by David Guymer
Wary now, Khagash-Fél stepped back. The Eye of Katchar had not shown him this. Tossing his axe out of the ring, he turned and yelled back to his own supporters for his more favoured weapon: ‘Sönögch, a sword.’
A tall warrior in armour of metal scales and a conical leather helm with a horsehair plume moved to obey. As the sword flew from the man’s hand Khagash-Fél saw that a fifth figure now stood amongst his supporters.
Everything seemed to slow down, as if the Eye of Katchar showed him his future once again.
The sword hung in midair as though trapped in crystal.
The shaman, Nergüi, was a flourish of colour beside Sönögch in his long, feather-like blue robes. Eagle feathers, animal teeth and gemstones glittered in the firelight. Dozens of bead necklaces made a frill around his throat and across his narrow shoulders. An elaborate feather headdress screened his weather-scoured features from the rain and torches. Only his piercing amber eyes shone amidst the umbral shade. For a brief moment they met Khagash-Fél’s one. With a movement so subtle it failed to disturb the chimes sewn into the streaming silk ‘feathers’ of his robes, Nergüi shook his head.
The sword sailed with celestial slowness into the ring.
Khamgiin.
A hammering filled Khagash-Fél’s head. The groan from his left gardbrace announced the swelling of his bicep as his fists clenched; fists that were turning a deep magma-red. Steam hissed from the joins in his armour where the rain struck his bare skin.
His last born was dead.
Khagash-Fél opened his mouth wide as if to cry out, but no sound issued forth but a strange, hollow buzz, that of a swarm of maddened wasps sealed within a jar. There was a rising pressure in his gut, like the urge to vomit only much more intense and with an irresistible will of its own behind it. Steam poured off him as, with a resounding crack, his jaw dislocated and stretched still wider.
His sword came towards him.
Khagash-Fél batted the blade aside to send it skittering away across the stones.
Everything snapped back into focus.
Buhruk bellowed a new challenge and raised his spear as Khagash-Fél finally released a cry of his own, a droning roar that rose from his gut, flying from his distended jaw on a torrent of bloated, pestilential flies. The Doombull swung his mace into the swarm, as effectual as a brush in holding back a wildfire, and an instant later he was engulfed in it. The minotaur screamed as if he was on fire, swinging wildly from within a chittering second skin, as he tottered forwards and then toppled. On hitting the ground his mighty frame burst apart, thick bones and armour plates piling into the cobbles and scattering putrid chitinous bodies across the ring.
Khagash-Fél sucked back a deep breath, working his jaw until he felt it click back into joint. Fury glimmered down to a cold point, the dark ember after an inferno.
‘Is there another challenger?’
Men and their horses crowded the road, filling the narrow street with the creak of rain-softened bull-hide armour and drunken laughter. They cheered Khagash-Fél’s victory as he and Nergüi strode past. The shaman’s bone clogs clicked on the cobbles, the strips of sodden blue silk that made up his robes trailing through the excrement that ran in rivers down a drainage channel in the middle of the street. A rat the size of a fox and covered in blisters scurried from a doorway to lap at the stream. The half-timber walls that flanked the cobbled road were scratched with depictions of steppe spirits – Katchar the all-seeing eagle; Khorûne the warhorse; Nhorg the carrion crow and harbinger of pestilence; Silnaar the hound, the reveller – or the newer symbols of the Greater Gods they represented. Others had been knocked down altogether to leave piles of rubble, over which mangy children formed loose tribes to fight for the acclaim for their elders. The thatch had gone to the horses. Horse-hide tents shrugged off the rain within the ruins, drab cone-shaped structures draped with skins and furs and pegged into the rubble with bone pitons.
Even within the walls of the civilisation they had crossed mountains to level, the tribes still preferred the comfort of their tents. On another day, it would have been amusing.
Khagash-Fél walked to a stone building that had lost its front wall, roofed only by a skeletal frame of wooden beams. Rainwater sluiced through onto the men bent over their steaming anvils below. The flat notes of hammers beaten into solid iron rang out. A ribbon of sparks screamed through the open wall, stuttering, pausing, then flaring up again as a heavily tattooed smith pressed the sword in his hands to the sharpening wheel.
‘How does she fare, Darhyk?’
At the deep knell of his voice, the smith looked up and grinned. His shaven head glistened with a mixture of rainwater and sweat, his dark hair worn as a topknot and looped around his neck out of the way of his craft. A brand similar to the one on Khagash-Fél’s face – marking him as once the property of the steel-shops of Zharr Naggrund – had obliterated half of the man’s face. His muscular torso swam with tribal tattoos as he drew the sword from the wheel and held it before his eyes. They were tightly bound with black cloth and he ran his fingers blindly down its lithe, curvaceous edge.
‘She is a fine figure of a blade, warlord. What I would give to see her with my own two eyes.’
‘You would not be the first. And whatever you would give, she would take from you. That and more.’
The smith sighed and lowered the gilt-edged blade to within a hair of the spinning stone wheel. Nergüi faced determinedly out into the street. His shoulders shook with yearning. ‘Then she is a true lady,’ said Darhyk. ‘Had I been you I would have let her dance with the Doombull.’
‘Ildezegtei does not lower herself to such games, and nor would she forgive the interruption to her ablutions.’
‘The gods see you victorious in any case,’ said Darhyk, kissing his fingertip, placing it to his heart, and then pointing it north towards the home of the Greater Gods. ‘My prayers now are for your son.’
Khagash-Fél showed Darhyk a face of stone. ‘The gods seldom heed my prayers, old friend. I doubt they heed yours.’
‘Yes, warlord,’ Darhyk replied smartly, returning the blade to the stone with a keening shriek of what sounded almost like pleasure.
‘This way,’ said Nergüi in a relieved murmur once they were away from the smith’s workshop.
Everywhere there were warriors: singing, drinking, casting bones, feasting around great fire-pits dug out of the cobbles, and fighting, anything to make the weeks of inaction pass more swiftly as their scouts hunted for the armies of the Empire and the next phase of the war. Occasionally there were beastmen amongst them, but for all that the End Times had united them, their ancient breed and men were too different to commingle and the herds confined themselves largely to the forest outside the walls.
How Khagash-Fél had come to despise those woods.
It was foreign, unnatural terrain. At times it felt like a wall around the city, one designed to keep him and his horse warriors in rather than invaders out. Viewed from the city’s tallest buildings it stretched on forever, and it felt like no surprise that even the limitless legions of Archaon could be swallowed without trace. Some days it was easy to believe that there really was nothing but the forest, that the world beyond its borders had already fallen to the Realm of Chaos and this pocket of rain-lashed stone was all that remained.
The gods had guided him this far. They had called him from battle with the forces of Greasus Goldtooth and summoned him to this strange place, and he refused to believe that even the gods would call on the mighty Khagash-Fél without good cause. If they could only send him a sign, some inkling as to what great task he had come here to perform and where it was to be done.
Instead they had taken his son from him.
And if the tribes did not leave this place for fresh conquests soon then Buhruk Doombull would not be the last champion to die by his hand.
After about half an hour of rui
n and squalor, they approached a small patch of scrubby common flanked on three sides by high-walled stone buildings with mock battlements on their roofs. The Empire men – Hochlanders – had made a stand here, blocks of spearmen and halberdiers packing the road and the common while their feared longrifles poured down shot from the surrounding balconies. There had been straw bales here and big, circular targets erected on wooden stanchions set up on the grass. This had been a place where men practised their martial skills. But no longer. This was Nergüi’s realm now, a place with one foot in the stirrup of the final ride. This was where the shamans brought the injured and the sick.
It was a place that Khagash-Fél, blessed by the gods, had had no cause to visit before now.
Hitching up his robes, Nergüi traipsed into the muddy quagmire that a succession of rain and hungry war-beasts had made of the grass. The targets and straw men were long gone, replaced by a number of interconnected tents, each large enough to incorporate several chambers within their thick hide walls. Unlike the practical tents of the warriors these were a lustrous white, cut from the carcasses of the white pegasi that dwelt amongst the highest peaks of the Mountains of Mourn and glowing from within with the burning of fragrant oils. Runic symbols and expansive, sprawling motifs had been scratched into them and glistened in the wet. Elaborate spirit catchers made of feathers and beads and lengths of white silk fluttered between the structures like moths after the illuminated hides. Wind chimes sang mournfully. Coloured flags fluttered from rings punched into their sides, all the way to their open tops where incense-scented smoke puffed into the rain.
Nergüi strode ahead into the tent complex.
Younger men in similar but less ostentatious garb to the shaman moved purposefully between covered door flaps, hurrying from shelter to shelter to protect vials of unguents and baskets of sweet-smelling herbs from the rain. A handful of hulking bray-shamans wandered between tents, sniffing at the entrances like hounds in a stranger’s village. Khagash-Fél could taste the distinct, at times conflicting, strains of magic in the air. It fomented something superstitious and primal in the back of his mind, stirred by the muffled chants of shamans, the smell of incense, the eerie song of chimes.
Nergüi approached the entrance to a tent that looked little different from the others that surrounded it. A dark-antlered skull flanked by a pair of stakes formed a lintel. Each was topped with a covered brass dish filled with oil that lapped under a greenish flame. Khagash-Fél caught the scent of wild grasses and for an instant he was on the back of a horse, charging across the open steppe with the wind in his hair and just a score of men at his back. He shook off the memory. That had been centuries ago. Here amongst the trees and rain and darkness was where his present lay.
A heavy flap of tasselled silk closed the entrance. Nergüi stretched an arm through to draw a portion aside and a thick, sweaty odour pushed out. Khagash-Fél could hear a murmured chanting and the hollow wooden beat of funerary sticks from within.
The shaman waited.
Khagash-Fél steeled himself. To avoid a foe’s eye was to let him know he was feared and Khagash-Fél feared nothing, without or within. One man’s loss, even his, meant little in the final counting. The strong marched on, the imperfect perished. The gods remained.
He nodded once, ducking under the skull lintel and into the waiting gloom.
A warrior’s name was earned, not given, and Khamgiin Lastborn had come into his by being the only one of four sons to survive his quest into the Northern Wastes to claim the notice of the gods. Now he lay in state upon a woven mat of horsehair and grass, hands crossed over his powerful, silk-shirted chest. Though lacking his father’s gifts, Khamgiin had lost little of Khagash-Fél’s great stature.
It was strange to see him so unadorned. A Chaos warrior’s wargear was a favour from the gods and not so easily set aside, but with the passing of that favour, Khamgiin’s armour had fallen away like bark from a dead tree. Now he reminded Khagash-Fél so much of the man – the boy – who a hundred years ago had mounted his sturdiest horse and ridden into the Kurgan lands to the north. It produced an odd sense of longing that he could not quite place or describe. He had been right the first time.
It was… strange.
Nergüi danced and hummed, sometimes breaking into a low chant and shaking his voluminous sleeves in the air before returning to his rhythm. Small bowls of burning oil had been positioned meaningfully around the room. They produced more smoke than light, and brass covers cut with weird and disturbing designs reduced even that liminal glow, turning the walls themselves into shifting scenes from the daemonic heart of the netherworld. The shaman’s undulating hum and the ethereal rhythm of his acolytes’ funerary sticks added to the unreal air.
Khagash-Fél turned back to his son. The body was scattered with black feathers. It was traditional to question the dead on the future before their cremation, for like a man on a good horse their vision went farther and with more clarity than that of men with their feet trapped on mortal ground. Intently, Khagash-Fél examined the pattern into which the feathers had fallen, but despite the foresight granted him through the Eye of Katchar he did not have the skill to interpret such prophecy. He would have to speak with Nergüi later to learn what his son had reported from his ride to his patron’s domain.
‘What mighty champion felled you, Khamgiin? Where are they?’
There was no answer there, and he was uncertain what had made him ask. Perhaps it was the play of light and shade across his son’s face? For a moment Khamgiin’s eyelids had appeared to flutter, deep black pits gaping open from an abyss. Nergüi’s singsong chant sank as if into a dream, and some compulsion had Khagash-Fél kneeling at Khamgiin’s side and placing his hand upon his son’s. Khamgiin’s hands were clammy and cool, but a throbbing ache started up just behind his forehead as soon as he touched them. Shadows flowed around Khamgiin’s still face, deepening the eyes, hollowing the cheeks, parting around his lips to draw in more of the surrounding darkness like a last breath into a dead man’s lungs.
Khagash-Fél resisted the urge to pull away, confronting this strangeness and the mortal fear it aroused in his heart. He tightened his grip.
‘Who felled you?’
‘Whom do you hope will answer, Half-Chosen?’
Khagash-Fél’s grip on his son’s hand stiffened. Cartilage snapped under his fingers. On the dark mask that wore Khamgiin’s face there was no suggestion of pain.
‘By what right do you ask?’
A pulse of agony seared through the Eye of Katchar and into his brain. Khagash-Fél grunted in pain, as though his eyes had been held open to an intense light. Or a deep, terrible darkness. The pain forced itself into an image, second-hand and blurred, tinted blue, but in it he saw Khamgiin. His son wore his gifted armour and strode through a herd of beasts towards a small knot of terrified men on a hill. They were Empire men. Hochlanders. Their spears glinted green and blue. Such men could not have bested the Lastborn. He tried to take command of the vision in his mind and move it forward, but he could not.
‘What is such insight worth to you?’
A second stab of pain and the Eye inched open, stirring like a dragon disturbed from slumber. A confusion of places and people, futures and past, hit his mind at once.
A thickly-muscled dwarf Slayer tore through the mass of beastmen that sought to bring him down. His axe glowed with runes that hurt the Eye to look upon, and in a watercolour smear of pain the shapes and colours that made him ran instead to the form of an old, blond-haired swordsman in a red cloak, with a rare skill with his runic blade.
Khagash-Fél sensed a flicker of hatred for these two, of fear even.
As he watched the vision ran again, the beastmen that the pair battled thinning and blurring until they became something altogether different. Something daemonic. The creatures were dark-skinned with savage, evil faces. Their limbs were multi-jointed and sawed crazily as they
attacked, ending in a spread of black knife-like claws. The dwarf tore through them with an equal savagery. The man followed in his footsteps, fighting back-to-back, deeper into the underbelly of what looked like a fortress. Silvery-red runes glowered from the high basalt walls.
‘Did one of these best my son?’
A chuckle oiled through the shadows. ‘It is not Altdorf or Middenheim or any of the great cities of this age that will witness the Slayer’s final days. Where but in the halls of the first Slayer can the last great Slayer meet his doom?’
‘This means nothing to me. The gods called me west to fight in the final war,’ Khagash-Fél growled. He felt as though he were pleading, as though he knelt before one of those gods even now. His heart beat so hard it felt twice its proper size.
Khamgiin’s black lips twisted into a sneer. ‘One god called you, Half-Chosen. One god did not forget his mighty champion in the east, and you have a higher purpose. My purpose is the true purpose of Chaos, and few have earned the ire of Chaos as have these two fools.’ There was a blunt stab of pain in Khagash-Fél’s Eye and the vision focused on the man and the dwarf, the dwarf battering through a river of daemons as the man fended off the hordes at his heels. Again Khagash-Fél had that strange sense, that door-seam glare of incandescent loathing and ungodly fear. ‘His is the power to thwart the End Times themselves. He cannot be allowed to fulfil his destiny.’
Khagash-Fél’s mind reeled. Avert the End Times? Impossible! The Everchosen had arisen. The Old World stood on the brink, and Khagash-Fél had brought the tribes halfway across the globe to give it its final push. It would be his legacy, his glory. The thought of some nameless warrior – worse yet, a dwarf – driving back the tide of Chaos even after it had risen so high brought his blood to the boil and yellowed his vision with hellfire.
Black laughter wound its shadowy voice through Khagash-Fél’s long grey hair, causing the oil bowls to flicker. ‘Mighty warriors of portent and prowess have faced them and fallen, but they are not invulnerable. These are the last days. I have been shown their downfall and by my will and by my word I command it so.’
