Thornwinder was on his knees. The death sentence of the banishment had almost been delivered. He knew well the ills of starvation, thirst and exhaustion, and they were past the point of survival now. He could feel it in the numbness of his joints, which should have been in agony. He could taste it on his swollen tongue which rendered his words indiscriminate moans, such that only the thing in the trophy could have understood him. He was a dead man. His body had not yet caught up with the fact, but it was dead.
He was supposed to bring the towers down and sever the crowned heads. He could not do that as one more dried-out corpse littering the Bloodwind Spoil.
‘What must I do?’ he asked.
‘Drink,’ said the head.
Thornwinder had found a chunk of flint early in his exile suitable to be knapped into a hand-axe. With the last of his strength he yanked the severed head off its spear-point and hacked at its brow, splitting the skull further with each blow until he had sliced off the top of the cranium. He tore the section of bone away and felt the flood of warmth over his hands as fresh, hot blood boiled up from the inside. It kept flowing like a freshwater spring, drenching Thornwinder and the ground beneath him, sluicing down the ruined face of the Unmade.
Thornwinder held the fountain of blood over his head. He had barely energy left to lift it. He turned his face upwards and let the blood flow over him, opening his mouth so that it flooded into him. He forced mouthfuls of hot, metallic gore into his throat, swallowing it down. It filled his eyes and nose. There was nothing but blood.
Then the dullness in his body was gone, and he felt pain again. He felt every wound the Bloodwind Spoil had dealt him. He cried out, spewing blood. He threw the fountaining skull to the ground and rose to his feet once more. The broken earth was like blades against the soles of his feet. The air was like knives. He opened his eyes and saw the battlefield as if for the first time, the desiccated faces of the slain, the riven ground and the remnants of the Devourer’s fury.
Good, said the being that was now inside him. You are strong.
‘I am strong.’
What is our demand?
‘The towers will fall. The walls will crumble.’
And how will it begin?
Thornwinder looked down at his hands. They were covered in blood, pooling among the scars and open wounds. ‘With Harrow,’ he said.
V
Again, the gore drake was not hard to track.
This was Harrow’s strength, not its weakness. It drew in those who were not ready to face it. A prey so easy to corner must be easy to kill, they thought. It need not be conscious thought, articulated and acted upon. It was a quiet deception far beyond the cunning the would-be hunters expected of such a beast. The Devourer was bestial, but it was not stupid. Its cunning surpassed that of anyone who might try to impose his will on the land. The same was true of Harrow. But Thornwinder knew that now.
He struck from the trees. He chose a huge trunk to scale where he could watch the jungle for leagues around. Mouths opened in the bark, full of fangs, but they knew the raw strength that filled Thornwinder now and did not try to snap off his hands and feet as they would with anyone else. Thornwinder had taken a spear from the battlefield with a head of carved bone and he drew it as he perched on a branch overhanging a trail through the forest. The old bloodstains showed that Harrow used this region as a hunting ground, carving trails through the jungle with its size.
Those who had hunted the gore drake, including Thornwinder himself, had tried to out-think the beast, reasoning that Harrow was stronger than they were and hence that to outwit it was the only option. This was a trap, for Harrow was as cunning as they were. Thornwinder had fallen into that trap and almost died.
The solution was strength. Raw, bloody and furious strength. Of course, Harrow was strong, too. That was the whole purpose of the creature’s existence.
A test. A living parable of might.
Patience did not come naturally to Thornwinder, but the strength of the blood gave it to him now. With his spear poised, he let the jungle surround him and make him a part of itself. Dew ran down his face and insects crawled across his skin. Noxious flowers bloomed around him. He could feel, could taste, every breath the earth took, and the movement of every living thing radiating out around him like the blood vessels of the land.
He felt the massive footfall of the gore drake. Long before, he had smelled the trail of blood that oozed from between its scales. Now it was approaching and the jungle recoiled at its presence. Thornwinder could sense the forest’s dread of Harrow. Everything was prey to it. Trees fell before its claws and every living thing was fodder for its gullet. Harrow was the capstone of a natural order which placed the strongest at the top.
Strength defined it. Strength would overcome it.
The hulking, sinuous shape of Harrow appeared through the trees. It knew he was there. Thornwinder was exposed up in the boughs of the tree, like a novice hunter who underestimated the prey’s awareness of its surroundings. He could almost taste its glee that another fool had come to test themselves against it.
Thornwinder had to appear knowledgeable and experienced, but not enough to actually pose a threat to Harrow. It was not difficult, because he had been that hunter once before, when he had thought he could entrap and kill the gore drake.
Harrow crunched through the forest, passing beneath Thornwinder’s branch. It had acquired new scars. Patches of scales were missing where prey had fought back, and scar tissue formed new armour over the most vulnerable parts.
Thornwinder switched his grip on his spear so the point aimed downwards, and jumped.
Harrow sensed his coming – even a seasoned hunter of the Venom Fang could not mask his scent completely. As Thornwinder hit the ground the gore drake lashed its enormous body to one side, shattering the trunk of the tree.
It hissed, and its many red eyes narrowed to focus on Thornwinder. Perhaps it recognised him. It thought he was going to try to outwit it – administer some fatal poison, perhaps, or lure it into an ambush where another band of hunters were waiting to impale it with javelins and arrows.
Instead of running, or feinting to the side, Thornwinder planted his back foot and lunged.
The ground pulsed and bowed under his feet. The jungle shuddered as its strength rippled up into Thornwinder’s body. He felt the lifeblood of the Eightpoints pulsing through him. The rush of raw power flooded up his body and into the muscles of his shoulder and arms.
It was strength that would kill the gore drake. Not cunning. Not subtlety. Only strength.
The point of the spear punched into the beast’s face just below one of its sets of eyes. The knapped stone edge cleaved through muscle, scar and bone. One of the eyes burst as Harrow screamed in pain and anger. Thornwinder felt the strength pulse through him again as he twisted the spear and the wound split wide open. Another eye was forced out of its socket and rolled wildly as Harrow’s tail thrashed through the forest.
The spear was torn from Thornwinder’s hands. He let it go.
The next step was to run. He could force Harrow to exhaust itself chasing him, or follow it as it limped to its lair to recover. That was what a hunter would do.
But Thornwinder was not a hunter any more. He was a killer.
He ran straight at Harrow as the beast was still reeling. He leapt at its face. Harrow swung its huge head and its jaw bit Thornwinder in the chest, slamming him to the ground. Bones crunched, but the strength in Thornwinder flooded over the pain and dulled it. His hand closed around a scaly ridge of bone and when Harrow raised its head, it lifted Thornwinder with it.
‘I know what you are,’ he growled as he clung to its skull. ‘You are not the Devourer. You are the test it sends.’
Harrow thrashed its head, trying to throw Thornwinder off, but his grip was too strong. The soft tissue of its eye split and oozed beneath his fingers.
‘You are the first of the towers to fall.’
Harrow roared again. Its jaws snapped and a fang speared through Thornwinder’s calf, but again the strength of the earth was stronger than the pain.
Thornwinder reached across its bleeding face and his hand found the wound he had opened up with his spear. He dug his fingers into one side of the wound and grabbed the other, forcing all the Devourer’s strength into his arms as he prised it open.
Bone cracked. Gristle snapped. The gore drake’s skull split open down the side of its face, revealing the crevice of dark red pulp and muscle inside. Thornwinder thrust his hand deep into the gore drake’s brain and its seething heat enveloped him. Blood welled up and pulsed out around him, hot and rapid with Harrow’s racing heartbeat.
Thornwinder forced the wound further apart. Another eye burst. Some crucial part of its brain was ruptured and its front leg collapsed, throwing its huge slavering head into the mulch. The split was wide enough for Thornwinder to force his shoulder inside and he pushed deep into the interior of its skull, his hands ripping out clods of grey matter.
Harrow shuddered as its brain was destroyed. It gasped out a wet, ragged breath. One of its back legs kicked and spasmed.
Thornwinder felt Harrow’s heart stop. It hammered wildly and arrhythmically for a few moments, then let out two final, sluggish beats, and was still.
He slid out of the mass of gore oozing from the gore drake’s broken skull. He was completely covered in blood and brains. He wiped the worst of it from his eyes. Harrow was lying on its side, jaw slack, a mass of red sludge already mixing with the damp earth under its head.
He commanded his own breathing and heart to still. The Devourer’s strength was still in him. He could feel it resonating through the ground beneath him. He felt his injuries now, the cracked ribs and wounded calf, a hundred strains and bruises. They did not cloud his mind as they might have before. Now, they only reminded him he had won.
Good, said the voice that had been inside him since he drank from the trophy’s skull. You see how it can be done? Strength against strength. Fury against fury. As it should be.
There was power in the beast, waiting to be harvested. An Untamed Beast knew how to take it. It was in the flesh, the heart, the entrails. It was in the marrow of the bones.
The discarded spear lay on the ground, almost submerged in the gore. Thornwinder picked it up and snapped the blade from the haft. Its edge was keen enough to skin and dismember.
This would take some time.
VI
Heart-eater Thornwinder watched as the fires were lit on the battlements.
The fortress had been built so rapidly it seemed to have blistered up from the land like a symptom of infection. That would have made it a natural thing, though. This fortress was not natural. It was built by the hands of the captives and lower ranks of the Iron Golems, who had sent a warband to this craggy and chill region of the Bloodwind Spoil to raise it up.
Two walls rose facing the sheer drop down to the foothills far below. From this angle, Thornwinder could see the malnourished slaves and half-armoured Iron Golems striplings scrambling across the stonework. Blocks of quarried rock were being raised on wooden cranes to build up the second pair of walls forming the fortress. Other slaves worked at the bellows fuelling forges of billowing orange flame, where the tribe’s smiths were hammering out weaponry and icons to their Gods. The Iron Golems themselves were massive armoured figures overseeing the work, quick to whip, beat or simply execute.
Order from the chaos. Taming the wrath of the Eightpoints. Nothing offended Thornwinder more.
‘The night will be dark,’ said the plains-runner, Broken Nail. He was one of the most capable hunters and trackers in the Venom Fang. Already the skinny, twitchy youth had picked out the routes through the crags to reach the half-built fortress. ‘No moon. They won’t see us before we’re beneath the walls.’
‘Should we attack tonight?’ asked Thornwinder.
‘It would not be my place to say, Heart-eater,’ replied Broken Nail.
The lad had learned quickly. Clever he might be, but his place was far, far below the Heart-eater of his tribe.
Thornwinder turned from the hateful sight of the fortress to survey the warriors gathered among the rocks behind him. Ever since he had taken over the leadership of his tribe, he had been bringing them to this point. A blow struck against the disease of civilisation. A spear-thrust into the heart of order. Fools like the Iron Golems would not dare to try to raise a fortress over the Bloodwind Spoil for a long time, and when their fear subsided, the Untamed Beasts would be ready to remind them with the Venom Fang at the fore.
‘We attack when the night is darkest,’ said Thornwinder. He could feel the tribe’s excitement as they realised the fight would be soon. They had lost many on the journey into the mountains, but they had never lost the fire of hatred that drove them on. ‘The Devourer demands these walls shall crumble. These towers shall fall. The heads will roll before any can wear a crown. This is the will of the Devourer.’ He held his spear high. ‘Tear it down!’
‘Tear it down!’ The tribe echoed their Heart-eater’s chant. The mountain winds would snatch the sound away before it reached the sentries the Iron Golems posted on their walls. The land was on their side.
The light glimmered away to pure darkness. The only illumination was from the watchfires on the fortress walls. It reflected in the glossy red orb of Harrow’s sole undamaged eye, still embedded in the half of its skull that Thornwinder wore over one shoulder. Its scaled and scarred hide hung in a grand cloak behind him.
He wore the skull of Heart-eater Riphide and the hands of Preytaker Flaywrithe on his belt. The belt itself was made from the skin of Elder Speartongue, for Thornwinder had dug the old man up to take it. He still wore the arrowhead beneath the skin of his face, the mark of exile, as if to challenge the rest of the tribe to question him about it. None ever had. Thornwinder had made a trophy of everyone who had banished him, and then he was banished no more.
The Iron Golems were led by a pair of twins, one male and one female, clad from head to toe in black iron. They watched the construction of their fortress from two thrones surrounded by forges and anvils. Beside each throne was a heap of blades, each ready for inspection by the warband’s leaders. The Iron Golems believed in the strength of steel. Any flaw was an unforgivable weakness, in metal or flesh.
The Venom Fang did not believe in steel. Flesh was enough. Flesh was all they had. Everything else was a lie. The gleaming blades issuing from the forges of the Iron Golems were a multitude of insults to the Devourer.
Thornwinder stomped up the slope and crested it, knowing the darkness of the night would keep him hidden. Broken Nail slithered down the loose shale ahead of him with the other hunters and pathfinders, while the braves and blood-coursers followed their Heart-eater. Though they were silent, the hostility and lust for blood fairly hummed between them. They had waited so long, and waiting was not something an Untamed Beast ever relished.
A braying note echoed across the peaks. Several Iron Golems rushed onto the half-built walls.
‘They see us!’ called Broken Nail from up ahead.
‘Damn their sharp eyes,’ growled Thornwinder. ‘But they have won themselves only a few more moments to fear.’ He turned back to the bulk of the tribe advancing behind him. ‘Tear it down!’ he yelled, and as one they broke into a headlong charge.
It would have been suicidal to charge the fortress once it was fully built, although that might not have deterred Thornwinder. As it was, construction had only just begun on the closest side of the fortress. The Venom Fang could vault the foundation blocks and instantly be among the defenders. Instead of their impregnable mountain stronghold, the Iron Golems had built a pen into which they could be herded for the kill.
This is how they would die, with their backs against the walls th
ey had built.
Thornwinder felt the mountain stone beneath him reaching up to bear him aloft on his way. The crags rumbled as they shifted and the Devourer took in a breath, bowing and distorting the land. Thornwinder rode the ripple of stone that carried him straight at the Iron Golems.
The armoured warriors were rushing to the defences formed by the wall’s first foundation. The twin warlords were bellowing orders and taking up their axes. The slaves were scattering and hiding.
The Venom Fang scouts paused in their advance, so Thornwinder would be the first into the fight. That was as it should be. The first blood should go to the Heart-eater.
The stones bore Thornwinder high above the Iron Golems lines. He leapt down at them, spear-point aimed straight at the face of the Iron Golem directly below him.
He yelled in wordless rage and satisfaction as the point crunched home through steel and skull. It punched through into the chest cavity. Thornwinder heaved the weight of the Iron Golem off the spear, flinging it away in a crescent of spurting blood.
The Venom Fang crashed into the fray behind him. Everything was bone on steel, obsidian against flesh. An arrow speared through the eye slit of an Iron Golem who rose up to engage Thornwinder, shot from Broken Nail’s bow. Another Iron Golem knocked the head clean off an Untamed Beast with a huge stone-headed mace, only to be swamped and dragged down by three of the dead man’s tribemates.
Everything was blood and noise. Thornwinder’s heart swelled, and the power beneath him welled up through him as if he were a fountain of the earth’s fury. He could feel the newer part of him, the entity that had entered when he drank from the Unmade’s skull, raging like a fire, stoking the forge inside him.
What does the Devourer demand? that entity asked.
‘That the towers shall fall,’ growled Thornwinder. He stabbed around him, feeling armour sundering against the point of his spear.
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