by Warhammer
The Skulltaker marched through the mangled wreckage of the shamans, his boots sloshing through the muck of pooled blood and offal. A wounded shaman tried to crawl from the warrior’s path, dragging its body through the sludge with a mangled arm, bleating pitifully. The Skulltaker did not break stride as he walked past the crippled beastman, simply reversing the grip on his sword and stabbing the point through the creature’s neck, ending its pathetic ordeal.
The sight of the shaman’s callous execution snapped the already fragile restraint of the minotaurs. Snorting and bellowing, the huge monsters charged, their weapons raised, their horned heads lowered. The ground shook beneath their ploughing hooves, like the rolling quaking of a stampede. Even the faintest gleam of intelligence was washed from their eyes as brute fury took hold over them.
The Skulltaker stood, implacable, immobile before the oncoming rush of the minotaurs. The warrior’s arm swept forwards, driving the black blade into the lowered head of the first minotaur, piercing its skull with a sickening crunch. He ripped the sword free, spinning around as the lifeless bulk of the monster smashed into the ground in a spray of blood and brains. In the same motion, he dropped into a crouch, bringing his sword scything through the knee of a second minotaur. The brute bellowed, toppling as the slashed bone of its leg snapped under the weight of its body.
The Skulltaker did not give the maimed creature a further thought. He was already turning to face a third. The smoking edge of his sword screamed as it chopped through the monster’s horn, sending it dancing through the air. The minotaur roared, bringing its huge club of bone and stone smashing down. The earth beside the Skulltaker exploded beneath the tremendous impact, but the man avoided the crushing blow. His sword licked out at the monster again, hacking through its wrist. The minotaur’s paw leapt from its wound in a gush of blood, flopping to the ground. The monster’s body lurched to one side, the weight of the bludgeon it held in one hand dragging its entire mass away with it. Before the minotaur could recover, the point of the Skulltaker’s sword was burrowing through its ribs, skewering its heart.
A fourth minotaur crashed into the Skulltaker while he dispatched its fellow. The brute’s horns caught the man, sending him flying through the air. The minotaur did not give the stricken champion time to recover. Rushing onwards, its head lowered, its horns lashing from side to side, the beast smashed into the prone man, trying to grind him into the dirt with its horns. The warrior’s body was battered and mangled beneath the minotaur’s savagery, bones cracking before the brutality of the monster’s attack. Armoured hands clutched at the minotaur’s head, wrapping around its horns in an effort to fend off the assault. The monster’s powerful jaws snapped at the man sprawled beneath it, the fangs scraping against the darkly stained armour of his breastplate.
Probing hands slipped away from the minotaur’s horns, groping desperately at the monster’s face as they dropped away. There was purpose behind the desperation. Even as the minotaur mauled him, Khorne’s champion thought not of escape, but of attack. Armoured fingers pressed brutally into the minotaur’s beady yellow eyes, stabbing into them like iron knives. The minotaur threw its head back, howling in agony as the wreckage of its eyes slithered down its face.
With his enemy’s attack broken, the Skulltaker turned to find his sword. His vision settled on the quivering body of the third monster he had killed, at the smoking blade still buried in its side. There was blood dripping from his armour as the warrior dragged himself back towards his sword. Broken bones ground together, and ruptured organs pumped pain through his body. No mortal could have endured the mauling delivered by the beast, but it had been many lifetimes since the Skulltaker had known mortality. Every limping step brought the Blood God’s power surging through him, mending flesh and knitting bone. Khorne had legions to die for him. The Skulltaker was marked out for a different purpose.
From near the herdstone, Nhaa watched the Skulltaker hobble away from the last minotaur. The beastlord’s eyes narrowed with cunning when it saw that the man had lost his terrible sword, as its slippery mind contemplated the obvious gravity of the Skulltaker’s wounds. Nhaa scraped the blades of its fighting claws together, knowing that it would never see a better opportunity. Cautiously, the chieftain began to circle the battlefield, watching for its chance.
When it had circled around to the warrior’s back, Nhaa struck. With panther-like speed, the beastlord rushed at the human. Only a few feet from the Skulltaker, Nhaa leapt into the air, hurtling at the man like a missile. Nhaa slammed into the Skulltaker’s back, its fighting claws tearing through the warrior’s armour, impelled by the chieftain’s momentum. Nhaa’s growls ripped through the clearing as its bronze claws dug deeper into its foe’s body. Sadistic ferocity twisted the gor’s bestial face as it wrenched the claws around in the wounds it had dealt, widening the gashes in its victim’s back. Nhaa almost forgot its disappointment that the warrior did not cry out as it felt the man’s blood running down its arms.
The Skulltaker slumped to his knees, lurching forwards as the beastlord’s fighting claws burrowed into his flesh. Nhaa leaned down to maintain its grip on the failing warrior. The gor’s fangs gleamed in a feral snarl. More than just the instinctive man-hate of the beastmen, Nhaa exulted in its victory as a display of its power. The Skulltaker had slaughtered and killed his way through the lands of the human tribes, unstoppable as the fist of Khorne, but he had not prevailed in the Grey. In the Grey, the doom bringer had found his doom.
Metal hands locked around Nhaa’s throat as the beastlord leaned over the warrior. The chieftain’s eyes went round with panic, and the snarl slipped from its face. The grip around its neck was not the weak, fragile clutch of a dying man. It was a grip of steel, fingers of iron tearing at the beastman’s flesh. As it felt those fingers tighten, as it felt its skin rip, as it felt its neck being twisted, Nhaa understood the enormity of its mistake. Weak, battered, broken, the Skulltaker was still more than the beastlord could overcome.
A loud crack announced the breaking of Nhaa’s neck. The gor’s horned head sagged obscenely against its shoulder, sightless eyes staring emptily into space. Nhaa’s body crumpled to the ground, crashing beside that of its killer.
Long minutes passed. The near-blind eyes of the warherd were focused upon the clearing, fixed upon the still, unmoving shapes of their chieftain and the terrible warrior who had slain it. Slowly, with tenuous, anxious steps, the bolder elements of the tribe began to filter out from the trees. The gors advanced towards the dead bodies of chieftain and champion, sniffing at the blood-drenched ground.
Then the gors were scrambling back to the trees. One of the bodies moved, rising from the ground. The Skulltaker did not even glance at the retreating beastmen. Instead, he closed his bloodstained hands around the bronze claws still stabbed into his flesh. Slowly, painfully, he ripped Nhaa’s blades free from his body. The Skulltaker stared down at the chieftain’s broken body, letting its bladed arms flop back against its chest.
The Skulltaker consider Nhaa’s carcass for only a moment. The warrior set one of his armoured boots on the beastman’s chest, and closed his hands around Nhaa’s curled horns. The Skulltaker leaned down over the monster, and then exerted his tremendous strength, pulling at the horns while his boot kept the body pinned in place.
A wet, tearing sound rose from the corpse. With a final, furious tug, the Skulltaker ripped his prize from Nhaa’s shoulders. The lingering beastmen gave voice to their terror as they saw the champion lift Nhaa’s head into the air. They fled, scrambling back into the depths of the Grey, praying to their savage gods that they would be spared the fate of their chief.
The Skulltaker ignored the frantic, scrambling noises that rose from the forest around him. He was still weak from the minotaur’s mauling and Nhaa’s treacherous attack. It would take him a long time to heal from such injuries, to recover his strength after such a trial, but he would not be idle while he rested.
Dragging Nhaa’s head by its horn, the Skulltak
er stalked towards his sword. Soon, a fourth skull would dangle from the chain lashed across his body, a fourth offering to the Blood God’s rage.
Silence reigned within the great hall. Obsidian walls cast eerie reflections across a floor of polished ebony. A great crystal, three times the size of a man, rose from the centre of the floor, suspended in the air by unseen chains of force. The smooth, globe-like skin of the crystal glowed with strange lights that burned from within. The glow was captured by the black stone walls of the chamber, shining across them in great, sprawling images. The scenes projected by the crystal played like moving tapestries along the black walls.
A sombre group of men watched the images cast by the crystal. Cloaked in robes of black, their faces dark, their expressions grim, the elders of the Sul knew the gravity of what they witnessed. The Skulltaker had claimed another head and with it brought the entire domain of Teiyogtei one step closer to oblivion.
‘Nhaa has fallen,’ declared one of the sorcerers, his plaited beard streaked with golden thread. ‘The Skulltaker has another offering to place before the Skull Throne.’
‘And now Tulka is dead,’ observed another, his eyes stretching from his sallow face on leathery stalks. ‘One less for the Skulltaker to hunt.’
‘Tulka does not matter.’ This time the words came from the gold-masked Thaulan Scabtongue. ‘His power has passed into his lieutenant. The Seifan still have a chieftain, one who has eaten the flesh of Teiyogtei. With the power he has consumed, the heir of Tulka inherits the deathmark that lingered over his predecessor. The executioner must yet collect four skulls before doom descends upon our land.’
‘The flesh of Teiyogtei is all that keeps the Blood God from devouring the domain,’ cautioned the gold-bearded sorcerer. ‘Without that link to the great king, there is nothing to defy Khorne’s hunger. It is a dangerous game we play, Thaulan. The risk is great.’
‘The reward is greater,’ Thaulan replied. ‘Even as he serves the Blood God, the Skulltaker serves the Sul. With every skull he claims, our enemies are diminished.’
‘But if he should kill all the chieftains…’
‘Death is not enough,’ Thaulan said. ‘He must have their heads, trophies to bear back to the Black Altar. Only then will Khorne be satisfied.’
‘Then everything depends upon Sanya,’ the stalk-eyed Sul announced. ‘Our one hope for survival rests with her and a clutch of half-witted Tong.’
‘Not our hopes,’ corrected Thaulan, ‘but our ambitions. We have seen the power even a shard of the Bloodeater possesses. When it is reforged, even the Skulltaker will be destroyed.’
‘What of the Tsavags?’ objected gold-beard.
‘Sanya will attend to them,’ Thaulan said. ‘She made provisions that were not in Enek Zjarr’s original vision.’ The faces of the assembled elders lifted into cruel smiles. Their kahn’s treachery and cunning were infamous throughout the tribe, but that of his consort was impressive even to the Sul. They could leave the Tsavags to her devious plan. The mammoth-rider was never born who could see through the deceptions of the Sul.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A purple sky hung overhead, sprawling across the heavens like an angry bruise. Black clouds boiled through the haze, flickers of lightning burning behind their sombre depths. The clouds moved independent of the howling wind, scattering in every direction as they slowly rolled across the sky. The wind was a fierce, biting gale driving down from the north, shimmering flickers of energy trapped within its coils, dragging the essence of the gods with them as they raged their way southward.
This was the edge, the borderland between the world of mortals and the Wastes. There was no name for this place, this desolation saturated in the malignity of the gods. Perhaps it had once been a part of the Barrens of Nuur, perhaps it had once been a forest like the Grey or a place of towers and gardens like the Crumbling Hills. Now it was nothing, a blight that stretched away to where the black gloom of the clouds reached down to consume it. The ground was parched, grey and lifeless beyond even the desiccated lake bed of the Barrens. More than lifeless, it was a cursed place. Great hills littered the landscape in lonely piles of black stone, as though shunning the company of their fellows. They were almost shapeless, these hills, like piles of oozing mud or the molten stumps of mountains.
More than the black hills, the grey earth and the purple sky, the borderland was dominated by the mouldering shine of bleached bone. The plain was covered in skeletal heaps, broken bones scattered as far as the eye could follow, betokening some ancient slaughter beyond imagining.
Qotagir guided Devseh into the field of bone. The mammoth’s strength was waning, despite the efforts of the Tsavags to tend its wounds. The Seifan had been vicious in their attack, and it was a testament to the endurance and tenacity of the beast that it had been able to travel so far without being allowed to stop and rest.
To stop would allow the Seifan riders another chance to overtake them. They had lost half of their number fighting against the Hung. A renewed attack would finish them. There was no choice, they had to press on and hope that Devseh could endure.
The decision seemed to have been the wise choice. They had reached the borderland, a place no Tsavag had gazed upon for generations. They could feel the power of the gods flowing down from the north, and smell the clammy taint in the air. In many ways, they were reminded of the otherworldly aura of Teiyogtei’s tomb, an eerie sense of dread that tugged at the back of the mind, goading it towards violence. Even Devseh felt the sensation, the mammoth’s temper flaring in trumpeting outbursts and mindless attacks against boulders and piles of bone.
‘He must rest soon,’ warned Qotagir, calling back to the howdah from his ivory cage on the mammoth’s neck.
Dorgo looked back at the Barrens, watching for any sign of dust rising from the dry lake bed. The desolation was silent, as dead as the land before them. If the Seifan yet pursued them, the Hung were still far off.
‘Try to find some high ground,’ Dorgo told Qotagir. They would be in bad shape if they lost Devseh, but their condition would be worse if they failed to spy the Seifan crossing the Barrens.
Dorgo continued to watch the land pass away behind them as the mammoth slowly lumbered towards one of the crude piles of rock. The warrior’s skin prickled with dismay as he saw grotesque red weeds sprout from the grey earth behind them, erupting in a rough line that matched Devseh’s footsteps.
He cast his eyes downward, watching the ground as the mammoth plodded on. Blood continued to trickle from some of the animal’s wounds, splashing to the lifeless earth in drips and spurts. Wherever the blood struck the ground, the scarlet grass fought its way up through the grey dirt and scattered bone.
It was an eerie, ugly sight, made even more uncanny by the hideous, writhing life displayed by the weeds. They were like bloody fingertips trying to claw free from a shallow grave. Dorgo shuddered at the image, trying his best to banish it from his thoughts.
‘You look troubled, warrior.’
Dorgo started as the soft voice intruded upon his grim imaginings. Soundlessly, Sanya had crossed the platform to join him at the side of the howdah. The confidence and arrogance of the sorceress, the bold superiority that she had lorded over her Tsavag companions since they had departed many days ago were gone. Once again, she had the haunted, frightened look that Dorgo had seen at the tomb.
‘Far less than you,’ Dorgo replied. He shook his head, making a contemptuous gesture at the patches of writhing weeds. ‘This is a filthy land,’ he said.
‘The Blood God’s touch hangs heavy here,’ Sanya said. Her eyes narrowed as she studied Dorgo’s face. ‘You can feel it too. The air is heavy with the Blood God’s malice and the Blood God’s hate. The earth lusts for blood, the sky screams out for pain.’ She pressed her hands to her head, pressing her long dark locks against her ears, and screwing her eyes shut in an expression of suffering. ‘This place knows we are here. It wants to destroy us, to devour our flesh, our souls.’
�
��It will be cheated,’ Dorgo scowled. He spat into the grimy dirt below. A red weed poked up from the grey ground, but found spittle less sustaining than blood. It withered as quickly as it sprouted, leaving only a brittle yellow husk behind. ‘We did not brave the Barrens and defy the Seifan to add more bones to this desert.’
Sanya’s face twitched into a less than reassured smile. She turned away from Dorgo, watching as the huge mammoth continued its drive across the desolate grey earth. Bones crunched beneath its laborious steps, providing a strange accompaniment to its heavy, rasping breath. The Sul watched as a stretch of broken ground came into view, a region pierced by hundreds of tall, slender poles. Not poles, the sorceress quickly realised. Stakes. With that realisation, the sorceress understood that if this place was without name, it was not without history.
‘This is where it happened,’ she whispered in a voice subdued with awe.
Catching the woman’s tone, Dorgo took leave of his careful vigil of the retreating Barrens. There was little enough about this quest that was to his liking: the enormity of his task, the grave consequences for failure. Most of all, he disliked the company of the Sul sorceress. A witch was unpleasant enough to be around, a Sul one was worse. Even after their battle with the Seifan, Dorgo found himself watching Sanya for the smallest warning of treachery. He distrusted every display of emotion, and every trace of feeling in her voice. He disliked riddles, disliked challenges that went beyond strength and courage to solve.
‘Where what happened?’ Dorgo asked suspiciously. Sanya’s surprise seemed genuine, but he knew that the Sul wore their faces like the Muhaks wore their masks. It took a craftier mind than his to know for certain what was really going on behind the visible display.
Sanya ignored the caustic challenge in Dorgo’s question. She pointed to the field of stakes, to the broken ground beneath them. The litter of bones was heavier here, mixed with old pieces of crumbling armour and the splintered wreckage of axes and swords. Heaps of skulls, piled far too orderly to be some caprice of the elements, grinned at them from between the stakes.