Clint Werner: Blood for the Blood God

“You speak of rain and blood and terror? You wear the skull rune of Khorne? Fool! This is the desert, where it has not rained since before the days of Teiyogtei! Blood and terror? Here they belong to one man, one man alone, Bleda of the Veh-Kung! This is the sacred land of Neiglen, where the Blood God has no part.”

Bleda’s voice wheezed with fury as he spat his words onto the sand. He flicked his chain-staff through the air, the rods and links buzzing like a swarm of flies as the wind fled before it. “I am the Tabernacle of the Divine Rot,” the kahn croaked. “Behold the power of the Crow God!”

With a flick of his hand, the kahn slapped a flabby finger against the leprous flesh of a slave. Instantly the man collapsed in a groaning, twitching mass. Skin sloughed from his bones and flesh darkened beneath a sheen of filth. A great horn of twisted bone erupted from the slave’s forehead even as his eyes slithered across his face to merge into a single putrid orb at the centre of his head. Hands lengthened into talons and organs swollen with rot burst through his skin. Great fangs dripped from a suddenly gaping maw. A swordlike growth oozed from the slave’s side until at last its weight tore it loose from his body.

The stricken slave moaned, retching as it stooped to retrieve the blade his body had grown. When it stood again, its claws were wrapped tightly around a length of twisted corrosion, a crust of decay flaking down its blade.

Bleda laughed as his slave was consumed by the Divine Rot of Neiglen, his mortal being devoured by the daemonic essence his kahn had infected him with. The plague bearer moaned again, and then started to stumble towards the defiant stranger. Bleda’s corrupt laughter bubbled forth again as he pressed his hand against a second slave.

Hutga sat in the silence of his yurt, staring at the ancient weapon cradled in his lap. The ji had been handed down from the khagans of the Tsavag for centuries. It was a sign of their authority, a testament to their fitness to rule over the Tsavag. He could feel the weight of years as he ran his hand along the moon-shaped blade and its ivory heft. He could almost hear the echoes of his fathers and their fathers, back to the beginning of his people. The mighty weapon was more a part of the khagan than his own skin, more a part of him than his own blood.

The chieftain sighed as the thought came to him, as doubt and disappointment stabbed into him. He had driven his son hard, had done everything he could to make him strong and proud, a true Tong warrior, a man fit to rule when Hutga’s time at last came, but however hard he drove Dorgo, however much he tried to test the boy’s limits, Hutga always felt that his people needed more.

He wondered if perhaps he had driven Dorgo too hard, had set unfair expectations for him. Did he drive the boy so hard because he worried about his fitness to lead, or because he was afraid his love for his son would temper his judgement, would place a man unfit to rule upon the throne of the Tsavags? Did he test Togmol and others who were not of his blood half so severely?

Hutga shook his head. It didn’t matter now. Dorgo had been proven unworthy with his cowardice and his lies. If he had fallen in battle with Lok, his father would have mourned him. For him to return, disgraced and vile, cowering in his falsehoods like some faithless Hung was more than Hutga could endure.

When Ulagan and his scouts returned with the truth, there would be an end of the matter. Dorgo’s tongue would be cut out for daring to tell such lies and the boy would be cast out from the tribe. The khagan was under no illusion what exile meant: a lingering lonely death in the wilds, if Dorgo did not fall victim to one of the other tribes first. It was debatable which was a worse way to die.

Still, the boy’s cowardice and lies had earned him no less a fate, even if he was the khagan’s son.

What if he had told the truth, though? What if he had seen someone, some stranger from beyond the domain, kill Lok?

Hutga stared hard at the blade of his ji, looking past its keen edge into the dim days of legend when it had been forged by Teiyogtei. None of the other chieftains could have killed Lok.

There was a balance in the domain, some capricious force that prevented the tribes from ever annihilating one another. Each of the eight chieftains was a powerful warlord in his own right, but none was mightier than any other, and none could prevail against one of his rivals. Their strengths and weaknesses were too evenly matched, the balance too close for any one warlord to overcome another.

Dorgo had said the man who killed Lok was not another chieftain, however. That gave Hutga pause. Never in the history of the domain had an intruder been the equal of a chieftain.

Only once in the ancient sagas was such a being recorded. Hutga felt a chill course through him as he pondered the possibility.

The flap of the khagan’s tent was pushed aside and Yorool’s disfigured frame hobbled into sight. The shaman bowed, making obeisance before his lord.

“The scouts have returned,” Yorool said. “They have captured one of the Muhak.”

Hutga noted the same haunted look in the shaman’s mismatched eyes as he made his report. The khagan forced his own doubts from his face. It was not wise to show weakness, even before the old shaman.

“He has been taken to the place of questions?”

Yorool nodded, a grim smile spreading on his lip. “The Muhak will speak when you ask him to speak. He is only flesh and bone, after all.”

Hutga rose from his throne, smoothing his moustache. “Then let us talk with him,” he told the shaman. For the life of his son, Hutga hoped that the prisoner would bear out Dorgo’s story. For the sake of his people, he prayed that everything Dorgo had told him was a lie.

Lashed across the wooden platform, limbs stretched and spread away from his body, chained to small, rounded protrusions, there was little the Muhak captive could do but scream. The Kurgan were noted for their toughness, and the Muhak were rugged even by the grim standards of their savage race, but everything mortal had its breaking point, that stage where mind and soul were at last overwhelmed by pain and the fear of pain. When that point was reached, there was no secret that could not be given voice.

Hutga could see the Muhak’s flesh writhing beneath his skin as the blood-grubs Yorool had set into the Kurgan’s wounds burrowed into the exposed muscle. The insects would gnaw and tear their way deep, never relenting until they found the moist darkness where they could lay their eggs.

The khagan’s face was stern as he watched the Muhak shudder and struggle. The chains would hold even one of his brawny breed. They were the sort of fetters used to hold juvenile mammoths and keep them close to their mothers when the tribe was on the march. Beside that power, the strength of the mightiest Kurgan was nothing.

Hutga looked away from the captive’s screaming face, watching as Qotagir circled the platform. The old Tsavag held an ivory goad in his weathered hand, motioning with it to guide the enormous creature that moved with him, following his every step as though it were his shadow.

Barn’s bulk blotted out the light as it lumbered around the platform, the wood quivering with the mammoth’s every step. The oldest and wisest of the herd, Baru was almost human in its understanding of the commands Qotagir shouted to it. The mammoth was covered in glossy grey hairs, its pillar-like legs coated in old scabs and bruises, its long trunk split into four separate, mouth-like noses. There was a cruel intelligence in Barn’s bulging, crust-rimmed eyes.

Looking into them, Hutga knew that the beast fully appreciated the havoc its master asked of it.