Dark Age (Red Rising Saga 5)

No more words are shared. They meet in a sudden flurry of violence that rattles my bones. Sefi bounds backward, more agile than the huge man, but not by much. She hops foot to foot, probing, sliding, and lashing forward. She is a spirit of the ice, nearly Valdir’s match by the reckoning of the dozens of Golds she’s sent to the Void.

But Volsung ignores the blades and recklessly thrusts at her heart with his warsaw, forcing her to turn her attack into a defense. He is old, and has maybe lost a step, but he is cunning, and Sefi knows it. The recklessness was a trap to lure her into baiting him, and Sefi barely twists her heart out of the way as his blade scrapes along her rib cage.

She spins back, but smelling blood, Volsung comes on like a bloody storm. Screaming at the top of his lungs, he goes berserker, hammering at the razor and axe as if he intends to chop them to splinters. He uppercuts with the hooked piercing end of his warsaw. Sefi deflects with her razor, lifts her left leg, and sidesteps to her right.

He pivots his spear, and brings the saw half crashing down. She catches it with her axe. Veins bulge in his trunk of a neck. Muscles twist in his core and he pushes down, down, down. Sefi brings the razor around underneath from her left to cut him in half. He pivots the bottom end of the spear diagonal, blocks the razor outward. The metal of both instruments warps as they rebound, hers outward, his inward. He uses the momentum, driving with his legs as he uppercuts with the piercing end toward her opposite leg, ripping a canyon from her mid-calf, through the inside tendons of her knee, all the way up her inner thigh to her pelvis.

Sefi stumbles back, and in six compact thrusts, he punctures both her ankles, her kneecaps, and both her rotator cuffs. She falls like a slack puppet. Her axe and razor clattering to the ground.

It took less than a minute.

Dead silence. I grow nauseous in it. I should have shot Xenophon and died in that room. This can’t be happening. Some of the female jarls bolt for the exits. The Valkyrie go berserk. But they are outnumbered and slaughtered. As pulseRifles whine and axes rise and fall in the periphery, Volsung watches his daughter crawl away from him toward her axe, leaving smears of blood on the stone. He stalks after her and stomps on the back of her head until she goes still. He places the axe in her hand, and crouches with a knee on her spine to say: “Valhalla bears only the brave. Will you remain quiet in the end, my child?”

Volsung straddles his daughter, putting his weight on her tailbone, and sets to grim work. With the knife from his waist, he cuts open her vest to reveal Sefi’s tattooed back. In a tender sawing motion, he carves off two long flaps of flesh from the shoulder blades to the tailbone, exposing her rib cage. She flails like a punctured fish. Then with a small axe from his hip, Volsung hacks at the ribs on either side of her spine. She jerks in agony, but no sound escapes her. He discards the hatchet and pries open her rib cage from behind to expose her lungs. Tears leak from her eyes. She gasps for air.

As peaceful as a man cleaning a fish, Volsung takes a handful of salt from a pouch and throws it on the wounds. Sefi spasms, the muscles of her limbs balling up in cramps. Not one of her warjarls comes to her aid. They watch the Valkyrie being slaughtered without drawing their axes. I grow sick with hate for them, for the betrayal and horror in Sefi’s eyes. When Volsung realizes she will not scream, he nods with pride and kneels to dry the tears from her face.

“Valhalla will welcome you, child. Go to our Fallen who feast, go to your brother in the Skyhall, you are freed on Allfather’s wings.”

“Tyr Morga will eat your heart,” she rasps.

“Perhaps,” Volsung whispers. “My god is fickle with his favor.”

He reaches into her opened back with both hands, and knowing the end is here, Sefi shouts with her last breath: “Hyrg la Rag—” Her words turn to a gurgle as Volsung tears out her lungs and hurls them on the ground. She blinks at them. Her eyes drift closed, and only the tattooed spirit eyes look on.

I shut my eyes and hear the crunch and hack of steel on flesh as Volsung continues his work. When I open them again, he has taken her heart. He holds it above him to show the warjarls. Blood sluices down his biceps into the white hair of his armpits.

“Allfather!” he cries out. “Allfather! I offer you these stains!” It takes him two minutes to eat her heart. When he is finished, he shudders in satiation. “Worthy.” Then he grabs Sefi by the ankle, forming a red trail as he drags her up the stairs to the Griffin Throne and takes his seat.

I seize the moment to crawl toward a fallen Valkyrie. With the angle, I can’t free myself from the cuffs, but with her blade I’m able to pry open the heel of my boot and palm the heartspike Pax altered for me.

All kneel for their king except for Ozgard, who is allowed to stumble toward the remains of Sefi. He looks at her and finally screams. It’s more than a scream. It’s a soul dying. He falls to his knees in horror at the sight of his Queen’s ribs splayed out like bloody wings. Volsung tosses him the knife he used on Sefi. It skitters across the floor to slide to a stop in front of Ozgard. But he’s no longer Ozgard. Spit drips down his lips. His remaining eye is glazed.

“A red griffin, wasn’t it, shaman? I have fulfilled your prophecy. Fulfill mine.”

As if under a spell, the shaman picks up the blade, turns it around, and buries it into his remaining eye. As what was Ozgard weeps on the ground, Volsung takes the razor of Aja into his hand.

“Seven hundred years of slavery. Seven hundred years of war. Seven hundred years of anguish for them.” Seated on Sefi’s throne, he closes his eyes and the distant roar of the crowd, ignorant of the horror coming for them, laps through the defiled building.

“Reaper. Reaper. Reaper,” they chant.

Fá opens his eyes. “Sack the city. Take their treasures. Rape their men, their women, their children. Remind them the Allfather’s truth: the world is yours, if you can take it.”

THE BIRDS CHIRP. Early beams of sunlight warm the frosted stone of the plaza at the top of the Bellona Stairs. The scent of bonfires and crackling boar meat thickens the air. Two thousand Ascomanni feast beside their king as the city trembles with screams. I should be sitting across from Volga watching her try to impress Pax. I should be with my friends. With my aeta. Instead, I suffer the banquet of a beast.

I have never been more disgusted with our bipedal species.

Was Sefi all that held the monster inside at bay?

In the shadow of Griffinhold, airborne Obsidians rove in packs, lighting fires with phosphorus bombs, savaging citizens who thought the roofs shelter from the marauding hordes below. Not Ascomanni, but the very Obsidians who drank and sang in the streets at Winter Solstice, who shopped in the markets and waved at the Reds who rebuilt their city.

I’ve seen genocide. I saw the Jackal’s bombs go off. The ghost of the flash stayed burned in my eyes for two years. But this is not a flash. It is…more human, and worse for it.

I understand us now. How easy it is to follow a pointing finger.

“Have you thought about my offer, Mr. Horn?” Xenophon asks. The White watches the burning city with zero connection. A line of slaves in chains five kilometers long stretches toward the former Julii flagship parked south of the city. Will the Republic just watch the rape of Olympia?

“I have thought about your offer. At the right price, it could be interesting.”