Warcry: The Anthology

by Various Authors

  ‘What are you doing, Ma’asi?’ said Klitalash, behind him.

  Marik ignored him, rising with a faint rustle of dead snakeskin. His skin had been washed and pricked with tattoos. His hair had been washed and dyed and drawn up in the Invidian style. It smelled of dead snake and poisoned fat. He still wore his old rind plate, strips of rag sewn in around the midriff to cover the thighs, but the snakeskin cloak was another affectation of the Striking Death. His feet, beneath it, were barefoot. Desert style. The better to feel his path through the sand. For all their talk of Gods and favour, Marik wondered if it was the practical need for such local knowledge that led the Striking Death to assimilate the warriors of beaten tribes so freely.

  ‘I asked you what you are–’

  ‘I heard you.’ Marik turned his head. Despite his best intentions, Klitalash was a difficult man to hate. ‘I make offering. We have not been attacked in several days now. The Thirster of Blood must be placated, lest bloodlust run to disfavour.’

  ‘This will satisfy him?’

  Marik made a thin smile, hearing in his mind the old refrain. ‘It matters not from whence the blood flows…’

  Klitalash squinted over the rugged hills. The clearblood had donned a silver mask, etched with the acidic spit of certain prized serpents to evoke a coiling, hypnotic pattern. Only his throat and his eyes were visible. Marik could see that the young man’s eyes lacked the clear, scaly covering of the tribal elders, the truebloods and venombloods. They were lidded like a normal man’s, and the dust stung tears from them like a normal man’s.

  ‘You do not think we will spill more today?’

  ‘More is always welcome.’

  ‘The day is still young. It still basks in the dawn.’

  ‘There is something in these hills.’ Marik frowned towards the slumped dunes. ‘I hear them sometimes, particularly at night, mocking us, hiding in the voice of the wind.’

  ‘I hear them also, Ma’asi.’

  ‘The eight-tailed naga, perhaps?’ Marik shook his head. ‘But then why not show itself?’

  Klitalash shrugged.

  ‘I just wish I knew exactly what we were meant to find here. Lead us to the Brazen Hills, Yaga asked, and I have – but now what?’ Marik dropped to his haunches, scraping away an inch or two of gritty topsoil until his fingernails scraped burnished yellow metal. ‘Brass. The hills are made of it. This dust is blown in from Blood Lake Basin and the Corpseworm Marches.’ He looked up and pointed to where a bleak sun loomed over the undulating horizon. ‘From there. A thousand leagues away, give or take. Almost to the eastern limits of Carngrad. But these hills…’ Crouched, he turned his hand palm down. He could feel the repulsive power of the hills pushing back against his mortal flesh. ‘They are said to be a splinter of the Thirster’s axe, left in the ground when he smote this land in a fury. That’s how the surrounding territory earned its name – the Deepsplinter.’

  ‘Does the Red God know any other way to smite, Ma’asi?’

  With an icy smile, in spite of the younger man’s offhand blasphemy, Marik turned to look back.

  The Striking Death made a long sinuous line over the hills, backs bent under the weight of rolled tents and gear, wrapped in their cloaks, faces covered against the wind. They had set out from Marik’s steading with a dozen waggons, but the Deepsplinter was harsh terrain, and even the toxin-cured hardwoods of the Invidia jungles looked appetising to such creatures as could survive that desert.

  Even the environment was hostile.

  The first day had seen the waggons befouled in mires of blood, great bogs that had oozed from the porous rocks as if their passage had caused the ground to bleed.

  The second day had brought a cold so bitter that clothing froze to skin, the jungle saurians that pulled the Invidian waggons falling into a deep slumber and simply never awakening. The men and woman of the Striking Death had drawn lots to drag the carts throughout the third day.

  That night the skies opened, and it had rained knives.

  Many had taken shelter under the waggon beds, but Marik knew better.

  The way to see out such storms was to face them without fear, and to trust in one’s favour. By the time the storm had broken, half of the Striking Death’s followers were dead and all their waggons destroyed. After that, Yaga Kushmer ordered the warriors to carry their own gear and commanded their worshippers and followers back to the ruins of Marik’s steading. Muad’isha had glared at Marik as though this last act of unholy spite was in some way his doing.

  Marik had wanted to laugh in the champion’s face. He had not though. He could not seem to find the mirth.

  He was still thinking back on that, wondering on it, as Klitalash crouched by the small trench that Marik had dug. The wind was already starting to fill it back in with sand. The clearblood pointed past it to a relatively undisturbed spot.

  ‘What is it?’ said Marik.

  ‘A print.’

  ‘It’s a dent in the sand.’

  ‘A print.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘In my false life I was a hunter, raised by great hunters. It is a print, Ma’asi.’

  Marik frowned at it. It was little more than a small divot in the ground to him, as likely a freak of the wind as the heel or the toe of some denizen of the Brazen Hills. ‘It is difficult to follow prey in the Brazen Hills, but then I’m not much of a tracker. Nor a hunter. Most prey on the Deepsplinter will find you long before you find it.’

  Klitalash drew around the mark with his finger.

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘A dog?’ Marik suggested. ‘A bird?’

  ‘If I did not know better, Ma’asi, I would say it was–’

  The desolate cry of a hunting beast rang from the sand-covered hills.

  The long column of Striking Death warriors niggled to a crawl, individual fighters stopping to free weapons from burnous wraps, slowing everyone behind them down. A second howl echoed from the opposite direction.

  ‘A dog?’ Marik hissed again.

  ‘The print is not a dog’s.’

  Huffing and snarling, in a scrabbling hiss of sand, a huge hound-like animal crested the hill to Marik’s left. The beast was enormous, the size of a small horse, with a leonine mane of sandy fur, ram-like horns and random blisterings of vestigial spikes. The most immediately obvious feature, however, was an overbite of truly monstrous proportions, framing its small, deep-set eyes between a pair of sword-length incisors.

  ‘Rocktusk pack,’ Muad’isha called out, a fierce whisper that grated through the fear-clogged air. A long, serpent-coil spear hissed as it rattled free of the leathern sleeve on the trueblood’s back. He transfixed two adolescent warriors with an unblinking gaze and pointed to the rocktusk on the hill. ‘Kill it, hasousi.’

  With an eager shout, the two clearbloods struggled up the dune towards the dog, swords held clear above the sliding sands.

  The rocktusk regarded them disdainfully.

  Disquiet squirmed in Marik’s belly.

  ‘Something is not right here.’

  ‘Agreed, Ma’asi,’ said Klitalash, sharing his unease. ‘A rocktusk does not wait to make a kill.’

  The second rocktusk mounted the hill to Marik’s right. Its sand-coloured mane billowed in the full glare of the cresting sun. Shouts of challenge rose from the straggled line of Striking Death. In the midst of the column, surrounded by large men and lithe women with green-tinted blades, Yaga Kushmer seemed to uncoil. He rose off the ground with an angry hiss, his body lifted into the air on the backs of a dozen snakes.

  A third howl sounded nearby.

  Muad’isha started to shout something.

  Marik never heard what it was.

  A warrior exploded from the sand beside Klitalash and himself. Pale-skinned. Painted in woad and pierced. Clad in little more than a dusty loincloth. His hair was raked
back into a topknot. Sand cascaded from broad, muscular shoulders as he burst from his hiding place beneath the dunes, swinging an axe made of sharpened bone in both hands. Marik backpedalled, too surprised even to defend himself on instinct. Sand dragged on his heels even as the rest of his body bent to evade the swing. He fell onto a cushion of dust. The bone axe moaned as it crossed his belly. He kicked back from the ground, slamming his heel into the warrior’s shin. The man grunted, stumbled only for a moment, but long enough for Klitalash to wrap one hand around the warrior’s face and slide his wave-edged knife between his shoulders.

  A warm drizzle splattered Marik’s face.

  Klitalash withdrew his blade, pushing the murdered warrior over as he did so. He drew a slender vial of whorled glass and passed it to Marik. A dark liquor sloshed inside. Marik drew his knife protectively to his breast and bared his teeth.

  ‘No. Not on my wife’s blade.’

  The younger warrior frowned, but returned the vial to the pockets of his cloak.

  Marik got up.

  Everywhere he looked Striking Death warriors fought off feral-looking fighters who had buried themselves in the sand in ambush. The dust disturbed by the battle cloaked everything in a bronze haze.

  ‘Untamed Beasts.’ Klitalash drew a slender short sword in his left hand to complement the knife in his right. Striking Death style. ‘Like killing animals, Ma’asi.’

  With a howl, Marik ran at the nearest sand shadow he could define.

  The haze thinned as he passed through it, unveiling a hulking savage almost as massive as Muad’isha, made bestial by animal pelts and the horned skull that encased his head. The feral champion drew a wet fist from a tribeswoman’s back. It was sheathed in a gauntlet of blade-edged bone and held a dripping heart. The woman moaned as she toppled. The warrior smeared the still-beating organ over the jaws of his skull helm, and turned his head invitingly towards Marik.

  ‘Little warrior.’

  ‘Gore and bone!’ Marik yelled. ‘Souls for the Great Nagendra!’

  Marik did not know where that oath had sprung from. Nor, in that moment of blood thirst, did he care.

  Like a striking adder, he lunged for the pale slab of the champion’s chest. A cuff of bone blocked his knife. Marik’s arm jangled. The feral warrior laughed.

  Sand blustered between the two men and stole the unholy warrior away.

  Marik howled in frustration. The battle became a drugged blur, duels between ghosts and too-brief skirmishes, fought to the whims of wind and sand. It stole warriors, scattered the sounds of their combat with the feckless love of a child. At the sound of a drum-like pounding, Marik whirled to see a rocktusk thundering down a slope towards him.

  Twelve feet away.

  Ten.

  He saw its face, mashed up to unnatural ugliness by too-massive teeth, slobbering and terrible.

  Eight feet.

  It shifted its gait, weight pushed towards its hind legs for a killing lunge. Marik tensed, knife low, ready to drive it up into its mouth. It would not stop the predator from crushing his ribs and ripping off his face, but he might yet take the hound with him to the Plains of Brass.

  Just as the beast was primed to spring, Yaga Kushmer was there.

  Marik shifted his guard as the Serpent Caller stabbed his long steel blade into the rocktusk’s hind leg. It whined and turned to snap at the leader of the Striking Death, only to collapse onto the stabbed leg when it suddenly failed to take the beast’s weight. Yaga swept around it like a man with no bones and too many joints, stabbing and cutting several times. The rocktusk emitted a canine whimper as it flopped onto its paralysed muscles. The Serpent Caller chuckled. Drawing a thick-bodied snake from inside his cloak, he hissed to it, bent to deposit the creature on the ground and then was away even before the serpent had begun tightening itself around the rocktusk’s throat.

  Marik blinked, lowered the knife and forced himself to move again.

  A broad, bare-shouldered back emerged from the dust storm as he ran towards it. He bared his teeth. The champion. He stabbed, only to see some uncanny prescience warn the warrior of the incoming blow. The giant whirled. The sinuous haft of his spear cracked Marik’s wrist and knocked Jarissa’s knife to the sand. He gasped, clutching the bone in pain.

  Muad’isha grinned at him and dipped his head.

  ‘Ma’asi.’

  Then the trueblood’s back was turned again, his spear chomping through flesh and armour like a daemon-forge propeller through the thick mire of the Blood Lake.

  A bloodcurdling cry startled him from his reverie.

  He turned around, his back to Muad’isha’s, as a barbarian garbed only in bone piercings and body paint charged from the dunes.

  Marik dropped to one knee, scooped up the sinuously curved sword of a fallen warrior, then swept it to horizontal to block the barbarian’s blow. She snarled over their locked weapons, ripped her club away, then kicked sand into his face. He rose gracefully, meeting the ­woman’s animalistic fury with swiftness and guile. The viperish exchange of parries and blows brought stabbing pains from his bruised wrist. With a series of darting feints, he tricked the woman into opening her guard and slashed low. She saw it coming. He saw it in the sudden tension of rock-hard abdominals, the pulling in of the stomach, the bowing of the hips, and his blade tip stitched across bare flesh. A few spots of blood squeezed through the broken line of skin. The woman flashed filed-down canines, raw animal madness in her eyes. Marik coolly swapped his weapon to his left hand, and prepared to go again.

  Then the woman collapsed to the ground.

  Marik stared down at her as her foot began to jerk and foam ­bubbled from her mouth. He looked at his blade. The cold steel carried an unhealthy green-black tinge.

  ‘Nagendra,’ he breathed.

  Muad’isha chuckled.

  ‘To kill with one bite, this is a good feeling.’

  Marik tore his eyes from the sword in his hands. ‘It is.’

  ‘Now you are one of us, Ma’asi.’

  He raised his borrowed sword, his sword, and shouted a challenge, aware of the sibilance he was sure it had not contained before.

  ‘Nagendra!’

  The survivors of the Untamed Beasts knelt on the brass dunes, heads bowed in submission, hands bound behind their backs.

  ‘You win, old snake. What are you waiting for?’

  The barbarian’s leader growled like a bear whose sleep had been disturbed by a hissing viper. A savage mane of black hair blustered about him in the wind. His skull helm had been broken open, his face bloodied in the process, but Marik recognised the champion with whom he had briefly sparred.

  ‘Thruka Heart-eater,’ said Yaga. ‘You are a long way from your hunting grounds.’

  ‘Our hunting grounds are where our prey is. Our prey is here.’ Thruka’s heavy lip peeled up into a crooked, palsied grin. ‘So these are our hunting grounds.’

  ‘Yours is a simple soul, Thruka.’

  ‘Simple soul, simple life.’

  Watching from across the sand amongst the Striking Death, Marik leant towards Klitalash. ‘Do they know each other?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’asi,’ Klitalash whispered. ‘There are many tribes on the Bloodwind Spoil and only so much glory to be shared. The Striking Death and the Mad Hunt have circled each other many times.’

  ‘It has been many nights since Valarum,’ Yaga went on.

  ‘It has,’ agreed Thruka. ‘I assumed you were dead by now.’

  ‘If wishes were blessings…’

  ‘You took two of my hunters in the old city.’

  ‘You killed three of Yaga’s.’

  Thruka scowled and pulled on his bonds, glaring over the sneering faces of the Striking Death. His gaze seemed to linger overlong on Klitalash, eyes narrowing for a moment, before moving on. ‘Are my kin still here now?’

 
‘No. They died in Valarum, died in the pit. It is only Striking Death here now.’

  Unbidden, a sibilant chorus arose from the throats of the Striking Death. Marik joined them. Thruka glared defiantly, but several of his warriors contrived to lower their heads still further. Yaga turned to his warriors and raised his arms. The serpents wound about them rattled and hissed.

  ‘What should Yaga do with these warriors of the Mad Hunt?’

  ‘In the pit. In the pit. In the pit.’

  ‘What prey do they hunt?’ Marik called out.

  ‘Quiet, Ma’asi,’ Muad’isha hissed in his ear. ‘You will learn the silans, the art of stillness.’

  Thruka turned to him. His eyes widened slightly in recognition. ‘Little warrior. To cross Thruka in battle and speak of it after is as rare as a glimpse of the golden gor.’ He dipped his head to him. ‘I am honoured.’

  Marik felt little rage at the warrior’s boastfulness, just a torpid uncoiling of grey emotion in his breast. He wondered at that. It was as though vengefulness and hate were a poison against which the venom of Blan Loa had inured him.

  ‘We have read the entrails,’ said Thruka. ‘We have cast the bones and delivered smoke signals from the sacred eyries. The Gods guide us to the path of a beast worthy of our skills.’

  ‘Eight-tailed naga,’ Marik breathed.

  ‘What?’ said Thruka.

  ‘You track the serpent,’ said Marik.

  ‘I…’ Thruka’s big face settled into a grin. ‘We track its keepers. They are lazy and careless. We know where they camp.’

  Marik shivered in cold-blooded anticipation, and beside him felt Klitalash and Muad’isha do the same.

  ‘The trueblood spawn of Nagendra is here,’ said Muad’isha.

  ‘In these very hills,’ Klitalash added.

  Marik turned to Yaga. ‘We need them.’