Dan the Warlord

by Hondo Jinx

  Nearby, a stunning dragon-woman with bright green wings strafed enemy riders, cooking them with an incinerating exhalation of orange flame.

  A mercenary rushed Dan and was pulled from his horse by a pair of harpies, who shrieked with glee, their bare, bloody breasts wobbling as they fought over their prey in midair. One harpy had the screaming man by the shoulders; the other gripped his legs. After a few seconds of mad screeching, fluttering, and tugging, they tore the invader in half, soaking enemy cavalry in a downpour of blood and guts.

  Meanwhile, Dan’s horde buried its collective muzzle in the carnage. They were an improbable army of orcs and trolls, giants and Mullet Men, gnolls and hobgoblins, kobolds and were-folk, drunk on slaughter and united loyalty to their warlord. They were a terrible force indeed, and any mercenary who slipped past Dan and his demons tumbled straight into their bloody jaws.

  It was too much for the duke’s cavalry. A minute into their ill-fated clash, a collective shudder rippled through the armored riders, and they broke in a chaotic rout.

  When foot soldiers break, slaughter ensues. When tightly massed cavalry break, the slaughter is even more epic. Horse slams into horse. Panicked men leap from their saddles to be trampled. Discombobulated deserters lose their way and flee straight into the enemy ranks.

  Dan charged forward through a glorious shower of hot, fresh blood, whirling and slashing in a deadly dance set to the music of invaders crying out for mercy and meeting only death.

  Then he was through the enemy ranks.

  Before him, a few sprinting stragglers were being pulled down or lifted away to similar fates. Otherwise, only an empty stretch of churned sod stood between Dan and the rails, where the locomotive was pulling away, departing in reverse, huffing puffs of black smoke as the Duke of Harrisburg abandoned his men to a bloody end.

  Oh no, you don’t, Dan thought, racing after the accelerating train.

  It wasn’t enough to smash the invaders and drive them from his land. He would have his vengeance.

  Pulling alongside the cattle car, Dan guided Granite close to the tracks.

  Slinging Talon over his back, Dan stood in his stirrups and leapt across the gap. Catching hold of the slatted sides of the cattle car, he climbed onto the rattling rooftop, where he met with a surprise.

  “Razah,” Dan breathed, his cloak flapping as the train rushed forward faster and faster.

  Sitting cross-legged twenty feet away with his gold-encased forearms resting atop his thighs, the huge, powerfully built black panther man once again hovered in midair—only now he was somehow managing to race along overtop in perfect time with the train.

  Dan unslung Talon. He took his time, relishing the gleam of the fading sun along these love-forged blades.

  When he looked up again, the warrior-monk’s bright green eyes had opened. Razah observed Dan not with panic, surprise, or amusement but only the primordial calm of a jaguar ready to kill.

  As had been the case during their initial meeting, the prince wore no crown or finery, only loose gray trousers that disappeared into the golden bands that armored his shins but left his feet bare, mirroring the golden bracers that encased his forearms.

  Razah unfolded his legs and lowered himself to a standing position in a smooth flow of rippling muscles covered in heavily scarred black fur.

  The warrior-mystic’s nostrils flared, and his jaws cracked in flehmen display. “I never expected to smell you again, barbarian,” Razah said, his voice a low growl. “You smell… different.”

  “I am different,” Dan said.

  “You no longer carry the stench of fear,” Razah said matter-of-factly. The jet-black pupils splitting his luminescent green irises swelled with interest. “And yet you stand before a superior opponent atop this speeding train. Another trick? Your gun again? Or are you expecting that one of your winged demons will swoop down and carry me away?”

  Dan shook his head. “They are under strict orders not to do that.”

  Razah grinned slowly. “Is that so?”

  “It is. When I heard that you had aligned yourself with the duke, I made it clear that I would kill you myself.”

  Dark laughter rumbled up out of the huge, black chest. “Now I understand. You have blinded yourself to fear and reality alike by falling in love with an ideal,” he said, advancing slowly. “So which engine drives you toward doom, honor or justice?”

  “Neither,” Dan said, also walking forward. “You’re just a prick.”

  More laughter. “A prick. Ah, you humans and your emotional outbursts.” Razah stopped several feet away and fell into a loose half crouch, swiveling his left leg forward and blading his body away from Dan. “You amuse me and yet, I must admit, I will never understand your foolishness.”

  “You don’t need to understand,” Dan said. “You merely need to die.”

  Razah raised his hand into a low guard and began to rock subtly back and forth. “Bluffing, threats, and cleverness, all in the face of certain death. Barbarian, you are perhaps the most human of all the humans I have ever met.”

  Dan shook his head. “I am more than human now. Can’t you smell it?”

  “Whatever I smell, whatever you are, you will soon be far less than human.”

  Now it was Dan’s turn to laugh. “Cleverness and a threat? Very human of you, Razah.”

  “But I do not bluff,” the panther man said, “and that makes all the difference.”

  “If you think I’m bluffing,” Dan said, “that big, ugly head of yours is stuck even farther up your ass than I’d figured. Now let’s do this. I have people to kill.”

  Razah continued to rock rhythmically back and forth, each forward rock carrying him surreptitiously an inch or two closer.

  His strike will be fast, Dan thought, holding Talon at the ready.

  “If you are so confident, barbarian, why not toss away your weapon?”

  “I’m confident, not stupid.”

  “You think that ridiculous sword will save you?”

  “I didn’t bring Talon to save me,” Dan said. “I brought it to kill y—”

  And then he was swinging low, blocking Razah’s kick.

  Talon rang loudly off the prince’s golden bracer with a spray of sparks that Dan barely registered, busy as he was avoiding the lightning-fast swipes that followed. He dipped under the panther’s slashing claws and swiveled through, getting the angle.

  But before he could counter with his sword, Razah disappeared.

  Poof.

  There one second, gone the next, and Talon’s triple blades punched only through air.

  Before Dan could even register what had happened, what felt like a train speeding in the opposite direction slammed into his kidneys, knocking him from his feet and sending him tumbling across the rooftop.

  Dan’s leg jutted out over the edge, but he had managed to stay atop the train. A good thing, that. The train was still gaining speed, rushing along now at what felt like eighty miles an hour. The ground alongside the tracks was a blur as they raced across Freedom Valley, heading toward the Jungle Kingdom.

  Pain pulsed in Dan’s lower back like a war drum. There was nothing quite so exquisitely painful as a kidney shot.

  “Slow,” Razah said matter-of-factly, ambling forward in a relaxed advance.

  Dan scrambled to his feet just in time to dodge a side kick—and stepped straight into Razah’s follow-up attack, a hooking slash to the body. The panther’s claws burned across Dan’s middle, slicing through shirt, skin, and flesh, cutting him to the ribcage.

  Dan growled. Off balance, he swung his fist and landed an awkward backfist that bounced harmlessly off the panther’s shoulder. With Razah’s short fur and iron muscle, hitting his shoulder felt like striking a mossy tree.

  Razah disappeared, then reappeared a second later, hovering in his lotus position ten feet away. “Weak,” he said.

  “I’m a little disappointed by your showmanship,” Dan said. “It’s gratingly needy.”

  Loweri
ng gracefully into a standing position, the warrior-monk shrugged. “Too much time spent in the gladiator pits, I suppose. Even panthers play to the crowd. Besides, felines of all stripes are known to toy with our prey. It is, perhaps, our single vice. I will, for example, very much enjoy drawing out the suffering of Tatiana once I sink my claws into her supple flesh.”

  Dan turned his body, presenting a smaller target, and held Talon across his chest, parallel to the roof of the speeding car. “That’s not going to happen,” Dan said. “Tatiana is mine.”

  “Yours?” Razah laughed, his voice full of surprise.

  Dan fired a blade.

  Had Talon operated mechanically, with some sort of trigger device, Razah might have read the attack and disappeared. But this sword was Agatha’s one true forge, not only a flawless weapon but also a weapon linked directly to Dan’s consciousness, and Dan simply willed the sword to fire, not telegraphing the attack with so much as the bat of a lash.

  The blade punched straight through Raza, taking him between the ribs left of center and just below the heart, then blew out of the gladiator prince’s back, skipped off the rooftop, and spun away into the blur that was the easternmost edge of Dan’s territory.

  Razah hunched with a coughing growl, his mouth going blood red. Meanwhile, pink foam was already draining from the wound.

  “Lung shot,” Dan said, walking toward him. “You’re fucked, buddy.”

  Razah’s lip peeled back in a defiant snarl. “I am no frail human,” he gurgled. “Even now, I am mending.”

  Tatiana had told Dan as much. The gladiator priests had mastered their bodies down to a cellular level. In thirty seconds, Razah would seal the wound, purge the lung, and return to full strength, Dan’s surprise attack wasted.

  Dan had to finish this before that happened.

  “Sure you’re healing,” Dan bluffed in a very human fashion. “You’d better kill me now, before you run out of air, tough guy.” Saying this, he swung Talon in a two-handed grip, from left to right. Raza disappeared, and the attack sliced through empty air—just as Dan had anticipated.

  Switching the pommel to his right hand, he turned with the swing, bringing it all the way around, where the two remaining blades struck the panther just as Razah rematerialized behind Dan, ready to finish him. Talon slashed across Razah’s hip and pelvis, slicing the warrior-monk deeply but failing to disembowel him.

  Dan didn’t have time to bring the blade back around. He couldn’t give the panther a second to regain his composure, or Razah would blink away again. So he bulled forward, making a blunt instrument of himself and shoulder checked the snarling prince.

  It was a primitive, instinctual attack, ugly and imprecise. But it wasted no time, and Dan’s shoulder slammed into Razah’s gut, forcing him backward.

  Dan kept coming, halfway off balance himself now, and launched a stumbling headbutt. He was too short to nail Razah’s face, so he targeted the ribcage instead. His forehead slammed into the foaming wound.

  Razah yowled in pain and rage, stumbling backward and lashing out with his clawed hands with lightning speed.

  The combination landed with superhuman speed and power, five or six shots nailing Dan in a single second.

  On some level, Dan was aware of Razah’s claws tearing open his scalp, ripping open one cheek, and slicing a line of fire across his forehead, just missing his eye, which blurred instantly with a shower of hot blood.

  The concussive blow of Razah’s strikes jerked Dan’s head from side to side, filling his head with an explosion of bright white sparks. One of the blows spun Dan’s chin all the way to his shoulder, and for a fraction of a second, everything disappeared. Pain, sight, thought, everything.

  The panther had scored a flash knockdown, only Dan didn’t drop. For a fraction of an instant, Dan was out on his feet, knocked the fuck out by one of Razah’s heavy-ass shots.

  In close fights between experienced warriors, these flickering instants are turning points. Everything hangs brutally in the balance until one opponent wobbles, and the other surges, snowballing a flickering edge into an avalanche of advantage.

  Razah felt the strike land, felt its solid impact against Dan’s temple, and felt the telltale vibration shiver through Dan as consciousness left the barbarian’s body.

  It was a thing Razah had felt before—many times—that moment in a fight when one clean shot changed everything and a brief, frantic slugfest hurtled headlong into a one-sided massacre. Like any good finisher, Razah responded instantly and surged forward to finish the fight—or rather, he tried to surge forward.

  Dan came to, cursing himself—and in that same instant felt Talon strike Razah’s leg. Yes, he had been unconscious for a split-second, but his body had fought on, following through with the swing like a boxer still throwing punches while out on his feet.

  Talon severed first one leg and then the next.

  Screaming in pain, Razah toppled forward. His claws slashed across Dan’s torso, slicing through the meat of his chest, but then slipped free, and the gladiator slammed face-first into the roof of the train car.

  No civilized man would have been able to react quickly enough to capitalize, for no sooner had Razah hit the rooftop than he was popping up again, meaning to slash open the thumb-thick femoral artery pumping within Dan’s inner thigh.

  But if Dan had once, in a world adjacent to this reality, been civilized, he was no longer, and he reacted with the speed of not only a barbarian, but a barbarian in full frenzy, a barbarian living in the moment, fighting more by instinct than thought, because thinking is slow and instinct is fast.

  Surging with the wild elation of a fearless man having narrowly escaped the jaws of certain death—that elation rushing not from the mind but the bones themselves, rushing out of the marrow, where dwells the true life force, that savage, stubborn existence which transcends the individual and passes from generation to generation through time alongside fear and lust and love for one’s progeny—Dan stomped down on the prince’s skull with all of his strength, which had, thanks to his bond with Illandria, surged beyond 18/92. Exactly what strength he now owned, statistically speaking, Dan had no idea; nor did he care, especially as he felt Razah’s face break beneath his heel.

  Up and down, Dan stomped as the train roared on faster and faster. Up and down, up and down, chambering his knee up to his chest and slamming his boot down full force over and over again into the skull of the fallen panther. With each stomp, pieces of the warrior-monk’s head cracked and snapped.

  Dan roared with triumph as Razah’s skull lost its shape, sections of bone calving away until the former Pangea of the panther’s head had broken apart into so many tectonic plates sliding apart and dipping under each other.

  Still Dan stomped on.

  His battle rage carried a certain logic. Having narrowly dodged death himself, he would not stop, would not deviate in the slightest, until the threat was eliminated beyond any shadow of a doubt.

  Dan stayed the course, locked in the simple behavioral loop, lifting his foot and slamming it back down as fast and hard as he could, every fiber of his being locked into this pattern of destruction until at last it was over—completely, unquestionably over—and breaking the frenzied, repetitive attack, he stepped back from Razah.

  If full consciousness in a sentient being relates to a thinking state, only then did Dan return fully to consciousness. He gasped for breath, filling his lungs with the cold air that was rushing powerfully over him as the train hurtled eastward.

  For a long time—and Dan had no sense, in any precise terms of how much time had passed—he had been locked in his desperate, frenzied attempt to finish Razah. As his lungs sucked in great gulps of air, clarity returned, and he understood what he was seeing sprawled at his feet: the legless corpse of a black panther warrior prince crowned no longer by a head but rather by a shapeless mess of blood and fur as flat and dead as week-old roadkill.

  Dan shuddered, adrenaline releasing him and joining the torna
do of power whirling within him now—Zamora’s power and more.

  Much, much more.

  He straightened, drew his lungs full of good cold air, and showed the darkening world the bright and bloody smile of the barbarian triumphant.

  Then, with the train hurtling toward Hell’s Canyon and the Jungle Kingdom beyond, he crossed the roof and leapt across the gap to the train engine that held Blivet and the Duke of Harrisburg.

  At long last, he had reached the hour when his long-dreamed-of vengeance would finally come to dark fruition.

  38

  No Longer the Warlord of the Wildervast

  The train rattled, shaking badly at this speed.

  Dan scaled down the ladder and hopped from the cattle car onto the metal platform at the back of the engine. Here between the cars, having escaped the river of wind rushing across the rooftop, he felt a soft caress pass over his split brow. In the wake of the gentle caress, he felt his brow knit back together.

  Dan grinned. “Leave the rest for now,” he said.

  He knew that Razah had torn his face wide open, and across the ribs, where the panther had slashed him open, a steady burn joined the deep, dull throbbing that still beat within his lower back.

  But this was just pain. And pain was nothing.

  Let them see my ruined flesh. Let them see how far I am willing to go.

  The caress did not return, but he heard a faint chuckle, as dark as midnight, within the confines of his skull.

  Stepping to the iron door, he tried the handle. It was locked, of course—at least initially. Then the tension released. He twisted the handle, opened the door, and stepped into the loud, oppressively hot confines of the main cabin, where two men spun to face him.

  Dan recognized the short, plump, and balding man instantly. Of course, when someone sucker punches you with a lightning bolt, you tend to remember their face.

  The sorcerous asshole of all sorcerous assholes, Blivet, business suit and all, stood before him, already mumbling an incantation.