Warriors of the Chaos Wastes - C L Werner

by Warhammer

  Ulagan suddenly pitched and fell, sprawling in the gravelly litter of bones. Dorgo slackened his pace, jogging back to help the failing hunter to his feet. From somewhere beyond his vision, the hungry howls of the hounds drew closer.

  ‘Leave him!’ snapped Sanya. The witch had stopped when she saw Dorgo turn back. She stood, hands pressed against her hips, drawing deep breaths into her starved lungs. ‘He won’t make it.’

  ‘We didn’t abandon you,’ Dorgo retorted, scowling at the woman.

  Sanya’s face split in a withering sneer. ‘You needed me. You don’t need him.’ Togmol rounded on the witch, fingering his broadaxe. She met his hostile gaze and smiled. ‘Let the pack have him and we buy ourselves time.’

  ‘We’re not leaving him,’ growled Dorgo. Ulagan sagged limply in Dorgo’s arms as he helped him up. The howls sounded closer, more excited and eager.

  ‘Then we’ll all die here,’ Sanya told him. She glared at Dorgo, matching his rage, defying him to tell her she was wrong.

  Togmol snarled something at the witch and slowly stalked away from her, moving to help Dorgo with Ulagan. The dazed hunter lifted his head weakly, cheered by the approach of the big warrior. Dorgo started to give voice to his gratitude when he saw Togmol’s axe lash out. The wide blade chopped down into Ulagan’s leg, splitting it to the bone. Savagely, Togmol ripped his weapon free. The stricken Ulagan toppled from Dorgo’s grip, rolling on the ground in a ball of pain.

  Dorgo’s sword was in his hand, the point sweeping towards Togmol’s throat. The big warrior blocked the strike with the haft of his axe. ‘Leave him for the hounds,’ Togmol warned. The words only outraged Dorgo further. Again, the sword slashed at Togmol’s body. This time he retreated before the blow, scorn in his face as he backed away.

  ‘We have to worry about more than rescuing our kinsmen or avenging them if they are dead,’ Togmol said, his voice pained. ‘The entire tribe is depending on us. If we don’t bring Teiyogtei’s sword to the Black Altar, who will save our people from the Skulltaker?’

  Dorgo stared at his friend in stunned silence, struck dumb by the ghastly irony of Togmol’s words. He remembered telling Togmol the same thing when he would have rushed into the red weeds in a hopeless effort to save Qotagir and the others.

  The words were being thrown back at him and he hated the cruel wisdom in them. The tribe was depending on them, his father was depending on them. Beside that burden, even the debt he owed Ulagan counted for nothing.

  Slowly, Dorgo nodded, returning his sword to his belt. He did not look back at the crippled hunter, pretending that he could not hear the man’s desperate pleas. The howls of the daemons drew still closer. First Sanya, and then Togmol started to run again. They did not look back.

  Dorgo could hear Ulagan’s cries turn to curses as he ran away. The hunter cursed them by gods and ancestors, heaping prayers of ruin and death upon their heads. Dorgo tried not to listen, every word twisting in his gut like a dull knife.

  Then, suddenly, Ulagan’s voice was gone. The howling of the daemons was gone. The landscape and even the sky, seemed somehow different, as if they had stepped from one room into another. Dorgo looked back, amazed and horrified to see neither the abandoned hunter nor the gruesome mountains he had studied with such anxious eyes for so very long.

  ‘No reward without sacrifice,’ Sanya said, laughing. The sorceress cast aside the guiding talisman, the daemon finger crawling obscenely through the bone shards, dragging its chain behind it. Beside her, Togmol was gaping at something on the horizon, struck dumb by some awesome sight.

  Dorgo did not understand her glee, any more than he could understand why she had thrown away her talisman. Only a few yards separated him from the witch. He closed the distance with cautious, wary steps, watchful for some new treachery. Within a few paces he saw it, and he knew without being told that he gazed upon the Black Altar.

  How a few paces could have hidden it from his sight, he did not understand, some trickery beyond mere distance, that much was certain. It appeared in the manner of a conjurer’s trick, winking into sight as soon as Dorgo stepped near enough to pierce its unseen veil.

  He had thought the colossus of Teiyogtei was immense, now Dorgo understood that it was a dwarfish runt beside the enormity that the ancient king had tried to ape. It looked taller than the mountains, taller than the sky, a black cyclopean effigy rearing into the heavens, gigantic and eternal. It was folded into a crouch, crumpled on its knees. Its chest was thrown back, its hound-like head lolling against its broad, powerful shoulders.

  Thick, mighty arms dangled from those shoulders, the clawed hands brushing against the ground. Immense wings, like the pinions of some gargantuan dragon, were folded against its body, flattened against its sides. The giant shape was covered in great plates of armour, their surfaces crawling in runes and etchings. The entirety was carved in a strange, brittle-looking stone, blacker than pitch and dull as rusting iron.

  The evil air of horror that exuded from the thing was like an ugly whisper, the lingering stink of something rotting away. Dorgo could see that the statue’s breast was ripped open, cut in the manner of some ghastly wound. From where its heart would be, a fiery crimson glow shone.

  ‘It must have taken a thousand tribes to build this,’ Dorgo gasped in open wonder.

  Sanya shook her head. ‘No, it only took one man.’ She pointed at the gigantic shape. ‘This is no statue. It is the carcass of Krathin, the bloodthirster, he who was called the Lash of Khorne. Long ago, before he was a king, before he led the Tong down from the Wastes, Teiyogtei slew Krathin in a battle that shook the heavens. From his husk, Teiyogtei built the Black Altar, fuelling it with the vanquished spirit of the daemon.’

  ‘That glow where its heart should be,’ Dorgo observed, ‘that is where the Black Altar is.’

  Again Sanya shook her head. ‘That is where Teiyogtei placed the door. The Black Altar is beyond.’

  Togmol stared up at the enormous daemon, wincing as he considered the dizzying height at which the horned, dog-like head rose from the broad, armoured shoulders. ‘We have to climb up there, don’t we?’

  ‘Unless you think you can fly,’ the sorceress told him.

  Stragglers were still descending from the mountains long into the night. The panic and confusion of the battle in Ikar’s Refuge had sent the Tsavags racing into the passes and valleys, desperate to protect their families. Only the rearguard had lingered long enough to see the breaking of the Vaan host, the butchery visited upon them by a monster from the mists of myth. If there had been any doubt in Hutga’s heart that the killer stalking the domain was in truth the Skulltaker, it died with Ratha.

  Maybe it was the lack of doubt that filled his mind with woeful thoughts. Hutga had been reared on legends about Teiyogtei Khagan, the great king of the horde. He had heard all the tales of his mighty deeds and fierce battles, of the armies and monsters he had slain, and of the daemons he had vanquished. Later, grown old in the traditions of his people, grown strong in his power as chief of the tribe, he had come to question all the old stories. If Teiyogtei had been so mighty, how could a lone warrior be his nemesis?

  Now he believed again, for he had seen that nemesis. What hope remained for Hutga and his people lay in the lingering power of their ancient king, in the faith that a weapon that once struck down the Skulltaker would do so again. There was no other way. The spectacle of slaughter he had seen in Ikar’s Refuge was mute testimony that force of arms could not defeat the Skulltaker. Something more than mortal strength and steel was needed to destroy the destroyer.

  Hutga thought of the Sul and their magic. Steeped in sorcery, the Sul were a power apart from the mortal world. Theirs was a power far beyond the mean spells of shamans and warlocks, a power second only to that of the gods, but was it enough to protect them from the Skulltaker? Hutga had seen the limits of Sul sorcery at the tomb of Teiyogtei. Even Enek Zjarr was helpless before the malign power of Khorne, unable to work his magic within the sanctuar
y of the Blood God. Against Khorne’s champion, how much trust could even the Sul place in their sorceries?

  Was that why Enek Zjarr had not come? Not from fear of the Vaan or the Seifan, not from some secret alliance of treachery and deception with the chieftains, but from fear of the Skulltaker. Enek Zjarr said that he had used his magic to spy upon the Skulltaker, to see him strike down Csaba and Bleda Carrion-crown. Had the sorcerer seen the approach of the Skulltaker here as well? Was that why he and his people cowered in their floating citadel?

  Hutga looked at the bedraggled, frightened faces of his tribesmen as they marched their mammoths down from the mountain. Never had he seen his people look so broken, so desolate.

  ‘We will seek out the Sul,’ Hutga decided. He turned to his sub-chiefs. ‘Spread the word among the people. We will wait an hour, no more than two, for others to come down, and then I want the entire tribe on the march.’

  ‘To Enek Zjarr’s castle?’ one of the Tsavag war chiefs asked. There was a haunted, crushed taint in his eyes that it pained Hutga to see.

  ‘Enek Zjarr stays behind his walls,’ the khagan explained. ‘Clearly he thinks they can protect him.’ Hutga’s face split in a fierce grin. ‘I mean to have him extend that sanctuary to his loyal allies. Or I mean to hold his heart in my hand.’

  The savage words seemed to bolster the withered spirits of the war chiefs as they walked off to spread the khagan’s orders to the rest of the tribe. Yorool, however, was not deceived by Hutga’s hollow words.

  ‘Enek Zjarr has abandoned us,’ the shaman pointed out. ‘That Seifan jackal was right when he said that every head the Skulltaker claims helps the Sul.’

  Hutga nodded, troubled to hear Yorool voice his doubts. ‘With Ratha dead and the Skulltaker on the trail of the new Seifan kahn, only the Tsavags stand between Enek Zjarr and control of the entire domain.’ The chieftain rubbed his arms, trying to ease the chill from his metal-ridden skin. ‘I don’t know. You saw the Skulltaker. Do you think even Enek Zjarr could control something that powerful?’

  ‘He does not need to control him to profit from his works,’ Yorool said.

  ‘You forget,’ Hutga replied, ‘the Skulltaker wants Enek Zjarr’s head as well as mine.’

  ‘That,’ Yorool observed, ‘may be the reason he sent your son to reforge the Bloodeater, not to protect the domain or the Tsavags, but to protect Enek Zjarr.’

  Ice crept into Hutga’s eyes, the cold fury of a father who has risked his son for a lie. ‘We’ll discuss that with Enek Zjarr,’ he vowed, ‘and if I don’t like his answers, the Sul will discover that the Skulltaker isn’t the only one who can kill.’

  Dorgo and his companions passed through the open chest of the dead daemon, into the boiling light glowing within its corpse. The world around them was washed away by the burning, hellish glow. As the angry glare blinded them, they could feel their bodies being pulled and clawed by wraithlike hands. The air in their lungs became a stinging ash, the sound in their ears a sullen roar. Heat, infernal and searing tore at them and around their hearts a cold malice of timeless hatred closed its phantom talons.

  There was no stepping back, no time to relent the desperation that had brought them to this place that was not a place. The mortal world evaporated around them, steaming into the nothingness of beyond. Blind, deafened, wracked by the malevolence of another reality, they continued their crawl through the daemon’s charred husk. Groping, stumbling, they fought back the terror that burrowed into their brains, exciting forgotten, primitive fears.

  Slowly, vision returned to their tormented eyes, the hellish glow lessening into a gory crimson light. No more did they stand within the tunnel-like wound in the daemon’s chest, but upon a narrow ledge of red-veined rock, overlooking a vast pit filled with bubbling molten fire. Great tongues of black flame licked up from the depths, shooting hundreds of feet from the churning surface of scarlet magma, bringing with them the stink of burning blood. The walls of the pit were like the terrain of the horrible boneyards surrounding the monstrous carcass of the bloodthirster. Pale and bleached, things made of bone instead of stone formed a latticework of megalithic bones interwoven in grisly union. The walls of bone descended far into the pit, far overhead they stretched until at last they formed a rounded cone, through which a sky of bruised, ghostly stars could distantly be seen.

  Immense chains of bronze stretched across the pit. Anchored into the walls, each link in the chains was bigger than an ox and covered in dark runes of vile aspect. The chains were spaced evenly around the funnelled walls, eight in number and none less gigantic than its fellows. Where the chains met at the centre of the pit, they were anchored to a structure of blackened metal, a building cast in the shape of an immense skull with sword-like antlers. The mouth of the skull gaped wide, but whatever was within was concealed by a veil of shadow and smoke. Only the chains anchored in the walls supported the structure above the boiling surface of the pit far below, and with each blast of black flame from the pit, the skull-shaped building swayed slightly as it was buffeted by the elemental fury below. A curtain of smaller, mortal-sized chains dripped from the bottom of the structure, sporting a wild array of metal hooks and buckets. Ugly, shrivelled things hung from some of the hooks, grisly in their charred suggestion of human forms.

  This, Dorgo knew, was their goal. This was the Black Altar, the spectral forge where Teiyogtei crafted his mighty weapons. Where the Bloodeater had been made and where it must be remade if he would save his tribe from the Skulltaker.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It took more courage than Dorgo thought he had left to step out onto the closest of the monstrous bronze chains. Feet planted on the surface of the horizontal link, arms wrapped through the loop of the vertical link, he felt the entire chain sway under his weight. Below him, at an almost impossible depth, the boiling fury of the pit sent bursts of heat and fire searing up at him. The metal was hot, unpleasant if not intolerable beneath his touch. The leering, horned skull of the Black Altar seemed unimaginably far away, as if the structure had retreated from him when he set foot upon its moorings, or the funnel cone had grown in its dimensions in response to his intrusion.

  Dorgo shook his head, rubbing at his eyes, trying to force the cruel deceit from his vision. In the Wastes, Sanya said, belief was its own reality. Believe he could never reach the structure and he never would. He struggled to force his senses to perceive his surroundings in a new way, but it was impossible to discredit what his eyes saw, what his flesh felt.

  The chain shivered again. Dorgo saw Sanya creeping out to join him on the link. She had torn strips from her robe to wrap her hands against the hot metal. For all her knowledge of the gods and their secret powers, the sorceress looked even more anxious than he did, regarding their perilous crossing.

  He might have felt some sympathy for her, if the memory of her cold, dismissive acceptance of the loss of Ulagan and the others wasn’t so fresh in his mind. He needed Sanya’s knowledge, her arcane art, to reforge the Bloodeater. That was as far as his sympathies went. It was better to trust a viper than a Sul.

  Dorgo carefully edged his way along the first link, keeping one arm wrapped in the loop of the vertical link. For a perilous moment, he dangled over the pit as he stepped from one link to the next, his legs not quite able to traverse the gap between the two horizontal surfaces. He tightened his hold around the loop of the vertical link, pulling himself across with his arms until his groping feet touched metal once more. He sucked a stinging lungful of air into his body, trying not to look down as he released his hold on the vertical loop and lunged for the next link.

  For a horrible instant he was unbalanced, and then his flailing arms caught at the hot bronze, throwing themselves around the loop in a fierce embrace. He’d made the crossing between two links in the chain. His heart felt like a diseased lump in his breast when he looked at how many more lay between him and the Black Altar: a hundred, perhaps twice that.

  Despair wracked Dorgo’s mind. He coul
d never do it, never cross such an awesome distance. It was beyond endurance, beyond the endurance of any man. Then the image of his tribe flashed before his eyes: men, women and children strewn across a desolate landscape, butchered and torn. The crossing might indeed be beyond human endurance, but he would make it anyway.

  Togmol’s voice cried out from behind him, warning Dorgo and Sanya to brace themselves. The big warrior stepped out onto the bronze chain, following Dorgo’s example as he made his crossing from the first link to the second. The two Tsavags grinned at each other, revelling in their pathetic accomplishment like youths returned from their first hunt. They could do this. They would do this.

  Dorgo looked back at the first link. Sanya was poised at the edge of the horizontal surface, but was unable to repeat the example of the burly Tsavags. Powerful in mind and magic, the Sul were weaker in body than the puny runts the Kurgan tribes left out for the wolves. Repeating Dorgo’s feat of pulling himself across the emptiness between links was beyond her strength.

  ‘Stay there,’ Dorgo warned. He turned his body around with desperate caution, and started to retrace his steps.

  Togmol caught hold of his arm. ‘What are you doing?’ the warrior demanded.

  ‘I’m going back for her,’ Dorgo said.

  ‘Leave the witch,’ Togmol snarled, making certain his words were loud enough for Sanya to hear. ‘She got us here, that is enough. We can work out how to use the Altar for ourselves.’

  Dorgo shook his head. Togmol’s suggestion appealed to him, cried out to all the petty bitterness in his soul, but he knew he could not take the chance. Too much depended on their success. Togmol groaned in disgust as Dorgo crept back across the link, and then pulled himself over the gap and back to where he had started.

  ‘I can’t,’ Sanya started to tell him. Dorgo waved aside her explanation, pushing her back to the rocky ledge. He began removing belts and straps from his armour and gear, dumping the heavy mammoth hide on the ground. He glanced at Sanya, and then tore at the heavy chain around her waist.