arched tunnel beneath the battlements and gate-tower, and then he was stepping out into the last rays of daylight, the sun a pale glow above the trees of Forn. Before him spread the field of the dead, a road cutting a line through the cairns that filled the plain. Bleda took a deep breath and marched on.

He’d looked down upon these same cairns from the tops of the battlements many times, knew that they sheltered the fallen from that day that the world changed. The day the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim had broken free from the Otherworld and become flesh.

But those same cairns had looked different when viewed from so high above, like pebbles cast upon a cloth of green fabric. Now, though, they rose to either side of Bleda, tall as him, some taller, looming, filling his world, pressing in upon him.

So many dead! Has there ever been such a battle, with so many killed?

They were covered with moss and lichen, earth filling the gaps between stones, grass and weeds growing, snails and slugs and other things scuttling between the slabs of stone. The wind sighed through them, sounding like a thousand voices, whispering.

And what would the dead tell me, of that dread Day of Wrath? Deeds of valour, of courage and honour. Of murder and slaughter?