‘I suppose I have,’ Quintal admitted. ‘But it was only answering a thirst I already had… a thirst that all men have, though there are some who take perverse delight in refusing to give way to it. We came here in search of enrichment, my friend, and we have it. Are you not ready, after all we have suffered, to claim the entirety of your inheritance?’
‘If you will pardon me for saying so, Luis,’ Ashraf said, gently, ‘you do not seem quite yourself since you fell into the well. I am not quite sure what to make of you.’
‘You are not required to make anything of me,’ Quintal countered. ‘I am a self-made man, as all proud Estalians desire to be. The question is: what will you make of yourself?’
Ashraf glanced around at the walls that were a-swarm with exotic vermin. He remembered that he had passed his hand along those walls, and had come away with nothing worse than the slime of crushed fungus upon them. The scorpions had refrained from stinging him, and the leeches from sucking his blood, just as the horny asps had refrained from biting him. This was not the nature of such creatures; they were obviously operating under some alien influence.
Other men might have accounted that influence generous as well as kindly, but Memet Ashraf was a pirate; he had ceased to believe in kindness, let alone in generosity.
‘I have never had the slightest ambition to be a priest or a magician,’ Ashraf said. He had not known that it was true until he said it. But it was true. He had not known that it was irrelevant until he said it, either. But it was irrelevant.
‘If you attack me,’ Quintal pointed out, equably, ‘you will need to be quick and clever. Perhaps you can run me through before I can bash out your brains, and perhaps not. I think not, but you might disagree so I shall not press the point. Instead, let us look calmly at the possible outcomes. In one case, I would die and you would live; in another, you would die and I would live; in the third, we would both die. Consider only the first and best: what will you do when I lie stretched upon the staircase, with the sceptre tumbled from my hand? Will you pick it up, or leave it where it lies? Perhaps you would be a hero if you killed me, and perhaps a fool - but in either case, what would you be thereafter? What will you become when you stand here all alone, with the sceptre at your feet?
‘What will you make of yourself, Memet Ashraf? I make you no promises, although I could. I could promise you wealth, power, and luxury. I could promise you an empire - and more than that, all the joy and triumph of building an empire, of shaping its nature and future. I will not do that. I promise you nothing, except a chance to make something of yourself that is more than you are now.
‘As for the fee you must pay… well, I shall play the honest trader and admit to you that it is exceedingly high, and it may not be haggled down.
‘Now you know all that you need to know, and you understand more than most men are ever privileged to understand. So tell me, Memet Ashraf: what will you make of yourself?’
Still Ashraf hesitated, but he knew that the hesitation was only a display. He already knew what he had to do, and what he was. He supposed that he had known since the moment just before he had turned in his saddle to put an arrow into the breast of one of the pursuing orcs. That was the moment when he had first realised that there was a road of sorts across the desert: a road as yet invisible to Luis Quintal, but clear enough to a desert-bred man.
He had known as soon as he began to make out the ancient traces of that route that it was a road to damnation - and that every road he had ever followed in his entire life, by land or by sea, had been directed to intersect with it. He understood, now, that he had passed the crossroads, and that only a human capacity for self-delusion had kept him from knowing that the gap between anticipation and fulfilment is always an illusion of time and thought.
Memet Ashraf was not a hero - and if he was doomed to be a villain, he thought, why should he not play the part properly?
Ashraf placed the sword-belt around Luis Quintal’s waist, and buckled it for him.
‘We have no time to waste, my friend,’ the Arabian said, as the Estalian sheathed his sabre. ‘We have to find a safe way out of here as soon as we can. This crooked road has a great deal further to take us, and we had best be on our way.’
MARK OF THE BEAST
by Jonathan Green
TORBEN BADENOV SCOURED the smouldering remains of the peasant village for signs of life, but saw none. The settlement had been razed to the ground. The acrid odour of burning in the air almost masked another, more sinister reek; Torben knew instinctively what it was. His horse whinnied and snorted; she could smell it too, and it made even this hardy, steppe-bred warhorse uneasy. The musky odour was of something both animal and man, less than either but at the same time greater: the stink of the beastman.
For ten days the border patrol commanded by the highborn Captain Yasharov, had been hunting the beastman warband through the snow and ice of the coniferous forests, where the lands of the Taiga met the foothills of the Worlds Edge Mountains.
Torben ran fingers through his tangle of raven coloured hair and looked to where his men waited, as Captain Yasharov and his entourage rode up the wind-scoured slope in front of the broken posts of the settlement stockade.
Torben had been in the army of the Tzar for five years, first as a foot soldier and now as a cavalryman commanding fifteen men. He looked to each of them in turn. There was Oran Scarfen, a rat-faced, whiskered rogue from Talabheim; there was Vladimir Grozny, a huge, heavy-set bald-headed Dolgan. Adjusting the padded jerkin of his leather armour was Alexi of Nuln, one of the Emperor’s men. Alexi was the oldest in the band. Next came the two Tolyev brothers, Arkady and Andrei. Absent-mindedly cleaning the blade of an ebony-handled knife was Manfred of Stirland.
Oleg Chenkov, named the ”Preacher” by the men, sat in an attitude of prayer. Under his chainmail shirt he wore a sackcloth habit. Like so many others, his family had been murdered by the predations of a marauding northmen tribe. The experience had unhinged his mind, driving him into a sanctuary of religious fanaticism, and compelling him to find service in Tzar Bokha’s army that he might smite the enemies of mankind with righteous vengeance. His constant muttering of holy scripture unnerved some of the other men. He was mumbling now.
‘Be quiet, Preacher,’ said a blond-haired giant, seated high in the saddle of the roan next to Oleg. Arnwolf’s huge physique denoted his Norse ancestry. Beside the huge barbarian was Zabrov, a sallow-skinned steppes warrior. He rode saddleless and without reins, as if he had been born on a horse.
Mikhail Polenko was a member of an offshoot branch of the noble household of Praag and was quick to remind people of his proud and ancient lineage.
Then there was Yuri Gorsk who was practically a boy compared to the rest of them. The remaining four had been transferred from the remnants of a unit that suffered heavy casualties in an earlier skirmish. Kiryl, Evgenii, Cheslav and Stefan were their names.
The whole unit was uneasy. It had been only two days since they had last seen evidence of the beast horde’s rampage. Their quarry must be almost within reach: Torben could feel it.
The young cavalryman commander looked at his captain and Arman Yasharov returned the stare with fixed cold eyes. His flat nose and chiselled features spoke of his noble heritage, as did the swathing ermine-lined cloak and fine leather boots he wore.
Torben despised Captain Yasharov, and he was not alone. He was arrogant, ill mannered, short-tempered and lacked any real battle experience. Even in a country with a reputation for raising mighty warriors, there were still those who attained high position by familial influence, money or favouritism.
The unit commanders held the captain in low regard, but none would dare disobey his orders. The only ones who didn’t seem to share the general consensus were the captain’s personal bodyguard, and Torben knew that their loyalty did not come cheaply. So it was that Captain Yasharov was secure in his position as general of one of the Tzar’s armies.
However, Torben could well imagi
ne that Yasharov had been given this border patrol to lead thanks to the machinations of a political rival of his father’s. Somebody, it seemed, with influence even greater than Ramov Yasharov liked him about as much as his own troops did.
‘It’s definitely them,’ Torben told the captain.
‘We cannot be certain that this was the work of the horde we are hunting, commander. There are many such warbands infesting these forests.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, but we can be sure,’ Torben said, barely suppressing his frustration at his commanding officer’s irritating incompetence, and pointed over the ridge behind him.
A gust of wind brought the slurry stink of the dung to the captain’s nostrils before his eyes took in the scene. Excrement had been crudely arranged in moist piles to form a particular shape, one that they all now recognised. They had seen it many times since they had begun tracking the beastmen: torn into the bark of trees; daubed in blood on the rent awning of a pillaged wagon or made from the carefully-arranged bones of the warband’s victims. The ”Mark of the Beast”, some of the men had called it. It was a crude, almost runic, representation of a skull: two long, curved horns in the ascendant, two shorter horns framing the oval outline of a long-muzzled head. But they had never seen it on such a scale before. Here, the combined manure of the whole warband had been gathered together and moulded into a symbol that covered an area the size of a field.
The first signs they had come across of the warband had suggested a pack numbering somewhere in the region of twenty creatures. But it had taken more than twenty ruminating digestive tracts to produce this amount of excrement. Either the pack was growing in size or the first group they had encountered was only a splinter force of a much larger tribe, and one into whose territory Yasharov’s army had now strayed.
Torben had heard a rumour that there were more beastmen in the world than men. It was a nightmarish thought and Torben put it down to being just that - an exaggeration. Now he wasn’t so sure.
But something else troubled him. The corpses of several of the razed settlement’s defenders lay amidst the ruins. But they had found no other bodies among the burnt out buildings. Where were the rest of the villagers?
GASHRAKK BLACKHOOF, BEASTMAN champion, Chosen of the Great Beast and leader of the Dark Horn tribe, fixed Cathbad with a piercing black stare that bore into the shaman’s own blinking caprine eyes like a bone-tipped spear. Gashrakk was bigger and bulkier than the most formidable of his bestigors warriors. His whole body was corded with muscle and covered with a tough dark hide. Ridged horns rose proudly from his monstrous goat head. His flesh was pierced with symbols of his dark gods and he had a thick iron ring through his nose.
He was no mere bloodlusting beast. Of course, bloodletting and cruel violence had its part to play in sovereignty but Gashrakk was above those other chieftains who thought nothing of strategy and posterity. He has been blessed by the Chaos Gods, granted a malign, human intelligence combined with savage, animal cunning.
Cathbad the shaman wore a hooded robe that covered his body completely. It was decorated with esoteric sigils, painted with a mixture of blood and soot. Two long horns emerged from holes in the hood. The cloak-robe was tied at the waist with a gut cord and he held a long staff, adorned with animal skulls.
‘You summoned me, my Lord Blackhoof,’ the Dark Horns’ shaman grunted in the guttural words of the beastmen’s ugly tongue.
Gashrakk snorted gruffly, a gust of animal-breath turning the rancid air around him even ranker. ‘I did. I want you to read the auguries for the sacrifice. I need to know if today is the propitious time.’
‘I come prepared.’ The shaman ushered two gor beastmen into the chieftain’s hut. Slumped between them was a human prisoner, gagged and bound. Cathbad pulled a large saw-edge gutting knife from inside his robes, the prisoner’s eyes widened in terror. The gor guards tightened their grip on the panicking man’s arms and his desperate wailing penetrated the gag that stopped his mouth.
Cathbad thrust the serrated knife into the man’s midriff. With a sharp tug the shaman opened him up from stomach to sternum. Eyes screaming, the man watched as the rent in his abdomen bulged and ejected his intestines, the viscera flopping wetly and splashed onto the packed earth floor. The light in his eyes faded but the agonised grimace remained. The beastmen released their hold on the prisoner and the body crumpled to the ground.
The soothsayer stared at the pattern formed by the entrails and the pooling fluids.
‘The omens, are they good?’ prompted the beastlord.
‘The gods smile on this day,’ Cathbad said. ‘The signs are auspicious for the sacrifice. Slaughter the prisoners this night and the Lord of Misrule, the Lord of Beasts, will be freed of his prison, to fulfil the ancient prophecy.’
At the shaman’s words, Gashrakk considered the tribal herdstone, which stood on the highest ground within the camp, like some malevolent grey-black sentinel. The monolith was huge: three gors high, weighing as much as the whole herd. It was adorned with lengths of rusted chain from which dangled the tribe’s trophies and remnants of offerings made to their bloodthirsty gods.
But what made the Dark Horns’ herdstone unusual was the ancient prophecy that wound over the fractured faces of the rock. Carved countless seasons past in still-potent runes, it told of the Lord of Misrule, who had once held great swathes of land in the grip of his anarchic rule; a kingdom of confusion. It told how he had been conquered; how he now slept within a prison of stone, the Cave of Beasts; how he would one day be freed by a champion of the descendants of his tribe, to return order and civilisation to the natural bestial state of chaos and wanton destruction, red in tooth and claw, where beast preyed upon beast.
Gashrakk’s lips formed something approximating a smile. Then tonight it would be. It was Gashrakk’s belief that if he sacrificed enough souls to the daemon-beastlord he would rightly be made the greatest of those champions, and thus rewarded. The Lord of Misrule’s return would throw the lands of men into anarchy and the Dark Horns would rampage across the realms of Kislev and the Empire in a bloodthirsty orgy of killing.
‘Beware!’ Cathbad suddenly declared. ‘I see an army marching on our camp, an army of the hu-men.’
‘Hu-men,’ Gashrakk growled. ‘But the omens are good for the ritual to take place?’
‘Of course, my lord.’
‘Then nothing must be allowed to prevent its happening.’ He turned to one of his guards. ‘You! Take word to Slangar and Barruk! Tell them to marshal their warriors. Nothing must disrupt the sacrifice. We will deal with these hu-men like the litter of runts they are, and paint our fur with their blood!’
IT HAD BEEN easy for Torben Badenov’s scouts to follow the tracks left by the beastman horde. There had been nothing more the Kislevite soldiers could do for the nameless settlement and its lost populace, other than to avenge its memory and not rest until their chieftain’s head adorned a stake outside the army’s camp.
Torben spurred his steed forward, coming level with the sharp-eyed Yuri Gorsk and Mikhail Polenko. The other thirteen mounted men were spread out across the valley behind them. As Torben’s unit scouted ahead through the wild, untamed hills, the bulk of Captain Yasharov’s army trudged through the wilderness, several miles behind them.
Torben felt uneasy. He felt - knew - that something was waiting for them out here in the wilderness of the barren uplands. It was perfect ambush territory. He had not wanted to take this route and had suggested circling around the valley to come upon the beastmen from upwind to ensure a surprise attack. He suspected that the creatures already had the scent of the approaching army. Yasharov had rubbished the idea immediately, laughing at Torben’s, ”inane understanding of strategy”.
‘That could take days!’ he had scoffed. ‘The way to win this is to charge at the heart of the foe as quickly as possible, and rip it out!’
Torben guessed their captain was eager to return to hearth and home, at any cost. Torben scanned the rim of the valley. I
ts crest appeared almost black against the clouded grey-white of the winter sky. They would have to make the best of the situation. They could not return to Yasharov until they had at least sighted the beastmen.
And then Torben saw them.
At first they were no more than black silhouettes against the stark horizon, lank manes blowing in the wind, flint-headed spears in hand, taking their place in line around the valley sides. Then they were a pelting mass of leaping, bounding bodies. Torben’s men cried out to each other, drawing their weapons as the beastmen set about them.
It was immediately apparent as the pack converged that Torben’s scouts were greatly outnumbered. The horses whinnied and shied but the soldiers did their best to bring them back under control.
Darting glances from side to side, Torben saw four of the filthy, dark-skinned beastmen moving towards him. These were of the breed that some scholars and soldiers referred to as ungors, or un-men. Their bodies were thickly haired with contrasting-coloured fur covering their shoulders and descending the length of their spines to the scraggy tuft of a vestigial tail. Horns protruded from their foreheads, some no more than nubs of bone, others sporting crowns of several darkly ridged projections. All of them carried crude hide-stretched, wooden shields and deadly gutting-spears.
As the first ungor thrust at the mounted Torben, he was ready with a powerful down swing that batted the shaft of the spear away. The beastman stumbled forward on cloven feet, carried towards the mounted soldier by the momentum of its lunge. As a result, Torben’s returning upswing caught the creature under the jaw. Half its face disappeared as the malformed mandible was torn free. The ungor fled, screaming through the ragged, gaping wound.
Torben turned his steed towards his other attackers, as all around him his men engaged with the hollering beast warriors. The reins clenched firmly in his left hand, Torben swept his sword at the stooped figure to his right. He caught the beastman across its shoulders, opening a bright crimson wound in the matted fur.
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