Warcry: The Anthology

by Various Authors

‘That the towers shall fall,’ growled Thornwinder. He stabbed around him, feeling armour sundering against the point of his spear.

  What else?

  ‘That the walls shall crumble.’ Thornwinder kicked the legs out from under an Iron Golem who rushed at him, and shattered the back of the man’s skull with a blow from the butt-end of his spear.

  What else?

  ‘The heads shall go uncrowned. The earth shall vomit up the stones. The hearts of the civilisers shall be swallowed down.’

  What else?

  Thornwinder was inside the fortress now. Between him and the twin thrones was a host of Iron Golems forming up into a fearsome line of blades. They had an organisation and discipline alien to most of the warbands of the Bloodwind Spoil, as if by pounding the parade ground they could bring order to the chaos.

  The female twin was behind them, ready to storm through the line and finish off Thornwinder with her executioner’s axe. Behind the visor of her helmet she had a scarred and twisted face.

  What else?

  Every tower. Every wall. Every crowned skull. It all had to be torn down.

  He had not gone far enough. He had failed the Devourer. The towers would still stand.

  Thornwinder slammed into the wall of Iron Golems. They were scattered before him. He stabbed one through the gut and shattered the faceplate of another with a punch. He ripped his spear free and whirled it around his head, and the obsidian edge sliced the hand off one of the Iron Golems aiming an axe-blow at his skull.

  It would not be enough. He could tear down these walls, hurl the very stones off the mountain peaks, and it would not be enough. Civilisation would still stand.

  Thornwinder turned back to the battle behind him. The Venom Fang and the Iron Golems were evenly matched, and dozens of dead already lay heaped up around the worst of the fighting. The blood-coursers took the glory of the kill while the braves finished off the wounded on the ground. All followed in the wake of the Heart-eater, the pinnacle of the tribe. The authority.

  Authority. Leadership. Civilisation.

  The warlord was charging at Thornwinder now. His thoughts were rushing so quickly he barely had time to parry her axe with a swing of his spear. The spear’s haft shattered and he followed up with an elbow to her throat. She reeled backwards, barely keeping her grip on her axe.

  Good. You understand. It was the voice of the entity again. The power that surged through him formed itself into the words. Every tower must fall, even those you built yourself. The very structures you stand atop must crumble. Family. Clan. Tribe. Tear it down.

  The warlord recovered and charged at Thornwinder. She stumbled as an arrow appeared in her thigh. Broken Nail drew another arrow from his quiver as he skidded to a halt beside his chieftain.

  Plains-Runner Broken Nail shot Thornwinder a grin. ‘The hunting is good,’ he said.

  Tear it down!

  Thornwinder drew the obsidian skinning knife from his belt. He understood now, for the first time, what the Untamed Beasts truly were. What the Devourer demanded.

  Tear it down!

  The knife weighed his hand down with the meaning of what had to be done.

  We care not from whence the blood flows!

  Thornwinder put his whole weight into the thrust that impaled Broken Nail through the chest. The youth looked down at the knife jutting from his sternum with as much surprise as pain. Thornwinder tore the knife from Broken Nail’s chest, bringing a mass of gore and organs with it. Broken Nail was dead before he hit the ground.

  All around him, Thornwinder saw only the pillars of hateful civilisation. The Iron Golems with their discipline, the Untamed Beasts with their loyalty to the tribe. He picked up a discarded spear from the ground. It might have been from an Untamed Beast or an Iron Golem. It did not matter.

  Tear it down!

  Thornwinder charged into the melee behind him. Untamed Beast and Iron Golem alike fell within the reach of his spear. The shock of his assault made them weak. He beheaded and impaled, he crushed beneath his feet and shattered bone with his fist, all fuelled by the rage of the earth.

  It filled him to bursting. It burned. It demanded. Only death could slake the scalding thirst. Ten had fallen. Twenty. Thirty. The battle was no longer one side versus another. It was a whirlwind of blood with Thornwinder at its centre, and everyone caught within it was dead.

  The Iron Golems charged at Thornwinder, led by the twin warlords. Some forced their way close enough to lay blade or hand on him. A hundred wounds opened up on Thornwinder’s body, but the pain was lost among the fury.

  The Untamed Beasts fought back. They were no allies of the Iron Golems, but they were fighting for survival against the same monstrosity. Arrows showered down and found their mark. A javelin speared through the meat of his biceps. A stone axe cleaved into his shoulder, lodging in the bone.

  More died. A skull crunched against the ground. The bones of a forearm snapped. Thornwinder tore his arm free of the throng and struck out with his spear, catching someone – Iron Golem or Untamed Beast, he could not tell – in the face and slicing down to the brain.

  Hands grabbed him, bodies weighed him down. His spear was broken and lost. He broke free once more, slashing around him with his skinning knife, but then the bodies closed over him again.

  Tear it down!

  A moment of lucidity broke through the fog of blood. Thornwinder saw the madness around him. He had killed friends and brothers, sisters and tribemates. He tried to draw breath, but the press of bodies on him would not allow his lungs to expand. It was the weight of death.

  He demanded the madness return before he fully understood what he had done. Blessedly, it returned, drowning his consciousness in blood. He saw only empires collapsing, the heads of kings and emperors rolling, the land blasted clean of the disease that was civilisation.

  It was in insanity that Heart-eater Thornwinder of the Venom Fang died, beneath a cairn made from the bodies of friend and foe.

  VII

  The sky was flesh. Wounds wept blood. Some of the mountaintops were lashed with gore, others were bathed in the crimson rainbows of light breaking through the mantle of torn skin.

  ‘We will leave a trail through this,’ said First Hunter Blackscale, regarding the blood-spattered ground with distaste.

  ‘No one has ventured into these peaks for years,’ replied Heart-eater Talon Scar. Where the First Hunter was tall and long-limbed, Talon Scar had a squat, broad-shouldered power that suited her as the foremost authority in her tribe. That tribe, the Burned Offerings, trudged up the mountain slope behind her, almost thirty hunters strong.

  ‘You really think the Brazenwyrm headed this way?’ asked Blackscale. Alone of the Burned Offerings, he was free to speak to the tribe’s Heart-eater plainly, even to the extent of questioning her decisions.

  ‘The Rotspire Marsh is past those peaks,’ replied Talon Scar, indicating the next bank of forbidding mountains. ‘The wyrm picked the forest clean of prey and now it’s migrating to a new hunting ground. We’ll catch up to it in the marshes. We just have to keep going.’

  ‘Wherever the prey is headed,’ mused Blackscale, ‘we can’t stay here.’

  Talon Scar walked up the loose, bloody stone of the slope ahead of her, cresting the shoulder of the mountain. Before her were the remains of a structure clinging to the edge of a cliff. Its walls had massive foundations but had been torn down or toppled by the elements.

  There weren’t supposed to be structures of any kind up here, not even age-worn ruins.

  ‘Stay here,’ she ordered to her First Hunter. She drew her bow and nocked an arrow.

  Old skulls littered the ground around the ruins. She recognised the bone and obsidian weapons of her fellow Untamed Beasts, along with the decaying iron armour of another tribe. It had been a battle, a vicious one, long ago.

  Within the rui
ns, in front of a pair of weathered thrones, was a heap of bones and spoil. Weapons and armour were piled up along with dozens of skeletons. The monument was topped with a spear, and impaled on the end of the spear was a head.

  The severed head was that of an Untamed Beast, judging by the dark green tattoos visible around the neck. Its hair was worn in a single strip of braids, matched by the braided beard. Unlike the rest of the battlefield’s dead, the head was preserved, as if it had only been cut off yesterday.

  On one cheek was a raised triangular scar where an arrowhead had been inserted beneath the skin. It had the look of one of the old ways, a mark the dead and fallen Untamed Beasts tribes had used.

  Talon Scar approached the battlefield trophy. She shouldered her bow again, now more curious than wary. The mountains were so devoid of inhabitants that only born survivors like the Untamed Beasts could hope to traverse it. Now, it seemed there had been others here once, who had lived and died here above the clouds.

  The eyes of the severed head swivelled to face her. The slack jaw closed and spoke.

  ‘What are you?’ it said.

  ‘I am Talon Scar, Heart-eater of the Burned Offerings Tribe,’ she replied. ‘I am an Untamed Beast.’

  ‘What do you seek?’

  ‘I hunt the Brazenwyrm.’

  ‘A prey that will win you the renown of your brethren.’

  ‘It is,’ said Talon Scar with pride. ‘I will be the first to face it and live. I will take its head. It shall be mounted on the walls of the Varanspire when I am the Everchosen’s Huntmaster.’

  ‘The Brazenwyrm will kill you,’ replied the head. ‘If you even reach the marshes alive. You are weak.’

  ‘What do you know?’ retorted Talon Scar. ‘You are naught but a severed head!’

  ‘I know you think you can outwit your prey, and I know you will fail. Stronger and more cunning hunters than you have already tried and failed. And I know how you can succeed.’

  Talon Scar folded her arms in defiance. ‘How might that be?’

  ‘Drink deep of me,’ replied the head. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of one eye. ‘Take in the strength of the earth. The fury of the Bloodwind Spoil. What ruled the Jagged Savannah can rule the Eightpoints, if you but accept its rage into yourself.’

  ‘What are you?’

  Blood was pouring from both eyes now, and running down the spear’s haft to trickle through the heap of bones and weaponry. ‘I demand the towers shall fall,’ said the head. ‘The walls shall crumble. The heads shall go uncrowned. And you are destined for more than to die hunting the Brazenwyrm. You are destined to bring the empires down. All you have to do is drink.’

  Talon Scar clambered up the heap, scattering brittle skulls. She pulled the head off the spear, and warm blood ran down her arms.

  ‘I felt it in the land of my birth,’ she said. ‘The Devourer, beneath the Jagged Savannah. I knew I was more than my tribe. More than the Untamed Beasts. I hunted and killed, and it was not enough. I became the Heart-eater, and it was not enough.’

  The head in her hands smiled at her. Gore welled up between its lips. ‘Then drink,’ it said.

  And she drank.

  PROVING GROUND

  Sarah Cawkwell

  This is a place of murder. Old death oozes into the soil, turning the dust to crimson and prickling the senses with the ever-present threat of violence. Here, violence and survival are one and the same and only the savage and the insane can thrive, feeding on one another and being fed on in turn. Where there should be growth, there is none. Where there should be hope…

  There is none.

  The great, bladed edifice of the Varanspire towers above it all. Like a tangled corpse, it spoils the lands within its reaches. It imbues them with the scent of decay, the foetid taste of putrefied and diseased air, and ­perhaps worst of all, it seems somehow responsible for the ­capricious silence that is pierced only by the occasional cries of the inhuman. When combined, these things ravage the senses. The tower is the culmination of them all. To stand within its shadow is to know the loss of everything. The Bloodwind Spoil has known that touch for as long as memory. It reeks of slaughter and sacrifice and loss. It continues to know the touch of death. Its suffering is everlasting.

  The grove has stood on these vast plains of carnage since time immemorial, a twisted mockery of life surfacing in a stagnant pond. It lives because it is fed and because it is honoured. At its heart, the mightiest tree bows its heavy branches under a chill wind, silhouetted against a sky red as fire but cold as the depths of the darkest ocean. The metallic tang of blood is strong. This is not a good place. But it is a sacred place.

  Spears of blue fire lance from the blood-red skies, but they do not burn. Their touch does not always destroy, but it changes in awful, infinite ways. A bolt strikes the earth below, narrowly missing the mother tree at the grove’s heart. In that moment, the crazed inferno lights her up in all her horrific beauty for a heartbeat. The tatters of cloth on her branches flutter feebly, like moths beneath a pin. As the wind whips up to a frenzy, the cloth snaps more sharply, but her branches remain still and unmoving.

  The smaller trees surrounding her are also lit, bent double by the weight of time. They proudly display decorations of their own: beads and fetishes, symbols carved into their trunks. For a moment, the grove is highlighted in all its grisly detail.

  Another tongue of cursed fire bursts on the plains and once more throws the mother tree into sharp relief. It is possible, in this moment of illumination, to believe that the fluttering tatters of cloth are still attached to the bodies that once wore them. But perhaps it is just a trick of the light. The wind gives the illusion that someone struggles to be free of the thin branch which has impaled them. Just as suddenly, the wind ceases and the fabric stills. Freedom in the Bloodwind Spoil is, after all, an illusion.

  Darkness returns to the grove, and the mother waits. It is what she has always done.

  The grove is a rarity. It is an oasis of something imitating life in a veritable ocean of madness. The vast tree nestles within a crater in the cracked, dry earth and a network of fissures spreads out from that ancient point of impact. Those fissures stretch as far as the eye can comfortably conceive in every direction, a cobweb of bleak crevasses and shadowed rifts in the blasted ground.

  Drawing back from ravaged plains the landscape alters rapidly. It becomes a tapestry of rocky barrens and crystalline wastes. Boulders of living glass and glossy, black rock stud the bleak hillsides. A procession of markers lines the slopes of one, the desiccated remains of severed heads wedged atop them, mouths open in gruesome, eternal screams directed at the sky. It is clear from the groove worn into the earth that this hill is the end of a track. The scattered rocks give way to more obvious clusters and formations; cairns and shrines appear by the trackside, marking the final resting places of those who have fallen on this trail and offering them up to the dark powers.

  There are hundreds of such offerings, thousands, perhaps. Every one of them is a monument to a fallen champion who once strove for greatness in the uncaring sight of the Everchosen. It is a parade of morbid curiosity. How far did they rise and how did they fall? In the Bloodwind Spoil there are as many ways to die as there are motes of dust on the wind. Each death will remain forever a mystery and for every cairn that stands, there will be thousands of bones buried beneath the dust of centuries. Those who fell unmarked and unremembered.

  Heading away from the fields of the dead, the trail is more defined, growing wider, leading through the solitary shell of a gatehouse whose flanking walls have long since fallen to rubble. It is fully collapsed on one side and yet it stands proudly astride the path, proclaiming to any would-be travellers that the wastes are now behind them and that perhaps greater dangers lay ahead – the protean territories of the warbands and the petty fiefdoms of minor champions.

  Beyond the gatehouse
there are unmistakable signs of habitation, if not civilisation. Wretched, sagging shacks of red mud and stinking filth litter the way, as ugly and brutish as their inhabitants. Smoke curls from the tops of some of these structures, the cook fires of robber gangs who prey on the weak and those who are foolish enough to travel openly. In the distance, the sounds of a city caress the very edge of hearing.

  Lone huts become villages, filled with those so lost to madness and mutation that even a city of killers will not abide them. They skulk in the shadows, rarely seen, but there is a constant sense of malevolence and eyes that watch from the darkest, hidden places. In time, even these areas become inconsequential, replaced as they are by villages filled with those of a cannibalistic nature, and finally, the eye beholds the border forts of warlords that cluster within reach of the ruined outskirts of the city of Carngrad.

  This place is a sprawling, festering boil of dirty stone and lingering hatred. Towers, turrets and buttresses pile on top of each other, reaching for the blighted sky like a drowning man clawing for air, or perhaps more accurately, like a corpse ripping its way free of the cursed earth. Buildings tilt wildly, leaning towards one another like whispering conspirators squeezing out whatever light tries to reach the benighted streets below. Ash and smoke rise endlessly from the charnel fires and the screams of victims and their killers ring out over the tolling of the great brass bell that marks the warped passage of time in this part of the city.

  It is a living hell and it is home to countless lives.

  The very core of the city is a dizzying maze of streets, alleys and open sewers, filled with a throng of people who go about their daily lives filled with the trepidation and suspicion and sheer hatred for one another that is so prevalent. There are merchants mingling with murderers here and, with alarming frequency, they are one and the same thing.

  It would be easy to focus on those who scuttle on the ground below, those to whom the Corvus Cabal refer as the low-folk. Perhaps attention can be turned upon the carnage inside the slaughter pits, or even the crazed victims of the halls of white glass. It would be just as easy to dwell upon the spiny edifice of the nearest palace of the Seven Talons and the warbands who endlessly grapple for supremacy in its shadow. But the citizens of Carngrad have learned, through a succession of hard lessons, not to gaze too long upon the darkness that surrounds these places. So it is that very few think to cast their eyes anywhere other than straight ahead, and there is a single direction in which fewer still think to look. It is the unseen world of the rooftops that the Corvus Cabal have chosen to make their own.