On the battlements above Fort Abercrombie's main gate stood Eirik Stormcrow.

  Below him, the now free Northmen captives held spear-points at the backs of a terrified cluster of Skarl non-combatants: elders, mothers clutching children, the infirm.

  The sound of massed hooves.

  The remaining Skrals emerged from the tree line and screeched to a chaotic halt.

  About thirty warriors were still alive.

  At their head was Borvak, and beside him was Grakk’Thor. The swirling vortex of stolen life-force above him pulsive erratically.

  They saw the carnage within the courtyard – the bodies of their warriors, the spilled salt, the overturned barrels. They saw the prisoners held at spear-point. They saw gate, wide-open, as if welcoming them.

  And then they looked up.

  Eirik stood front and center. To his left, held firmly by a scar-faced Northman, was Shala, Grakk’Thor’s daughter. To his right stood Veyla, Borvak’s heavily pregnant wife. Between them, held upright by two Northmen, was the ancient crone, Kethra, Grakk’Thor’s mother.

  Dren cowered nearby.

  Tied along the wall beside them were a dozen more Skarls – young mothers, adolescent boys, respected elders – each with a Northman captor holding a knife or spear at their throat.

  The message was devastatingly clear.

  A collective snarl ripped from the throats of the Skarl warriors. Ponies stamped and snorted, sensing the rage and terror of their riders. Borvak surged forward half a length as a dozen warriors mirrored him, ready to charge the open gate.

  Grakk’Thor raised his bone rattle and screamed.

  The line wavered. Ponies skittered sideways, held back by reins pulled taut. Warriors strained against their mounts, but their eyes were fixed on their loved ones. They could storm the gate, but the blades would fall long before they reached the ramparts.

  “Dren. Translate. Exactly.” Eirik remained impassive.

  Dren flinched. “H-He says… Do not attack.’”

  Grakk’Thor screamed again.

  “UL GASH THUL ZHOG! RELEASE THEM! THE WHITE DEATH WAS YOUR WORK! YOUR UNHOLINESS TARNISHES THE SKY FATHER! RELEASE THEM OR FACE THE WRATH OF VEL MOKTHUL!”

  Eirik didn’t blink.

  “Tell them there will be no negotiation necessary. They will watch their kin die, and then they will die. One by one. Starting now.”

  Dren did as told.

  Eirik nodded curtly to Olaf.

  Olaf stepped forward and raised the ice saber. His eyes settled on a middle-aged Skarl woman trying to comfort a young boy clinging to her leg.

  A warrior's wife, probably.

  “Her,” Olaf grunted, pointing with his blade.

  The Northman captor holding her yanked her forward, away from the boy, who screamed. Olaf strode towards her. The woman looked up, her eyes wide with incomprehension, then dawning horror.

  She began to plead in Skarl with a terrified wail.

  Borvak roared. Warriors surged again. Grakk’Thor’s rattle shook furiously, the crimson light flaring, holding them back, but barely.

  Olaf didn’t hesitate.

  The saber descended in a brutal arc. Thunk-crunch. The woman crumpled as her boy’s scream turned into a shriek that echoed across the pass.

  A howl of collective fury and despair erupted from the Skarl warriors. The unnatural control imposed by Grakk’Thor’s draining vortex seemed to be fraying at the edges.

  Grakk’Thor raised his free hand again, fingers twisting in a complex gesture. Fetishes on his robes began to glow with a sickly purple light.

  Helga hadn’t been idle on the wall. She’d confiscated a Skarl hornbow and a handful of arrows from a fallen guard. She’d nocked an arrow the moment Olaf stepped forward. And now, she drew smoothly, sighted down the arrow, and loosed.

  TWANG!

  The arrow hissed through the frigid air and slammed into the thick bone bracer encircling Grakk’Thor’s wrist as he gestured.

  CRACK!

  The bone splintered. Grakk’Thor screamed as the gathering purple light around his hand fizzled and died in a shower of harmless sparks. The vortex above him flickered violently. His concentration shattered.

  Eirik didn’t react to the shaman’s pain. His gaze was fixed on Borvak, who was staring at his injured shaman, then back at the wall.

  “Olaf. The old woman.”

  Kethra was still muttering. The Northmen holding her looked uneasy but pushed her forward as Olaf approached. He raised the saber.

  “NAAAAA!” The scream tore from Grakk’Thor’s throat. He clutched his broken wrist, his milky eyes wide with a terror beyond the physical pain. “UL! NA!”

  Borvak looked from his shaman, broken and screaming for his mother, to his pregnant wife, Veyla, trembling on the wall, her face streaked with tears. The crimson light in his eyes flickered.

  Olaf hesitated, the saber poised. He glanced at Eirik.

  Eirik met his gaze, then looked back at Borvak. He gave the nod.

  The saber fell.

  It was a clean blow, severing the ancient woman’s thin neck. Her chanting stopped instantly as her head tumbled slowly down the inner face of the battlement before thudding onto the stones below.

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  A terrible silence followed.

  Then, like a dam bursting, the sound came. A guttural moan of pure, unadulterated grief and fury from the Skarl warriors.

  Eirik stepped towards Veyla. The Northman holding her flinched but held his ground.

  Eirik placed a hand on her trembling shoulder. He turned her slightly, positioning her directly facing the massed Skarls below, making sure Borvak had a perfect view.

  He didn’t need to speak.

  Borvak snapped.

  The crimson light in his eyes flared, drowning out the last vestiges of reason. The shaman’s control, already weakened by pain and grief, vanished entirely.

  Borvak threw his head back and unleashed a roar that shook the very stones of the pass. He bellowed, driving his heels into his pony’s flanks. The beast surged forward.

  “BORVAK! NA!” Grakk’Thor shrieked, clutching his broken wrist.

  But it was too late.

  Seeing their champion charge, blinded by fury and the need to do something, to save or avenge, dozens of other Skarl warriors broke ranks. They ignored Grakk’Thor’s frantic screams. With answering roars, they kicked their ponies into a frenzied gallop, following Borvak’s charge forward.

  The ground before the walls looked like hard-packed snow and frozen earth.

  But it wasn’t.

  As the leading ponies, Borvak’s at the forefront, hit the seemingly solid ground just fifteen yards from the base of the wall, the thin crust Eirik had meticulously prepared with his Frost Mana shattered.

  It wasn’t just an ice sheet breaking. It was an entire, brittle plane of reinforced frost giving way beneath concentrated weight. The sound was a sickening CRUNCH-SPLINTER-CRACK! like a glacier calving.

  The leading ponies plunged downwards as if the earth had opened up. But it wasn’t a just pit.

  It was a pit with a forest of ice-spikes.

  Beneath the deceptive crust, Eirik had spent precious minutes and a significant portion of his remaining mana conjuring not a wall, but a killing field.

  Countless jagged spikes of blue-black ice, each as thick as a man's wrist and taller than a spear, were packed densely and angled lethally upwards.

  Borvak’s pony hit them first. It shrieked as multiple ice spears punched through its chest and belly, lifting it momentarily off its front legs.

  Borvak himself was catapulted forward over its neck. He hit the spikes shoulder-first. There was a crunch of bone and armor, and his furious charge ended instantly. He was pinned, impaled through the torso and leg. The crimson light in his eyes flickered and died.

  The warriors charging close behind him had no time to stop.

  Momentum carried them into the gaping maw of the ice trap. Ponies screamed as their legs snapped on the uneven, collapsing surface or were impaled through their chests and flanks. Riders were thrown forward, skewered on the waiting spikes or crushed beneath their falling mounts.

  A few tried desperately to rein in, colliding with those behind them who hadn’t yet seen the carnage. Ponies panicked, rearing, biting, kicking. Skarls were thrown from saddles, landing hard on the frozen ground or, worse, stumbling into the expanding perimeter of the ice trap where more hidden spikes waited.

  Grakk’Thor stared, his mouth hanging open in silent horror. His champion, his blood-sword, the core of his remaining power, was a bloody ruin pinned on ice.

  On the wall, Helga nocked another arrow.

  She picked off a warrior attempting to drag a wounded comrade back, the arrow punching through his throat. Another trying to dismount and scout the edge of the trap met the same fate.

  The Northman captives holding the hostages stared, their fear momentarily replaced by awe and a fierce, savage satisfaction. The Skarl non-combatants in the courtyard below wailed in despair.

  Eirik didn't let his guard down.

  Grakk’Thor looked broken, but still dangerous. And there were still warriors alive, wounded, panicked, but alive. The fight wasn't over.

  His gaze swept over the remaining Skarl force, then back to Veyla, shaking violently, her hands pressed over her mouth, eyes wide with terror as she stared at where her husband lay impaled. Then to the despairing Grakk’Thor beyond the gate.

  Eirik’s voice cut through the lingering screams and the moans of the dying on the spikes.

  “Shaman. Surrender. Now. Or I will give the order for the final executions.”

  He placed his hand back on Veyla’s shoulder. She flinched as if burned, a choked sob escaping her. Below, Grakk’Thor lifted his head.

  "Commander..." Helga murmured, her bowstring taut, an arrow nocked and aimed directly at the shaman’s heart. "He's gathering something..."

  Grakk’Thor’s voice erupted into a shriek that echoed off the mountainsides.

  His broken hand clenched into a fist around the obsidian knife still clutched in his good hand. He raised it high, the blade glinting wetly in the twilight.

  But it was towards his own body.

  The warriors closest to him – four hardened men whose faces held the desperate resolve of the damned – didn’t hesitate. They understood. They kicked their ponies forward, forming a living shield between Grakk’Thor and Helga’s bow on the wall. Their eyes met their shaman’s, a grim acceptance passing between them.

  Helga loosed.

  The arrow hissed true, aimed for the sliver of space between the warriors’ shoulders. One of the shielding Skarls threw himself sideways with a roar, interposing his body. The arrow slammed into his ribs with a wet crunch. He grunted but stayed mounted, swaying.

  Grakk’Thor ignored the arrow. He drove the obsidian knife deep into his own chest, just below the collarbone. Blood, black as pitch in the dim light, pulsed from the wound. He tore the blade free and plunged it again, lower, into his gut.

  A strangled cry escaped him, but his chanting intensified.

  The vortex above him, which had dimmed to a faint crimson shimmer, erupted. But it wasn’t sustaining life anymore. It was consuming it.

  The swirling mass, shot through with veins of utter blackness, descended and fused with Grakk’Thor. Tendrils, thick as a man’s arm and crackling with crimson energy, plunged into the wounds he’d inflicted upon himself.

  He screamed.

  His body began to distend. Bones cracked and reforming beneath his skin. Leather and fur garments strained and ripped as his torso swelled, pushing outwards like over-ripe fruit splitting its skin. The milky film over his eyes burned away, replaced by twin coals of pure, crimson fire.

  The warriors shielding him were not spared.

  Tendrils lashed out from the burgeoning mass that was Grakk’Thor, spearing into their chests.

  They didn't have time to scream.

  Their flesh desiccated in seconds as their life force was violently siphoned away. Their ponies screamed and collapsed. The stolen vitality surged back along the tendrils, pouring into Grakk’Thor, fueling the monstrous transformation.

  Where the warriors had stood, only dust and brittle bone remained, held aloft for a moment by the tendrils before crumbling.

  The thing that stood before Fort Abercrombie was no longer Grakk’Thor.

  Twelve feet tall, its distended torso was a mass of pulsating flesh crisscrossed with thick veins that pulsed with dark light. Six massive, multi-jointed limbs sprouted from its back and sides, ending in obsidian claws that scraped gouges in the frozen earth. From its gaping maw, a thick, whip-like tongue of solid shadow lashed, dripping sizzling ichor.

  A wave of pure terror washed over the wall.

  Northmen captors stumbled back from the hostages, their faces white. On the ground, the remaining Skarl warriors recoiled, their terror overcoming even their loyalty. Veyla fainted, slumping in her captor’s grip.

  "FROST MOTHER SAVE US..." Olaf breathed.

  "GET DOWN!" Eirik roared, shoving Olaf sideways just as a shadow-tendril thicker than a tree trunk lashed out from the monstrosity.

  It struck the battlement where they’d stood a split-second before. Stone exploded in a shower of razor-sharp shrapnel. The impact shook the entire wall section. Northmen and hostages alike were thrown to the walkway. Screams rent the air.

  The monster’s burning eyes fixed on the wall. On Helga. She had nocked another arrow the moment the transformation began. She had a clean shot at the pulsating mass that was the thing’s grotesque chest. She drew, smooth and fast.

  Twang!

  The arrow flew straight and true.

  A shadow-tendril snapped out faster than sight. It intercepted the arrow inches from its target, shattering the shaft into splinters. The monster's obsidian tongue lashed out like a striking viper, long and swift.

  Helga tried to throw herself sideways. The tip of the shadow-tongue, sizzling with dark energy, caught her across the chest plate. It didn't pierce her leather. It sucked.

  Helga gasped.

  Her eyes widened in shock. Colour drained from her face with terrifying speed. The skin on her face and hands visibly withered, turning grey and papery. She staggered, her bow clattering from nerveless fingers.

  She looked down at the spot where the tongue had touched, then up at Eirik.

  Her lips moved, forming a silent word:

  "Commander..."

  Then her body hit the stones, drained of... everything.

  "HELGA!"

  Eirik grabbed Olaf. "Don't! It's death out there!" He felt a block of ice in his chest. Helga. Steady, lethal Helga. Gone. He forced the grief away.

  "I go down," Eirik snarled. "The rest of you, HOLD THOSE HOSTAGES! Olaf! If it looks like we’re losing… kill them all!"

  He spun, vaulting over the inner edge of the battlement, landing on the courtyard stones below with a jarring thud.