Tales of the Old World

by Marc Gascoigne

  The chieftain hacked again and disembowelled his own man. Karthos let the ruptured body topple away and ran across the flagstones to retrieve his horse.

  Bereng’s horn blew again. A few paces short of his twitchy steed, Karthos looked round. Nearly a dozen more Dolgan warriors were pouring down the steps on foot from the longhouses. That explained the riderless horses.

  Karthos ran to meet them. Ffornash and Aulkor leapt from their horses to join with him. Odagidor remained in his saddle and came in close to the steps, scattering the foot soldiers with his hooves. There was a hissing sound, and one of the Dolgans coming down the steps sprawled backwards with a red-feathered arrow in his brow.

  Karthos reached the lower steps, and swung his pallasz at the nearest Dolgan. This warrior had a long-hafted adze, and drove it down at the zar like a woodsman with a timber axe. Karthos side-stepped, and the man overbalanced from his desperate strike. Karthos’ pallasz opened him from the hip to the armpit and scattered broken links of ringmail across the flagstones. The man fell onto the courtyard floor with bone-cracking force.

  Ffornash the Dreamer had famed skill with the long-blade. He was a tall, lithe man who shunned armour because it slowed his limbs.

  Both fists around his sword grip, he danced up the steps, ducking an axe and sidestepping a stabbing spear, and sliced his silver sword back and forth, ripping through a neck and opening a Dolgan belly.

  Aulkor broke a Dolgan sword against his heavy pallasz, and cut the man through to the breastbone with a side swing. But his blade was wedged. He tried to wrench it free as another Dolgan came down at him with an adze. Karthos flew forward with a howl, and ran the adze-wielder through before his blow could land. The Dolgan thumped away down the steps, his adze spinning free into the air as the dead hands released it.

  “My thanks, zar seh,” Aulkor gasped, extracting his bloody sword at last.

  Karthos did not reply. The fight was far from done. Now Odek, Odagidor and Gwul Gehar had joined them on foot, battling up the steps into the thick of the Dolgan pack. Another enemy fell and rolled heavily down the stone risers, hit by one of Aulkmar’s arrows this time. The steps themselves had become slippery with blood. Dying men clawed at their ankles and shins. Karthos broke a shield away and then cut through the haft of an adze, then a forearm, then a throat. He was changing lives into death. Tchar would approve.

  Fighting clear, he reached the top of the staircase. The only Dolgans there were corpses, transfixed by red and grey feathered arrows. He turned and looked back, in time to see the act that finished the fight.

  Koros Kyr, still holding the warband’s standard high, rode in hard and killed a Dolgan horseman with a wide blow of his pallasz. Then he reined hard around and removed the head of the Dolgan chief. It was a superb cut, all the power of the standard bearer’s arm behind it. The brute’s helmed head flew off in a mist of blood, and bounced and rolled like a cannonball on the flags. His horse took off, and carried the headless corpse out through the gate and away down the ravine.

  Broken, the remaining Dolgans tried to flee, but there were Kurgan swords all around them. Gwul Gehar’s waraxe finished two more. The few that made it to the gateway, wailing and screaming, were dropped hard by Zbetz and Aulkmar, who sat astride their tight-circling horses, loosing arrow after arrow.

  Zar Karthos, spattered head to toe in gore, lowered his dripping pallasz and smiled. They had destroyed the Dolgan warband, and with no loss to themselves.

  Tchar was evidently with them.

  The sorcerer clan of Tehun Dhudek had numbered sixteen, an extended family of sons and fathers and uncles. A further twenty acolytes had dwelt within the high stone walls, along with some thirty slaves and womenfolk. Now only thirty lives remained all told, most of them the women, who had been hidden in the fastness caves when the raid began. The Dolgans had sought to learn the truths of the talon from the oracle by force of arms.

  Ygdran Ygra had been right. The truth was sometimes a curse, for the Dolgans had found only death at Tehun Dhudek.

  The survivors of the fastness clan regarded Karthos’ warband with some wariness, fearing that they had exchanged one murdering pack for another. With his sorcerer, Karthos went to meet with the most senior of the surviving hetmen.

  “We came to make fair offering in return for answers,” he told the old man squarely. “We would not have resorted to violence. You need not fear us now.”

  The old hetman sat on a clammy stone chair in the draughty hall of one of the longhouses. He had insisted on wearing a golden mask so that the Kurgan would not see his grief.

  “What would you have given us, zar, as an offering?” one of his younger acolytes asked. This young man had a bandaged stump where his right hand had been struck off by the Dolgans. He clutched it against his chest like a newborn babe.

  “Gold, fine stones from my war chest, salt-meat and wine. Whatever else pleased you that I could provide,” Karthos said.

  “But now we have given you more than that,” said Ygdran Ygra. “By force of arms and the sweat of toil, we have given you salvation from the Dolgans. What is that worth?”

  Answers, it seemed. For two nights, Karthos’ sorcerer was shut away in the furthest longhouse, probing the secrets of the clan’s oracle. A great storm came up during that time, and hammered upon the doors and shutters. The warband sheltered in the first longhouse, their food and drink provided by the grateful clansfolk. The storm’s rain put out the pyre of Dolgan bodies heaped in the yard before they were even half burned.

  The storm cleared. A pale yellow light filled the sky above the fastness peaks. The mountain air was alive with the gurgle of water draining and running down the cliffs into the valleys far below.

  Ygdran Ygra came out of seclusion, tired and hungry. He refused to speak until he had eaten a platter of pigs’ feet and drunk some watered ale besides. Karthos had never seen him so exhausted. For the first time, he looked his years, haggard and worn out.

  “It will be quite a thing to do,” he said at last, his voice soft. He dabbed shiny spots of pig grease off his chin with a kerchief.

  “How so?” Karthos asked, unplugging a wine flask and pouring himself a beakerful.

  “I know where it is and what it is,” Ygdran Ygra replied. “But now finding it is not the burden. Killing it is.” He shook his old head and tut-tutted. “Even your father, Kelim Karthos, he who was zar before you, even he would have shrunk from this task.”

  “Just tell me of it,” Karthos said.

  “A heralder,” said the old sorcerer. “Tchar wants us to take a heralder.”

  Karthos feared that if he told the men, they would revolt and ride away. But they begged to know, and he could not keep it from them. So he sighed, sat down amongst them in the draughty longhouse, and blurted it out.

  For a long moment, there was no sound except the moaning of the wind and no movement except the drift of the sunlight on the floor as clouds passed across the sky.

  Then Ffornash the Dreamer let slip a low, sad chuckle, and Gwul Gehar spat in the hearth, and the brothers Aulkor and Aulkmar looked at one another and shuddered.

  “So, not a doombull then?” asked Tnash He-Wolf.

  Koros Kyr slapped him for his question, and the warband broke into laughter.

  “You will ride with me?” Karthos asked.

  “We are pledged, zar seh,” said Odek simply. “Riding with you is what we do.”

  It took four days to reach the Wastes. Four days’ hard ride, and all of them fatigued and aching from the battle that, they were sure, only Tchar’s will had seen them win so thoroughly. Odagidor suspected that Tchar had wanted them to crush the Dolgans because they were the ones who were destined to meet the pledge and take the shyi honour.

  But Bereng muttered that they had been spared and granted victory only to give the heralder more blood to spill.

  None of them had ever seen a heralder, except for Zbetz Red-fletch, who had been a child when one savaged his home village. He remem
bered little of it, except its ravening beak that had rent his father in two. He had been a young child. It had haunted his dreams ever since.

  Lokas Longham said he thought he might once have seen one, circling in the heavens, high up, above Zamak Spayenya, many years before, when he had been riding with the warband of Zar Shevras. An eagle, the others said.

  “With the body of a lion?” he replied.

  “How could you tell if it was so far away?” asked Odagidor.

  “Maybe it was an eagle,” Lokas said resignedly.

  The Wastes were cold and empty. Nothing living seemed to grow or thrive there. At all sides, the dry plains rolled away to the limits of the world, broken only by ridges of crusted rock and scattered boulders. The soil was as dry as dust, as white as a sorcerer’s sacrificial chalk. The sky was dark, washed purple by the poisoned light. Thunder rumbled throughout the day, and around the hem of the horizon, slashes of lightning grazed the air and bit into the earth like bright and slender fangs.

  The air smelled of decay. Wailing sounds echoed over the desolation, from no obvious source. Amongst the white dust, every few miles, gnawed bones protruded. Horse, man, man-beast.

  On the fifth day out from Tehun Dhudek, Ygdran Ygra rose in his saddle and pointed.

  “There! As the insight was given to me. An outfall of rock, spiked in three places, like the front part of a crown. Before it, a steep slope of rocks and stones. In the sky of the west, a crescent of clouds. This is the place.”

  Karthos felt fear then, the turning of a long-standing worry into true fear. He sensed it settle upon his men too.

  He drew a deep breath and raised his left hand out, fingers splayed.

  They rode up into the flinty slope of stones. All of them carried long lances now, fashioned from the cold forests they had passed through to reach the open wastes. Swords would not be enough to do this deed.

  According to Ygdran Ygra—and the lore of the Northlands—a heralder was a most feral beast, twisted from nature and combined by the mutable touch of Tchar into a chimera. It was in part a lion, but more massive than even the greatest hunting cats of the Taiga, but its head was that of an eagle or vicious prey bird, hugely beaked. It possessed wings. In the oldest of times, such animals had been plentiful and common, plaguing the realms of man, but they had faded away into the remote corners of the world. Some said the wizards and lords of the Empire had such creatures tamed as war-steeds.

  They were called heralders, because their appearance was said to herald great events and moments of history. Ygdran Ygra feared the gods were playing with them. He had read the signs that they should pledge at a special dawn, a heralding moment. It was as if their path had been set from the start. Their doom too, perhaps.

  In the language of the tribes, these rare beasts were called ghur-phaon, the essence of all beasts.

  The warband moved up through the litter of rock, their horses’ hooves causing stones to slip and patter away down the jumbled slope. Thunder rolled, distantly. There was an increased stench of death in the air, as if meat rotted close by. Karthos saw the rocks were splashed with great deposits of white dung, like birdlime, but far more prodigious. “Caves,” said Odek.

  His second-in-command was pointing to dark holes in the cliff face above them. Roosts indeed. This place felt like a lair.

  Karthos lowered his lance and was about to call back to the band when a shrill cry cut the world apart. It was piercing, as loud as if an eagle had been perched upon his shoulder.

  The ghur-phaon showed itself.

  It had scented them, located them with its beady eyes perhaps. It came out of one of the deep caves and spread its fearful wings. They were mottled black and white, the lead feathers as long as a horse’s back. It took to the air.

  Zbetz Red-fletch screamed despite himself, his childhood horrors made flesh. All the horses reared, terrified, smelling the predator coming down upon them. Gwul Gehar was thrown down onto the stones, Lokas too, so hard his neck snapped like a twig. Aulkor’s horse broke and ran, despite his best efforts to control it, and carried him away down the long scree slope.

  “In Tchar’s name…” Karthos heard Odek stammer.

  The beast was huge. Its body massed the weight of six horses at least. It leapt into the air on lithe feline back limbs, its hide a mangy grey. A tail the length of the slave master’s finest gang-lash whipped out behind it.

  Karthos couldn’t decide what was most terrifying: the width of the massive, beating wings or the horror of the ghur-phaon’s foreparts. Its head, massive and distended, disproportionate to the limber body behind it, was the head of a vulture: a massive ivory beak like an ogre’s waraxe, at the crest of which tiny, wild eyes gleamed. The beak clacked like swords striking together, and he saw a glimpse of a thin white tongue.

  Around the head and back along the throat, the monster was fletched in black and white down, which became quite shaggy around its breast. Its forelimbs were not the nimble things of a cat. They were scaled bird’s feet, huge and armoured in silver. Each of the three scale-encrusted toes on the forelimbs sported a long claw.

  Just like the talon Karthos had seen the High Zar lift out of his box.

  It came down upon them, keening into the dark sky, beak opened to rake them apart.

  Zbetz Red-fletch fired off two arrows before it came upon them, but his darts seemed like tiny red flecks amongst its feathered breast. Aulkmar loosed one arrow of his own before his horse threw him. He broke his left forearm on the stones as he landed.

  Odek, Ffornash and Bereng hurled their lances at it. All bounced off.

  The creature landed amongst them, crashing out a blizzard of loose stones and chips in all directions. Koros Kyr and his horse were spilled over, and Tnash too, his horse ripped open by the ghur-phaon’s talons. It lunged at Gwul Gehar’s horse and bit it in two with a savage slash of its monstrous beak. The slope reeked of hot blood.

  Odagidor charged into the side of it, the tip of his lance digging deep. It recoiled and lashed out. Odagidor’s horse lost its head from the muzzle to the eyes and toppled. Odagidor had his spear shattered and his left arm removed at the elbow. Gwul tried to drag him clear, both of them sprayed with the blood pumping from Odagidor’s stump.

  Odek tried to recover his spear, but the vast, flapping wings smashed him over. Zbetz fired an arrow that struck the ghur-phaon in the throat. Enraged, it surged forward across the loose stones and seized Zbetz by the right hand and forearm, lifting him off his horse and shaking him in its beak. Screaming in pain, Zbetz flew through the air, his arm shredded.

  Karthos raised his lance and spurred his horse on, keeping the tip of his weapon low. The monster’s claws had just ripped Aulkor in half at the waist.

  Karthos plunged the lance into the beast’s upper body from the side, pushing it in with all the force he could muster. The ghur-phaon started to bleat and wail, its body thrashing. It almost tore the lance out of Karthos’ hands.

  Odek ran to him, and Tnash and Koros Kyr, and they all put their muscles into it, grabbing the shaft and pushing it home.

  The ghur-phaon screamed.

  “Hold it here!” Karthos yelled, and let go of the lance. He drew his pallasz and ran towards the snapping head of the monster. Double-handed, above his head, he swung the sword down and cut wide its neck, casting scads of blood down into the air. Blood engulfed him like a mountain torrent.

  He sank to his knees.

  “Zar seh… it’s dead,” Odek said.

  Karthos nodded, and went to one of the outstretched forepaws. With a cry, he struck at it, and then raised the bloody claw in his hand.

  Aulkor, Odagidor, Zbetz and Lokas were dead. Their mangled and twisted bodies were bound up and thrown across the backs of riderless horses. Almost every warrior was bruised and hurt. Aulkmar’s arm was shattered, but he complained only for his dead brother.

  * * *

  The moons were setting. They rode back along the trackway towards the gathering place. Flies buzzed
around the dead strung from their spare horses.

  Twenty-strong, Zar Blayda’s warband rode out into their path. Their swords were drawn.

  Karthos simply raised the talon in his hand. Dried blood clotted its thickness.

  “Want to try for it?” he hissed.

  Blayda turned his band back and rode away.

  The ring fire around the tree was lit. The bands had gathered.

  Karthos led his warband up to the pavilion to claim his honour. Drums beat all around them.

  “Have you fulfilled the deed?” Surtha Lenk said as he emerged from his tent.

  Karthos showed the High Zar the talon.

  “You know what this means?”

  “It means that my warband and I have done what is necessary. We have made your pledge. We must be granted with the honour of shyi-zar.”

  “Shyi-zar. Death zar. You understand what it is I want from you?”

  “Yes, lord seh. You ride to war. Should you fall there, you need the best warriors to ride ahead of you into the afterworld, to prepare your place and guard you when you arrive. This is the duty of the shyi-zar. This honour amongst honours I claim for my warband.”

  Surtha Lenk nodded.

  “Thank you. Ride on to battle, Shyi-zar Karthos,” he said. And with the ghur-phaon talon, he cut Karthos’ throat, and Odek’s, and those of all the others, every single soul of them willing.

  Slaves and sorcerers banked the ring fires up until the lightning tree was awash with firelight. Slaughtered, gutted and stuffed, the warsteeds were set upon poles, facing east, and the riders of the warband placed upon them, similarly supported.

  They had achieved the highest honour, the duty of preparing the way for their High Zar in the afterworld.