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“Ulrik the Fearless, well met. I do not plan to try to stop you,” the man said. He had short, greasy blond hair, slicked back on his head, and an unkempt beard that covered a weak chin. Still, Ulrik noted the man’s corded, muscular arms and his broad chest. At his side he wore a long, straight sword. His arms and legs were covered in a scarred, brown leather armor, and across his chest was a dented metal plate decorated with a painted red hammer—the claw-ended kind of hammer used to pound in nails. “I merely want to join you in seeking answers. My name is Morten.”

  “Morten the Hammer?” Ulrik asked, recognizing the symbol and the name. He’d heard tales of the man from Hammerfest, a nearly empty city of frozen ruins up in Lapland. Tales Ulrik didn’t like. Stories of the men Morten had brutalized and the women he’d had his way with. Most of the stories involved the Laplander outwitting his foes, instead of overpowering them. Often through trickery or betrayal. Many of them were undoubtedly bluster and legend, but there was probably some truth in them.

  “You are heading to see the Jarl now?” Morten asked.

  “I lost men on this voyage,” was all Ulrik said, and he took a step further toward the Jarl’s longhall.

  Morten again thrust his hand out, this time toward Ulrik’s chest. It was enough, after a lengthy voyage, losing two friends and missing even more meals.

  Ulrik, a few inches taller than Morten, and broader, with fists like frozen slabs of reindeer, stepped closer to the Laplander, whose hand made contact with Ulrik’s chestplate. Another step forced the man’s loosely extended arm back and bent it at the elbow. Then Ulrik slammed his forehead into the bridge of Morten’s nose. Blood splattered both men in the face, splashing into their eyes.

  Morten staggered backward from the blow, but his hand was already moving to a black-handled knife on his belt.

  Ulrik spun and cocked his arm. He came around in a full circle, his pointed elbow mashing into Morten’s ear, and knocking the man sideways to the ground.

  Someone screamed out a blood-curdling battle cry from behind him, and Ulrik heard the tell-tale scuffle of leather boots on the pebbled ground.

  He ducked low, just as a man soared over him. The man had tried to tackle Ulrik, and as his form sprawled to the ground several feet behind Morten’s body, Ulrik recognized him as the first man he had hit. Another damned Laplander. These two have no honor.

  Morten stirred on the ground, and since he was down there anyway, Ulrik hammered a fist into the man’s face. The blow knocked Morten down and out of the fight, and made a worse mess of the man’s already bloodied nose.

  Before Ulrik could scramble forward to go after the man who had attempted to attack him from behind, he was bumped from the side by yet another man, this one a huge moving wall of flesh and furs—only his legs and arms were bare. Ulrik lost his balance and toppled over onto the ground. The wall of flesh was mighty Trond, who now picked up the Laplander who had attacked from behind like a coward. Trond hefted the smaller man’s body and threw him up the beach as Ulrik watched, stunned at the ox’s strength. Arms and legs flailed until the small man smashed to earth right where the sand and pebbles met long patches of scrub grass.

  Ulrik staggered to his feet and turned his eyes back to Morten. The greasy man was awake and clambering to his feet, spitting a thick phlegmy wad of blood to the ground, while pulling his longsword from its brown scabbard.

  Ulrik pulled the long handled ax from its leather loop on his belt, and yanked his cracked wooden shield off his back, gripping the curled, well-worn, leather arm straps with his left hand.

  Morten’s blue eyes faltered for a second, glancing back at the bustling harbor.

  It was in that split second that Ulrik processed the sounds around him. Men were yelling and screaming. Some were shouting oaths, and others were promising death.

  Knowing it was foolish to take his eyes off his opponent for even a second, Ulrik still did it. He let his eyes dart back to the harbor.

  In the span of a few seconds, the marshy beach had erupted into a full scale battle. Turning back to Morten as the man stalked forward, Ulrik slammed the head of his ax against the metal dome on the center of his battered shield. It made a deep, satisfying clang.

  “Come find death, Laplander,” Ulrik said, smiling and exposing blood-stained teeth.

  2

  Ax versus sword. Metal versus wood and bone. All washed in sprays of blood and spittle. If not for all the screaming, Ulrik would have thought the assembled Northmen were enjoying themselves. Battle rang all around him, but he kept his focus on the Laplander.

  Morten lunged with the sword point first, keeping his distance. Ulrik easily parried the strike with the head of his ax. Despite not liking the stories he had heard about the Laplander, he knew better than to trust in only stories when it came to the character of a man, and it seemed Morten’s heart wasn’t really in the attack. Ulrik had no desire to actually hurt the man, but if the fight went on for long, he would have no problems with further embarrassing him.

  Morten’s eyes darted to the other battles around the beach, while Ulrik had seen all he needed to. He would keep his gaze fixed on his opponent, now that the weapons had been drawn.

  Morten thrust out half-heartedly again, and Ulrik was about to parry, when the Laplander’s eyes darted again, and he yelled, “Look out!”

  Not sure whether it was a ploy on the part of the man who was renowned to be a backstabber, Ulrik dove left instead of down, keeping his eyes on Morten and bringing his ax up at the same time, in case the man pressed the attack. Instead, Morten directed his attention at a new opponent. His sword flashed up just in time to stop a thin man swinging two axes down where Ulrik had been, just seconds before.

  Ulrik rolled in the sand and came up in a stance at the side of Morten, just as another man came rushing in, shield first, like a human battering ram. With short dark hair and pure murder in his ice chip eyes, Ulrik categorized this man as the larger threat. Plus, the man’s shield was coming straight for Ulrik’s midsection. He steeled himself for the hit, but it still lifted him off the ground. The man kept running, and Ulrik lifted his ax handle high, then struck the maniacal runner on the top of his head.

  The man dropped like a stone, and Ulrik landed on his feet, several yards further up the beach. He was about to rush back into the fray when he spotted Morten and the slim man Trond had thrown fighting side by side now, against three other men. At first the two Laplanders seemed outnumbered, but as Ulrik watched, he realized the two knew each other, and they fought side by side or back to back, as if they were born to it. The smaller man fought with twin hand axes, while Morten had pulled out a knife to go with his sword.

  They are talented, Ulrik observed.

  Closer to the harbor, Trond was barreling through men like an unstoppable storm, but as Ulrik watched, he noticed the giant man was only attacking the most aggressive and bloodthirsty of the combatants. Often with non-lethal head-butts or punches. At first look, Trond appeared out of control, but on closer inspection Ulrik saw he was picking his targets.

  Then something unfortunate happened that changed the tide of the battle.

  A man with a short sword took a serious swing at Trond’s head, missing the larger man’s neck, but cleaving off his beard with the deadly swing.

  Oh, you stupid stack of testicles, Ulrik thought.

  And then Trond, a man of strength unbridled and with a composure to be appreciated, went berserk.

  He rushed the smaller man, swatting his sword aside before grabbing the man’s skull between two massive hands and simply crushing it into a pulpy mess. Then Trond ran for the next nearest man and crushed him with a blood-drenched, meaty fist, before kicking at another and biting at a third.

  As Trond lost touch with reality, all around him men detected that the brawl had become a serious killing field, and they either upped their efforts or backed off and away to the fringes of the fight—or like Trond, they lost their minds, falling into snarling, thrashing berserker rages.

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sp; Ulrik, too, could fall into a desperate, swinging rage, pummeling his enemies into oblivion. But he was nowhere near that angry today, and he saw no reason to fight these men at all. They had all come together for a common cause. He needed some way to calm the melee, but he saw no way to do it without risking his life.

  To his side, Morten and his ally had knocked out their foes, the three men on the ground—two of them bleeding from several small and inconsequential stab wounds. The two victors were watching the out-of-control fight that was threatening to leave many dead or injured.

  “Odin’s beard,” Morten’s friend said. “Look at that.” He pointed past the fracas to the pier, where a woman had just shoved a man off the wooden walkway and into the water. “Do you know who that is, Morten?”

  Morten made no reply as the two fell silent, watching the woman.

  She had long blonde hair and wore goggles with red lenses on her face. Under the thick goggles was a spread of makeup resembling a Raven’s outstretched wings, only the ink was red—or else it was blood. Either was possible. She wore black leather with additional studded armored pads on one leg and the opposing shoulder. A long-handled ax hung by her side, and she marched confidently off the pier, and right into the thickest part of the fighting.

  The woman jabbed upward with her left elbow as a man approached her. She had to leap slightly off her feet for the elbow to connect with the man’s jaw, but the strike was so lightning fast, that the much smaller woman managed to snap the man’s head backward. Before he even started to fall, she had landed back on the soles of her black boots and spun. Her high kick connected with another man’s ear, sending him off to the side and into three other brawlers, knocking them all off balance, as they crumpled into the wet sand.

  The woman took two more steps before a man with an ax and a beard that flowed to his waist rushed her. She sidestepped his lunge, turning and delivering the bottom of her fist to the back of the man’s neck with such force and speed that Ulrik could see the man’s neck bend downward as his head snapped back toward his own shoulder blades.

  Broken, he thought.

  The woman continued forward. When the fighting wasn’t close enough to reach her, she did not pursue it. Ulrik realized she wasn’t entering the fray—she was merely passing through it. And if anyone got in her way, she was putting them down. Brutally.

  Morten gave voice to Ulrik’s thoughts. “She is a very calm fighter.”

  Then a man with a beard in long braids with silver metal cones at the tips punched the woman in the side of the head, his fist slipping past her defenses. She staggered slightly to the side, and quicker than Ulrik could see, she drew a knife and slashed upward as she fell away from the man. As her arm swooped away from the man’s head, a thin line of blood from the man’s slit throat trailed the dark metal in her hand. And the woman, recovering her stance, launched herself into the fight, her own berserker rage consuming her as she began to drop larger fighters all around her.

  Ulrik watched in awe, thinking the woman would take down every man foolish enough to confront her whirling, striking form, until Trond, still lost in his own bloodlust, headed straight for her.

  3

  It is a wonder we have made it this far, Halvard thought.

  He stood with Jarl Gregers on the second story of one of the few skeletal buildings in town to remain roughly vertical. Most of the others had toppled, crumbled or at least fallen over to a forty-five degree angle, decades before he had been born. And at fifty-two, he was an old man by humanity’s current standards. Old enough to be glad he wasn’t down below in the melee.

  From his perch, a hundred yards farther inland than where the bulk of the fighting was taking place, he thanked the gods he was too old to fight, and beseeched them to let his plan succeed. Despite his earlier dark thought, he knew the human race had redeeming qualities and was worth saving.

  Halvard turned to the Jarl, a man of sixty, with a paunch belly earned from far too many years of drinking, after his own fighting years were done. The man had clawed and scrabbled his way to the top of the region’s toughest men—often over their cracked skulls.

  The Jarl leered at the fight, clearly missing the old days. A few inches shorter than Halvard, the man knew little of science or the history of the world, as Halvard did, but he appreciated a good fight.

  “Now this is more like it,” the Jarl said.

  Halvard rolled his eyes skyward and thought, Odin, I may have been too hasty with that ‘redeeming qualities’ thought.

  “Look at them, Halvard. Bloody good fighters, all of them.”

  As the Jarl leaned against the rusted railing to get a better look at the scrambling fight below them, Halvard saw a large man from Oslo called Trond throw a smaller man to the beach. A closer look revealed the thrown man to be a Laplander named Oskar.

  That would mean... Halvard scanned the fight, and there at the edge of it he saw Morten the Hammer. Another Laplander. They were cousins. Where the one went, the other was always close by. Morten’s opponent darted left as a man attacked from behind. Halvard recognized Ulrik the Fearless, and he was glad the man had made the journey. Travel by sea was always perilous.

  “Who is that?” the Jarl asked.

  Halvard followed the man’s pointed finger to the dock, and saw the other fighter he had hoped for the most.

  “That is Val, Jarl Gregers. The woman fighter from Åland, I told you about.”

  As they watched, Val dispatched all threats with liquid efficiency.

  “Freya’s tits, the woman is good. I would have her for my own.”

  Jarl Gregers had been a renowned womanizer in his youth, but both men knew he rarely made headway with the ladies these days. Besides, his wife Agatha would neuter him if she thought he was cheating on her.

  “Perhaps, Jarl, it would be best to keep her on the mission, and consider wooing her should they return?” Halvard suggested. The Jarl was a dullard, but an easily swayed dullard.

  “Yes, you are correct, good Halvard. What would we do without your science and good counsel?”

  Probably starve, Halvard thought. He was the only man in a hundred miles who had been trained by his father in the ways of the old sciences—languages, reading, maths, agriculture, engineering, biology and genetics. The sciences handed down from father to son, generation after generation, after most of the world’s knowledge had been lost. A few still knew the old ways, and Halvard had done his part to train replacements for himself. Still, most of the Northmen were not interested in the lost arts and ways. Learning how to forge better blades or grow stronger crops? Yes, these were things they were happy to learn. But anything to do with the history of the world or the sciences that were mostly confined to books outside of Halvard’s laboratory? They would rather drink themselves into a stupor and beat each other bloody.

  As Halvard watched the fight, he realized that the fighters—all of them men except for Val—were starting to take the battle seriously. If they didn’t put a stop to the brawl soon, Halvard would have very few left from which to choose for the mission.

  “Jarl,” he said, “perhaps now would be the time to end the fight? Before the best fighters are wounded, or before Val loses her...charms?”

  The Jarl nodded and fumbled the large ivory horn from his belt. But before the horn could be sounded, Halvard’s heart shot into his throat. Deep in the twists, lunges and evasions of her fight with three men, Val was oblivious to the massive Oslo man, Trond, rushing at her from one side.

  Halvard looked up and saw why, just before Val did herself. The blonde woman pivoted, just in time to see an absolute mountain of a man—a full head taller than Trond—rushing at her. If she hadn’t turned, he would have smashed into her from behind, and she never would have known what killed her. Now at least she would see it, but there was no time for Val to dodge the man. She did the only thing she could, and dropped down into a crouch, her arms above her head to protect her skull from the impact.

  But it never came.<
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  Instead, Trond leapt through the air, clearing her head, and just before the mountainous man would have run over the slim blonde woman like a force of nature, Trond dipped his head and the top of his flying skull rammed into the bigger man’s stomach like a tree trunk. Both of the big men went tumbling to the sand behind Val, as she quickly stood, her legs apart and ready for another attack.

  The Jarl’s horn sounded into multiple bursts in the air, and most of the combatants stopped instantly. A few still traded blows, but they quickly quieted down. Trond stood, said something to the larger brute on the ground, and started to walk back toward Val. For her part, the woman sheathed her ax and resumed her initial course, walking toward the longhall and the neighboring ten-story building where Halvard watched.

  The large man—Halvard thought his name was Vebjørn—stood and angrily chased after Val. The Jarl, seeing that the mountainous man had not lost the fight in him, huffed hard on his horn three more times. But Vebjørn still rushed for the small woman. Trond, who was walking beside her, turned his head, and saw that the man was rushing in like a frantic polar bear.

  Turning fully, Trond pulled a longsword off his belt, lowering the tip to spear the oncoming maniac. Val turned as well, seeing Vebjørn’s frantic rush.

  The Jarl let loose a stronger, longer blast from the ox horn. At two feet long and set with silver filigree, the horn was a beauty, and when the old man filled up his portly lungs, he could let loose an epic blast of sound from the thing.

  This time, the last combatant stopped. Just feet from the tip of Trond’s longsword.

  Halvard could see the men exchange angry words, and then Trond turned and began walking toward the tower, looking over his shoulder periodically at Vebjørn. But the larger man had lost interest and was calmly walking toward the Jarl’s tower with all the others. As he got closer, Halvard saw that it was indeed Vebjørn, a man known as the ‘Bear of the North.’ The name fit. For the last few decades they had been seeing the occasional white or brown bear that topped fifteen feet, and Vebjørn was at least eight. Halvard didn’t know why the man was so upset, but he was glad Trond and the Jarl’s horn had stopped him.