Blood for the Blood God
C. L. Werner
For Emily, who is much too young to be reading big words any time soon.
Prologue
The stink of blood and death was thick upon the plain. A crimson light tainted the sky, turning the midday sun into a smouldering ember behind the unnatural haze. Overhead, the croaking of vultures drifted down, like the impatient muttering of daemons. Again and again the carrion birds circled, never descending, never departing. The reek of death had drawn them from their gruesome rookeries, to linger until they had filled their scrawny frames with their hideous repast.
A man stood upon a small hill, little more than a jagged pile of rocks cast down by the craggy mountains beyond the plain. Like the vultures, he waited, waited for the sounds to fade: the warriors’ din of crashing steel and the screams of dying men. Unlike the vultures, he did not listen to the clamour with a mind greedy with hunger. He was no scavenger, no slinking jackal preying upon the leavings of true predators. The man stood with a pride alien to scavengers and ghouls. His frame was straight and tall, his limbs corded with iron-knots of muscle, his chest swollen with strength. Armour of lacquered bone and boiled leather was fastened around his powerful body, blackened with soot to match the braided scalp-locks that dripped from beneath his gold-masked helm.
A nest of spikes protruded from the rim of the helm, stabbing up at the crimson sky. Crafted from ruby, adorned in jade and obsidian, the crown that circled the daemon-masked helm was more than the affectation of a primitive savage, the boast of a barbarous warlord. It was a talisman of power, a display of authority and might. It was the heraldry of a king, and each of the spikes that jutted from its band betokened one who had stood against its wearer and been cut down by his sword.
It was whispered that no mortal had crafted that crown, that it had come from the Realm of the Gods, that each time another fell to its wearer it was no artisan who placed a new spike of ruby upon the king’s brow, but rather that the crown grew a new blood-thorn to commemorate the deed.
Terror of the Blood-Crown had spread through the Shadowlands, passing in frightened mutterings between the horse-clans of the Hung, the nomad tribes of the Kurgan and the warherds of the beastkin. The name of he who wore it had become a curse on the tongues of a dozen races: Teiyogtei Khagan, the “glorious king” of the Tsavag. Unlike the khagans, who had led the warhosts of the Tong in the past, exploding into the Shadowlands in a storm of slaughter and pillage, Teiyogtei had not led his people back into the forbidden vastness of the Chaos Wastes. The king had remained, and with him the Tsavag, the most vicious tribe to ever emerge from the forsaken realm of the Tong.
Teiyogtei’s eyes closed in thought behind the snarling mask of his helm. He saw again the bloody dream that had drawn him out of the Wastes, into a land where the breath of the gods was a calm breeze rather than a raging tempest. Here, the bloody dream had been cast aside, old oaths and pacts forgotten. Here, a new dream had been forged, cast in the iron of Teiyogtei’s indomitable will, not the dream of endless slaughter but the vision of timeless empire. By his might, by his power, Teiyogtei had conquered the plains and bound the steppes to him with chains of terror. Now it was not only the Tong who swore allegiance to him, but tribes of Kurgan, Hung and beastkin.
Other warlords had forged such warhosts, great hordes as vast as the horizon. They had squandered their power in campaigns of carnage, spending their strength in the vainglorious effort to appease the ever hungry gods. Teiyogtei had a different vision. He saw a land crushed in his iron fist. He saw castles and fortresses rising from the dust of the steppes, mines stabbing into the deeps of the mountains, fields exploding across the forsaken plains. He saw a land reforged in his own image, a domain that would become stronger than the steel that built it. This would be his glory, his legacy, not the empty quest to please the capricious gods, his name forgotten in the murk of time. The domain he built would endure long after he was gone, and through it his legacy would outlast the gods. He had forged powerful alliances with the strongest tribes, gifting their chieftains with mighty daemon weapons in exchange for their oaths of blood and loyalty. His was an army such as the Shadowlands had never seen, the horde of a conqueror, the horde of a king.
The roar of battle drew nearer. Teiyogtei’s eyes snapped open, his armoured hand closing around the sword at his side. With a shrill hiss, he drew the blade from its scabbard of flesh, the flayed husk of Teiyogtei’s first victim. The sword burned like scarlet fire in his hand, fat and crooked, a ripple of lightning captured in crimson steel. Teiyogtei felt himself being drawn into the flickering embers that burned within the blade. The khagan pulled his eyes away, sneering at the greedy malice of the Bloodeater. The blade had feasted upon many souls since the hour it had been forged, but it would never taste that of Teiyogtei.
The warlord stroked the sharp edge, letting it scrape against the iron of his gloves, teasing the weapon’s malignancy with the nearness of his blood. Angered, the Bloodeater would be even deadlier in battle, eager to feed its frustration with death and ruin. Teiyogtei wanted the weapon at its most malevolent. He feared that the battle to come would test its hostility to the full.
A choking death rattle rose sharply from the crimson mist. A hulking shape, little more than a shadow through the curtain of gory fog, pitched and fell, its head rolling free from its shoulders. Dimly, through the veil of mist, Teiyogtei could see mangled heaps of flesh strewn across the ground, scarcely human in their butchered ruin, piled in heaps of broken bones and severed limbs. Amid the wreckage, he could see a handful of warriors still standing, stubbornly refusing to abandon the fight. Two scarred Kurgan warriors lunged deeper into the crimson murk, monstrous axes clenched firmly in their fists. A breath later, Teiyogtei heard their screams, heard the sound of sizzling flesh and the liquid splash of blood upon earth. The khagan dared to glance down at the Bloodeater, reassured to find that its fires burned steadily, a visible token of its smouldering fury.
“What has come for you can be vanquished, but never destroyed.” Those had been the words the old Tsavag shaman had muttered as he looked up from the puddled entrails of his sacrifice. A warning from the gods? A threat? No, Teiyogtei had taken it as a challenge. He knew which of the dark gods had sent this creature to ravage his domain. He knew that it would not relent until he had faced it in combat.
“Vanquished, but never destroyed.” Teiyogtei sneered at the prophecy. The shaman had paid for his cryptic words, his skull smashed beneath the foot of a Tsavag war mammoth. A man made his own destiny. He did not need the riddles of the gods to lead him astray. Man, monster or daemon, Teiyogtei had yet to encounter anything that could survive the Bloodeater’s ravenous bite.
The clamour of battle faded into a metal echo, only the moans of the dying and the croaking vultures disturbing the silence. The crimson mist swelled, billowing as though moved by an unfelt wind. The rolling curtain stretched towards the hill where Teiyogtei stood alone.
The khagan had forbidden any of his followers to stand with him. Whatever creature had crawled down into his domain from the Wastes, he would face it alone. If he was victorious, it would reaffirm his might in the eyes of his chieftains, bind them all the more to his will. If he fell, it would not matter if a thousand fell with him. Teiyogtei allowed only the four hundred Kurgan who stood beneath the hill to stand against the beast. If four hundred could not stop the monster, no number of mortal warriors and mortal blades would. Teiyogtei would not squander the strength of his horde in useless conflict. It would matter little if he destroyed the monster at the expense of his army. No, if the horde was broken, death upon the creature’s blade would be only too welcome.