Blood for the Blood God

17

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 could 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.

“Remove that and anything else you don’t need,” he told her. “Anything like cord or rope, you give to me.”

Hesitantly, timidly, Sanya began to discard the many charms and amulets she bore. Lead flasks of strange humours, tomes of spells bound in serpent-skin, strange foci of every description and shape soon littered the ground. Besides her torn robe, she wore only a single charm, a silver representation of the Eye of Cheen the Changer. Dorgo nodded in approval when the woman finished stripping away her excess weight, and then glowered at her as she stooped to retrieve her bag.

“Leave that with the rest,” he scolded.

Sanya glared back at him. “If it stays, so do I,” she snapped.

“It looks like it weighs more than the rest combined,” Dorgo snarled.

“That is my worry,” Sanya told him, defiantly standing her ground.

The warrior glared at her, furious at her idiotic obstinacy. What was so important that she would risk both their lives and those of their people? Dorgo took a menacing step towards her, tempted to seize the damned thing and throw it into the pit. He relented only when he saw Sanya edge towards the lip of the shelf, her intention clear. If the bag went, she would follow it.

“It’s my worry if I’m going to carry you across that damned pit!” he growled, backing away.

Sanya stared at him for a moment, as though not fully understanding what he had said. Briefly, a look that could almost be described as gracious came over her pretty face. Quickly, it vanished and the usual expression of smug arrogance returned. “I have abandoned much of my magic already,” she told Dorgo in a withering tone. “I will not leave it all. The bag comes with me, or you can try to puzzle out the secrets of the Black Altar for yourself.”

Dorgo lividly cursed the woman’s stubborn insistence. He looked away from her, testing the strength of the cords and straps he had collected from the discarded gear. A few snapped under his brutal efforts, but others held fast. He coiled them around one forearm. Turning back to Sanya, he scrutinised her from head to foot, appraising her as he might appraise a mammoth calf. He felt confident that he could carry her, even with the bag, but the distance they would have to cover was not to be discounted. Dorgo felt sick at the thought of trying to cross the chain with the added strain on his muscles, but there was no other way She had to get across.

Dorgo stepped in front of the sorceress. “Onto my back,” he said. “Grab me from beneath the arms, clasp your hands behind your neck.” Sanya didn’t question the order, but pressed herself against his body. Dorgo took one of the cords from around his forearm, tying Sanya’s wrists together. It was an awkward process, relying upon touch rather than sight, but he would rather have the pressure against the back of his neck than have a choking knot around his throat.

“Legs,” he said, slapping his belly. He felt Sanya’s weight drag on him as she shifted her body to comply. The sorceress’ slender limbs wrapped around him, crossing over his midsection. With her arms secured, he took the leather length of his belt and lashed Sanya’s legs together crosswise against his stomach. He could feel every curve of the woman pressing against him as he made the strap tight. He almost forgot the kind of creature she was, sorceress and Sul. Then he looked again at the bronze chain and the boiling pit and remembered exactly what she was: dead weight.

He stood for a moment, taking a few experimental breaths, making certain that the bindings would not restrict his breathing. Dorgo let himself become accustomed to the added burden of the woman. Tied to his back like a Muhak mother’s baby-basket, Dorgo hoped he had done everything he could to prepare. With a last prayer to gods and ancestors, he stepped out onto the first link, slowly edging his way back across the ghastly span.

Togmol shook his head as he watched Dorgo retrace his path with Sanya tied to his back. A blast of black fire set the entire chain swaying, forcing both Tsavags to grab desperately at the vertical loop of the strange bridge. Togmol swore. Dorgo was mad trying to cross with the witch. However long their chances were of deciphering the Black Altar alone, the chances of making the crossing with a Sul sorceress hanging off his body was even worse.

Dorgo motioned for Togmol to move ahead. The big warrior understood what his friend was telling him. They had both felt the way the chain had swayed when they moved. Coupled with the fiery temper of the pit, it was an added hazard they could do without. The idea was to move in sequence. Togmol would press ahead to the next link, and then Dorgo and Sanya would follow. They would keep an empty set of links between them, so they did not risk unbalancing one another when they made the desperate scramble from vertical link to horizontal.

It would make for a slow, tedious, backbreaking crossing. One look down, however, was enough to vividly display the price for haste.

Hours seemed to pass as they crossed the swaying span. How many times they had nearly been knocked from the chain by a tempestuous blast of force from below, how many hideous moments of terror had stolen upon them as their hands and feet desperately struggled to secure a hold as they lunged from one link to the next, none of them liked to consider.

Whatever favours or fortunes the gods owed to them had been spent a hundred times over in the perilous crossing. None of them dared hope such indulgence would continue to the end.

The end was near, however. Only twenty links separated them from the grisly blackened skull that loomed above the pit. Closer, they could see its strange contours, its angled cheekbones and glaring sockets. The horns were etched with savage runes, and the teeth filed into spear-like fangs. From the depths of the open mouth, they could see an angry, infernal glow, burning with a sanguine light.

There was movement in that light, something dark and fearsome. Dorgo had the impression of several men moving around in the shadows. Then the shapes emerged from the black recesses of the structure into the hellish light of the pit, not men at all, but a grotesque semblance of human form. They were tall, their bodies swollen with muscle and strength, their skins leathery and crimson. There was nothing human about their heads, elongated skulls with barbed curls of black horn coiling against their sides. Their faces were cruel and inhuman, bleached fangs grinning from wide mouths, blood-black eyes staring from the pits beneath heavy brows.

Dorgo felt Sanya gasp in fright. “Bloodletters,” she hissed. “Armsmen of Khorne!”

The daemons crept to the edge of the open jaw, smiling with vicious mockery at the men struggling so hard to cross the distance to reach them. One of the monsters stared full into Sanya’s pale face. It lifted its hand, splaying wide its talon-tipped fingers. With a growl, it folded one of the digits against its palm. In using the finger of a daemon to guide them here, Sanya had not considered that she was betraying their intentions to that same daemon.

The bloodletter snarled something to its fellows, something that brought feral barks of amusement from the daemons. The beasts advanced upon the bronze anchor chain that Dorgo and his comrades were crossing. With an incredible display of brute power, the daemons grabbed hold of the bronze links and began to tug at the chain.

Slowly at first, the Tsavags felt the effect of the daemons’ efforts. The chain began to lurch upwards, then outwards, and then down, in a terrifying rolling motion. The men tightened their holds around the vertical loops, screwing shut their eyes as they endured the ghastly ride.

After what seemed like hours, the daemons tired of their sport. Neither of the men had lost his hold, no satisfying scream had risen from the pit as the impertinent mortals fell to a fiery doom. Instead of stepping away from the chain, the daemons waited for its momentum to subside, fairly drooling in wicked anticipation. Just as the chain became stable again, it once more shuddered from the attentions of the bloodletters.

The daemons were crawling out onto the chain, leaping from link to link with a contemptuous ease that sickened the men watching them.

Togmol began to retreat back along the chain, hurrying to keep ahead of the bloodletters. The entire span swayed and bounced as the daemons howled in anticipation of the blood that would soon stain their claws: worse than the buffeting caused by the spurts of flame from the pit, worse than the jouncing violence of their lunges from link to link, Togmol nevertheless did not falter in his hurried, desperate retreat. As he passed Dorgo, however, there was no fear on the big warrior’s face, only a resigned determination.

“Hold fast,” Togmol warned in a low voice as he crept past. Then he was gone, lunging for the horizontal link behind Dorgo’s. The warrior landed with a grunt, his legs sliding out from under him. Togmol’s hand coiled around the loop of the horizontal link. It took his full strength to lift himself back onto the swaying surface. All the colour was drained out of him when he again had the hot metal beneath his feet. He crouched there, his entire body quivering from the terror of his near-accident.

Dorgo turned away from his friend, alarmed by Sanya’s warning shout in his ear. Ahead, the bloodletters had drawn much closer, scuttling across the links like great red rats. Their eyes shone with murderous anticipation, and their jaws gaped in hungry excitement. Six links separated them from their prey… five…. four.

Togmol’s roar snapped Dorgo’s head away from the daemons. He saw the big warrior, his broadaxe raised high, his legs wrapped through the loop of a horizontal link, drive his weapon crashing against the chain Dorgo could feel the impact shiver through the entire span. He could hear the bloodletters snarl in sudden alarm. Then Togmol’s axe struck again, and Dorgo understood his warning to hold tight.

The link shattered beneath Togmol’s second blow. The chain snapped in half, sending the span behind Togmol’s axe shooting down and back, crashing against the wall of the funnel. The span before the bite of the axe swept forward, towards the skull-shaped dome of the Black Altar.

The tension of the chain gave it considerable momentum, cracking it like a whip through the emptiness beneath the structure. Dorgo felt his body cut and torn by the nest of hooks and chains beneath the Black Altar as the thick bronze length passed through them. Shrieks echoed from the cavernous walls as loathsome red bodies hurtled into the abyss. The bloodletters had not kept a tight enough grip on the links as they swarmed across the span to reach their prey. They paid for their hubris, splashing into the molten fire below.

Dorgo closed his eyes, biting down on the pain that wracked his body as the momentum of the bronze chain sent them crashing again and again through the nest beneath the Black Altar. Finally, the chain began to slow, its motion becoming lethargic and measured. When it finally stopped, Dorgo opened his eyes again. He could see the edge of the structure above them, a dark lip of twisted fangs around which the anchor of the chain was looped. Twenty links still separated them from their goal, and what had been a terrifying crossing, now became an even more horrifying vertical climb.

He looked down to thank Togmol for his quick thinking. Dorgo went cold when he saw only a set of empty links below him. The big warrior had somehow lost his grip during the violent episode, joining the daemons he had dispatched to a fiery oblivion.

“We still have to reach the altar,” Sanya reminded him, as though reading his thoughts.

Dorgo continued to stare at the empty chain and the boiling pit below. He wondered how much was too much. How much could be sacrificed before the burden was too great, the victory too small? He shook his head in disgust. A bitter victory was still better than defeat.

“Why not?” he decided with a sigh and began the long, laborious climb to the Black Altar.

Pyre-Rock, it was called. It was not hard for any who looked upon the sky castle of the Sul to understand why it had been so named. Once, the dreary dust bowl that sprawled between the wooded foothills and the stagnant pits of the Devourer’s swamp had been the capital of Teiyogtei’s kingdom. A great city had once stood here, its towers rearing up into the night, its battlements stretching a league and more around its houses and courtyards.

It had all gone. Not even a hint of rubble was left to show what had been. The city had been razed in the war that followed the passing of the king, as each warlord tried to assume command over all the domain. As the capital, as the city Teiyogtei had built, the settlement became a powerful symbol in the wars for domination.

The first to hold it had been the Sul and they had used the city as a formidable stronghold to prosecute their campaign of conquest. Alliance between the Vaan and Tsavags had spelled their undoing, however. After a terrible siege, the thick walls had been breached and the raging Vaan had put the city to the torch.

The conflagration quickly spread through the wooden structures, engulfing entire districts in the blink of an eye.

Even with their sorcery, the Sul had been unable to stop the destruction. Every flame they quenched was reborn elsewhere by a Vaan warrior’s torch. In the end, the sorcerers retreated to the alabaster walls of their palace, leaving their common tribesmen to perish in the flames. They combined their magic, bending it towards a single purpose, but not the salvation of the city, the salvation of themselves. Instead of extinguishing the raging fires, they encouraged them, exciting the flames higher and higher.

The conflagration swirled through the city, turning on the berserk warriors of the Vaan, driving them back. Only the white palace was spared. Outside its walls, the fire burned fiercer than anywhere, melting the earth, and gouging a deep furrow into the bedrock upon which the foundations had been set.

In a moment of awesome power, the palace was torn free from the earth, and carried up a hundred feet into the smoky sky, supported upon a pillar of white fire. The soot from the dying city rose up and swept across the palace, staining the alabaster walls an ashen grey, imprinting upon it forever the stench of death and destruction.

The pillar of white fire was still burning, generations later. With their common men gone, the Sul became a tribe of sorcerers and witches, perpetrating the most obscene rites to preserve their power and their sanctuary, the sanctuary that Hutga, desperately, prayed they would share with the Tsavags.

The mammoth-riders approached the eerie pillar of smokeless flame, gazing up at the grey walls above them. The mammoths stamped and snorted in alarm at the taint of fell sorcery. The men in the howdahs could feel it too, a clammy foulness that slithered across their skin and sickened their senses. Babies wailed and children cried, old men made the signs of the gods and women hid their eyes from the sinister fortress.

The power of the gods was a strange and terrible force, a thing to be revered and respected. Sorcerers like the Sul were the ultimate in blasphemy. They did not wield their powers through service and humility, but exulted in their magic, believing that they were masters, not servants or slaves. They met with daemons as though they were equals. They appealed to the gods not with prayers, but with pacts and plots, schemes that each sorcerer ultimately intended to twist to his own benefit. Madness was too small a word for such vainglorious pride.

Yet these madmen were his people’s final hope to escape the wrath of the Skulltaker.

Hutga stared at the silent, lifeless walls. Where were the sorcerous dogs? Had the Skulltaker already been here? Had he somehow made his way into the floating Sul fortress and taken the head of Enek Zjarr?

A snarl crawled onto Hutga’s face. No! This was simply more Sul trickery! Enek Zjarr might not be controlling the Skulltaker, but he meant to profit from him. The Tsavags were the last obstacle in his complete domination of the land. Why wouldn’t he abandon his allies, when it served his purposes?

“Enek Zjarr!” Hutga roared, his voice so loud that even the mammoths swayed uneasily at the sound. “Enek Zjarr! Show yourself you lice-suckling dung-worm! Hutga Khagan would hear more of your lies! He would hear more fables about Bloodeaters and Black Altars!”

The chieftain’s voice echoed across the empty landscape, startling a few rock rats from their holes. At first, only silence answered his roar. Then he saw motion behind one of the frosted windows of the palace. The portal slowly swung open. The faceless gold mask of Thaulan Scabtongue looked down at him.

“Why does a dead man howl outside my walls?” the sorcerer challenged Hutga. “You should be making peace with the gods before you see them. Beg them to forgive the weakness of the Tsavags and maybe they will even allow such a wastrel mob into the Hunting Halls.”

“Dog!” Hutga shouted, brandishing his spear. “Whoreson spawn of serpents! I won’t lower myself to speaking with your vile kind! Fetch me Enek Zjarr, I would speak with that treacherous liar!”

“He will not speak with you, Hutga Ironbelly,” Thaulan sneered from behind his golden visage. “Enek Zjarr communes with the gods. He has no time to waste with Tsavag vermin!”

Hutga’s face turned crimson with rage. He leaned back, pulling his arm back to cast his spear at the mocking sorcerer, caring little that he would lose the sacred weapon in doing so. Yorool’s panicked grip on the weapon was the only thing that stopped the murderous impulse. Sullenly, Hutga wrenched the spear from the shaman’s grip. He let the bronze shaft fall to the floor of the howdah, scowling with disgust at what he had almost done.

Above him, Thaulan laughed. “Play the warrior, Ironbelly, if you think that can save you!”

“Traitors! Traitors all!” Hutga hurled the words up at the palace as though they were stones. “You have used my people all along! What have you done with my son?”

“What we told you,” Thaulan said. “He has gone with Sanya to find the Black Altar and reforge the one weapon that can kill the Skulltaker.”

“Liar!” Hutga snapped. “You never intended to destroy the Skulltaker!”

“For one who came here to seek sanctuary for his people, you are most ungracious Hutga Ironbelly,” said Thaulan, his tone icy with contempt. “No man is the friend of the Skulltaker and only a fool would try.”

Hutga collected himself, despising the pride that had made him give voice to his rage. He had come here as a beggar, not a warlord. Whatever treachery Enek Zjarr had worked against them, the Sul were the only hope his tribe had left.

“Forgive my words,” Hutga said, almost choking on his shame. “They were unjust. I ask Enek Zjarr’s indulgence.”

“There is no sanctuary here for you,” Thaulan called down. Some sorcerer’s trick caused his voice to carry to even the most distant of the Tsavag mammoths, ensuring that even the oldest ears heard him. “But grovel all you like if it soothes your soul.”

“Do not condemn my people because of my harsh tongue,” Hutga implored.

“I condemn them because of their stupidity,” Thaulan hissed. “I condemn them because the Tsavags have stood in the way of the Sul for too long!”

“Let me speak to Enek Zjarr!” Hutga insisted.

“He will not speak to you, Ironbelly,” the sorcerer repeated.

“Damn you!” Hutga roared. “At least take in the children!”

Thaulan’s malevolent laughter was like the yap of a jackal. “Keep your brats, they’ll make fine sport when the end comes. I will tell you one thing, though, Hutga Ironbelly. Enek Zjarr was sincere when he said he needed your help to destroy the Skulltaker. You ask where your son is and I shall tell you. He is in the Wastes. Even now, he approaches the Black Altar.”

Hutga blinked in disbelief at Thaulan’s scornful words. “Then he is alive? There is hope?”

“No, Ironbelly,” Thaulan said. “There is no hope for you. The hour is already late.” The sorcerer’s gloved hand lifted, pointing from the window, out across the dusty plain. “For the Tsavags, it is later still.”

Hutga turned, following the direction of Thaulan’s gesture. Nearly every man in the tribe was doing so. What they saw sent a tremor of fear running through the entire company. In the distance, a dark speck could be seen moving across the landscape: a lone rider.

“The Skulltaker comes,” Thaulan hissed, a vile note of expectancy in his tone. “The Sul have already taken steps to protect ourselves from him. Can you say the same, Hutga Ironbelly?”

The sorcerer’s laughter was still dripping down on his ears as Hutga ordered the tribe back on the march. There was no sanctuary for them here. He had been a fool to think there would be. There was no escape for them. No matter where they ran, the Skulltaker would find them.

Hutga looked back at the gold-masked shape staring down from the palace. Maybe it was already too late, but if the Tsavags were to die, at least they could do so without jackals for an audience.