But Kalja could not stop. Her eyes were drawn inexorably upward — to the towers, the sculpted stone, the strange runes that she could not read but which somehow felt meaningful. As she looked on, the air under the arch flexed as if it were liquid and had bulged from the far side. She halted.
Nothing. Hot ash-wind blew through the aperture, unchanged by the stone it passed under, still as foul as it ever was. Another growl of thunder shook the skies, and the clouds raced above them, piling higher with every breath she took. It would be a big storm. Perhaps the rain would foul their tracks and put the bloodreavers off their scent.
A scream pierced the dark, high and terrified. The sound came from the mouth of the cleft, and echoed strangely as it surged out into the open. Kalja knew the owner of that voice, and shivered to think of the torment that could make him cry like that. She shook herself down, forgetting about the ruins and concentrating on the old obsession — to take just one more breath, to live to see just one more dawn.
Then she started to run, hunted again, just as she always had been.
Chapter Three
The bloodreavers fell into their habitual running pattern — spread out, fanning across the landscape like dogs on a scent. Those on the edges had the sharpest eyes and the keenest nostrils. They could detect mortal fear from a half-league distant, and ran it down remorselessly until it lay shrieking under their fingernails.
Rakh began to pant, falling into the rhythm of the chase. His blade — a pocked cleaver with a human bone handle — swung in his left hand, still wet with saliva and crimson. The others loped hungrily, swinging their blades, making their armour-plates rattle. The musk of blood-frenzy thickened on the hot air.
‘Blood for the Blood God’, he murmured to himself, slurring the words through his damp lips. Where had he learned them? Why did every mouth utter them, from the Realm’s spectral north to its parched south? No priest had ever taught them, for there were no priests in the wilds — the chant came naturally, willingly, as if the very air whispered it to him in his dreams.
They raced down a long, wide depression, veering around outcrops of the black-edged thorn bushes. Ahead of them yawned the mouth of a defile, the twin walls of which reared up steeper as the channel narrowed to a distant point. The prey had gone down that way — even Rakh could smell that.
‘Faster,’ snapped Sleikh, bounding over the piles of rubble, his axe-head swinging.
Beyond the pack-leader, out in the dark, something moved. Rakh was still running, so barely saw it, but he wasn’t delirious — a shadow had detached from the base of the rocks, then vanished.
He craned his neck from side to side, struggling to keep pace with the runners around him. What had it been? Were there more of them? Had the mortals hunkered down, hoping they would pass them?
But Sleikh was sprinting now, making for the gorge’s narrow throat. The oldest and deadliest members of the pack went with him, their bodies made spare and strong by a lifetime of gorging on raw meat. None of them had noticed the movement — they were consumed with the blood-scent now, locked on to the spoor of fear and exertion.
Rakh almost cried out a warning, but the pack-hierarchy clamped his lips shut — break the communal blood-scent and the rest would turn on him quickly, ripping into his sinews with just as much enthusiasm as they would prey.
And that was what doomed them. They had almost reached the mouth of the narrow cleft when the first of the war-horns blared out, cracking the skies and making Rakh’s ears ring. He staggered, half-losing his footing.
Sleikh reacted immediately, spewing out curses, swinging his head to and fro, trying to see where the sound came from.
More war-horns sounded, this time from the other side of the valley, from up ahead, from behind, from everywhere. Rakh spun around, crouching defensively, spitting on his cleaver-blade to slicken it and trying to gauge where the enemy was.
The wait was scarcely more than a heartbeat. They burst from the high sides of the defile, spilling down from the tattered edges like rats spewed from a pipe. Rakh saw the sheen on their armour — scab-red, rimmed with black iron — and cursed his fate.
A warband, then, a Lord’s retinue — better armed, brutally trained, more than a match for them.
‘Gut them!’ Sleikh was shouting, pointlessly, already racing to where the first of the red-armoured warriors was careering down the steep slope.
More warriors were coming up from the south now, hemming them in. They must have followed the bloodreavers for a long time, waiting for nightfall, confident that their prey would be so consumed by meat-lust that they would grow careless. They had been right.
Rakh stayed close to Sleikh, his palms sweaty. The bulk of the bloodreavers came with him, contracting into a knot, turning outwards, keeping their faces to the enemy.
The first of the warband’s fighters came in hard, hurtling from a breakneck descent, their mouths frothing with foam. A burly axeman in furs and black-rimmed plate crashed into Sleikh, barrelling him backwards. The rest slammed into contact, roaring from raw throats, hurling blades in spine-cracking lunges. They were massive, all of them — thick-limbed, clad in iron and steel and bearing axes with icons of ruin scratched into the blunt metal.
Rakh ducked under a wild swipe, then thrust up with his cleaver. The ragged edge bit slickly into muscle, and the warrior before him grunted in pain. Rakh twisted his cleaver and black blood bubbled up from his victim’s mouth. He thrust the gurgling corpse aside, ready to meet the challenge of the next one.
Blood warriors, thought Rakh, ducking out of the path of another short-handled axe. What are they doing here? This is the waste — nothing for them but ashes.
The press of bodies around him doubled as more warriors crashed into the fray, slashing, kicking and punching with their spiked weapons. Gore flew around them in whirling slicks, thrown wildly by the hurtling axe-heads. Rakh ducked again, too slowly, and was struck on his helm with a glancing blow. It made his ears ring and he scrabbled into the shadow of a bloodreaver, avoiding death by offering up his pack-mate.
More than a quarter of the rest were already dead, gutted like fish and gasping bloodily on the rocks. Sleikh had kept the pack together and was fighting hard, trying to reach the narrow cleft where they might at least have a rock wall at their back, but Rakh could see that it was already hopeless — they were surrounded, caught in the open and badly outnumbered. This would all be over very quickly.
He tried to break out, shoving the iron shield of a blood warrior aside and lashing out with his cleaver to clear a path. He managed to down another one — slicing through the creature’s upper thigh, thrusting upward, head-butting him savagely across his exposed face — but he was stumbling amid the churning bodies, desperate to break free.
Somehow, driven by that desperation, aided by the flickering shadows, the screams, the darkness, he shoved himself into a narrow space between moving bodies, and saw the edge of the melee before him. Spitting thanks to the Blood God, he went for the gap, lunging out and slipping on the blood-wet rock.
He almost made it. Too late, though, he saw just why a space had opened up, large enough for him to slip into. Rakh skidded to a halt, falling back on to his withers, his ravaged jaw falling open.
The figure looming before him was gigantic. He towered over the blood warriors just as they towered over Sleikh’s rabble. His armour glistened in the fading light, dull red like spoiled wine. The plates were lined with bloodied bronze, and adorned with skulls. He carried a great brass standard, and above it was set the icon of Khorne in smouldering metal.