Chapter 1 - Blood and Broadleaf

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The troll hits me with a fist the size of a cook-pot and I go sideways into the river.

Water and mud and the taste of copper and silt. I spit, roll, get my feet under me. The current pulls at my knees. Around me the river runs red, and the red isn't all mine. Ghurn is face-down in the shallows, his spine bent wrong. Torrik's axe is stuck in the mud six feet from Torrik's hand, which is six feet from Torrik's body. I count four dead, then five. The raiding party I brought into the Itzince is meat.

The troll comes again.

It is stone that moves, a boulder that learned to walk. Its shoulders are wider than I am tall, its fists like tree stumps trailing river weed. The eyes are flat and patient. It has been killing my warriors the way I would shell nuts. One at a time, patient as stone.

I am here for ruins. Druidic magic, old power, bound to the green and the rot. My shamans say it can be claimed through dominance. Mount the conduit, take the power. The Gorrath have been following stories and broken glyphs for generations. Instead of ruins I have this thing in front of me and six of my dead behind me.

The heat sits on me. It has been sitting on me since I crossed the border. Wet and heavy, a second skin I cannot peel off. The air in this jungle is warm water. I breathe and drown. I breathe and drown. Sweat layers on sweat and nothing dries. My lungs are full of green steam and the troll is coming and the river is pulling at me. I hate this climate.

I plant my feet. My chest piece is cracked down the middle, one shoulder guard hanging by a strap. The ironwood club is still in my hand because my hand does not let go of weapons. That is the one thing this body has always been good at: holding on, breaking what it touches.

The troll swings. I go under it. The fist passes over my head close enough to pull my hair and I drive the club up into its armpit, where the stone-skin thins to something that gives. It screams. The sound shakes water off the leaves. I hit it again and again. My arms know this rhythm better than anything else I have ever done, kill, kill. The club splinters on the third blow and I drop it and use my fists because my fists have always been enough.

Its arm catches me across the ribs.

The world goes white. Then red. The boiled leather splits like bark and underneath it my body opens along a line from hip to armpit. I stagger and look down. The gash is deep, deep enough to see the pink of muscle working under skin. Blood sheets down my side and the rain washes it and more comes. My body has taken hits before, axe-blows and spear-thrusts. A jaguar once opened my shoulder in the border hills. This is different. This wound kills you in an hour if you stand still. Ten minutes if you fight.

I fight.

My weapon through its shoulder. Ironwood and bone punching through the gap in its stone-hide. It howls, lurches back, and I twist the shaft and feel something inside it give. It is hurt enough to reconsider but still moving. It pulls free with a sound that makes my stomach turn and crashes into the undergrowth, snapping saplings, leaving a trail of gouged earth and black blood.

I stand in the river with my hands hanging and my blood mixing with the rain until I cannot tell which is which. Six dead orcs float in the current behind me. The troll's track goes northeast, into the deep green, and I can hear it crashing and moaning somewhere in the canopy gloom.

I walk. Away from the river, uphill, into the old growth where the trees are so thick the sky disappears. My feet find a root. Then another. Vines catch my ankles. Branches slap my wound. The pain in my side keeps me moving. A scream in the ribs with every step.

A tree rises out of the green.

It is massive, wider than three of me. The roots flare out from the trunk in buttresses taller than an Amazon, creating hollows and bowls in the earth. The bark is pale, fissured, old enough that my dead feel recent. Things glow along the roots. Fungi, blue-green, pulsing faintly. The light makes the darkness navigable.

I fall against the base of the tree. The bark is warm. The moss gives under my back. My ribs are on fire and the fire is spreading. I press my hand against the wound and my hand fills with blood.

I am Brath. Warchief of the Gorrath. I took the chieftain's throat with my bare hands. I have dropped Amazons and jaguars both.

I am Brath, and I am bleeding out against a tree. Somewhere in the green dark, the troll is licking its wound and deciding whether to come back.

The fungi pulse blue-green. The light fades when I blink and comes back slower.

The blood runs out of me and mixes with the rain and the rain mixes with the mud and the jungle closes over all of it like a green mouth swallowing something it caught.