The Untamed Beasts hit the Unmade defences and the battlefield was all bedlam and noise. Screaming, roaring, breaking bone and buckling steel, bone against bone and iron against flesh.
Right in front of Thornwinder, one of the Venom Fang’s braves fell with a spear-point through the stomach that punched out through his lower spine. The Unmade, a towering monstrosity crammed into a bulging gut-plate, threw the corpse off the spear with contempt. The enemy’s eyes, set deep in gnarled pockets of dried and shredded muscle, turned to Thornwinder. The ragged slit of a mouth smiled at the easy kill that would follow.
Easy to kill. That was what they thought of him. Not just the enemy, but the rest of the Venom Fang. That was why Thornwinder was there. A sacrifice to the Devourer, blade-fodder to spill his blood on the ground and remind the rest of the tribe how strong they had become.
It was anger at that very thought that drove Thornwinder on to meet the Unmade.
The spear-point thrust over his head as he ducked low and leapt back up to strike. The jawbone axe swung up and caught the lower edge of the Unmade’s gut-plate with more strength than Thornwinder had ever mustered in his short life. The Unmade stumbled back and Thornwinder pivoted as he landed, spinning to bring the axe around with full force.
The Unmade’s size was its weakness. It was too slow to duck or move back out of the weapon’s arc. Thornwinder let out an involuntary cry of exultation as the bone edge crunched into the side of the Unmade’s skull and bit deep, shearing halfway through to the middle of the browbone. Pulp spurted from the Unmade’s eye pits and it was dead before it sunk to its knees, the spear dropping from its mailed fist.
‘See! Even the whelp is blooded!’ Thornwinder gasped down a breath, suddenly feeling the exertion, as he turned to see Preytaker Flaywrithe watching him with a mocking sneer on her face. Her quiver of javelin-sized arrows was already half-empty and she fought with a bone hatchet in one hand and her bow in the other. ‘He who has no life taken yet, wallow in shame! Even the boy is ahead of you!’
Thornwinder felt a tightness in his chest, a knot of indignation and fury. He had killed for his tribe, he had fought as hard as any of them there – he had prevailed when other Untamed Beasts had already fallen – and they were laughing at him for it.
If there had been a spear in his hand, or a bow with an arrow nocked, he could not be sure he would not have loosed it at Preytaker Flaywrithe in that moment. He would have gladly seen her fall as a punishment for mocking him.
The fury passed, to be replaced with another emotion. The battle was raging ahead of him. Unmade and Untamed Beast were both draped over the defences and the charge had broken up into dozens of smaller fights, combatants ripping into one another in ones and twos. The Untamed Beasts’ charge had thrown the Unmade back but now the enemy were resurgent.
He saw their leader. The warlord of this Unmade band was larger than any of the others, and onto his armoured body were nailed dozens of skinned faces. They stared out from him with anguish and pain in their empty eye sockets. The Unmade warlord’s own face was a pared-down skull, bloody and slick, with the tendons standing out in red cables and a lipless mouth full of fangs grafted in from other creatures. Where he was not covered by armour, severed hands hung from hooks screwed into his flesh and bone.
The warlord of the Unmade lashed out around him with a pair of weighted, spiked mace heads attached to long chains. One stroke took the head off a courser of the Venom Fang who charged at him. Another swept the legs out from another brave before the other Unmade fell on him and speared him dead where he fell.
In that moment, witnessing the abomination that led the enemy, Thornwinder decided that no one would ever laugh at him again. He would die first, for death was better than being spat on as a worthless whelp for the rest of his existence.
He broke into a run, aiming straight for the warlord. A spear whistled past him, slicing deep into his shoulder. One of the Unmade reached out to grab him as he ran and wrestle him to the ground. Thornwinder crunched his jawbone axe into the Unmade’s wrist and kept going.
He felt the ground shift under him, and he knew it was the Devourer bearing him up. Sections of cracked earth lifted, toppling men aside. Blood-red tentacles shifted where the earth opened up, the living mass of the Bloodwind Spoil awakened by the bloodshed above it.
The sky changed colour. A purple-black plume flowed across it, and warm spatters of blood began to fall. The Eightpoints loved war. It was waking up. And it was on the side of the Untamed Beasts.
Thornwinder scrambled up the steepening slope ahead of him. He was lifted high above the battlefield. The sound filling his ears was a thunder of tearing rock and the grinding of leathery hide against broken stone.
An Untamed Beast tumbled down the slope past him. Others were fending off the massive ropes of muscle uncoiling hungrily from the ground. Thornwinder ignored it all, because the Unmade warlord still stood, and there was no other way to show the Venom Fang tribe who he was.
Thornwinder leapt off the shard of the upturned ground. Beneath him was the warlord, surrounded by a bloody circle of torn flesh reaped from the Untamed Beasts by his swinging chains.
Too late, the warlord looked upwards to see Thornwinder falling on him.
The warlord raised a hand to fend off the downward blow of Thornwinder’s axe. The edge cleaved through the hand and wrist, splitting the warlord’s forearm halfway to the elbow. With a sweep of his arm, the Unmade threw Thornwinder aside and the jawbone was wrenched out of his hand. He landed hard, shoulder first, and rolled to his feet.
It was fury that was driving him. Fury, and the Devourer. He could feel it beneath his feet – the savage deity of the earth, the land’s own raging that demanded the uprooting of civilisation from the Eightpoints. It was the Devourer’s rage that forced him to stand in the face of the Unmade warlord. It dulled the pain. It banished the doubt.
Thornwinder ran straight at the warlord. A mace head slammed into the ground like a comet beside him, just a hand’s breadth off target, showering him with pulverised rock. He jumped over the chain that slithered across the ground behind it, and leapt at the warlord.
The Unmade dropped the chain and grabbed Thornwinder’s arm. Thornwinder was held fast in a grip strong enough to crack bone. His other arm groped at the Unmade’s ruined face, searching for an eye, a cheek, anything soft enough to ruin empty-handed. But this was an Unmade, and it had no face to destroy.
He grabbed the Unmade’s chin and forced its head back. The ropey expanse of its throat was just visible above the collar of its breastplate.
Thornwinder struck out like a cornered animal snapping at a hand held too close. The Unmade’s enormous size and strength came with reactions a heartbeat slower than Thornwinder’s. Before the warlord could wrench him away, his teeth closed on the foul-tasting, gnarled flesh of its throat.
He felt the gristle parting. His mouth filled with blood. Thornwinder wrenched his head back and the warlord’s larynx came away.
Thornwinder threw his head back as the warlord’s blood sluiced down his chest. Around him the battle seemed caught in a sudden stasis as the eyes of the Unmade and the Untamed Beasts turned to the death of the warlord.
He spat out the chunk of flesh. The Unmade warlord sunk to its knees, then toppled onto its front in the dirt. The warlord’s grip of Thornwinder’s arm finally relaxed. The ground heaved in appreciation for the sacrifice, rising and falling as if taking a vast and rumbling breath.
Preytaker Flaywrithe was watching. On her face was an uncharacteristic mix of appreciation and surprise. This time, she had nothing to say.
Though night did not always follow day in this region of the Bloodwind Spoil, the sun had set and the sky was dark. The light came from a scattering of stars and the fires lit nearby for the Venom Fang tribe to make camp until morning.
Thornwinder had the Unmade warlord’s head in hi
s hands. Edged by the blue-green sunlight, it looked like a thing sculpted from dark stone, an idol to be worshipped. The rest of the warlord, along with the Unmade dead, were burning in funeral pyres on the other side of the battlefield, minus the many trophies the Untamed Beasts had taken from them. Heart-eater Riphide had handed the warlord’s head to Thornwinder without a word.
Thornwinder had already planted a bone-tipped spear in the ground. His discarded jawbone axe lay beside it, atop a small cairn of broken weapons and severed extremities.
‘Tell me, brave, how did you come to take your name?’
Thornwinder looked up to Elder Speartongue watching him set up his battlefield trophy. Speartongue was the oldest of the Venom Fang, an ancient and dried-out creature who had made some bargain with the Devourer to survive well beyond his allotted years. Some said he had lived more than forty summers.
‘I am chased,’ replied Thornwinder. ‘Before. On the mother-land, the murder-land, Jagged Savannah. A brave seeks his own name and chooses me as his prey. I am weakest, they say. Runt of the spawning. I am to be culled. Diseased part to cut out.’
‘But if he could not cull you,’ said the elder, ‘then you would not be proven the weakest. He would be.’
‘So he must be culled instead,’ concluded Thornwinder. ‘He lames me with a bowshot. I run as fast as I can but he gains on me. Then I come to the valley with the sides too steep to climb. I turn to face him. He draws his bone knife.’ Thornwinder smiled. It did not suit his face – long and serious, older than the rest of him. ‘I am not hurt. I lie all along. I move to put a patch of slaughtervine between us. He is so happy to cull the whelp that he doesn’t see it.
‘He walks straight into the slaughtervine. It eats him from the ankles up. Many hours for him to die. His body is wound around with the thorns, and from that I take my name.’
The elder nodded in understanding. ‘And no more were you called out for the cull.’
Thornwinder impaled the warlord’s head on the spear-point with a crunch. The Unmade stared out from its position on top of the trophy, mouth slack, eyes blank. ‘No more.’
‘Why are you here, Thornwinder?’
The question was not just about the trophy, or the battlefield. It was about the Eightpoints itself. The most experienced warriors of the Venom Fang tribe had marched through a shimmering portal to reach this tortured, changing realm, and Thornwinder had gone with them. The tribe had tolerated him, because someone had to be the first to die on the other side, and if Thornwinder became that sacrifice it would be no great loss.
As to why he had gone – the elder was not the first to ask. Thornwinder himself had asked that many times.
‘The Devourer rules the Jagged Savannah. Empires fall before they take root. It is ours. What is there left for me? But this land…’ Thornwinder swept a hand to encompass the battlefield, the horizon and the Eightpoints beyond. ‘Everyone comes here to tame it. They build temples and cities. Only Untamed Beasts fight for the land. Without us, the Devourer is denied. The Eightpoints needs us.’
‘But what of the Varanspire? You know of the fortress of the Everchosen One, brave. Heart-eater Riphide will take skulls and win fame until the Everchosen One calls for him to serve as the Huntmaster of Varanspire. It is for this that the Venom Fang came to the Eightpoints.’
‘I have heard,’ said Thornwinder. ‘The Everchosen One does Devourer’s work. He burns down the mortal empires. Kingdoms fall. Cities fall. The earth reclaims it.’
‘But what of the fortress itself?’ asked Elder Speartongue. ‘Does that not represent an empire? It is the mightiest and grandest construction in the Eightpoints. How can any brave claim to serve the Devourer, when Varanspire still stands?’
Thornwinder closed his eyes, imagining. He saw lands awash with flame, covered with nothing but the ash of incinerated empires. ‘When realms of mortals are gone,’ he said, ‘when all the crowns have fallen, when the walls and towers are torn down, the Untamed Beasts return to Varanspire. Tear that down, too.’
‘Stand,’ said the elder.
Thornwinder did as he was told. He was a lanky youth, lacking the bulk of a man like Riphide. He was built for running across the Jagged Savannah for days on end. His head was shaven save for the fringe of braids running along the middle of his scalp. Aside from the blue-black bruise left by the warlord’s grip around his arm, he was mostly free of scars and blemishes. Scars were a measure of age in the Venom Fang. Were it not for the warlord’s head on the trophy beside him, and the knowledge he had taken it, it would indeed be easy to conclude that Thornwinder was a weakling runt brought along solely to die.
Speartongue took a small knife with an obsidian blade from the many pouches he wore around his waist. Thornwinder did not move as the elder drew a long line down his chest with the point of the blade. With a few well-practised strokes he drew out the mark of the Devourer, a jagged maw, in red bloody lines.
‘You are no runt,’ said Elder Speartongue. ‘And you are no brave. You are Thornwinder, a blood-courser of the Venom Fang. You are an Untamed Beast.’
II
The quarry was not difficult to track. The ruthless landscapes of the Eightpoints had evolved a creature that mocked the hunter. It dared the pursuer to shadow it through this tangle of tight, predatory jungle.
Thornwinder paused and crouched low by the trail of blood. It dripped off the leaves and soaked into the dark mulch of the earth. He could not wait there for long – every time he paused the jungle closed in, vines snaking around his feet, leaves covered in miniscule teeth reaching out to latch on to his skin. Mouldering skulls and ribcages peeked through the undergrowth as a reminder of what happened to those who did not stay ahead of the forest’s instinct.
His prey had crashed through here, and recently, for the jungle had not drunk its blood yet. A gash mark on the trunk of a tree. A huge paw print filling in with foul water. Thornwinder was closing in.
He was faster. The quarry’s enormous bulk cut down its choices of pathway through the close-packed trees. He could cut corners and gain on it.
The shape of the quarry was described by the wounds it left in the landscape. Though Thornwinder only knew it from descriptions, he had a complete picture of it in his mind. A massive quadruped with shovel-like forelimbs for ripping through the undergrowth, and pinning its prey to the ground. A fringe of bone around the back of its skull, protecting its neck. A long and bladed tail that could slice a man in half with a swing.
And a constant flow of blood from its enormous scaled body.
Its name was Harrow. It was a gore drake, perhaps the only one. And Thornwinder was going to kill it.
He had abandoned the simple jawbone axe he had carried as a brave. Now a seasoned courser with a dozen battles behind him, he wielded a glaive with a long haft and a single-edged blade chipped from gleaming obsidian. Across his chest he wore a belt of leather with loops holding a variety of knives for throwing, gutting, skinning and the slitting of throats. He still had the fringe of red braids along the centre of his scalp, and had grown his beard into a similar mass of braids, like a nest of red snakes.
He had scars, now. Simply existing in the Bloodwind Spoil had written a map of his deeds on his skin. Arrow nicks and sword slashes. The pocked spread of disease across his shoulders and upper arms, from an infection he had overcome with the sheer bloody-mindedness of an Untamed Beast. Bite marks on his forearms from wrestling down the prey on the Venom Fang’s grand hunts. He would add some more before this day was done.
He felt movement up ahead. The ground rose up into a dead-end valley, terminating in an impenetrable thicket of carnivorous trees with blades for leaves. If the quarry was here, it could not get away from him by doubling back.
It had to go through him.
He had it.
Thornwinder allowed himself a smile, which was something he had not done for many years.
He heard the crunching of trampled foliage ahead. The quarry was turning about, seeking a way to keep putting distance between hunter and prey. He could taste the panic in the vibrations of the earth. As it had years before during the battle against the Unmade, the land of the Eightpoints was speaking to him with the deep, rumbling voice of the Devourer. It was telling him he would soon be more than his tribe thought him to be. He was destined to be great. He would see the empires fall. This was where it began.
He drew his glaive and moved slowly forward, masking his presence as the quarry did not. The jungle, aware he was a fellow predator, parted before him. The blood on the ground was fresh and warm. Thornwinder forced his heart to still. His aim had to be perfect.
He caught the first glimpse of blood-slicked scales through the trees. He heard its deep and rumbling breath. He smelled the gory sweat that seeped from it, the stink of raw strength tinged with panic.
Harrow, the gore drake. One of the sacred beasts of the Eightpoints. A legend of the Bloodwind Spoil. Wherever life burst from the tortured earth, venomous and relentlessly fecund, Harrow found its hunting ground. It oozed blood from every pore, and had to constantly devour to replace what it lost. Few had seen it and lived. No one had ever set out to hunt it and returned.
Harrow was twice Thornwinder’s height at the shoulder. Its eight eyes glittered with an intelligence beyond animal. Its massive shovel-clawed forelimbs dug into the earth as it turned in place, and its four rear legs bunched up with muscle ready to leap. Gill-like fronds along its body shuddered, spattering the forest with blood.
Those fronds were its weakness. They fringed its breathing orifices, through which could be reached its vulnerable organs and blood vessels. They bypassed its tough scales and the bony armour covering its back and skull.
From a handful of glimpses of the beast, and the very rare stories from survivors who had fled from its rampages, Thornwinder had developed his plan of attack. Stalk it, corner it, approach unseen and impale it through the gills. Then, wait for it to die.
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