by Warhammer
He backed away from the stricken warrior, leaving the Bloodeater thrust through the monster’s gut. The Skulltaker watched him retreat, his malevolence seeming to flicker as the Bloodeater drained his soul. Blood bubbled from Teiyogtei’s mouth, spilling from the face of his gilded mask.
It became an effort for him to keep the Skulltaker in focus as his vision began to swim with pain. The king growled against such weakness. He would see the monster dead before he allowed himself to fade into the Hunting Halls.
The Skulltaker reached his hand to his belly, gripping the hilt of Teiyogtei’s sword. With savage, twisting tugs, he pulled the sword free, stagnant blood exploding from the wound. The Bloodeater’s fire was extinguished, smothered by the malignity of that which it had tried to devour. The Skulltaker tossed it aside with an almost arrogant contempt. The Bloodeater shattered against the rocky ground, and the Skulltaker’s boots crushed its shards as he advanced once more upon the king.
Teiyogtei stared at the executioner. Even had he been able, he would not flee. Despite his best efforts, his hour had passed. No man could hope to cheat the gods.
Yet, as the Skulltaker came towards him, Teiyogtei noted that the imposing warrior seemed somehow diminished. It was as though he were draining away with the blood that continued to vomit from his gut.
The khagan had the impression of ice dissolving in water. By the time he drew close to the king, the Skulltaker was a shrivelled echo of the warrior who had fought against him. It was only with a shuddering effort that the Skulltaker lifted his black blade, struggling to strike Teiyogtei.
The black sword slashed at the king’s face, shattering the Blood-Crown and splitting the gilded mask in two, but the edge failed to taste the man within, and Teiyogtei smiled as he saw the Skulltaker crash to the ground, his last effort wasted.
The impression of dissolution was undeniable. The Skulltaker’s body was visibly corroding, melting into a mass of stagnant blood. The sword he had carried crumbled into cinders, fleeing into the sudden wind. The blood seeped into the earth, as though sucked down into the ground. Soon, only the Skulltaker’s carnage bore witness to his existence. Teiyogtei’s laugh of triumph ended upon a hollow note as he recalled the words of his shaman.
Vanquished, but never destroyed.
The haunting words were still echoing in Teiyogtei’s mind as he collapsed to the ground, overcome by his wound. He dimly heard his chieftains rushing up the hill to attend their king, dimly he heard them calling for their healers and witch doctors.
Teiyogtei Khagan could hear the voice of the Skulltaker more clearly.
Doom. Doom has come to the betrayers.
CHAPTER ONE
Rock shattered to dust beneath the immense weight of the mammoth, sending fragments spraying into the scraggly brush. Ninety hands high, its enormity cloaked in matted black fur nearly two feet thick, the mammoth towered over the land, seeming to dwarf even the distant mountains and their claw-like peaks. When the behemoth moved, the world trembled, each plodding step causing stones to topple from the hills around it. The boulders rattled and crashed down step-like terraces to smack against the brute’s legs as they rolled into the plain below.
The mammoth ignored the impacts with godlike disdain, the flesh beneath its leathery hide scarcely scratched. The gigantic head swung from side to side, enormous black eyes studying the slopes around it, curled ivory tusks reflecting the summer sun. The massive trunk, like a bloated jungle python, reared back, coiling against the mammoth’s scaly face. The maw beneath the trunk gaped wide and a deafening bellow boomed from the beast’s body, the roar of a hunting titan.
Men covered their heads as the mammoth’s bellow thundered across the sky, their skulls throbbing from the nearness of the sound. A walled platform had been lashed to the beast’s back, a small fort of ivory and bone covered in hides of fur and skin. Within this fort, men clung to leather straps and watched the land pass beneath them as their colossal steed lumbered through the dusty hills.
Even as they guarded their ears against the trumpeting bellow, the men kept wary eyes trained upon the hills and ready hands upon the short throwing spears that rested in leather baskets beside them.
Each of the men was stocky in build, with powerful thews and bulging muscles. Their dusky skin bore the scars of sun and wind, their broad faces the lean hunger of hardship and travail.
Upon some, strange lesions and bizarre growths marred the uniformity of limb and visage; others carried still more outrageous displays of what was called ‘the gift of the gods’. For these men were of the Tsavag tribe, descended from the mighty Tong, who dwelled deep within the Wastes, on the very threshold of the Realm of the Gods. They wore their armour of bone and fur with pride, and adorned their dark topknots with talismans of ivory and bronze.
There was no arrogance in their adornment, for the Tsavag were too secure in their superiority to feel the need to boast.
A lone Tsavag stood in the cage of ivory chained around the mammoth’s neck. Like his kinsmen, he was dark of skin, with a broad, hungry face. A trick of the gods had made his eyes the colour of gold, shining like coins from their dark setting. Blotches of discoloured skin ran across the tribesman’s body, marking his flesh like the belly of a toad, but there was no aberration in the cords of muscle that swelled his arms, nor the sharp intelligence that peered from the golden eyes.
Dorgo Foecrusher was among the greatest of his tribe’s warriors, son of their khagan, Hutga Steelskin. In his twenty-five summers he had killed a hundred foes in battle. Kurgan, Hung, even the despicable beastkin from the Grey had shed their lives on his blade.
Dorgo had earned the respect of his tribesmen with each victory, but still he yearned for more. There was one Tsavag he had never been able to impress, the only one of his tribe who mattered so far as he was concerned. If he was to succeed Hutga as khagan, he would need to prove himself worthy to the grizzled warlord.
He wondered if it would ever be possible to meet his father’s high demands.
The warrior shook his head, forgetting for a time his mired ambitions. He needed to keep his mind on the hunt.
He lifted his gaze to the rocky hills that peppered the plain. They rose in crumbling mounds, worn down into cracked stumps by wind and rain.
Dorgo could still see the broken fragments of stone towers rising from their summits, could still make out the step-like plateaux that marched up the sides of the hills. Once those steps would have been terraced gardens, overflowing with rice and wheat, and green things of every description. The towers would have been filled with warriors, warily watching over the gardens at their feet. This place had been the granary of Teiyogtei, when that great warlord had carved his kingdom from the desolation of the steppes. The towers, the gardens, even the hills had been built with the sorcery of his shamans and the sweat of his slaves. With his gardens, Teiyogtei would feed his horde and expand his domain across all the Shadowlands.
The whispers of the shining dream still lingered in places like this, calling out to men like Dorgo, who possessed the imagination to hear them. The ruins of Teiyogtei’s dream were scattered across his kingdom like old bones slowly wearing away beneath the unforgiving sun.
In his ambition, the king had not reckoned upon the wrath of the gods and he had been brought low. The Shadowlands never fell beneath the banners of the Tsavag and today only eight tribes remained of what had once been Teiyogtei’s numberless horde.
Dorgo shook his head again, scolding himself for allowing his thoughts to wander once more. It was a failing his father never ceased to observe, scolding Dorgo that there was too much of the dreamer around him to ever make a good khagan. Dorgo’s fist tightened as he recalled the scornful words. Perhaps he was a dreamer, but so too had Teiyogtei been.
The mammoth’s trunk reared back again and the beast’s bellow rolled across the land. Dorgo studied the hills, watching every sign of movement among the rocks.
Despite the years since they had been irrigated, plan
ts still erupted from the dusty soil upon the terraces. This drew goats and elk into the hills where the uneven ground would protect them from wolves. Even men had a difficult time stalking the animals through the old gardens where the treacherous ground forever threatened a murderous fall to the plain below. The other tribes only even attempted the feat in times of famine, but the Tsavag were better, their minds sharper than the dull wit of Kurgan and Hung. They did not climb into the crumbling hills. They made their prey come to them.
The mammoth’s trumpet was a sound to strike terror into any man, and beasts were not immune to such fear. When the mammoth bellowed, more than just rocks were knocked loose from the hills. Deer and elk, goats and sheep, even the sickle-clawed hill tiger would leap from their refuges, scattering through the rocks to escape the angry giant.
In their panic, even sure-footed goats and nimble deer would stumble, to pitch headlong to the plain below. The throwing spears of the Tsavag standing in the howdah made short work of any animals not killed by the fall. It was a method of hunting that had been developed by generations of tribesmen until it had been refined to a precise art.
Dorgo’s people never lacked for meat, even in the hardest winter or the driest summer, simply because they had mastered the Crumbling Hills.
This day, however, only rocks clattered down from the hills. The Tsavag hunters and even the war mammoth beneath them began to sense an eerie wrongness around the hills around them, an unseen menace lurking somewhere nearby. Tsavag hands left the ivory shafts of throwing spears to clutch at the grips of axe, sword and flail. A new urgency crept into the eyes watching the hills, no longer looking for the fleeing shapes of goat and elk.
Every man remembered tales and legends about the strange creatures that sometimes crept down into the hills from the forbidden Wastes. They wondered if such a monster would be bold enough to attack a war mammoth. They wondered if they would be bold enough to meet it, in turn.
Dorgo watched the rocks, waiting for the lurking menace to show itself, waiting for the attack to crash down upon them in an avalanche of violence. The brooding hills defied his vigilance, remaining silent and empty, mocking him with whatever secret they held.
When the attack came, it erupted from below not above. The silence was broken by savage war cries as the slopes of the hills exploded into brutality and violence. Warriors lunged into the sunlight from concealed burrows, like a mass of angered ground vipers. Taller than the Tsavag, their skins pale, their bodies twisted by grotesque knots of muscle, the warriors rushed at the startled war mammoth with panther-like speed.
Dorgo cursed as he saw the ragged armour of hide and bronze lashed around their disfigured frames, as he saw the ghastly masks of flesh that were tied across their faces. The warriors were of the Muhak, one of the Kurgan tribes and the most pitiless rivals of the Tsavag. Each Muhak carried a long spear with a jagged iron head, the edges of the point barbed and cruel. Dorgo saw at once that the Kurgan were sprinting towards the mammoth’s legs, fearlessly charging at the behemoth to reach its soft underbelly. He roared commands to the hunters in the howdah behind him, cursing at them to hurl their javelins and stop the rushing Muhak.
Several of the warriors fell as javelins sank into their brutish bodies, but for each that crumpled to the ground, three darted beneath the mammoth’s pillar-like legs, jabbing up at its belly with their cruel pikes. Dorgo struggled to turn the beast, to bring it around to confront the foe, but the stabbing pain in its vitals broke the Tsavag’s tenuous control of the mammoth.
Maddened by the pain, the brute refused to move, simply bellowing and wailing in anguish. The Muhak beneath it continued to savage its belly, relenting only when oily ropes of entrails spilled from the wounds.
The mammoth reared back on its hind legs, crashing down in a bone-jarring impact. One Muhak, lingering to press his attack against the stricken beast, was smashed beneath the brute’s leg, crushed into a pasty red smear.
The hunters in the howdah forgot their javelins as the platform lurched upward, pointing them at the sun. Hands tightened around the leather straps in desperate, white-knuckled grips as gravity jerked at the men upon the tilting platform.
One Tsavag, slow to seize the strap, pitched in screaming despair to the ground thirty feet below, his head splattering against the rocky ground.
Dorgo whipped the mammoth with the ivory goad he held, trying to force it to obey the runes carved upon the ancient talisman. The gnawing fire of its wounds overwhelmed both training and spell, the mammoth’s painful trumpets tearing at the sky. The Muhak retreated to the safety of the slopes, jeering at the Tsavag, throwing stones at their steed to encourage its frenzy.
The reeling mammoth fell back to earth with a mighty crash. The impact tore leather straps from their fastenings and three Tsavag plummeted from the behemoth’s back to lie broken upon the ground below.
As the mammoth continued to stomp and bellow, the other hunters threw chains down from the howdah. Hand-over-hand they rappelled down the beast’s flanks, desperate to escape its crazed agony. The boldest of the Muhak charged down from the slopes to confront the fleeing men.
Screams added to the clamour of the mammoth’s pain as the Kurgan drove their long spears into the descending men, pinning them to the mammoth’s thick hide as they pierced their bodies.
The few hunters who reached the ground tried to fend off the opportunistic Muhak, chopping at them with axe and sword. Two Muhak fell, too slow in reacting to the threat of foes who could strike back. The others cast aside their long spears, useless at close quarters, and drew cruel, bone cudgels from belts of dried sinew.
The Tsavag rushed the Kurgan, determined to avenge their butchered kin. Bone cracked against iron as the two sides converged, Tong curses mixing with Muhak war cries.
Against the overwhelming numbers of the Muhak, the handful of hunters had little real chance, but the reckoning was to be decided from another quarter. Through the well of pain that raced through its body, the rage of the stricken mammoth fought its way to overwhelm the beast’s mind. Trumpeting its fury, the huge beast spun around, the sudden motion throwing a last Tsavag from the howdah.
The black eyes of the mammoth glared in berserk fury at the little men fighting around it. Lost in a red madness that did not differentiate between Tsavag and Muhak, the mammoth struck, smashing men beneath its ponderous feet, and goring them with its blunted tusks. Dorgo watched the serpent-like trunk lurch upwards, a struggling Tsavag trapped in its coils.
The mammoth tightened its hold, breaking the man’s body in a spray of blood and ruptured organs. The tattered wreckage dripped back to earth and the brute reared back, bellowing as it plunged deeper into its rampage.
Dorgo grabbed the great iron spike resting beside him in his ivory cage. It was the tool of every mammoth master, as vital as the rune-covered goad, but it was one that no Tsavag ever wanted to use. Dorgo hesitated, but then saw the broken remains of a hunter ground into paste beneath the mammoth’s pounding feet.
Snarling, he set the spike against the back of the mammoth’s skull. With a roar as feral as that of the raging beast, he forced the spike through the scaly plates and the thick skull beneath. The mammoth reared one final time as the spike impaled its brain. Strength deserted the beast’s body in an instant.
Dorgo clutched the bars of his cage, bracing himself as the mammoth toppled to the earth. The impact snapped the leather straps that bound cage to neck and Dorgo was thrown across the plain to crash against the rocky slope of the hill. The ivory cage crumpled under the impact, sending painful slivers scything into the Tsavag’s body. He felt one ivory talon rip into his thigh and another punch through his forearm.
Wracking pain shot through his body, every nerve on fire. He tried to move, ignoring the desperate plea of his body to lie still. His arm was caught, transfixed upon the broken ivory bar. Biting down on the pain, Dorgo drew his iron knife and began to saw away at the wreckage.
As he worked, Dorgo could see the M
uhak descending the slopes in force. They capered around the fallen mammoth, swatting at it with their clubs, stabbing it with their spears. Gleefully, the Kurgan warriors brained the injured Tsavag hunters, smashing their skulls with their clubs.
Among the celebrating Muhak was a hulking brute, his body so swollen with muscle that he more resembled an ogre than a man. The head that rose up from his thick, tree-stump neck bore the same flesh-mask as the other Muhak, but it had been cut away to allow the man’s jaw to protrude forward and his dagger-like teeth to jut from his shrivelled lip. A latticework of scars and cuts adorned the warrior’s body where it stood exposed by his crude hide armour. In his paw-like hands, he carried an immense mattock, the head of the hammer displaying a riot of blood-crusted spikes.
This, Dorgo knew, was no mere champion of the Muhak, but no less than Zar Lok, chieftain of the entire tribe.
Lok prowled among the dead Tsavag, lifting them from the bloodied ground to stare into the face of each corpse. One and all, he tossed them aside with callous contempt, stomping on to the next body with ever increasing ire. A particularly mangled Tsavag, the face reduced to pulp, provoked the zar’s already fragile temper. He turned upon the nearest of his warriors with a howl of fury, smashing the Muhak with his deadly hammer. The Kurgan’s chest cracked like an eggshell, pitching him to the earth in a shrieking heap.
Lok gave the murdered warrior no further thought, stalking ahead to the bulk of the mammoth and the ruined howdah on its back.
A grim realisation came upon Dorgo. Lok was looking for someone among the dead and there was only one person that could be. The Muhak seldom ventured into the Crumbling Hills, their own hunting grounds far to the west. It had not been chance that had caused them to ambush the Tsavag, the Kurgan had carefully planned their attack.
The way Lok picked his way among the dead, Dorgo was sure he knew who had led the hunting party. Killing Hutga’s son would avenge the death of the zar’s son, who had been slain in a raid against the Tsavag some months before. Dorgo redoubled his efforts to saw through the cage. To fall into the zar’s hands dead would be wretched enough, to do so alive…