Warcry

by Warhammer 40K

  Patience, resolve and the ruthless killing stroke. That was all he needed. And he had proven many times over the years that he possessed them all.

  The sounds of Harrow’s thrashing covered his own approach. The gory stink of the beast grew stronger as he drew closer. He could see now the rivulets of blood flowing down its blue-grey scales, giving it an ever-changing, shimmering surface. The next time it turned away from him and presented its gills to the point of his glaive, he would lunge, and strike.

  Harrow thrashed to one side, sweeping its tail through the trees. Wood shattered. Thornwinder had to drop into the mulch to keep his head on his shoulders as the tail passed right over him, shielding his eyes from the rain of splinters.

  There it was. The exposed flank of the gore drake. It gasped in a titanic, agitated breath through its gills, and Thornwinder could see the crimson pulp of its innards.

  He planted his back foot. Greatness was his. He was born to this. The whelp of the Venom Fang had first drawn breath under an auspicious sign, a blessing of the Devourer, and this was the time to prove it.

  He launched himself at Harrow, and his aim was true.

  Harrow whirled around so quickly it ripped the leaves off every tree in the valley. Its tail sliced through the trunks around it. Faster than the time it took for Thornwinder to plunge the glaive home, Harrow’s wet, fanged maw snapped open and closed, and plucked the glaive out of the air. It wrenched the weapon from his grip and threw him into the mud hard enough to drive the breath from him.

  Harrow looked down at him, and its eyes narrowed in something like amusement.

  Thoughts rushed through Thornwinder’s mind, accelerated by the sudden and immediate danger. At the forefront was the realisation that Harrow had been hunting him all along. It had led him here, far from the hunting grounds of the Venom Fang, into its territory where it would decide the battleground. It had drawn the killing blow from him, knowing it had only one weakness, and knowing Thornwinder would aim for it.

  Harrow, the Great Gore Drake of the Bloodwind Spoil, was many things – a legend, a terror, an apex predator. It was also more intelligent than the man who hunted it.

  Thornwinder jumped to his feet, knowing the gore drake’s forepaw would come crunching down at him. He threw himself to the side as a claw slammed into the earth. Harrow snapped its jaws at him, spitting shards of the broken glaive. Thornwinder jumped backwards and stumbled against a shattered tree stump.

  Harrow was over him, rearing up to crash down. Thornwinder rolled to the side as the gore drake’s bulk fell, and slammed a fist into the side of its head. Scale and bone crunched under the impact and one of its eyes shifted from glistening red to dead black. It roared, a terrible screeching sound that was echoed by the revulsion of the earth’s reply.

  The ground heaved up. Thornwinder felt its strength flowing into him again. He was its champion, and it did not want him dead just yet. He was thrown out of claw’s reach, got to his feet and started running through the forest to escape the dead-end valley. If Harrow got around him and trapped him there, he would surely die. He drew the largest of his obsidian knives and slashed through the spiny creepers that looped down from the forest canopy to ensnare him. A carnivorous flower lurched out of the undergrowth to catch his foot in its befanged petals, but Thornwinder kicked it off its stem as he rushed past.

  A river cut through the forest here. Its waters were polluted and multicoloured by the run-off from the jungle’s life processes. It rushed too fast and deep for Thornwinder to cross. He ran along it as the ground threatened to crumble into the noxious water under his feet.

  Harrow was crashing through the forest behind him. If the forest decided to let the gore drake win, it would part before the beast. With a path unobstructed by the jungle, Harrow was faster than Thornwinder.

  Ahead of him, the jungle dropped off suddenly. The river fell into a multicoloured waterfall that threw out a cloud of glittering toxic vapour as it plunged into a lake far below. Thornwinder had not come this way, or perhaps the Bloodwind Spoil had altered the landscape at a whim to create the cliff edge ahead of him.

  Or, it was another gift from the Devourer. It had mutated the land to benefit its champion.

  More proof that Thornwinder had been chosen to rise above, to become great.

  Thornwinder gave his faith to the Devourer in that moment. He had felt the voice of the earth. He had been borne to glory on it before. He would do it again. He ran straight for the cliff edge.

  He planted a foot on the edge of the cliff and hurled himself off it. He tumbled as he fell, and saw the spray of earth as Harrow skidded to a halt above. The many colours of the waterfall whirled beside him and his lungs filled with the toxic spray. The colours bled away as his vision greyed out.

  By the time he hit the water, Thornwinder saw nothing.

  III

  ‘It was born from the earth,’ said Elder Speartongue, ‘a shard of the Devourer’s own power. Its will made manifest. An avatar of its fury. Any mortal who sought to impose their will on it would die. This is the message the Devourer sent to us when it made Harrow. It cannot be tamed. It cannot be defeated. It can only be endured.’ In the half-light of the lodge, the elder’s face was furrowed by shadows that deepened as he sneered. ‘And you decided you would be the one to kill it.’

  Thornwinder had not left the lodge since he had been brought there, half-drowned, by the outriders who had accompanied him to the edge of the forest. His wounds were not yet fully healed in spite of the bindings, blessed by the spirits of the Bloodwind Spoil and sodden with stinking plant extracts, that covered the places where the gore drake and the jungle had left their mark on him. He pushed himself upright on the pallet of straw where he had been convalescing, scattering untanned hides and animal skulls left by his fellow coursers.

  ‘What must we do,’ he said, growling with the pain, ‘if we do not find the greatest challenges and defeat them? And if we die trying, we die. That is what we are.’

  ‘What we are?’ retorted Speartongue. ‘We are the hand of the Devourer! From us are drawn the strong! Heart-eater Riphide was blessed with the strength to survive. I was given the cunning to do the same. It is to men such as these that the honour of hunting Harrow must fall! Not to you, a courser, but one step removed from a nameless brave!’

  Thornwinder felt the pain subside for the first time since he had awoken after almost dying in the jungle. He knew it was anger that was dulling his wounds. One part of him watched it as it flooded through him, hot and red, fuelled by the elder’s words. It knew that much of that anger came from the fact the elder was right. But the greater part of Thornwinder bathed in that rage, wallowed in it, let it suffuse and submerge him.

  ‘I am greater than this,’ he snarled.

  ‘Greater than the tribe? Greater than the Heart-eater who commands us? What makes Thornwinder the Courser the equal of the greatest Untamed Beast? But you decided it was your destiny to slay that which none have ever faced and lived.’

  ‘I lived,’ said Thornwinder darkly.

  ‘All you achieved is to rob us of a spear. Brothers and sisters die because you are here instead of fighting. You insult the Devourer. You forget your place. You fail us.’ Elder Speartongue turned to the way out of the lodge, throwing his last words over his shoulder.

  ‘You are still the whelp,’ he said.

  It was not that detached, observing part of him that caused Thornwinder to leap up from the bloodstained straw. The observing part felt the pain of his broken ribs and torn muscles while the rest of him, drenched in anger, moved alone. That part grabbed the elder by his scrawny shoulders and spun him around, then threw him to the floor and leapt onto him, putting his full weight on the old man’s chest.

  It was the fury that drove a fist into the elder’s face, drew it back and slammed it down again, over and over. Relishing the crunch of bone and the wetness of the
impact as the elder’s skull came apart. Inhaling the spray of blood from his knuckles as the elder’s brains were reduced to bone-flecked pulp.

  It felt so good, so justified, that even that part of him not overcome with anger could not help but revel in the rush of the kill.

  Thornwinder crouched there in the darkness of the lodge, panting with exertion and pain. The elder’s hot blood ran down his chest and dripped from the braids of his beard. He could taste it.

  ‘Courser!’ came a yell from the outside. ‘What is this? What have you…’ Preytaker Flaywrithe threw open the flap of animal skin over the lodge door. The hot air rushed out into the night. She stared down at the elder’s ruined face and lifeless body. ‘Venom Fang, to arms!’ she yelled. ‘The elder is slain! Treachery!’ She stepped into the lodge and drew a bone knife from her belt. ‘He was the Devourer’s voice,’ she hissed.

  Thornwinder stood, blood running down his body. ‘He speaks for no one now,’ he said.

  They dragged him out of the lodge, which was dug into the earth of the hillside. Around it was the camp the Venom Fang had set up to weather the Season of Spears, which had sent storms of bone shards ripping across the Bloodwind Spoil for months. When it subsided, the Venom Fang would ride out again to punish those who sought to tame the Eightpoints, but for now they were gathered here in a sheltered valley where the hunting was good.

  Word of the elder’s death brought every member of the tribe into the centre of the camp, in a circle around the accused. They all had their spears and axes to hand, for they knew Thornwinder’s prowess. If he decided to fight, he was entirely capable of taking plenty of the tribe with him. Preytaker Flaywrithe kept her bow trained on him, ready to put an arrow through a thigh or a calf to hobble him if he tried to run.

  To Heart-eater Riphide fell the right to pronounce the punishment. He was freshly back from the hunt, still wearing the stripes of red and black warpaint across his massive scarred chest. A pair of bile elk were slung over his shoulders, ready to be slit open and harvested for their poisons.

  The tribe’s leader held his axe to the sky. ‘As the Gods look down,’ he intoned, ‘we are strong and we live. We are weak and we die. Treachery is weak. The pack turns on itself. It tears itself apart. It dies. The weak submit. The strong punish!’ He brought the axe down in a gesture of finality. ‘Courser Thornwinder has offended the Devourer and slain our own. Speak, accused.’

  Thornwinder clenched a fist with the effort of not leaping to his feet and setting about the tribe’s chieftain as he had the elder. He struggled to distil his hatred into words. He did not have the elder’s gifts of speaking for a God.

  ‘I am born to more than this,’ he said, struggling to keep his voice level. ‘I am punished for demanding greatness.’

  Heart-eater Riphide spat on the earth. ‘Death is too merciful,’ he said. ‘The tribe pronounces banishment.’

  Thornwinder had known from the moment the elder’s skull cracked beneath his knuckles that he would be banished. Petty crimes and failures might merit a swift execution, a slit throat or a shattered skull. But for crimes of treason or offences to the Devourer, the honour of execution was left to the land.

  A man on his own and unsupported was nothing more than prey on the Bloodwind Spoil. The Devourer would reach up with predator or disaster, with storm or simple starvation, to take his life. Banishment was a slower and more certain death than the hands of the tribe could come up with.

  Riphide slit a deep cut in Thornwinder’s cheek with a bone knife. Flaywrithe snapped off the head of one of her arrows and then the Heart-eater slid the triangular blade of bone into the cut, forcing it under the skin of Thornwinder’s face. The pain was nothing compared to the significance of it. The mark of the banished. Any Untamed Beast would kill him on sight now for his treachery.

  They herded him at spear-point to the edge of the encampment, where the shelter of the valley gave way to the fury of the storm. Preytaker Flaywrithe perched high up on the slope with her bow ready as Thornwinder was stripped of his weapons.

  He could have turned back and charged at the Untamed Beasts who had condemned him, to extract one last toll of blood before he died. But then he would be shot by Flaywrithe, and even if he survived the first arrows, spears and clubs would beat him down. He would make them suffer, but he would die. And there would be no greatness, no destiny, bleeding out on the ground beside the camp.

  He walked into the storm. Shards of falling stone cut his skin. He felt the anger of the land rumbling far beneath his feet. Not anger at his crime, but at his punishment.

  He was a servant of the Devourer, the relentless maw of the land. Everything he had done was to win greatness in the deity’s name. If it wanted him dead, it would kill him.

  If not, he would return.

  IV

  Several times he concluded that he was dead, only to be shocked by another heartbeat or inhalation. He had stared up at the sky and felt himself beginning to putrefy, only to realise he was alive, could move, could go on.

  Perhaps he really did die, and was brought back by some power – the Devourer, or one of the many Gods of those who battled across the Eightpoints. Or it was a form of hallucination brought about by the deprivation and pain of the Bloodwind Spoil. But each time, Thornwinder had got agonisingly to his feet, and marched on.

  He had struggled across plains of broken glass and blades. He had waded through caustic rivers of biting mouths, fed on fat, writhing worms he dragged out of the mud and sheltered from raptors big enough to carry him off whole.

  His body was covered in scars and scabs. When he moved, he left a trail of dried blood. His stomach constantly ached and his throat crackled with pain as it demanded water. But if he stopped, the many cruelties of the Bloodwind Spoil would catch up with him, and it would swallow him in its malice.

  In darkness he trudged across the rocky desert. Every step was pain, but he had almost stopped feeling it. It was a part of him. Without pain, he was not sure he would be Thornwinder any more.

  The night parted and a greenish moonlight fell across the desert. The ground here was broken as if heaved up from below, and loops of petrified tentacle oozed from beneath the slabs of shattered rock.

  He knew this place. The last time he had been here it had been during the day, surrounded by blood and fury, but in the back of his mind he could hear the echo of the Devourer’s rage.

  It had driven him on here, filled him to bursting and erupted through him in a killing frenzy. The memory banished the fugue of pain and exhaustion. He was suddenly intensely aware of every rise and fall in the ground, every unmistakeable piece of Unmade armour half-claimed by the desert. Every broken spear.

  He had been here before. The battlefield where he had earned the right to call himself a courser of the Venom Fang. Even though it was missing what looters had stolen, he could tell the skeletons and broken wargear that remained were from the Unmade and the Untamed Beasts who had fallen.

  He crawled up the steep slope he had once ascended at a sprint, knowing what he would see when he crested it.

  Below him, in the place the Unmade warlord had died, was the battlefield trophy Thornwinder had set up in the wake of his victory. The heap of arms and armour was still there, crowned with the Unmade’s head mounted on the spear-point. It all stood where Thornwinder had left it.

  He had not wandered here by accident. The Devourer had warped the landscape around him to see him reach this place. It had a path laid out for him, and all he had to do was follow it.

  As he approached the trophy, Thornwinder realised the head of the Unmade had not been reduced to bone and dust, as had the rest of the battlefield dead. It looked as if it had been set out against the elements for no more than a few days. Even the eyes still glimmered deep in their pits of scar tissue. The mouth lolled open to show the tongue still in place, not withered away or plucked out by carrion-feeders.<
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  Thornwinder reached the trophy and sank to his knees, staring into the eyes of the Unmade he had killed. It had been a thing of agonised fury, raw and brutal. Now he was sure something else was in there, nesting where the Unmade’s rage-filled brain had been.

  ‘What does the Devourer demand?’ said the severed head.

  It seemed the most logical, inevitable thing in the world for the head to talk to him. The Devourer had brought him here, after all. Everything was within its power.

  ‘The Devourer demands the towers shall fall,’ said Thornwinder. His voice was a dried-out croak. He felt the wound on his face as he spoke, where the arrowhead was embedded in inflamed and infected flesh. ‘The walls shall crumble. The crowns shall go unworn.’

  ‘What will you do,’ said the head, ‘to see the demand fulfilled?’

  ‘Tear it down,’ replied Thornwinder. ‘Trample and burn it. Tear it all down.’

  ‘And how will you do that if you are dead?’

  Thornwinder met the severed head’s gaze. The challenge in the question stoked a fire in him that had been dying since his banishment. ‘I will not die. I am fated to be great. I will live and conquer.’

  ‘No, Blood-Courser Thornwinder. You are a mortal man and you will perish.’

  ‘If that is true, then you would not speak with me,’ said Thornwinder. ‘It would not matter how I will serve the Devourer. But you speak. So there is a way.’

  The Unmade’s head contorted the mess of scars that made up its face. It was impossible to read a human expression from such features. ‘There is, Blood-Courser Thornwinder. I was born here from the fury of what you did. I was drawn forth from the earth by the blood you shed in this place. I knew you were the one to tear down the towers and sever the crowned heads. I knew you would return. The greatness to which you are destined is real, but you cannot reach it on your own. You need the will of the earth. You need me.’