Warriors of the Chaos Wastes - C L Werner

by Warhammer

  A flash of pain against his cheek removed the fog of terror that gripped him. Dorgo found Sanya glaring at him, her face twisted into a furious snarl.

  ‘Idiot!’ she spat. ‘Khorne is not merely the god of blood and slaughter. He is the lord of terror, the king of doom! As the master, so too the slaves!’

  Dorgo could faintly hear a sound rising from the silence of the bone-field. It took him only an instant to recognise the noise as something howling, something hungry, something evil.

  Sanya spun around, turning her fury on Togmol and Ulagan. The Tsavags were staring into the distance, trying to find the source of the howl. More terrible than the cry of the biggest wolf, more hideous than the roar of troll or tiger, the sound pawed through their souls to claw at the most instinctive fear in a man’s heart: the terror of prey for its hunter.

  Other howls sounded, scratching at the ebony sky. From all around them, the lupine cries pierced the twilight world, singing of fang and claw, singing of meat and flesh. In his mind, Dorgo could see them, loping through the darkness, their scaly paws crunching across the bony litter: lean and ravenous, their jaws agape, tongues lolling against their wolfish faces.

  Cruelty beyond the simple predator gleamed in their eyes, a pitiless wisdom horrible and malignant. Heavy manes matted with clotted blood flowed across their racing, dog-like bodies. Fleshy frills dripped around their collars of blackened bronze, and upon each collar, a single rune, smouldering like flame: the skull-rune of Khorne!

  ‘Run you spineless maggots!’ Sanya shouted at the Tsavags. ‘Your fear calls out to them! We must run, and beg the gods that we find the Black Altar before the fleshhounds find us!’

  The sorceress did not waste further words. Turning, she raced away, desperately following where her talisman pointed. Dorgo did not linger, nor were Togmol and Ulagan slow to hurry after the woman. Whatever doubts and suspicions they harboured against her, the howls of the daemons drowned them out.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Terror drove Shen Kahn through the narrow mountain passes, down into the flatlands. The Seifan retreat was a rout, riders and chariots scattering in every direction as they emerged from the valley. Shen made no effort to control their flight. Things had gone too far to worry about leadership of the tribe and control of the domain. Now the only thing that Shen held in his heart was fear for his life.

  Ratha had been cut down, butchered by a monster, who had carved a bloody path through the ranks of the Vaan. It was beyond belief that a single creature, be it man or daemon, could kill so many, even less when its victims were the elite warriors of the Vaan. Shen tried to cling to his conviction that the killer was no more than some daemon conjured up by Enek Zjarr, but he could taste the lie in his thoughts. He knew. However much he tried to deny it, he knew. The Skulltaker had indeed returned, this time for the heads of Teiyogtei’s heirs.

  Screams rose from the valley behind him. Shen turned to see men and horses, their eyes wild with fright, bolting into the flatlands. For a moment, his gaze rested on the fugitives, and then his eyes turned to the thing that pursued them.

  The Skulltaker was once again mounted upon his wolfish beast, the canine monster charging out from the shadow of the mountains in great loping bounds. Shen’s desperate hope that the killer would pursue Hutga and his Tsavags turned bitter in his mouth. There was no question, the Skulltaker had marked him as the next to die.

  ‘Faster!’ roared the warlord, snarling at the charioteer beside him. Already, the man was lashing the gasping horses with a ruthlessness born of panic. The big animals, a hand-and-a-half taller than the shaggy ponies ridden by most of the tribe, galloped frantically through the long grass of the flatlands.

  ‘If I push them any harder, their hearts will burst!’ complained the charioteer.

  Shen glared at his tribesman. The man was afraid, but not nearly afraid enough. It wasn’t his head the Skulltaker meant to claim!

  ‘Then maybe they are pulling too much weight,’ Shen said coldly.

  One of the kahn’s hands seized the reins of the chariot horses. The other slammed into the charioteer’s side, burying a fat-bladed knife in his side. The warrior gasped, shuddering as Shen drove the knife deeper. The murdered man clutched feebly at Shen’s armour, and then slumped to the wooden floor of the chariot. Shen wrapped the reins around his arm, and then grabbed the charioteer’s head, using height and leverage to tip the man headfirst from the chariot. The dying warrior smashed into the long-grass, tumbling end over end in a sprawl of snapped limbs and shattered ribs.

  Shen struck at the horses, urging them on. The whip snapped at their flanks, drawing blood from their savaged flesh. The kahn looked back, horrified to see the Skulltaker’s weird steed closing the distance. Seifan were fleeing in all directions, but the grim killer never wavered. Something beyond mortal senses told him which of the fleeing riders was the man he sought.

  If the Skulltaker would not chase his minions, Shen knew he must look elsewhere to find the time he so desperately needed, the chance to escape this domain and leave the killer behind.

  The answer appeared before the fleeing kahn’s darting eyes. The flatlands gradually sloped downwards as they stretched away from the mountains. Eventually, they sank into a watery mire, a blighted region shunned by Hung and Kurgan alike: the Swamp of the Devourer.

  Shen could see the edge of the swamp, where the long-grass stubbornly struggled to survive in foetid shallows. The sickly green vapours of the swamp clung thickly around the scraggly clumps of grass, like strangler’s fingers wrapping around so many throats. Ugly trees, tall and thin and barren, thrust up through the scummy waters, like some sinister wall separating the foulness of the swamp from the world beyond.

  Many were the tales of horror told about the swamp, evoked around the winter campfires: stories of ghastly death and fates worse than death, accounts of loathsome creatures neither daemon nor man. None were more terrible than those told of the Devourer, a thing that was not a beast, but rather the living malice of the swamp.

  It lurked behind that wall of trees, waiting for what flesh dared to intrude upon its forsaken realm. It did not consume its victims with tooth and fang, but sucked them down into the mud to rot and fester in the living muck of the swamp. A man was alive when his body was dissolved in the belly of the Devourer.

  Shen weighed the horror of the swamp against the horror of the Skulltaker. It was a choice of evils, but Shen was reminded that men had escaped the swamp to carry their stories back to their tribes. From the Skulltaker, there was no escape.

  Yelling at the horses, Shen wheeled his chariot around, plunging into the muddy dampness of the swamp. He watched the rancid waters with a keen eye even as he urged the stallions to greater effort. Where the long-grass struggled to grow, there the water was shallow. Where it was absent, where only floating scum rose above the water, the ground had dropped away in deep sink holes.

  Water sprayed from the wheels of the chariot, surrounding Shen in a curtain of stagnant filth. He struggled to watch the surface of the swamp, trying to keep track of where it was shallow and where it was not. The horses neighed and snorted in protest, upset by the rancour of the swamp. Shen’s whip cracked out again with vengeful fury. Less concerned with the danger ahead than he was the danger behind, Shen had no patience for the timidity of his steeds.

  Disaster was quick to overtake the fleeing kahn. Reckless and desperate, he had gambled too hard on his flight into the swamp. Where a man might have navigated a safe path between the patches of shallow muck, there simply was not room enough for a chariot.

  Equine screams rose as one of the wheels slipped into an unseen hole. The copper-bound wood splintered from the lurching impact. The chariot, its balance lost, crashed and slid through the slime, pulling the horses as they had pulled it. The ruined chariot spun around, and then slipped from the shallows into one of the sinkholes that peppered the terrain. The panicked horses were dragged after the reeling carriage, their hooves flailing uselessly a
t the mud.

  Coming to rest, the chariot sank in the deep water, scum bubbling as the mire sucked it down. Shen released the death-grip he had taken upon the armoured side, springing clear as his refuge disappeared. He found himself hip-deep in muck and slime, every step an effort as the sludge beneath his feet clung to him.

  Shen could see the horses struggling in the shadows, trying to keep the chariot’s weight from dragging them down with it. He reached to his belt for his dao, intending to cut the beasts free. He might have lost his chariot, but with a horse under him there was still a chance he could lose the Skulltaker in the swamps.

  The Hung’s face went white as his fingers closed on emptiness. He looked in disbelief at his belt, finding only a torn strip of leather flapping against his waist. The sword had been torn free during the violent crash. Shen did not think of the history, the tradition the sacred weapon represented for his people, nor even the supernatural power the weapon possessed. He thought only of the weapon he could have used to keep himself alive, something that was lost to him.

  Shen had almost decided to tear the leather tethers binding the horses with his bare hands when a new sound intruded upon the screams of the horses. It was the splash of something moving through the stagnant waters, something big, moving at speed. The kahn did not turn to look. Coming from the edge of the swamp, where mire met flatland, there was only one thing it could be: the Skulltaker’s ghastly steed.

  Shen bolted into the swamp, no longer watching for patches of shallow and the scum-covered sinkholes. He splashed through the reeking pools with crazed desperation, hardly slowing when he sank to his knees in stagnant water, or sloshed through flooded pits deeper than his waist. Escape! Escape was the only thought drumming through his brain, the shivering mindless terror of the prey. Every second, every breath was a small triumph, his entire existence collapsing into these insignificant instants of cheated death.

  The kahn’s hands groped at a clump of rotting long-grass, pulling him from a rancid pool onto another rise. The scraggly trees of the swamp had thinned, forming a sort of clearing, a solemn circle surrounding a bleak morass of brown, lumpy mud.

  Some warning instinct made Shen recoil from the muddy expanse, some primitive alarm of danger. The mud rippled, trembling with a wet spasm of unspeakable loathsomeness. He could see the quivering muck sloshing away, parting as something thrust its way up from the stinking heart of the swamp. He did not need to see more. In escaping the Skulltaker, he had found the Devourer.

  Shen backed away, hardly daring to breathe as the obscene lord of the swamp oozed up from the depths. A hint of something black and oily showing beneath the dripping mud was enough. The kahn turned to find another way through the maze of trees and sunken pits. He froze as his eyes left the Devourer’s pool.

  A mounted figure stared back at him, the lips of the Skulltaker’s wolfish steed curled in a silent growl, exposing its gore-crusted fangs. The expressionless mask of the killer’s helm gave no hint of the thoughts hidden within. Shen gave a little cry of horror as he saw the chain of trophies stretched across the champion’s chest, the skulls of the chieftains who had already met their doom.

  The skull of Zar Ratha, still wet with the Kurgan’s blood, grinned at Shen, seeming to welcome the onetime ally of the Vaan.

  For a moment, hunter and quarry looked upon one another, each man waiting for the other to act. Shen’s heart pounded against his bones like a hammer, his limbs tingling with fear. He could not tear his eyes away from the Skulltaker’s trophies, from the chain that would soon be wound through the empty sockets of his own skull.

  The instant passed. Slowly, the Skulltaker dismounted, dropping from the back of his fearsome beast. He drew his black sword from its sheath, the weapon’s sizzling voice hissing through the stagnant vapours. Each splashing step sounded like the tramp of a giant to Shen. As he advanced, the trophies rattled against the Skulltaker’s armoured breast, seeming to beckon to the doomed Seifan chief.

  Screaming, Shen turned and tore back through the trees, back to the pool of the Devourer. Death, any death, was preferable to the grisly fate the Skulltaker promised, to join the skulls of the vanquished in shame and defeat. He could not beat the Skulltaker, Shen knew it was madness to even try, but he could still cheat the monster of his victory.

  The thing that had been rising from the pit was clearer now. Mud had dripped off its ghastly bulk, puddling around its enormity. Shapeless, formless, it was like some great quivering mound of blackened meat, its surface pitted with oozing sores. Devoid of eye or ear, or nose, it still detected Shen’s presence, lurching through the muck towards the crazed Seifan, undulating like some rogue wave upon a stagnant sea.

  His horror of the Devourer lost, Shen threw open his arms as the immense, oozing slime reared up before him, pulsating with vile hunger. Pseudopods of dripping jelly burst from the thing’s black mass, wrapping around the kahn in a burning embrace. Shen could feel the acidic excretions eating through his skin as the tendrils pulled him back to the Devourer’s body.

  In all the eons of the abomination’s existence, Shen wondered if any of its victims had laughed as they were consumed.

  The dripping tendrils collapsed back into the Devourer’s body, dragging Shen with them. As the chieftain struck the oily skin of the creature, he sank into it, feeling its burning touch wash over him. Inch by inch, slowly, hideously, he was absorbed into the monster, absorbed into its formless bulk to be consumed.

  Suddenly, the slime trembled, shivering with a motion that was outside its mindless urge to feed. Shen could feel its pain all around him, even through the wet, searing agony of his own body. His suffering intensified as the Devourer’s acids increased their labours against the engulfed kahn’s flesh.

  Again, the substance of the Devourer trembled, shuddering like water before the wind. Strangely, the burning around Shen lessened, the wet embrace of the slime weakening. Something more solid than the amorphous coils of the Devourer closed around Shen’s arm. He felt iron fingers fumble at his partially digested flesh, sinking into the burnt meat, and tightening around the bone beneath.

  Shen did not know if he was pulled free or if the Devourer simply relinquished its prey, its shapeless mass sliding away from him like spray dripping from a stone. Through the one eye that had not been blinded by the slime’s acid, he could see it sinking back beneath the mud. The clearing was splattered with clumps of oily darkness, some still quivering with the last echo of life.

  The firm hold around Shen’s arm released him and the raw debris of the kahn’s body flopped obscenely into the mud. The Devourer’s acids had worked havoc on Shen’s body, leaving muscle and fat glistening where his skin had dissolved. Patches of bone stood stark beneath weeping wounds. Blood and bile seeped from his exposed stomach, dripping into the ruptured entrails below.

  The Skulltaker did not care about Shen’s wounds. The killer looked down upon the twitching wreckage of the chieftain with a merciless gaze. He had not charged the oozing mass of the Devourer to save his life, nor to preserve his rule had the Skulltaker carved his way through the burning bulk of the monster.

  There was enough reason left in Shen’s tortured body to know despair as he saw the Skulltaker’s black blade come chopping down.

  Dorgo’s muscles felt as though they were on fire, every pounding crash of his boot against the grisly field of bone sending a spasm of pain shooting through him. Endurance, even that of a breed as rugged and strong as the Tsavags, had its limits. He knew that he was quickly reaching his. Ulagan was already faltering, falling behind with every breath. Stronger than either of his tribesmen, Togmol was only now starting to show signs of fatigue.

  Sanya, somehow, kept ahead of them all. The Sul woman’s lithe figure pranced before them, nimble and graceful as a doe. Dorgo knew that she was using her sorcery to strengthen her, no bandy-boned Hung was the equal of a Tsavag, much less one of their women. She would not be the first of her sorcerous kin to use magic to overcome the natural
power of better men.

  Or was it sorcery? The chilling howl of the fleshhounds screamed from the distance, but not so distant as before. Sanya knew better than all of them the kind of daemons that stalked their trail. She knew the kind of death they could expect when the pack fell upon them. Perhaps it was knowledge, not magic, that lent speed to her feet.

  The pack! Dorgo’s weary eyes scanned the bleak horizon. They should be able to see the hounds, or at least pick out their dark shapes from the bleached terrain. There was nothing. Even when he looked in the direction from which one of the howls sounded, there was nothing.

  Sanya had warned that the Wastes were partly mortal in their essence, lacking the true etherealness of the world of the gods. Were the fleshhounds hunting them not from the Wastes, but from that other existence, that shadow realm just beyond the mortal coil? Hunting them from their phantom world until they tired of the chase and chose to claim their prey?

  Dorgo looked back at Ulagan and felt a pang of pity for the hunter. Ulagan had saved his life in the Prowling Lands, but there was nothing Dorgo could do to help him now. Ulagan’s face was clenched in an expression of mortal terror, greater even than Togmol’s claustrophobic misery in the caverns of the snake-men. He knew the ways of predators on the hunt. He knew that they invariably singled out the weak, the stragglers. He tried to keep up with his companions, to keep from lingering behind, but his flagging strength betrayed him. He knew he would be the straggler, the easy kill that would draw the predators to him, but would they go for the easy kill?

  Wolves in shape, the fleshhounds were more than beasts in mind. Daemons of the Blood God, dogs of Khorne, they were spectral manifestations of the Skull Lord’s savage hunger. Beasts would go for the straggler, allowing the rest of the prey to escape. Daemons, however, had the intelligence to take both the weak and the strong.