Blood for the Blood God

16

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 at 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 flesh-hounds 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.

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 sanctuary 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.