Clint Werner: Blood for the Blood God

Dorgo’s people never lacked for meat, even in the hardest winter or the driest summer, simply because they had mastered the Crumbling Hills.

This day, however, only rocks clattered down from the hills. The Tsavag hunters and even the war mammoth beneath them began to sense an eerie wrongness around the hills around them, an unseen menace lurking somewhere nearby. Tsavag hands left the ivory shafts of throwing spears to clutch at the grips of axe, sword and flail. A new urgency crept into the eyes watching the hills, no longer looking for the fleeing shapes of goat and elk.

Every man remembered tales and legends about the strange creatures that sometimes crept down into the hills from the forbidden Wastes. They wondered if such a monster would be bold enough to attack a war mammoth. They wondered if they would be bold enough to meet it, in turn.

Dorgo watched the rocks, waiting for the lurking menace to show itself, waiting for the attack to crash down upon them in an avalanche of violence. The brooding hills defied his vigilance, remaining silent and empty, mocking him with whatever secret they held.

When the attack came, it erupted from below not above. The silence was broken by savage war cries as the slopes of the hills exploded into brutality and violence. Warriors lunged into the sunlight from concealed burrows, like a mass of angered ground vipers. Taller than the Tsavag, their skins pale, their bodies twisted by grotesque knots of muscle, the warriors rushed at the startled war mammoth with panther-like speed.

Dorgo cursed as he saw the ragged armour of hide and bronze lashed around their disfigured frames, as he saw the ghastly masks of flesh that were tied across their faces. The warriors were of the Muhak, one of the Kurgan tribes and the most pitiless rivals of the Tsavag. Each Muhak carried a long spear with a jagged iron head, the edges of the point barbed and cruel. Dorgo saw at once that the Kurgan were sprinting towards the mammoth’s legs, fearlessly charging at the behemoth to reach its soft underbelly. He roared commands to the hunters in the howdah behind him, cursing at them to hurl their javelins and stop the rushing Muhak.

Several of the warriors fell as javelins sank into their brutish bodies, but for each that crumpled to the ground, three darted beneath the mammoth’s pillarlike legs, jabbing up at its belly with their cruel pikes. Dorgo struggled to turn the beast, to bring it around to confront the foe, but the stabbing pain in its vitals broke the Tsavag’s tenuous control of the mammoth.

Maddened by the pain, the brute refused to move, simply bellowing and wailing in anguish. The Muhak beneath it continued to savage its belly, relenting only when oily ropes of entrails spilled from the wounds.

The mammoth reared back on its hind legs, crashing down in a bone-jarring impact. One Muhak, lingering to press his attack against the stricken beast, was smashed beneath the brute’s leg, crushed into a pasty red smear.

The hunters in the howdah forgot their javelins as the platform lurched upward, pointing them at the sun. Hands tightened around the leather straps in desperate, white-knuckled grips as gravity jerked at the men upon the tilting platform.

One Tsavag, slow to seize the strap, pitched in screaming despair to the ground thirty feet below, his head splattering against the rocky ground.

Dorgo whipped the mammoth with the ivory goad he held, trying to force it to obey the runes carved upon the ancient talisman. The gnawing fire of its wounds overwhelmed both training and spell, the mammoth’s painful trumpets tearing at the sky. The Muhak retreated to the safety of the slopes, jeering at the Tsavag, throwing stones at their steed to encourage its frenzy.

The reeling mammoth fell back to earth with a mighty crash. The impact tore leather straps from their fastenings and three Tsavag plummeted from the behemoth’s back to lie broken upon the ground below.

As the mammoth continued to stomp and bellow, the other hunters threw chains down from the howdah. Hand-over-hand they rappelled down the beast’s flanks, desperate to escape its crazed agony. The boldest of the Muhak charged down from the slopes to confront the fleeing men.

Screams added to the clamour of the mammoth’s pain as the Kurgan drove their long spears into the descending men, pinning them to the mammoth’s thick hide as they pierced their bodies.

The few hunters who reached the ground tried to fend off the opportunistic Muhak, chopping at them with axe and sword. Two Muhak fell, too slow in reacting to the threat of foes who could strike back. The others cast aside their long spears, useless at close quarters, and drew cruel, bone cudgels from belts of dried sinew.

The Tsavag rushed the Kurgan, determined to avenge their butchered kin. Bone cracked against iron as the two sides converged, Tong curses mixing with Muhak war cries.

Against the overwhelming numbers of the Muhak, the handful of hunters had little real chance, but the reckoning was to be decided from another quarter. Through the well of pain that raced through its body, the rage of the stricken mammoth fought its way to overwhelm the beast’s mind. Trumpeting its fury, the huge beast spun around, the sudden motion throwing a last Tsavag from the howdah.

The black eyes of the mammoth glared in berserk fury at the little men fighting around it. Lost in a red madness that did not differentiate between Tsavag and Muhak, the mammoth struck, smashing men beneath its ponderous feet, and goring them with its blunted tusks. Dorgo watched the serpent-like trunk lurch upwards, a struggling Tsavag trapped in its coils.

The mammoth tightened its hold, breaking the man’s body in a spray of blood and ruptured organs. The tattered wreckage dripped back to earth and the brute reared back, bellowing as it plunged deeper into its rampage.

Dorgo grabbed the great iron spike resting beside him in his ivory cage. It was the tool of every mammoth master, as vital as the rune-covered goad, but it was one that no Tsavag ever wanted to use. Dorgo hesitated, but then saw the broken remains of a hunter ground into paste beneath the mammoth’s pounding feet.

Snarling, he set the spike against the back of the mammoth’s skull. With a roar as feral as that of the raging beast, he forced the spike through the scaly plates and the thick skull beneath. The mammoth reared one final time as the spike impaled its brain. Strength deserted the beast’s body in an instant.

Dorgo clutched the bars of his cage, bracing himself as the mammoth toppled to the earth. The impact snapped the leather straps that bound cage to neck and Dorgo was thrown across the plain to crash against the rocky slope of the hill. The ivory cage crumpled under the impact, sending painful slivers scything into the Tsavag’s body. He felt one ivory talon rip into his thigh and another punch through his forearm.

Wracking pain shot through his body, every nerve on fire. He tried to move, ignoring the desperate plea of his body to lie still. His arm was caught, transfixed upon the broken ivory bar. Biting down on the pain, Dorgo drew his iron knife and began to saw away at the wreckage.

As he worked, Dorgo could see the Muhak descending the slopes in force. They capered around the fallen mammoth, swatting at it with their clubs, stabbing it with their spears. Gleefully, the Kurgan warriors brained the injured Tsavag hunters, smashing their skulls with their clubs.

Among the celebrating Muhak was a hulking brute, his body so swollen with muscle that he more resembled an ogre than a man. The head that rose up from his thick, tree-stump neck bore the same flesh-mask as the other Muhak, but it had been cut away to allow the man’s jaw to protrude forward and his dagger-like teeth to jut from his shrivelled lip. A latticework of scars and cuts adorned the warrior’s body where it stood exposed by his crude hide armour. In his pawlike hands, he carried an immense mattock, the head of the hammer displaying a riot of blood-crusted spikes.