Marik’s hand closed around the grip. The indents in the binding were shaped to his wife’s hand.
‘You would give me a knife?’
‘You are Striking Death.’ Klitalash pulled back the layers of his cloak to reveal a string of knives above his left hip. ‘Striking Death have fangs.’ Letting the sleeves of snakeskin fall he leant forwards, appearing almost youthful in his keenness.
‘Would you speak of your trial to me?’
‘What of it?’
‘I do not remember mine. I was too young. But when Nagendra bit you, when his venom changed you, when Blan Loa then came to anoint you with his own venom, you did not fall. You spoke in prophetic tongues. What did the Great Nagendra say to you?’
Marik plumbed the tired soup of his brains.
‘I… don’t remember.’
Klitalash sat back. ‘Papa Yaga said it would be so.’
‘Papa…?’
‘The Serpent Caller. He who speaks with the voice of the Coiling Ones.’
With a clink of bone ornaments, Klitalash stood. He smoothed down his cloak, then offered his hand. Marik was surprised by that, and allowed the young tribesman to pull him up. The world around them spun.
‘Can you stand, Ma’asi?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you walk?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’ This time it was Klitalash who seemed to be suppressing a shudder. ‘Yaga has waited many days to question you on your visions. I would not have wished to be the one to tell him you needed more time.’
Marik studied the knife in his hand a moment longer, then slid it into the pocket sleeve in the pectoral of the rind plate he still wore.
‘Take me.’
Smoke clung to the broken earth like a morning mist, turning the familiar landscape of Marik’s old steading into the eerie and filling it with disorienting sounds. Harsh voices with foreign accents. The complaints of hungry brass-horns. The bubble and hiss of cauldrons and diffusers, which seemed to hang everywhere. Conical tents big enough for two or three men apiece rose from the skin of smoke like splinters. Victory totems, wooden poles ornately carved into the form of serpents, signposted the door flaps. Each one was unique and presumably said something about the deeds of the warriors who dwelled inside. Living snakes wound lazily up the poles and around the guy ropes, as though something in the smoke made them lethargic. Marik felt it too. His eyelids felt warm and heavy. His heartbeat sounded loud.
He felt for the knife in his breast sheath and touched the barest tremble of a beat.
Klitalash put his hand on Marik’s back.
‘This way.’
The charred bones of Marik’s steading rose from the earth in places, like the ribs of a daemon slain in ancient times. Bracing the back wall of a tent here. Sheltering a firepit there. Marik barely recognised it. Deprived of every landmark, it took him several minutes to realise that the Splintered Fang had not made camp in some daemonic graveyard but that this was, in fact, what was left of his home.
‘There were five families under my roof,’ said Marik. ‘Sharing the skulls we took and the blood we harvested. But I saw only Jarissa with me in the pit. What happened to everyone else?’
‘They all went into the pit.’
Klitalash said no more.
Marik did not need to ask.
The young tribesman led the way confidently through the murk, as though this were his lifelong home and not Marik’s, boots crunching on dried earth and the old, discarded spines of cacti. In all, Marik counted about a dozen warriors. Solitary tribesmen lounged by the open flaps of their tents, smoking from long, coiling pipes and staring listlessly up at the sky. A group of four gathered around a firepit, watching enraptured as a boiling kettle threw off unwholesome vapours, oblivious to the knot of snakes that writhed over their laps. Another pair engaged in what Marik might have considered a complicated ritualised dance if not for the long blades that both men wielded in each of their hands. They whirled about one another, viper fast. The longer Marik spent watching, the less able he was to tell if they were fighting each other or were side by side against some phantom enemy, two men duelling with smoke and, as far as he could determine, winning.
‘Venomblood duellists,’ Klitalash murmured, before ushering him on.
For every warrior, however, there seemed to be three times as many armourers, victuallers, serpent-branded slaves of less obvious trade. Smiths sharpened sword- and knife-blades on pedal-driven grind wheels. Cobblers hammered nails into boots.
The sheer diversity of peoples was dizzying.
There were sinewy, long-limbed folk from the Bloodneedle Savannah; dark-skinned men of serious expression from the Torrids; men of long, golden-red hair such as from nowhere that Marik had ever seen. He even saw a duardin. A female, he thought, but with that race it was difficult to be certain. One eye had been replaced by a polished stone, black hair pulled back from a ritually scarred face into a long braid. Her wispy beard was a mess of acid bleaching and tobacco stains. She was crouched over a leather satchel, training what appeared to be an infant naga. Every so often she would toss it a strip of raw flesh from the satchel, uttering gravelly words of duardin approval whenever a tiny belch of flame incinerated a morsel or it tore into the meat with sufficiently praiseworthy ferocity.
Marik watched the bustle sourly.
These warriors had sacked his steading and razed it to the ground, killing all therein in the manner so approved by the Gods. By the simple laws of the Bloodwind Spoil they were owed the respect of their victory. The Gods afforded no favour to the weak. And yet, Marik could not help but look down on a people who would cheat hardier warriors by treating their blades with poison.
A warrior who resorted to such practices was hardly worthy of the name.
‘This way, Ma’asi.’
Klitalash removed his hand from Marik’s back to move on ahead on his own.
The tent he picked his way towards was larger than the others, as though a number of smaller tents had been strung together. Seven ribbed, conical spires swayed in the wind of the desert, charms tinkling. The natural iridescence of snakeskin and carvolax scale made the runes written into its walls shimmer and writhe. An avenue of totem staves marked the entrance flap, taller and more numerous than at any other tent. Antlered heads topped them. The witch smoke and fire from the camp’s pots and burners made it seem as if their jaws moved and their nostrils flared, their hollow eyes filled with an undying malice.
A sibilant chorus went up as Klitalash walked between the totem staves. Shielding his eyes against the firelight, Marik saw the ankle-deep mat of snakes that writhed around the tent flap. He recoiled from them with a grimace, reaching intuitively for the knife in his breast sheath.
Unperturbed, Klitalash stepped into the wriggling, hissing mess and pushed aside the door flap.
‘Do not fear, Ma’asi.’ Klitalash turned to him. ‘They are Striking Death. They know you are one of them now.’
‘Closer, Klitalash,’ came a frail, sibilant whisper. ‘Let Yaga see the man that Blan Loa chose for us.’
Klitalash pushed Marik further into the fug that filled the tent.
A great white serpent emerged like a bound spirit from the coils of smoke, wound up over a nest of cushions. Its long, forked tongue gave a flickering hiss.
Marik recoiled in shock, then blinked, almost as horrified to see that it was not the white boa, Blan Loa, at all. It was a man, draped bonelessly over the cushions and cloaked in snake scale. He grinned up at Marik with a mouthful of blackened teeth and hallucinogenic vapours. He had probably been black-skinned once, before jaundice and impure living had wasted his flesh to the colour and consistency of dried clay. Large serpents coiled around his wrists, his thighs and his neck. Another was slowly winding its way around the man’s bare waist, its head disappearing back inside his sparse clothi
ng as Marik watched.
‘Ma’asi.’
The Serpent Caller dipped his head with a crinkle of dried skins, then took a draw on the stem of a pipe. He blew out, adding glittering fumes to the general haze, gave a rattling cough and then grinned, a gleam of something poisonous in his mouth.
‘Yaga Kushmer is this one’s name, Serpent Caller of the Striking Death. Papa Yaga speaks for the Coiling Ones who speak for Great Nagendra. Through them Yaga shows this warband the long path to glory and, when the Gods think them ready, to the eternal isle of the Varanspire.’
Marik pursed his lips, uncertain what to say in reply. It dawned on him that there was nothing he wished to say.
Yaga cackled.
‘Nagendra tells Yaga you are an unbeliever. Well you’ve gone into the ground and been reborn, Ma’asi. You’ve been chosen by Nagendra for great things.’
‘Who is Nagendra?’ said Marik.
The Serpent Caller’s mouth stretched wide. For an instant, Marik saw the mouth of the great boa from the pit. He blinked again and it was gone, back into the smoke.
‘A God-beast of the old times. Killed by another of his ancient kind before the coming of men. His death spawned the serpent races of the Mortal Realms. The Coiling Ones too are his children, harbingers of the father’s return.’ A snake slithered into Yaga’s lap. Holding the reptile loosely by the neck, Yaga drew it to his face and whispered to it in a sibilant language. It flicked his lips with a forked tongue. The Serpent Caller chuckled as he drew the snake to his breast. ‘With each sacrifice we give them, we bring Nagendra closer to his return to the world.’
Marik returned to silence.
‘You are a thoughtful one, Ma’asi? Or just quiet? The False Gods like them that way, when they are not killing in their name.’ The Serpent Caller drew himself upright. Serpents slid off him, trembling with irritated hisses. ‘What oaths to blood and brass did you make before doing battle with the Striking Death?’
‘You crept into our steading at night. Cut us with poisoned blades while we slept.’
Marik ripped Jarissa’s blade from its concealed sheath.
Yaga chuckled. ‘And what oath do you cry now, Ma’asi?’
‘I wonder how you would fair against a conscious warrior.’
Marik started towards the Serpent Caller.
A suggestion of movement from one of the tent’s many darkened corners distracted him. His head half-turned towards it. As implausible as it would have seemed a moment ago, before he had moved, a towering brute of a man stood there, wreathed in concealing smoke. Muscles bulged against creaking leather. A cloak of silvered scales lay over one shoulder. Dark veins threaded the champion’s musculature, as fine in their way as the fretwork on any Chosen’s armour.
Marik waited, but the warrior made no further move.
To watch him stand there, sullen and still, it was easier to imagine that the smoke had shifted its coils to reveal him than that the man himself had ever moved a muscle.
Marik lowered his voice.
‘Are you going to stop me avenging my wife and sacrificing this one’s lifeblood to the Bloodwind Spoil?’
‘Allow me to teach this heathen the embrace of Nagendra’s coils, Yaga.’ The voice, belonging to one so massive, was surprisingly genteel. It lilted, almost whispered, and in spite of the darkness and the pipe smoke inside the tent, Marik saw a long tongue flicker between the champion’s lips as he spoke. ‘Let me grind his unearned sense of superiority beneath the pestle of my boot.’
‘Forgive Muad’isha,’ said Yaga. ‘He is trueblood. The venom of the all-snake runs in his veins and poisons him to all those less holy than he.’
The trueblood champion folded his arms over his chest with a creak of leather. He had, Marik noticed, no eyelids. Marik turned back to Papa Yaga.
‘Does that include you?’
Muad’isha hissed, but Yaga lounged back onto his bed of cushions, sagging with a disgustingly boneless motion.
‘It is the way of the hotblood to goad, to flex with words when denied freedom to do so with muscles. The venom has yet to reach his spirit’s heart, Yaga thinks, but it will.’ With a flash of rotten teeth the Serpent Caller straightened again. ‘Nagendra hungers always for souls to quicken his return, but the Coiling Ones grant exception to the worthy. They find you worthy, Ma’asi.’ He took a draw on his long pipe. Glassy-lidded eyes shone in the green flare from the pipe bowl. ‘Tell Yaga what they showed you.’
‘You ask this of everyone?’
‘Before Blan Loa took you.’ Yaga lifted one lazy finger and drilled it slowly towards Marik. ‘When Nagendra’s poison was inside you, you were blessed with a vision. This is not a gift for everyone, Ma’asi. Nagendra shows you favour.’
Pride swelled in Marik’s chest.
Whatever animosity he felt towards the Striking Death and the Splintered Fang, one did not lightly shun the regard of the Gods. If there was one thing more terrible than their acclaim it was their ire.
As Jarissa would often remind him.
He lowered her knife.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Yaga follows the trails of the Coiling Ones, Ma’asi, to guide the steps of his tribe on the winding path to glory. Where are the Brazen Hills you spoke of in your vision?’
Marik frowned. ‘I… don’t remember speaking of them.’
The shaman snarled, the amiable all-knowing mask slipping just for a moment. He drew deeply on his pipe. ‘Klitalash,’ he coughed. ‘Leave.’ The young tribesman, who had not moved from his place by the door flap, dropped to one knee, bowed his head then turned and swept out. ‘The coils of the Great Nagendra are mysterious, Ma’asi. One cannot always find the head by following the tail. Perhaps he does not talk to Yaga like once he did.’ With one idle hand, Yaga gestured towards Marik. ‘But then he showed Yaga the way to you.’
Marik looked down, trying to relive the moment in his mind.
The acid-sharp pain of a snakebite to his ankle, poison filling him, pulling him under. Blan Loa approaching, its movements colluding with the poisons in his blood to lull his body into a sopor. The eager chants of the Striking Death becoming the hiss of escaping consciousness, becoming the words of God. He opened his mouth, shaped his tongue around them, but as hard as he tried he could not recreate the words they had been given to speak that night in the pit.
He shook his head.
‘It’s a blur to me. As if I died for a short time and crossed over before being returned.’
Yaga’s countenance oozed again to one of benevolence.
‘You did, Ma’asi, but Nagendra claims your soul from the False God. Do not fear, there are other means of remembering. Purer means.’ The Serpent Caller exhaled smoke, glittering in the thick air like petty charms. Marik coughed. ‘Blan Loa gives freely of his gifts, and a concentrated dose of his venom will return his visions to you.’
Marik took a step back, raising his knife again.
‘Concentrated?’
‘You have been chosen, Ma’asi. Your chance of dying now is very small.’ The Serpent Caller grinned, a black gash in the shimmer haze. ‘Unless your faith in Nagendra should waver now.’
‘You are asking for faith in a God I didn’t know of before today.’ Marik pointed his knife at the Serpent Caller. The snakes wound about his arms and chest hissed. ‘This is no test of faith. You meant for the white boa to kill me in the pit that night as it did my wife. Is this how warriors without honour clean up after their failures?’
‘Blan Loa is a creature of God, Ma’asi. It makes no mistakes.’
Marik spat on the floor of the tent.
‘You dare.’
Muad’isha came as a blur.
Marik turned to meet him on battle instinct more than any foreknowledge of his senses. He turned a punch on the inside of his wrist, then sidestepped to deliv
er a blow to the trueblood’s kidney. Muad’isha’s palm appeared in the path of his fist before the blow could connect. His fingers closed. Marik gasped as his arm was wrenched out of line, clearing the way for a hammer-blow of a punch to his chest. If Muad’isha had not let go at the moment of impact then it would have dislocated Marik’s shoulder. As it was, the barbed coils that gauntleted the trueblood’s fist ripped a hideous mess of flesh from Marik’s chest before throwing him back.
The wall of the tent ballooned behind him. He slid down it, onto his knees, tried to stand, but Muad’isha caught him by the throat and lifted him easily off the ground.
Marik’s eyes bulged. He kicked, but the champion’s reach was enormous and Marik could not even stab at his chest with his toes. He beat at the warrior’s forearm, scratched with fingernails, looking into the passionless, horizontally slit eyes of his killer as his sense of the world around him slipped away.
‘Enough, Muad’isha.’
Yaga’s voice.
With a hiss, the trueblood dropped Marik to the ground. The grip on his throat loosened and Marik gasped.
‘Where are your False Gods now?’ said Muad’isha.
‘Yaga does not expect you to help willingly, Ma’asi.’ Yaga’s voice came again, summoning him from across an inconceivable vastness, the distance between realm’s end and the inter-realm isles of the Varanspire. ‘It takes time for those newly chosen to embrace the faith.’ A long pause. Laughter. ‘So Yaga appealed on Blan Loa to coat Muad’isha’s gauntlets with his venom.’
Marik tried to curse, aware of himself folding with cosmic slowness towards the sandy floor.
‘You will tell Yaga of everything you see.’
Marik heard a terrible hissing, slithering closer, coming out of every sense. From some deep place, stranded within the numbness of his own deadening flesh, he felt himself scream.
‘You will share with Yaga the vision of the eight-tailed naga.’
Marik cut into his palm with Jarissa’s knife.
Squeezing his hand into a fist, he let the red drops soften the dry soil. He looked up, squinting. The wind was dust, swirling devils chasing one another over the backs of the hills. The way a warrior chased the favour of the Gods, Jarissa might have said, impossible to catch, and liable to slip through your fingers if ever you did. Thinking of his wife, lifeless in a shallow grave, made him squeeze a little harder, forcing one last drop to fall.
Warcry: The Anthology Page 21