by Warhammer
‘Consort, perhaps,’ Sanya said after a moment of consideration. ‘After you’d disposed of the elders, of course. But I’m afraid you’d never bend sufficiently to my will. You’re too truculent, too headstrong to make a good slave. The strain of maintaining spells over you is one I can easily do without.’
Dorgo glared at the sorceress, feeling his hatred of her swell with each passing breath. Sanya was terrible in her airs of gloating triumph, revelling in the catalogue of deceit and betrayal that had brought her ultimate victory. All the death, all the suffering that had passed, all the carnage wrought by the Skulltaker, was immaterial to her. It was a mentality as loathsome as it was callous. Even ever-hungry Khorne appreciated each man’s death in his moment of dying.
Sanya strode back across the floor, the skull of her betrayed master in her hand. Slowly, she paced around Dorgo, her fingers playing through his hair. ‘Too bad,’ she decided at last. ‘I’ll have to find another tool to wield the Bloodeater for me.’ Her voice became as cold as a winter tempest.
‘Skewer yourself, dog!’
Against his will, Dorgo’s hands closed around the hilt of the Bloodeater. With agonising slowness, he turned the blade around in his grip, pointing the sharp tip of the jewelled sword towards his gut. He strained against the pull of his muscles, struggling against the dominating will that compelled him. Sanya laughed and he could feel her power over him lessen.
He tried to drop the sword, but even as he started to flex his fingers, he felt her will force them closed again.
She was toying with him, making him die by degrees, savouring the helpless terror of his mind. A more sinister torment it was hard to contemplate, where torturer and victim were one and the same.
A strange sight intruded into his terror. Past the trembling fists of his outstretched arms, Dorgo could see the nest of chains behind the forge. He could see them shivering, trembling with motion as though moved by some intangible wind.
Slowly, at first, then more violently, they began to sway. Initially, Dorgo watched the chains only to distract him from Sanya’s torture, but soon a horrified fascination gripped him. Something was climbing up the chains.
As soon as the thought was in his mind, he felt Sanya’s hold on him falter. The sorceress turned away, rushing to the edge of the opening behind the forge. Dorgo threw the Bloodeater from him, letting it clatter across the floor. He scrambled away from weapon and the sorceress, retreating from both with horror.
The sorceress waved her hands in arcane gestures above the metal floor, banishing the spell of concealment that she had evoked, exposing the gaping hole through which the chains passed. Her face turned pale with horror.
Sanya was too consumed by her fear to notice Dorgo’s escape. She was trembling as she backed away from the opening, shaking like a lonely leaf in a thunderstorm. A red gauntlet closed around the lip of the opening, followed quickly by a hulking body encased in armour. The Skulltaker’s metal mask glared at the sorceress, as pitiless as the face of Khorne.
Crackling lightning flashed from Sanya’s hand as she drew power from her amulet. The sorcerous energy shimmered and danced around the Skulltaker’s body, as harmful as summer rain.
The monster moved towards her, each step echoing like the tramp of doom from the walls of the forge. The hungry, surly roar of the forge hissed back into life, welcoming the Skulltaker’s return.
Sanya continued to back away, continued to unleash her deadly magic against the oncoming monster, but there was no pit to hide from the Skulltaker this time, and no trickery that could ensnare him.
Against the champion, Sanya’s magic was incapable of working any harm. It was the Sul’s turn to know how it felt to be powerless.
With a moan of horror, Sanya felt her back press against the iron wall of the chamber. Backed into a corner by the Skulltaker, she made a desperate lunge for freedom. The champion’s mailed fist caught in her flying hair, jerking her brutally from her feet. The Skulltaker ignored the fallen woman, interested more in the object that had flown from her hand to rattle across the floor. He stalked after Enek Zjarr’s skull, reaching down to pick it up from the floor.
Sanya shrieked, desperate courage filling her. She leapt at the Skulltaker, jumping onto his back, trying to pull him away from the fallen head. The champion reached behind him, closing an iron fist around the woman’s shoulder.
In a single, savage motion, he ripped the sorceress from him, bringing her slamming down in an overhead manoeuvre. A sickening, spine-snapping crack sounded as Sanya struck the floor. Even in her agony, the crippled woman tried to push Enek Zjarr’s head from the Skulltaker’s armoured fingers.
‘Stop him!’ Sanya shrieked as the Skulltaker gained his last trophy. The monster turned away, marching back to the howling forge. The fleshy stump of daemonic malevolence was gyrating and pulsating with excitement, its teeth gnashing in hungry expectation.
‘Stop him!’ Sanya screamed again, her desperate eyes fixed on Dorgo. The warrior could feel only the faintest tug of her will against his, the witch’s pain befouling her powers.
‘If he drops the skulls into the forge, it will be the end of us all!’ Sanya cried. Her eyes went wild with terror as she saw Dorgo turn away from the scene, moving towards the doorway of the Black Altar. ‘It will be the end of the domain! The land and everyone in it will be consumed, absorbed into the realm of the Blood God! Nothing will survive! Think of your people!’
Dorgo turned back. He watched as the Skulltaker dropped the first of his trophies into the greedy maw of the forge. The entire structure shuddered, gripped by some titanic tremor. The howling of the daemon’s spirit rose to an almost deafening din, the blood-stink of the chamber intensifying into an overwhelming reek. Dorgo could feel things scrabbling at the corners of existence, clawing for entrance as old walls began to fracture. Something colossal, a presence gigantic beyond understanding, was looming down from some unimaginable height, casting its shadow of terror across the world.
Dorgo stared into Sanya’s fear-maddened eyes. There was no pity, no mercy in his gaze, only a cold satisfaction. There was enough sanity left in the sorceress to know despair when she saw the ice in Dorgo’s gaze.
‘Everyone will die!’ she pleaded again.
‘Better death than a life of slavery under the Sul,’ Dorgo snarled.
The Black Altar trembled again as the armoured fist of the Skulltaker dropped another trophy into the slavering mouth of the forge. Dorgo struggled to keep his footing. There was no hope, only a choice of evils, but it was his choice.
Dorgo made his way back out onto the Black Altar’s jaw, deaf to Sanya’s wailing screams. He braced himself as the structure shook again, as pillars of black flame leapt up from the pit. He moved out along the jawline, climbing towards one of the immense anchor chains.
Whether he fell into the pit or was consumed by the rising flares, Dorgo could take comfort in one thought.
When the Skulltaker dropped his last trophy into the forge, the Sul would know the choice that Dorgo had made.
Somehow, Dorgo was able to cross the horrific pit. Even in the oldest of his tribe’s legends, even in the tales of Teiyogtei, Dorgo had never heard tell of such an impossible escape. Choking vapours, pillars of fire as tall as mountains, the bucking violence of the chains and their scalding heat, such odds even the boldest liar to assume the mantle of shaman would not have dared to tell. Yet, by the grace of what gods Dorgo did not know, somehow he had reached the other side.
He had emerged from the glowing light set into the breast of the bloodthirster’s corpse, scrambling down its charred husk even as it crumbled away beneath him. Dorgo had barely reached the ground before he saw the enormous body collapse, falling in upon itself like a burning log. Even then, the dissolution of the carcass was not complete. The shapeless chunks continued to fall apart, disintegrating into dunes of blackened ash.
Dorgo stared across the horizon, struck numb by the horror that beset his eyes. The landscape of piled
bone and skeletal ground was changing, shifting in subtle, uncanny ways. Mounds of bone resolved into familiar peaks. Trees and rivers began to manifest into phantom shapes. Dorgo found that what he looked upon was horribly familiar, that he looked upon hills and mountains that he knew from the lands of the Tsavags. As Sanya had warned, the domain was being absorbed into the realm of the Blood God.
It was not a clean, pure sort of transference. The arrangement of hills and forests was erratic, far different from the way they had existed in the mortal world. The ghastly landscape the places of the domain intruded upon was not banished, but horribly merged into the substance of mortal stone and mortal tree. The strange image of the lands around the domain being stretched to cover the hole where the kingdom of Teiyogtei had once been suggested itself to his mind and would not be unseated. The domain had not been conquered. The realm of Khorne had not expanded.
The domain had been absorbed, consumed, torn from the mortal world and scattered through the spectral borderland of the Wastes. It was conquest in a deeper, more terrible fashion than the cruellest warlord could understand.
Dark clouds gathered in the sky, scarlet lightning flashing through their sombre veils. Red, pasty drops began to weep down from the clouds, a rain of blood. Dorgo could see stretches of the bone-littered Wastes bubbling and frothing as crimson pools spurted up from beneath the earth. All colour drained away as the crimson gore covered the land. The ground was lost beneath the rising tide of blood. Dorgo sloshed through the growing sea, rushing to gain one of the surrounding hills. A roar that was not thunder rolled through the desolation, and he thought again of that hungry howl in the depths of the forge.
Fierce winds tore at the heavens, sending the blood-rain splashing down in nearly horizontal sheets. Dorgo felt the sting of the drops sizzling against his skin, hot with an unholy fire. Tremors shook the earth, great geysers of black flame erupting from beneath the expanding sea of blood. Terror, brutal and malignant, scratched at his mind, hissing words of doom into his soul.
Dorgo at last reached his hill, scrambling up a surface that was slick with blood: trees covered in thorns, grass as bloated and obscene as that of the borderland, rocks with the sinister suggestion of bony arms. Nothing, not even in the most abandoned reaches of the domain had ever been so malevolent, so eager for a man’s blood. He could almost see the thorny arms of the trees reaching out for him, could almost feel the skeletal rocks clawing at his feet.
Always, there was the pulsing, pounding rage pressing against his skull, turning his brain crimson with thoughts of murder and savagery. Death, destruction and carnage, and the lust to exult in slaughter and ruin, pawed at his mind, trying to twist it, to consume it as the Wastes had consumed the domain. Dorgo screamed, trying to keep his last, tenuous hold on what he knew to be himself, trying to keep from being absorbed into something else, something monstrous and ancient and eternal.
The sea of blood continued to rise, swallowing the hill below him. Dorgo climbed higher, ever higher, fighting his way through brambles and brush alive with knife-edged thorns. The stinging rain became a burning deluge, welts rising up from his scalded skin as it struck him.
Then, with impossible abruptness, all was silence. No rain fell from the sky, no rock clutched at his foot. The terror and the bloodlust withdrew from his mind and soul, draining away. The wind became only the faintest breeze and the bellowing roar was a dim whisper. Dorgo found his gaze drawn back across the swollen waters of the sanguine sea, a sea more vast than anything he had ever seen, where only a few peaks and rises disturbed its surface. His attention was fixed, not to the mountains, nor even to the ocean of darkened gore. What he looked at was beneath those grisly waters, a heap of ash drowned beneath the waves.
Tears of blood fell from his eyes, blood burst from his ears and ran from his nose. He bit his tongue as his mouth opened to scream.
The surface of the sea erupted with a violence beyond that of the geysers, lifting in a great explosion that sent tidal waves rippling in every direction. Immense, gargantuan in its dimensions, the reborn daemon rose into the black sky, its leathery wings fanning the air in great lethargic beats. Molten bronze dripped from its massive hooves, fire falling from its claws. Armour, black and ancient, writhed with the torments of the souls trapped within. Hound-like jaws opened in a victorious howl that ripped across the world, finding its echoes in murders and outrages in a thousand lands. Baleful eyes, black as pits of blood, glared at the heavens with a hate more ancient than time.
Slowly, the apparition faded, vanishing into the ethereal kingdoms of gods and daemons.
Dorgo held his head in his hands, understanding the horror that his revenge against Sanya and the Sul had unleashed. Krathin the bloodthirster, the Lash of Khorne, was free.
EPILOGUE
Dark waves of blood lapped against the skeletal shore of Dorgo’s refuge. Except for a few scattered islands peaking above the crimson ocean, the Tsavag warrior was alone. Only the biting wind stirred the black sky, and only the sound of sluggish waves sloshing against the shore interrupted the silence.
Dorgo paid little attention to the barren world around him. He was locked in the awful realisation that he was the last of his people, the last of the Tsavags. Everyone he had ever known, everyone he had ever loved, respected or admired was gone. Even his enemies had been consumed by this ghastly world of blood and terror: the Vaan, the Seifan, even the Sul. All were gone. In the desolation of his heart, even hatred was denied its place. There simply was no one left.
The clatter of something striking the rocks beside him snapped Dorgo from his gloomy reflection. He spun around, gasping as he saw what had been thrown at him. Upon the rocks, shining with a dull inner glow, was the Bloodeater. The warrior lunged for the weapon, seizing it in his fist. He could feel its strength and power surge through him, pouring fire into his soul. He was alone, but he was also alive, and while he was alive, he would fight. To do less would shame the memories of his vanished race.
Dorgo rose from the ground. He saw a ghastly shape waiting for him at the top of the sunken hill. Blood from the dark sea dripped from the thing’s leathery crimson flesh and sizzled from the length of its smouldering sword. Great talons blacker than obsidian tipped its long, cruel hands. Bestial, reptilian paws supported it, hooked claws splayed wide to maintain purchase upon the blood-slicked slope.
A heavy cloak woven from numberless skulls tumbled from its shoulders, whipping about its body in a charnel breeze. Bronze armour encased its chest, the ancient metal pitted with the marks of battle and the runes of Khorne.
Its head was twisted and savage, four great horns stabbing out from temple and crown, notched and curled with infamy and spite. Its face was a merciless, skull-like visage, crimson skin stretched tight across daemonic bone. Dorgo was reminded of the ghastly bloodletters that had menaced him upon the anchor chain, but looking into the thing’s pitiless eyes he saw a hate that was beyond any mere daemon’s gaze.
‘The ember-like eyes stared down at the Tsavag and he knew the enemy for what it was. Dorgo did not know what terrible metamorphosis had consumed the last vestiges of the man who had been Vrkas. He did not know what inhuman malevolence had been poured into the vengeful champion in his moment of triumph. He could not guess at the abominable marriage of mortal and daemon, the fusion of living flesh and eternal malice that had created the horror which now glowered at him. His mind would not understand the strange path that had led the monster back to him, a spectral trail through forgotten lands and forgotten ages.
It was enough for Dorgo to recognize the daemon, to put a name to its timeless rage. The name of Skulltaker.
‘Your gods have spared you, monster!’ Dorgo spat, finding a terrible joy as hatred was restored to his heart. ‘Now they demand an end to our contest.’ Dorgo slashed the sword of Teiyogtei through the stagnant air, savouring the feel of it in his hand. This time, there would be no distraction, no interruption. The shock of Hutga’s death could not overwhelm him n
ow. This time, it would be a fight to the finish.
‘Come, monster,’ Dorgo snarled. ‘I’ll send you to join your daemons!’
The Skulltaker’s claws crunched against the bony shale as he descended from the high ground. There was no hesitancy in his march, no doubt or question, only the grim resolve of a man who had long ago accepted his fate.
‘No gods,’ the Skulltaker’s grinding voice spoke. ‘No witches. Just warriors.’ He paused in his descent, lifting his wailing sword in a sombre salute. ‘Just warriors and steel.’
As the two warriors charged across the desolate hillside, crashing together in a crush of muscle and metal, both knew the outcome of their battle mattered little.
The Blood God would not care from which carcass the blood flowed.
APPENDIX
Tribes of the Horde
Using the daemon weapons forged in the hellfire of the Black Altar, the great king Teiyogtei Khagan bound the loyalties of eight mighty chieftains and their tribes to his cause. With this mighty horde, he set out to do what no mortal king had ever accomplished: to carve an empire from the fractured wastes of the Shadowlands.
Tsavags
Teiyogtei Khagan’s own tribe the Tsavags are of the Tong race, a savage people dwelling in the heart of the Chaos Wastes themselves. Grotesquely mutated, possessed of strength and endurance far beyond lesser breeds of men, the power of the gods saturates the flesh of the Tong. Keepers of the mighty war mammoths, the Tsavags were great among their people even before the rise of Teiyogtei. Swept up in the king’s vision of conquest and glory, the Tsavags formed the nucleus of what would become his horde. Fierce and proud, fired by their connection to the legendary king, the Tsavags remain a powerful force within Teiyogtei’s shattered domain.
The Tsavags practise ritual scarring, carving marks into their flesh to denote their lineage and accomplishments. By this token, a member of the tribe will recognise the status of a kinsman simply by observing the signs carved into their face.