Clint Werner - Blood for the Blood God

Even if he was a powerful war-chief, the stranger could hardly hope to kill them all.

Enek Zjarr turned away from the pillar of blue fire, tearing his eyes away from the scene revealed by the heatless flame only with the greatest effort. His hand was trembling as he cast salt into the witch-flame. With a whoosh, the fire vanished, leaving behind only a wisp of foul-smelling smoke and the charred bones of the sacrifice from which it had flared into life. The blackened skull of the victim grinned at the sorcerer from the ashes.

The Hung mystic felt a tremor of fear run through him, reminded of the deathly helm of the warrior he had seen revealed in the fire. Despising the sensation, Enek Zjarr flicked his tattooed fingers at the skull, a burst of invisible force shattering it into dust.

The sorcerer paced slowly away from the circle of ash, disturbed by what his scrying had shown him. The stone walls of his sanctum threw back the echoes of his steps as he walked. Imps watched him from the wooden shelves that lined the hall, cowering behind alembics and piles of musty scrolls as their master passed. Suckled upon the sorcerer’s blood, they felt the anxiety and doubt that plagued his mind.

Enek Zjarr ignored the cringing daemons and stepped towards a stone altar. His painted hand waved through the air once more. The iron braziers set to either side of the dais smouldered into life, surrounding the altar in an orange glow.

Enek Zjarr stalked into the light. Tall and thin, his body swaddled in a heavy robe of spider silk, the sorcerer moved behind the ancient altar. A massive iron-banded book rested upon the stone surface, fixed to the rock by thick chains.

The sorcerer turned his dark eyes towards the tome, an expression almost of reverence pulling at his broad, cruel features. He stroked his long, drooping moustache with a lean, talon-nailed hand, closing his eyes in thought.

Finally, a decision reached, Enek Zjarr removed one of the barbaric talismans that dripped from his salmon-hued robe, snapping its cord in his impatience. He gripped the talisman, the skeletal finger of a man, tightly. A preternatural chill oozed into his bones as he held it, feeling its lingering antipathy seep into him. The sorcerer smiled, an expression colder than the feel of the morbid relic. The owner of that finger had been his greatest rival in life, but he had not been able to stop Enek Zjarr from overcoming him and assuming his position as kahn of all the Sul. As a warning to others, Enek Zjarr had ensured that his father’s death was not an easy one. In the end, only a single finger had remained as token of the Sul chieftain’s passing. It was all of his father that Enek Zjarr needed.

The sorcerer pressed the decayed finger against the leather cover of the tome, stabbing it into the brass lock that crouched above the binding. Tiny metal jaws snapped closed around the bone, gnawing at it with daemonic rapacity.

As the metal teeth tore into the bone, the lock slithered off the book, crawling across the altar and into the shadows. Enek Zjarr gave the eerie device no further consideration. His hand pulled back the heavy cover, chains rattling as it slapped against the stone altar. Thin, wisp-like pages stood exposed to his gaze, their surfaces covered in painted Cathayan characters.

Enek Zjarr leaned down, letting the blunted bulb of his nose almost touch the thin fragility of the book. Carefully, he exhaled against the book, letting his breath turn the pages. Leaning back, he watched as the pages flipped past, turned by their own energies.

Slowly at first, then faster and ever faster, the pages whipped by, searching for the knowledge the sorcerer desired. After a time, and with an abrupt suddenness, the book fell still once more. Enek Zjarr stared at the page, reading the elaborate Cathayan glyphs. Colour drained from his face and stunned dread entered his eyes. He turned away, wondering if he dared believe what the tome had told him.

Enek Zjarr looked again at the pile of ash from which the blue fire had risen. A haunted light crept into the black pools of his eyes.

He wondered if he dared not believe.

With a bubbling wail, the Veh-Kung warrior lunged at the intruder, falling down upon the rider from above. A dozen of his tribesmen took up his war cry, leaping down from the sides of the crystal spires. The iron fingers of their gloves shimmered weirdly in the moonlight, crystalline dust coating the metal talons. Like diseased lizards, the Veh-Kung had crawled up the crystal spires, gouging handholds in the living mineral with their claws. They watched from the heights as the stranger penetrated deeper into their lands, as his strange wolf-like beast loped through the shard-sand of the desert.

The first attack had been butchery, the hunters slaughtered nearly to the man by this eerie invader. Their carcasses where strewn through the silent canyons, mangled and torn by blade and fang. The stranger’s black sword had been as remorseless as the elements, carving a swathe of blood across the desert. The jaws and claws of his ghastly steed had been no less deadly, spilling entrails and snapping spines with every swipe of its immense paws, crushing bodies with every flick of its powerful tail.

The hunters’ weapons had broken against the armour of the warrior, splintering like rotten sticks against the dark plates. Wherever they attacked, however carefully they laid their ambush, the stranger was ready for them, almost seeming to welcome the chance to kill. From mazes of mirror that would have confused even a daemon’s twisted mind, the Veh-Kung struck again and again only to have their attacks falter and fail, waves crashing around the uncaring shore.

At last, the few hunters remaining had broken, fleeing back to their burrows to warn the rest of their tribe. Their cowardice earned them death beneath the sacred talons of the Crow God, only the warning they carried allowing them any trace of honour as the shamans’ chain-whips flayed the flesh from their bones. They had found a foe too deadly to overcome, but if the invader thought the men he had slaughtered represented the strength of the Veh-Kung, he was sorely mistaken.

Scores of warriors, each a hand-and-a-half taller than the degenerate hunters, each armoured in plates of reptilian hide boiled to the toughness of bronze, each bearing blades of iron, emerged from the darkness of the tunnels to answer the intruder’s challenge.

The first of the Hung warriors came crashing down against the rider, knocking him from his bronze saddle. The two men struck the ground in a cloud of shimmering dust. Other warriors hurtled earthward, their iron weapons slashing at the wolfish steed. The brute spun and howled as they hit it, gouging deep wounds in its shaggy hide. Warriors were sent reeling as the beast’s massive paws struck at them, slashing through their scaly armour as though it wasn’t there. The barbed tail cracked like a whip behind the creature, knocking men into the shard-sand with each lash of its brutal length. One Veh-Kung, bolder than the rest, landed upon the brute’s back, trying to stab its skull with the rusty curve of his sword. The blade cracked against the monster’s horns, notching as it struck the impossibly thick bones.

Before the warrior could recover, the beast twisted its head around, sinking its jaws into his leg. With a savage jerk, the wolf-beast ripped the man from its back, pitching him into the sand. Even as he started to rise, the beast pounced on him, collapsing his chest beneath its tremendous weight. Teeth bared at the warriors still prowling around its flanks, the monster brought one paw smashing down into the squirming thing pinned beneath it, flattening its victim’s head into a mash of brain and bone.

The shimmering dust that had claimed the Veh-Kung champion and his prey slowly settled. One figure stood, his dark armour dripping with shining sand and putrid gore, his black blade drenched in the blood of his foe, his clawed gauntlet locked around the slimy wetness of his enemy’s throat. At his feet, the rest of the Hung’s body shivered in a mire of its own filth. The intruder’s eyes glared at the other Veh-Kung warriors from behind the steel mask of his helm.