Bones of the Dragon - Margaret Weis [74]
He shut the door and stood for long moments in the shadowy darkness of the windowless dwelling. Then he slammed his fist into one of the support beams, causing the longhouse to shudder.
“Goat-fucking sons of whores!” he swore. “Witless arseholes! I warned the godlords. ‘Capture the dragonship and set fire to it,’ I said. ‘Leave nothing but ashes floating on the water.’ The greedy bastards didn’t listen. They wanted the ship for themselves. It was that whoreson shaman. I saw the gleam in his eyes when I spoke of it.”
Horg sucked his bruised knuckles and thought things over. There was the chance that the ogres could still win the battle. Dragons weren’t invincible. They could be killed, same as any other creature. Or perhaps the dragon had arrived late, after the battle had been lost and all the Torgun were dead.
Horg brightened at the thought. He hated the Torgun, who spent the fine summer months sailing the seas in their dragonship—the ship that by rights should have been his—in search of gold and glory, fighting battles Horg refused to fight. True, such raids had gained the Torgun little these days, as Horg was continually pointing out to his disgruntled warriors. That was why he no longer led the Heudjun in raids. Their time was more profitably spent in tilling the fields and tending the cattle.
Horg heard the whispers. He knew some of his people despised him as a coward. Horg’s spies were quick to bring him the latest rumblings and seemed to relish telling him the foul things people said about him.
Horg had another reason for hating the Torgun. Skylan Ivorson, the Chief’s son, had not shown Horg the proper respect. Two years ago, the Heudjun’s dragonship had been wrecked off the coast in a storm. Many warriors had drowned, as well as the ship’s Bone Priestess. The sacred spiritbone had been lost at sea and never recovered, which meant that the Heudjun had no dragon.
Horg and several of his cronies had gone to the Torgun to demand that Norgaard give him the Venjekar. During the meeting, the whelp Skylan had stated that it was his belief the gods had sent the storm to deliberately wreck the Heudjun dragonship as a punishment for their cowardice. That rash statement had angered the Heudjun and had almost resulted in war.
Norgaard had reprimanded his obstreperous son and insisted that Skylan apologize. Skylan had done so, though to Horg’s mind the young man hadn’t really been sincere. Horg had confidently expected Norgaard to hand over the dragonship, for the Torgun Chief was a broken old man who dared deny his Chief of Chiefs nothing.
Norgaard had refused, however, much to Horg’s ire. He was Chief of Chiefs. He deserved a dragonship. He deserved to have a dragon serve him. Horg had been angry enough to fight, but at the thought, his stomach curled up in a tight little ball. He decided that he would send his men on a raid to steal the Venjekar. The damn dragon, Kahg, had thwarted that plan.
Horg had waited for his revenge, biding his time until he could find a way to inflict harm on the Torgun and, especially, on Skylan.
Horg was a gambler. He believed in luck, not in the gods. He considered himself lucky. He attributed his rise as Chief of Chiefs to luck. His marriage to that cow, Draya, had not been lucky, but a gambler could always find ways to explain away a bad fall of the dragonbones.
The ogres had come to Horg as a lucky throw of the dragonbones. Horg had been dallying with one of his women in a secluded part of the beach when he had seen the ogres’ ships sailing under a flag of truce, heading for Vindraholm. He had been tempted to wait until they reached the city, where he would meet them surrounded by his warriors. Some god had whispered to him that he should meet with them alone, and he had rowed out to intercept them.
The ogres had given him the news that the Vindrasi gods were dead, defeated in a great battle. The godlords declared that