Warcry: The Anthology

by Various Authors

  The barbarian champion sneered.

  Yaga shook his head.

  ‘The Coiling Ones need nothing from such warmblood filth.’

  ‘You took me.’

  ‘That is different, but you are right, Ma’asi.’ Yaga dipped his head as though requesting forgiveness. ‘It is not for Yaga to decide who is worthy.’ Turning idly away from the Heart-eater, the Serpent Caller walked behind the line of Mad Hunt, regarding the row of bowed heads. ‘There is no place here to dig a proper grave, but the Coiling Ones are understanding. They will not disapprove if Yaga improvises.’ Upon reaching the end of the line, the Serpent Caller pulled a knife from a concealed sheath and ran it across the back of the bound warrior’s neck.

  It was a shallow cut. Jarissa used to make similar marks before killing a man, that the Gods would know who sent them. The tribesman hissed in pain, then opened his mouth to curse but no sound came out. His eyes rolled back into his skull and he jerked once, twice, against his bonds, before falling face down to the sand.

  Yaga looked upon him, glassy-eyed.

  ‘Unworthy.’

  The Serpent Caller moved one down the line, and cut again. Another body hit the sand. Thruka strained on his bound hands as Yaga moved to the third. Yaga nicked his neck and the warrior fell like the others. Just one more knelt between Thruka and Blan Loa’s venom.

  ‘Untie me, you coward,’ said Thruka.

  ‘Coward? It is not Yaga who fears to have his worth tested.’

  ‘Worth?’ Thruka spat. ‘This is no test.’

  Yaga’s eyebrow lifted. He turned the blade to his own breast, grimaced only slightly as he pushed the edge in deep. Blood oozed over the curved blade and down Yaga’s chest. The Serpent Caller grinned. ‘Nagendra loves Papa Yaga. He loves all the Striking Death.’

  He moved to the final warrior and cut.

  The warrior jerked and fell.

  Yaga smiled down on his still-twitching corpse.

  ‘One accepted by another warband can never be worthy.’

  He set his knife to the back of Thruka’s neck. Marik held his breath in anticipation. Then Yaga smiled and drew the knife back. Thruka almost fell anyway, such was his relief. The Serpent Caller cocked his head towards the sussurant hiss of the snake that had wound its way up his chest. ‘The serpent, Cabasou, is wise. He tells Yaga that Nagendra brings us together here for a higher purpose. Perhaps you cannot be worthy, but the road to the Brazen Hills has been coiling and long. Yaga has need of more slaves. You are a good hunter, Thruka, and you say you know where the eight-tailed naga lairs. Take us, and Yaga will beg the Coiling Ones’ forgiveness for denying Nagendra this one soul.’

  The big warrior frowned in thought.

  ‘There is a saying on the Jagged Savannah – never catch a snake by its tail.’

  ‘You can always say no. The Gods guide Yaga. He will find the true descendent of Nagendra on his own if he must.’

  ‘And if I do?’

  Yaga flashed his knife. ‘Then you prove your worth to Blan Loa.’

  Thruka bowed his head, beaten.

  ‘Untie me, Yaga. I’ll show you the way.’

  Marik lay flat on a ridge overlooking an arid basin. The sand was rough against his belly where the final wriggling crawl had parted the layers of his snake scale cloak. He covered his eyes against the sweeping gusts, the blown sand a natural barrier against prying eyes. The basin itself was a natural feature of the range, surrounded by wind-smoothed hills. In the hour or so that it had taken the Striking Death to make the ridge he had witnessed a dozen avalanches. The equally abrupt deposits of fresh sand, freak gusts that buried entire hillsides in seconds, were if anything even more terrifying to behold. Marik doubted there could have been more than a handful of safe approaches to the basin below, and could find no fault in Yaga Kushmer’s wisdom in enlisting Thruka Heart-eater’s aid. Only a hunter as skilled as the leader of the Mad Hunt could have brought them this close. Certainly not Marik.

  A gust of wind that smelled strongly of brass momentarily swept the barrier layers of dust aside.

  A ramshackle camp sat in the centre of the basin, surrounded by crude windbreaks and palisades.

  Condescension formed like a physical deposit in his chest, a plaque of wind-blown sand and species loathing.

  Gloomspite grots.

  Somehow the tiny, craven creatures always managed to find their way through the immense fortifications and monstrous garrisons of the Arcway gates and into the Eightpoints. And once there, despite their obvious frailty, they somehow managed to thrive, a weakling menace that no force of Chaos could ever eradicate. In spite of his martial disdain, Marik felt a troubling certainty that when the last two aspirants to the Varanguard finally killed each other in their fell lord’s name the grots would still be here, chasing after their illusive Bad Moon.

  The structures they had erected in the basin were outwardly rickety, but nothing as badly made as they looked could have survived the Brazen Hills for long. A few streaks of red paint remained visible on their walls, but the winds had otherwise scoured them to bare boards and metal. Inside the palisade, a forest of windmills with crooked, uneven blades creaked alarmingly as they shifted after every change in the wind. The rotation of those great wooden paddles in turn moved belts and pulleys and wheels, translating finally into the grinding motion of large drills studded with raptoryx teeth, gouging into the floor of the basin. The raucous shrill of tiny voices sounded even over the abrasive roar of the drills and the mad, wind-powered machinery that drove them. It was the pain in the ear that followed too loud and too high-pitched a noise. Marik winced and covered his ears, but the ringing stayed with him.

  He felt a cold anger, that torpid organ in his breast again briefly stirring.

  They were mining the Brazen Hills – digging for the very metal of the Warmaker’s axe!

  The biggest and brashest of the grots were bedecked in it. They strutted about the dust of the basin in overly large breastplates and towering helmets, adorned with neck chains and nose studs and with fat rings on their long, impish fingers.

  ‘How many of them are there?’ he muttered.

  Thruka lay a little further along the ridge, also flat on his chest, cloaked by dust and wind and the craggy nature of the hill face. For all his boisterousness, the onset of the hunt had brought out in him a savage discipline. Marik saw now how the Mad Hunt had managed to catch the Striking Death unawares. But the Splintered Fang were masters of the silent kill, and they too had concealed themselves along the ridge. Aside from Klitalash, next to him, even Marik could not see them.

  ‘I count forty in the mine,’ Thruka grunted. ‘Twenty more around the basin’s edge.’ He turned his head towards Marik, and flashed a bright smile. ‘Supposedly on guard.’

  ‘We can take sixty.’

  ‘Yes, little warrior. We kill half their sentries before they know we strike. Then our numbers will be closer to equal.’

  The warrior did not need to add that there was no even contest here or anywhere that would favour the grots over the hopefuls of the Varanspire.

  Klitalash pointed into the swirling storms.

  ‘I would be concerned more by that, Ma’asi.’

  Marik peered down.

  His eyes were less keen than the younger man’s. They were accust­omed more to the distance between knife and throat or cactus branch, averted from the grand spectacle of the Gods. As he strained, a shimmer of dust made a shifting mirage of what he first took for a Bad Moon idol. It took him several seconds to realise what it was.

  A low growl announced Thruka’s dawning realisation.

  The Gloomspite grots had the monster penned in a huge cage of timber stakes and metal wire, the supporting cables gaily hung with glyphs and totems. The distance was too great for Marik to make it out clearly. In addition, it seemed to be secreting a venom so potently
acidic that it was lifting the brass right off the floor of the basin, shrouding itself in a yellow steam. As Marik watched, the monster reared up to push against the gates of its pen. The flimsy structure bent outwards, summoning a small mob of grots to beat the truculent beast with charm sticks and loonstone bombs. All the while, a pair of grots suspended from the roof of the pen in a rickety basket gathered up the evaporated brass in what looked like giant butterfly nets.

  Marik watched the tormented creature as if he were about to slip out of reality and into a prophetic trance.

  ‘Eight-tailed naga…’

  Thruka grinned.

  ‘The truechild of Nagendra awaits, Klitalash,’ Marik murmured. ‘The Coiling Ones will provide, now and always, until the day of his rebirth.’

  ‘Then we go?’ said Klitalash.

  Marik shivered as the moment left him.

  ‘We go.’

  With a nod, Klitalash raised his sword. From somewhere along the ridge line, there came a sibilant hiss that might have been mistaken for the wind until four warriors in snake scale rose. Shaking sand from their backs, the warriors drew back intricately carved Invidian gumwood spears longer than their outstretched sighting arms, and threw. Three grots died without so much as a scream. One more stumbled a few paces before the poison on the iron spear tip filled its joints with fluid. Then Marik, Thruka, Klitalash and a dozen warriors charged down the loose scree below the ridge.

  Thruka bellowed a challenge.

  The handful of grots in his path shrieked and ran away. The Heart-eater laughed, pulling away from Marik to give chase. Stumbling into the gap he left behind, a lone grot charged at Marik. It was four feet tall, scrawny as a malnourished child, garbed in a filthy vest and armed with a brass-tipped spear. The pall of disturbed dust must have confused its sense of direction.

  Grots were malicious but craven creatures, with no stomach for battle.

  Marik clove the grot’s spear in half with a single blow of his sword, then turned with the momentum of the swing to strike its head from its shoulders.

  The creature charged on up the hill, stabbing furiously with the stump of its spear, before its knees gave out and it fell to the sand.

  His charge broken, Marik took a moment to look around.

  He was roughly halfway down the slope.

  The routed grots had reached their enclave’s palisades and were in the process of rallying there, slotting in alongside their mustering comrades. Marik could see they had slain fewer than Thruka had promised they would. About fifty were taking up defensive positions around the mine-heads, brandishing mean little spears and nocking shafts to bowstrings. Captains in burnished breastplates and bosshats capered and shrieked, chopping theatrically at the charging tribesmen with their swords. To the left, archers loosed a ragged volley, aiming too anxiously and too quickly as a wriggling carpet of serpents swept down the hillside towards them. Marik could just about make out Yaga Kushmer’s grinning visage before it sank into the rushing swarm.

  A terrific creak sounded above the Gloomspites’ aggressive cries.

  Marik looked up. His first thought had been that one of the ramshackle windmills was about to topple, but the sound had come from further away.

  The naga pen.

  On noticing the attack, the first thing that the beast’s attendants had done was to flee in panic to join their brethren behind the sanctuary of the township’s palisades.

  The child of Nagendra had seized its chance at freedom.

  Pushing with all its strength, the immense weight of its coils behind it, the wooden gates simply exploded. The entire pen came crashing down. The two grots in their hanging basket screamed as they joined an avalanche of wood and metal and whipping wires.

  ‘Nagendra!’ Marik yelled.

  Marik had never aspired to walk the path of the Gods. That had always been Jarissa’s calling. She had been devout, the one who had led the steading in sacrifice and set out into the Deepsplinter in search of skulls for harvest. But now she was dead. The Gods had chosen him for the path and turned his head to see its destination.

  He felt the dry, cold-blooded touch of destiny upon his brow.

  Klitalash tore after him. Thruka. Muad’isha. Half a dozen others peeling off from the attack on the Gloomspite township to join him on the Gods’ path. Marik ran a pace ahead of them all, heart pounding, no fear surviving to poison his breast even as the shrinking distance between himself and the demolished pen made the monstrous creature within its haze of brass grow larger and larger. Its scent became all-powerful. Insectile and rotten. Armour segments ground and chittered. Brushlike bristles rustled with captured sand.

  The monster shrugged off the debris, eight limbs pulling it easily free of the spoil. For the first time Marik saw it. Arachnarok. Even with his own limited understanding, it was clear that the spider had been hideously mutated, warped by the Chaos power that drenched the entirety of the Eightpoints. Its carapace was pitted with lesions. Its eye clusters wept a sickly fluid. The bristles that coated the segmented plates of its forelimbs were the true source of its brass-eating venom, and the ground beneath it hissed like the death scream of the Coiling Ones. Cries of angst and horror arose from the Gloomspite township. Arrows pinged off the monster’s brass-plated armour as it turned towards Marik and the Striking Death.

  Their charge faltered.

  ‘What is this?’ Klitalash hissed.

  ‘This is no snake!’ cried another.

  ‘Nagendra punishes us for sparing the Untamed Beast. Yaga no longer speaks with their voice!’

  Marik rounded on Thruka.

  ‘Did you know–?’

  A raised limb struck him in the chest before he could complete the question and threw him contemptuously aside.

  He flew several feet before hitting the wood pile that was left of the arachnarok’s pen, crashing through the wreckage. The back of his head struck an angle. His vision blurred. Blinking out of his daze he looked up. The scarred under-armour of the arachnarok’s thorax filled his vision like a total eclipse of the universe.

  A scream burst free of his mouth, the impetus behind it stronger than the strange new coolness that had settled on him, as a leg stomped down. A spiked foot segment shattered his collar bone, the arachnarok’s immense weight driving its spike through the pectoral rind plate, through meat and bone, crushing him to the wooden debris pile he lay on and skewering man and detritus to the brass earth.

  Marik gurgled. He clawed at the impaling limb, his body spasming like a hooked worm as the spider’s venom entered him.

  His heart slowed.

  Consciousness drifted.

  His nails continued to scratch. Ants. Digging in sand. His mind continued to drift, could almost reach out with hands that were not hands and touch his own body. He could feel the spider’s poison walling off his awareness. Brick by brick by brick. He looked back at himself through the tiniest of windows, enclosed in blackness, surrounded only by the hiss of digging ants. Of draining sand. Of Nagendra. Marik that was no longer truly Marik shivered, but there was no warmth, no cold, no elation and no pain. Into that nadir of weakness slithered revelation.

  This was where strength lay: in abject surrender to the Coiling Ones.

  Marik died and was buried.

  His name was Ma’asi.

  He willed his hand to move, to take a grip on the limb that impaled him. To his cool-blooded satisfaction it did, and held on to it even as the arachnarok lifted its leg from the ground. He screamed through gritted teeth. The pain was tremendous, as though his neck were being pulled from his torso. Then came something fifty times as bad. The arachnarok scuttled about on the spot and slammed its leg down, driving him to the ground again, crushing another warrior beneath him. He felt broken bones grind against one another, fragments cutting into new flesh and opening up new bleeds. A hot, poisonous steam rose from his throat, and
he screamed aloud as he was lifted again a few seconds later.

  From somewhere beyond the immediate vicinity of his agony he could hear screams, fighting, a pain-coloured whirl of violence surrounding himself and the arachnarok. He saw as the arachnarok flattened a fur-clad hunter beneath its abdomen. A red smear on the earth. Like Gloomspite paint. A moment later he saw Klitalash ripped apart, his belly staked to the ground under a bladed forelimb, his upper body tearing away from the rest as the monster’s mouth came down. Ma’asi watched with detachment.

  Such was the fate of those who groped blindly for the Gods, or ran carelessly in the path of the Chosen.

  Lifting the sword that was still, by some miracle, in his hand, Ma’asi hacked at the arachnarok’s foot. And again. Again. It seemed to feel no pain, continuing to slaughter its way through the Striking Death as his sword dug deeper, through brass, through chitin and into meat. Brownish haemolymph sprayed his body. At the tenth or eleventh blow, the monster’s armour crunched. Just a sliver of weakened brass held its foot to the rest of its leg.

  With a howl, Ma’asi struck through it.

  There was a moment of weightlessness, as if Nagendra himself dulled his senses to cushion his fall, before he slammed back to the ground.

  The pain was so intense he actually laughed. Spitting blood and spider poison, he dragged himself out from under the arachnarok. He climbed to his feet, noticing the way his head lolled onto its side where the arachnarok had shattered the bones and torn the muscles. He laughed again as he tugged the barbed spider leg from his collar.

  He studied the matt shine of the carapace, still dripping with his blood and flecked with his bone.

  Yes.

  There is strength here.

  As if another’s will guided his hand, he reached into the severed limb and scooped out the arachnarok’s flesh. His hand slotted almost perfectly into the carapace. He clenched it into a fist, crying out once more as he felt the residual, brass-eating poisons fuse the carapace to his arm.

  He held his clenched fist firm.

  He looked up, steam rising from his forearm, as the arachnarok lumped around to drive a bladed limb through Muad’isha’s heart. The mighty trueblood champion blubbered up blood as he was tossed aside. A clearblood threw a spear that snapped against the arachnarok’s armour, then turned to flee. The spider attempted to give chase, but moved unsteadily on seven legs, repeatedly trying to put weight on the severed eighth, half-stumbling, before correcting itself with the neighbouring two. It chittered with insectile confusion, torn between continuing after the screaming clearblood and returning for Ma’asi.