27

 

The long knives the attackers carried looked crude, but deadly. They were not quite swords—about two feet long and slim. But the metal looked weak, and poorly formed. Black and lumpy. Val thought she might be able to split one with a good strike from her ax—or even the wood of its handle.

As the first tattooed man closed in, she dipped low, under his twin knife sweeps, and then sprang up into the air. She swung down with her ax, the blade biting into the top of the man’s head, even as she continued her tumble forward, flipping over his falling body and tugging her ax free in the same movement. She landed on her feet behind the man, and he crashed to the grass with blood spraying from his head.

The men on either side of him stopped, stunned. Val’s left hand snapped out laterally, and her hand-ax spun through the air, slicing into one man’s blackened face, as she turned to the third. He pulled up his twin blades and flipped them in his hands, so the tips pointed down. His torso was twice as wide as hers, and this close she could see the patterns on his chest. They were old symbols, but still known for their association with evil—even far to the north where she had lived her entire life.

Swastikas.

The tattoo on his head was a giant black swastika. It started the intersection of its four legs at the bridge of the man’s nose. The bent legs of the design wrapped under his chin, over his bald skull to the back, and across the artificially flattened sides of his head, where the missing ears had once been.

But like everyone in the North, his eyes were a crystalline blue, for a moment revealing uncertainty and awe, and then quickly sliding back toward hatred.

The man rushed at her, one downward arcing blade slashing for her chest. Val swung her ax handle straight up, the head of the weapon tangling with the man’s wrist and the hilt of his blade. The strike blocked, Val snapped a booted foot straight up, catching Long Knife man in the chin, sending his head back, and tugging her ax handle from her hand.

He recovered quickly, and came back at her, the long weapons spinning again in his hands until the blades pointed upward above his clenched thumbs. He thrust forward with both hands, but Val slipped to the right, rolling her body around the outside of the man’s arm, and the side of his body. Her own knife—the blade just four inches long—already in her hand. It was her last weapon. But she brought it in close as she spun, slicing along the man’s side, just above his hip. Then her free arm shot up and backward, her elbow connecting with the base of the man’s skull.

She spun around the Long Knife’s body, even as he started to fall from the blow to his head. With the metal hilt of her knife still in hand, she threw her weight into a punch at the side of the man’s right knee. The cartilage protested with loud cracking noises, as the joint collapsed inward.

The man screamed, his knees impacting the soil. Val reversed her spin, and swept her arm out, slicing through the side of the man’s neck. Arterial blood arced up and over her head, as Val lunged to the ground, rolled and came up with the knife still in one hand and her recovered ax in the other.

She took a moment to orient herself. Ulrik was in the process of ramming his shield into the face of a Long Knife, as he pulled his ax free of another, his foot planted on the man’s chest, heaving the body free of the weapon. Closer still, Morten and Oskar were a whirling tornado of death, sweeping through two and three men with each strike of their long swords, the weapon cleaving through the Knives’ deficient metal as easily as it split Long Knife skin.

Erlend and Nils fought side by side, their blades clashing with the knives of two attackers. Anders was nocking and firing arrows, each shot finding and slipping into a Long Knife head. As she watched, one of the arrows went into an unguarded Long Knife ear hole. The man’s muscled torso snapped around in a circle and dropped. The hunting bird was nowhere to be seen. It made its own decisions whether to fight or fly, it seemed and, not for the first time, she wished Anders had better control over the creature.

Val turned her head back in the direction from which the Long Knives had come. The day’s gray haze still obscured the edge of the forest. But the ten new men rushing her way were easy to spot, as was the knife that had been thrown at her, spinning straight toward her face. She tilted her shoulders right, her head moving left. The blade whipped over her shoulder, the tip of it slicing through her leather jacket and nicking her flesh.

Her attention stayed on the man who had thrown his weapon. He was in the lead, the new group of attackers spread out in a wedge formation. Val stayed in place as the last two men on either side of the wedge split off, heading for her friends. She waited until the leader got closer. As he did, he swung with his remaining knife. Val swung her hardened ax over her head, like she was chopping wood, striking and cutting through the man’s knife blade like it was a head of cabbage.

Before her swing was complete, she reared her head backward and then slammed it forward, mashing her forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. The hit was so hard it rammed the bone and cartilage backward through his skull, killing him instantly.

The man fell at her feet, and Val spat on him.

The five men who had stayed with the leader slowed to look at her. Then the smallest of them screamed incoherently and charged. His four comrades rushed in from all sides.

There was no way out, and she could not leap over them as she had done with the first man. Not while stationary.

So she did the only thing she could think of. She dropped down into a crouch, swinging her knife in an arc at knee height. When the blade bit into multiple limbs, she struck again and again, shredding legs too committed to the charge to veer away before being sliced open. But it wasn’t enough. A tangle of bodies crumpled down on her like an avalanche of flesh, blood and body odor. She thrashed with her knife, the long wooden handle of her ax, her elbows and her head. But fists and knees pummeled her from countless directions, and eventually, the sharpened tip of one of the long knives found its way into her flesh.