The lookout spot Jackos had noted on the map was due north of Arnima in a long valley. Harald trotted that way, toward a footbridge crossing a deep gash in the land. He could hear Ulkarin behind him, still in the training yard grunting about something; but the gash was filled with rushing water, and its roar obscured anything Ulkarin might have said. It didn’t matter. He’d catch up.
Much to his embarrassment, a few moments later Harald slowed to a stop and stared around him in annoyance. Rather than leading out of town, the bridge to the north actually led to a small island in the middle of the city, with a shrine to Mara set up on its highest point. It was a quiet spot, if one wished to sit in contemplation or worship the goddess, but it certainly wasn’t the way they needed to go to get out of Arnima.
“Told you to wait,” Ulkarin said, coming up behind him.
“I couldn’t hear you over the water. No wonder you were trying to get my attention.”
“Yeah. We have to go back to the plaza and around a different way to get to the other side of the city. I should have spoken up earlier.”
“It’s a nice little shrine here if you like stone, I guess. What’s this book?” Harald crossed the shrine to the nearby bench, on which someone had left a copy of The Great War. He picked it up and opened the cover, then leafed through it quickly. There were no marks of ownership, no marginal notes, nothing to indicate who might have placed the book here – or why.
“Odd choice of titles to leave at a shrine of Mara.”
“Hmm. Not necessarily,” Ulkarin said. “Might have been someone trying to figure out why we got into this mess with the pirates.”
Harald peered at his companion, trying to read his face and failing miserably. Ulkarin was as closed-off a person as he’d ever met. But it was a clever thought, nonetheless. What Harald recalled about the tome was that it explored the root causes of the war that had raged when his father Ulfric was a young man, and concluded by observing how Hammerfell had been largely decimated and yet had stubbornly refused to sign on to the White Gold Concordat that was such a bone of contention in Skyrim.
“I suppose so. If I hadn’t had the benefit of growing up – well, where I grew up – I might not know anything about the great war and this book might help me understand.”
“You’re just a youngster, so yeah. And you’re not the only one.” His tone changed, lowered, and he shook his head. “Hard to believe there are warriors wandering around who weren’t even born when this all happened.”
Harald bristled. “I’m fifteen winters. Almost sixteen. I’m a man fully grown.”
Ulkarin surprised him by bursting out in a hearty laugh. “All of that? You’re barely into a beard, yer Highness. Maybe you’ll end up as tall as me by the time you finish growing.”
Harald harrumphed. Ulkarin was right, of course; but it didn’t matter. I still have to take on responsibilities I’m probably not ready for, regardless of my age. I don’t much like it but I can’t change what’s real. Besides, I’ve been in some hard fights and taken more than a few heads at this point.
“I doubt it,” he said, deciding that being angry about what was, after all, a perfectly honest observation was less than helpful. “I’m already as tall as Father. I look just like him, too. I expect I’m done with growing. And besides,” he said, giving Ulkarin a half-hearted grin, “it may be a new beard, but it’s a full one. Qara thought it was fuzzy when…” He trailed off, feeling his face flush.
Ulkarin laughed again. “I knew it. This Qara’s your ladylove, isn’t she?”
Harald shook his head vigorously. “No! I told you. We grew up together. We’re buddies. We did kiss once, I’ll admit that. Everyone seems to be quite sure we’re a couple but it’s not like that. Anyway,” he said in a rush, trying to change the subject, “show me the way north. We have some Exiles to spy on.”
“Sure,” Ulkarin agreed with another smirk. “Let’s go.”
It turned out that the path through to the north of the city was within a stone’s throw of the shrine, but separated from it by a branch of the stream. They needed to backtrack all the way to the church and then head north again. Harald grumbled to himself, wondering why it hadn’t occurred to anyone to build a wooden bridge here. It would have been nice not to have to trundle his body and its heavy gear all that much farther, but trundle he did. To the north the town rose atop another hill, paved in stone and accessible by a staircase. There was some sort of public theater on their left, the audience benches open to the sky but the stage and such covered with a flat wooden roof and tents. Past that, Arnima began to look much more like a normal town than it had from the south gates. Stone and stucco homes and shops lined the street; it was exactly the sort of construction Harald would have expected in the very old, wealthy, southern cities of High Rock, and it gave him an odd satisfaction to see it here.
Goes with the attitude of the royalty, to be perfectly honest. Pretentious, ostentatious, and grandiose, even though it’s only a skin-deep facade.
Another staircase led down to a market area that had fared less well in the flooding. Much of the pavement had been washed away or purposefully removed to make way for repairs. And yet in spite of the market’s looking a bit bedraggled, there were people out and about in it, shopping and calling out their wares. The sign outside a building across the way from Harald marked an inn, the traffic in and out suggesting prosperity. Flooded or not, it was healthier-looking than Forlorn.
“Cat got your tongue?” Ulkarin asked him as they approached the northern gate.
“Just observing,” Harald said. “Arnima seems to have come through the disaster better than some of the other towns.”
“At least the upper regions did,” Ulkarin told him. “There’s a whole undercity full of unsavory types. Let’s just say they didn’t fare as well as the nobility did.”
Harald tsk’d. “And isn’t that always the way?” He thought of Bal-Ran and his community at Little Vivec. Those people, and the refugees of various races in the rest of Skyrim, had fared far less well than his father, and the other Jarls in their Holds. And so had it always been. He’d been raised in comparative luxury and he wondered what he’d done to deserve it.
I suppose I didn’t have to ‘deserve’ a thing – my mother and father are wealthy. What I don’t deserve, though, is to assume that being wealthy makes me better, somehow. I’ve seen far too much of that here.
The scenery outside the gate was spectacular. The mountains separating High Rock from the northwestern borders of Skyrim seemed sharper and higher on this western side, their needle-like summits just visible through the clouds. Down here at ground level and across the river that he could hear before he could see it, a gorgeous, lushly-grassed meadow stretched out toward a pine forest every bit as thick as the ones in Falkreath and western Whiterun Hold. He stood for a moment just drinking in the view before remembering that they did, in fact, have a job to do and staring at trees wouldn’t get it done. At least not until they’d moved into position.
Harald noted the spiked barriers north of the town wall, and several burned-out cottages just off the road. He glanced back at Ulkarin. “What’s happened here?”
Ulkarin shrugged. “It’s like Jackos told us. There are raiders in the area, Orcs and Exiles and the Witchmen. I’ll bet this happened in one of those raids.”
“Hmm. Ok then. Good advice for us to watch our steps carefully.”
They crossed the river at a rickety wooden bridge that had seen better days, and followed a dirt path northward until sounds in the distance had Harald dropping into a crouch to slink into the shadows. It wasn’t likely that he could conceal his presence for long, but if he at least didn’t present a tall target he might stand a chance of making it to the overlook point Jackos had mentioned.
“I can just about feel my knees giving out from all this crouching,” Ulkarin muttered.
“Stop whining,” Harald whispered. “You haven’t been crouching for long, and as tall as you are they’d be able to see you coming from leagues away. Let’s at least make the attempt to get a look at them, shall we?”
“All right, yer Highness.”
Rather than follow the trail – an obviously foolhardy move that would likely take them directly into the Exile camp – Harald moved eastward, thinking to cross behind several huge boulders and up onto the hillsides beyond them. He’d nearly reached the first outcropping when his heavy armor clanked against the stone and what he’d hoped not to happen, did.
“What’s that?” came a voice from the other side of the rocks.
Harald scrambled up the boulder and drew his sword, frantically trying to find the enemy. After a moment of wondering whether he was going blind, movement far ahead of them in the shadow of one of the giant trees caught his attention. Apparently his own movement caught attention, as well.
“Reared your ugly head at last!”
Harald focused in on the distant man and began descending the outcropping. He frowned; the voice had been mighty clear to him for a man so far away. A moment later he discovered why as another figure dashed around the boulder, just in front of him.
Ulkarin?
But it wasn’t Ulkarin, as he learned when he dropped down from his perch. It was a man in a mishmash of armor that had seen better days and wearing an angry, almost bloodthirsty scowl. He held a sword in one hand and an axe in the other.
“I’ll carve you up!” the man growled, raising his sword to take a swing at Harald.
It had been such a huge swing that Harald had no trouble anticipating it. He raised his shield to deflect it as well as the blow that followed. He smashed the spikes forward, drawing a grunt and a fair amount of blood from the exile and staggering him backward.
“You’re in for it now!” the man yelped. Harald wondered what might have possessed the man to say that, but it became obvious as an axe blow ricocheted noisily off the back of Harald’s armor. He barely caught himself from falling forward and noted that the bandit who had come up behind him was apparently determined to remove Harald’s head.
“Ulkarin? A hand?” he yelled, leaping forward and somehow clearing the first bandit while barely dodging a second blow from behind.
“I’m coming, keep your shirt on,” he heard from the north. Ulkarin had made the full circuit of the boulder, along the route Harald had intended them to take. As large as Ulkarin was, he wasn’t speedy; but he was in fact coming to enter the fray.
As were three more Exiles.
And all of them were focused directly on Harald.
“I’ll hang you by your entrails,” the nearest of them hissed.
“You’ll have a bit of work getting to them,” Harald replied with much more confidence than he actually felt. He blocked as best he could while backing up, and swung his sword a lot more wildly than he would have liked.
“I’ll show you how we get down in the Reach!” another of them snarled, slashing at Harald and catching him under the arm, in the vulnerable spot left by raising his sword. Harald grunted; it wasn’t a deep wound but it still hurt, and he had no time to stop and heal up. The third bandit was approaching far too quickly for Harald to do anything but try to dodge attacks. When another blow struck home Harald turned and ran for the hillside, hating that he had to do so but remembering what his lessons had always stressed: the best way to fight was not to engage in the first place.
I can’t avoid being engaged but I can’t fight if I’m bleeding to death, so to Oblivion with bravery and valor and such.
To his relief, he heard a familiar voice behind him.
“Time’s up for you, mate!” Immediately after that, and while Harald frantically cast his meager healing magic on himself, came the sound of a heavy blow and a man’s scream.
“Brother down!” came from somewhere behind Harald.
“My steel’s going up your ass!” he heard, much closer. He turned back to the battle having staunched the worst of his bleeding, and saw the man’s sword coming down from overhead. He reacted, without thought.
“FUS!”
Again, he wished Qara was at his side, as her Shouts were fully-formed and powerful beyond imagining while his were a beginner’s meager fare. As he’d been told, though, he had natural talent with his Voice. The one word was enough to push the man off-balance and interrupt his swing, giving Harald the second he needed to slip to the side. He couldn’t see Ulkarin’s position but he knew the big man was working the skirmish, for he heard “Kiss my blade!”
“Have it!” the bandit he’d Shouted at yelled, stepping forward again to aim a blow that Harald barely blocked. With great relief he noticed the hulking form of Ulkarin rushing up behind the Exile.
“Right between the eyes!” Ulkarin declared. Then the most unexpected thing happened.
From somewhere above them on the hillside, fire bolts started raining down. For the briefest of moments Harald panicked. He couldn’t withstand physical attacks and fire at the same time, especially wounded. Then he realized that the fire was targeting the Exile, specifically.
I don’t know who you are up there but thank you so much.
Harald blocked one more blow and took one more wild swing at the man and then backed away in favor of Ulkarin’s mighty axe and the fire bolts from above. He peered in that direction and thought he saw a guard’s uniform. Apparently one of the people stationed just outside Arnima’s gate had heard the battle and come to investigate. It didn’t matter; Harald didn’t care who it was, just that they’d come at the perfect moment and then disappeared as quietly as they’d arrived.
He healed up and breathed deeply for a moment, returning to Ulkarin.
“And we haven’t even reached the spot yet,” the big man said.
“Wait, really?” Harald dug out his map and peered at it, dismayed to realize that Ulkarin was right. They needed to move north, still, before finding the overlook. “You’re right. Well damn.” He shook his head. “Thanks for saving my scrawny backside again, Tiny. It wasn’t clear that was going to end well, for awhile there.”
“That’s what you’re paying me for, mate. We just got unlucky with timing. Looks like that was a patrol, and we just happened upon it.”
“Yeah. So back to the task at hand. I’m still thinking we should head up the side of the hill and then move north. It’ll give us a better view and the high ground is always preferable.”
Ulkarin nodded, so Harald took point again, crouching to avoid being seen as best he could. As he pushed forward, he listened as hard as he could. He didn’t hear voices, or movement of any sort, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had their eyes on him.
Not that it would be that much of a surprise if they did. Stealth is Qara’s thing, not mine.
Sure enough, a few moments later his premonition proved to be accurate. Another Exile, this one gathering magic in his hands, ran forward yelling “I’m gonna make mincemeat outta you!”
Great. A mage.
Harald grabbed his bow, hoping to get some damage in at a distance rather than wait for magic to strike him. He fired once and knew from the man’s annoyed grunt that he’d struck home. As he tried to line up a second shot, though, he realized that the mage was targeting Ulkarin.
“Messed with the wrong Reachman,” came Ulkarin’s unconcerned voice.
It was over quickly. There was a tree between Harald and his hired man, obscuring the view; but he could see the wicked axe’s path swinging at, and through, the Exile. Once, twice, and with the third passage, even through the mage’s flames, the axe finished its work.
“Do you suppose we’re done with these guys?” Harald grumbled, approaching Ulkarin.
“Doubtful. But let’s get to that overlook.”
“At last, I hope.”
It turned out to be a futile hope. Harald led them back up the hillside and around the boulders, but then there was a chuckle, followed by a rough voice.
“Big shot, eh?”
The Exile had been leaning comfortably against the side of the next-closest rock face, deep in its shadow. Harald, therefore, once again didn’t see the man until he moved into action. He raised his sword, hoping to get in the first blow on the man who wore no helmet and only tatters of armor. And he did land the blow; unfortunately, the Exile gave as good as he got and Harald’s shoulder exploded in pain from the force of the warhammer coming down on his armor. Once again, a second opponent appeared from out of the lush undergrowth; the two men converged on Harald and several more blows went unblocked or under-blocked. Harald panicked; then the shame of having panicked blossomed into full-fledged rage. He Shouted.
“IIZ!”
To his relief, both Exiles toppled over in blocks of ice, giving him the chance to finish one before he could rise to his feet and then take on the second. He probably should have taken the moment to heal himself, but once again his anger led him to hammer blows down on the second Exile, finally raising his sword overhead and bringing it straight down into the man in a vicious stab.
“I’m sick of you!” he yelled as he planted a boot firmly on the dead man’s head and pulled his blade free. Then he whirled around, looking for Ulkarin. He’d heard his companion’s voice just before being startled by the Exiles, but there was no sign of him now and he feared that the big man had come to a bad end. Harald, sword still at the ready, moved to the top of the outcropping and gasped. Just below him was a camp with a huge bonfire crackling away. Somehow he’d managed to find the overlook in spite of noisily stumbling into battles all the way from Arnima. He saw movement; more men were heading toward the rise on which he stood. “Damn it!” he growled, though there was nobody there to hear it.
And just when he thought it couldn’t get more absurd, it did. From the south came the blast of a war horn, loud enough to echo all the way down this meadow that held the Exile’s camp.
“Damn it!” he cried again. Jackos had told him to turn tail and run if he heard the warning signal, and he would do so – but he didn’t like it a bit. It was bad enough that he’d been caught by surprise more than once in the past hour. He could feel the frustration and anger building in him, burning hot. But if the horns were blowing, that meant his sword arm might be needed back at the city gates and that, on its own, would be enough of a battle to quench the fire. He jumped down from the perch in the mountainside and started back toward Arnima, hoping fervently that Ulkarin was alive and would follow him.
He made it to the bridge and crossed it, frowning as he realized that there was no battle there before the gates. He had been certain that’s where he should go, and yet it was empty of fighters. He slowed to a stop, to listen, and heard heavy footsteps behind him. A familiar figure in dark armor thudded through the undergrowth and onto the cobbles.
“Tiny!” he called out with a grin. “Glad you could join me.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ulkarin grumbled. “So where’s the battle?”
“I’m not sure,” Harald said. “I’ve been trying to listen…”
Ulkarin cocked his head to one side, brow furrowed, and then nodded. “I just heard something. Southwest. Around the other side of the city. Let’s go.”
They followed the sounds of battle: faint at first, but Harald knew they were heading the right way when they reached the corner of the town walls and saw the fighting. There was a small group of buildings there, outside the protection of Arnima’s walls; one of them was an inn. It was there that the battle raged.
Harald had been expecting Witchmen or more Exiles, but this was a band of angry-looking Orcs instead – a fact that he discovered when one of them ran up behind Ulkarin, yelling “I’ll bathe in your blood!” Ulkarin didn’t seem overly distressed, or even startled for that matter. As Harald rushed up beside him to slam his spiked shield into the Orc’s face, the big man laughed.
“Oh, don’t feint now!” Ulkarin chuckled. He brought the huge axe around in an all-encompassing sweep that Harald barely dodged and the Orc didn’t. That one dropped to the cobbles, dead; but his fellow ran up, stuck his face into Harald’s plane of vision and sneered.
“You dare stand before me?” The Orc’s stinking breath crossed the short span between its mouth and Harald’s nose, and the rage that had been building in Harald burst out. Once again he blocked a blow, then stepped back, raised his sword, and rammed it through the Orc’s neck and down into its chest. He stopped, leaning over his own knees and panting to catch his breath.
“You alright?” Ulkarin asked.
“Yeah, just… trying to calm down,” Harald answered. This was getting to be a bit too much, the battle rage forcing its way out too often. Maybe Ulkarin and Loke had been right and he did have a touch of the berserker in him. Maybe he shouldn’t be doing this at all, lest he get himself in over his head.
Shor help me. I can’t let this get the better of me.
As the flames within died down, something dawned on him.
“Wait, weren’t we supposed to meet Jackos and company if the horn blew? Where do you suppose he is?”
Ulkarin rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a moment. “I didn’t see any signs of battle at the north gate, so I’d assume it has to be somewhere near the south one. I say let’s head that way and see what’s happening.”
“Down by Forlorn?”
“Yeah.”
It seemed to take forever to make it all the way around to the southern gate, but Harald could only muster so much speed. They passed a concerned-looking farmer driving his oxen away from the bodies, and the decidedly un-concerned guards standing before the gate. With battles going on just down the road, Harald would have expected the guards to be on high alert, not leaning placidly against the gate. Still, they had been inside strong-arming the merchant earlier; calm or not they now were outside the gates, in easy view of Forlorn. And sure enough, as he turned onto the bridge Harald heard the faint whacks of swords against shields, the sounds of taunting.
“Up by the next bridge,” Ulkarin said. “See ’em?”
“Yeah, I do. Let’s go.”
It took longer than it might have otherwise because they had to slosh through Forlorn’s flooded streets, but eventually Harald saw Jackos and a few others on the near end of the bridge. At the far end were more people, the sort he would have known as bandits back in Skyrim, though it wasn’t clear which set of foes they faced here in High Rock.
“All together, lads,” Jackos was saying. “We’re gonna push through this.”
It was then that Harald fully appreciated the sheer size of the man standing directly before him. This was one of the most enormous humans he’d ever seen. His presence was made even more imposing by the black armor and full helmet he wore. Harald couldn’t see his eyes, couldn’t see any part of his body – it was impossible to know what sort of being was in there. For a moment he thought of the Dwemer colossus he’d fought with the Nerevarine. This man wasn’t that large but he certainly cast a long enough shadow.
By the gods! He even makes Ulkarin look… tiny! What is he?
There must be giants in their bloodlines somewhere. Even Ulkarin’s. Normal people don’t grow this big. I’m glad they’re on my side. I’d hate to be the other guys.
They all started forward at the same time, Arnima defenders and opponents rushing at each other from opposite ends of the bridge. A moment later it became clear that the other side had giants, too. This one – a huge Redguard – was yelling “I’ll gouge your eyes out!” as he took aim on the nearest of Jackos’ men.
Harald had no idea who he ought to be attacking in the confusion, so he resorted once more to his Voice.
“TIID!”
The world slowed around him. Perhaps it was just his perception of time that slowed; he’d never been certain. Whichever it was, it was enough to let him focus clearly on the big Redguard and still dodge the fireballs being cast from behind him by one of Jackos’ battle mages. The Redguard, though huge, was wearing light armor with enough of his body exposed that Harald’s blows took him down in the few frenzied moments before time returned to normal. Harald backed up then, assessing where the rest of the combatants were. He watched in awe as the enormous man in black armor swung at a Redguard in traditional garb and split him cleanly, right down the middle. He’d heard Dardeh speak of watching Roggi do something similar, but he’d never seen such a thing before and the gruesome display of power set him back for just a moment or two. But there was no time to waste on gore. There was another Alik’r in front of him and he set on that man, a normal-sized man, a foe he could face down on more or less equal footing.
Another of them came up beside him, and suddenly Harald was fighting two trained warriors, not just one. He gulped, wishing that his battle rage would come to him that moment so that he wouldn’t be afraid: but it wouldn’t, and he was. Then a voice he didn’t recognize snarled behind him.
“I’ll piss on your corpse!”
It was the huge man in black again, and as he stepped up to take out one of the pair of Redguards he heard another of Jackos’ men yell “get him, Sek!”
“Come on, keep up!” Sek yelled back.
There were a few more clashes of steel against steel and then suddenly it was quiet on the bridge. Harald started to relax his muscles but, to his dismay, realized that Jackos was bolting toward the far side of the bridge.
“Eyes and ears, boys. We’re gonna drown these desert rats in the river from where they came.”
Harald stopped for a moment and sighed. He hurt. He hadn’t come across the border expecting to become engaged in the Reach’s internal affairs, but here he was. Well, he thought, I guess I’m following in Father’s footsteps in spite of myself. The Atmoran runs deep regardless of how many generations have come between. Being drawn to Shor is beginning to make a lot more sense now.
So we have more evidence of Hammerfell’s incursion at this side of town and Orsinium’s at the other. I’ve already run into one of the Witchmen. About all I need now is a Thalmor added to the mix and I won’t know exactly what to tell Father about this place.
Jackos apparently had been listening for his footfalls, for he raised his voice and yelled back. “Get close, or you’ll be an easy target!”
“Aye, sir!” he yelled back, wondering where in Oblivion that had come from but knowing that he was in this regardless of his better judgment. He followed as quickly as he was able. The solid form of Ulkarin with his battleaxe resting on his shoulder, and a much shorter Breton battle mage both passed him on the left. He sighed and headed into the deepening twilight, following Jackos to find out what the Dragonstar mercenaries were all about.