Clint Werner - Blood for the Blood God

“You won’t be burned,” Sanya assured him, though there was a touch of uncertainty behind her words. “The daemon’s spirit requires physical contact to understand what we need of it, to receive its orders.”

Dorgo looked back at the pulsating knot of quivering flesh. He could see the shimmer of heat rising from its gaping mouth. He glanced at Sanya and scowled, clenching his fist and waving it at her. “Be warned, witch, I’ll still have one hand to strangle that pretty neck!” The threat uttered, he walked to the edge of the forge and slapped his hand down against its lip.

His hand didn’t burn. In defiance of the heat and the buckets of molten fire he’d poured down into it, the fleshy surface was cold and damp, slimy like wet offal. It didn’t burn. The sensation that shot through his body was much worse than that.

He could feel something moving through him, crawling behind his eyes. His bones shivered from the deep, murderous growl of the daemon as its presence invaded him.

Then, in an instant, it was gone. Dorgo snatched his hand away and fell to the floor, retching in disgust at the spectral violation. He pulled away as he felt Sanya’s hands on his shoulders.

“The touch of a daemon is vile,” she said, her words heavy with the experience of abuse. “There is nothing so filthy in this world or the next as the petty splinters of a god’s magnificence. But they are a necessary evil, a bridge between mortals and the power of the gods.” She pressed forward again, cupping Dorgo’s chin in her hand. This time he did not pull away. Her face was a soothing mask, her eyes limpid pools. There was invitation in the curve of her lips as she smiled down at him.

“Come,” she said, guiding him from the floor with the delicate pressure of her hand, “see what your suffering has done.”

Dorgo allowed himself to be led back to the forge by the enticing lure of the sorceress. The obscene feeling of the daemon crawling inside him, the bloodthirsty foulness of its murderous spirit was forgotten. He was oblivious to the heat and the stench, the clammy taint of evil in the air. All he could see was Sanya, the slender curves of her body moving beneath the tatters of her robe, the smouldering glow of the forge dancing through her hair.

A change had come upon the forge. The teeth lining its surface had gnashed together, forming a flat, circular disc of polished bone above the mouth of the forge. While he watched, a ripple of motion passed through the disc, the bone surface trembling like the skin of a pond.

A depression began to form in the centre of the strange anvil, a surface that soon bore the unmistakable outline of a sword.

“Fit the shards to the shape,” Sanya told him, letting her hand slide from his chin to the side of his neck.

The woman’s touch thrilled him, exciting him, making him forget all his doubt and suspicion. He could only dimly feel the heat rising from the forge, the mephitic haze that rippled across the surface of bone.

One by one, he removed the crimson shatters from their pouch, setting each piece of the Bloodeater into the mould. Somehow, he was not surprised when the pieces fitted perfectly into place.

Sanya led him away from the forge, as mouth-like orifices slobbered open all along its sides. The mouths sucked great draughts of air into the forge’s unseen furnace, feeding its hellish fires. The bone skin above the fire began to glow, first red and then white.

Dorgo was amazed when he saw the ruby fragments of the blade melt into crimson liquid. A fire so hot it melted gemstone was unimaginable. Dorgo had thought that the forge would somehow knit the pieces back together, bind them with some daemon’s trick.

He understood better now. The bloodthirster was too much of a warrior to allow a blade with such weakness into the world. The Bloodeater would be remade from its destruction, like the fabled fire dragon of Cathay. There would be no spider-thin fractures and weaknesses where shard joined shard, but a whole blade cast from a single ingot of ruby, just as it must have been shaped when Teiyogtei first forged it.

While the shards melted, knobbly tendrils of flesh began to ooze from the lip of the forge, rising like boneless arms above the glowing anvil of bone. The tips of the tendrils hardened, becoming stumps of black, shining stone. They were still for a time, waiting for the heat and the fire to do their work. Then, with eerie precision, the fleshy bludgeons came smacking down, pounding against the daemon-bone disc.

Despite the otherworldly surroundings, despite the horrific nature of forge and hammer, despite the impossible substance being worked, the sound that filled the Black Altar was jarring in its normalcy: nothing more than would rise from any mortal smithy.

How long the daemon hammers worked the molten ruby, neither Sanya nor Dorgo could ever say. Hours or days, time meant less than little in the bizarre limbo of the Wastes. At last, however, the hammers no longer struck against the anvil of daemon bone.

Exhibiting the same eerie precision, they were absorbed back into the fleshy substance of the forge. Gradually, the heat began to abate, and then a scorching, searing noise rose from the mouth of the disc.

Blood, dark and stagnant, began to bubble up from the depths of the forge, slopping over the sides of the fleshy stump and running across the floor. The anvil and the blade were drowned beneath the rising tide. As steam rose from the mouth of the forge, Dorgo realised that the daemon was using this macabre method to quench the new-born blade.

When at last the bubbling tide of blood abated, Dorgo approached the forge once more. He found himself staring down into a pool of black blood that completely obscured the fang-like teeth and the sword they had held. He thought again of the depthless pit, the unfillable void into which he had poured bucket after bucket of fiery pitch. He felt a twinge of fear, imagining that yawning darkness.

The touch of Sanya’s hand against his arm reassured him. Boldly, he thrust his hand into the still warm mire of blood. His fingers groped through the blackness, brushing against the rough surface of the fangs. Then his hand touched something that was smooth and cold against his skin.

His fingers tightened around the unseen object, clenching into a firm fist as he pulled his arm back and ripped the reborn blade from its daemonic womb.

Bloody filth dripped from the Bloodeater, spattering the floor of the Black Altar. Somehow, the covering of blood could not hide the power and magnificence of the weapon he held. Dorgo knew that all the suffering, all the pain and violation, all the horror and fear had been worth it. He could feel strength pulsing through his arm, throbbing through his body.

He swung the sword through the empty air, shocked by how good it felt in his hand, as if it had always been there. A shimmer of power, like little sparks of crimson light, danced behind the blade as he thrust and slashed at unseen enemies. The warrior laughed, a pure sound, filled with wonder, the voice of a simple, child-like joy.

For the first time, it was not doom that ruled his heart, but hope. He had seen the Skulltaker, had seen what the champion could do. Dorgo had never truly believed that the Bloodeater could destroy the monster. Now, with the blade’s power flowing through him like a fiery river of strength, he did not believe anything could stand against him, even if it was the Skulltaker.

There was hope for his people and his father. There was hope for the entire domain.

“The Skulltaker will die!” Dorgo vowed, smiling as he gazed into the scintillating depths of his blade. “We will seek him out and destroy him!”

Sanya shook her head. “No,” she told him. “If we stay here, the Skulltaker will come to us.” She pointed at the Bloodeater clenched in his fist. “He will know what we have done. He will remember the sword that vanquished him once before. We do not need to seek him out, Dorgo, Hero of the Tsavags. If we wait, he will seek us .”