Blood for the Blood God

19

The bestial roar of the forge boomed within the iron walls of the Black Altar, drowning out even the boiling din rising from the pit far below. After so many centuries of neglect and loneliness, the daemonic presence of the forge seemed almost eager to work once more, anxious to bind a shard of its evil into a weapon and send a part of itself out into the world again, even if that weapon was going to be used to frustrate its vengeful lust.

Dorgo worked the complex nest of pulleys and chains. He hauled buckets of what looked like molten pitch, but which stank like burnt blood, up from the pit, pouring it into the yawning mouth of the forge. Impossibly, the emptiness within the fleshy forge never seemed to fill, consuming bucket upon bucket of the fiery broth. He could feel heat rising from within the darkness beneath the sharp teeth of the forge, could feel it growing to blistering intensity, but where the magma-like liquid vanished to, the Tsavag could not say.

Sanya watched Dorgo work, her eyes carefully studying both man and forge. She listened to the roar of the forge, concentrated on the clawing touch of heat against her soft skin. She waited for a moment, for the fleeting instant when all her senses would be in alignment, for the moment when the daemon would be ready to do its work.

The moment came. With a sharp cry, Sanya called Dorgo away from the hanging chains and bronze pulley wheels. Her senses told her that he had fed the forge enough, that its fire burned hot enough to serve them.

“Place your hand against the forge,” she told him. The warrior stared at her, distrust in his eyes. Sanya laughed at his suspicion. “Getting the sword is only half the battle,” she said. “I need someone to wield it, someone fool enough to challenge the Skulltaker.”

“But not fool enough to burn his hand down to the bone,” Dorgo growled back.

“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.”

The wait was not a long one. Even as Dorgo was contemplating Sanya’s plan, trying to weigh its wisdom against his fears for his people, against the desperate need for haste that gripped him, a familiar and unforgettable chill swept through his body. He could see that the sorceress sensed it as well, turning to face the doorway where the bronze panels had once stood.

A figure emerged from the shadows, a hulking shape encased in crimson steel and a horned, skull-like helm. In its mailed fist, the black blade smoked and snarled. Across its chest, the chain of trophies hung, their sightless sockets staring blindly across the Black Altar.

There was a hideous, triumphant quality about the way the Skulltaker marched across the metal, blood-soaked floor. Sanya blanched, growing pallid before the imposing apparition, her arrogance and pride withering in the champion’s grim presence. She retreated behind Dorgo, placing the warrior between herself and the monster. The Skulltaker hesitated for an instant, his deathly mask studying the Tsavag warrior.

Dorgo brandished the Bloodeater, making certain that the Skulltaker recognised the blade he held. He could sense that the champion did. The Skulltaker would remember the power of that weapon better than anyone or anything, the blade that had vanquished him once before. If anything could make him know fear, it was this.

The Skulltaker turned away from Dorgo, looking past him to the Sul sorceress. Dorgo felt his ire rise. Did the monster think so little of him that he looked to the woman as a greater threat?

The Tsavag rushed the Skulltaker, a Tong war cry rising from his throat as he charged. The Skulltaker blocked the warrior’s stabbing sword, knocking the Bloodeater aside with a backhanded sweep of his smouldering blade. Dorgo heard the daemon steel scream in protest as the Bloodeater bit into its otherworldly edge.

Dorgo feinted a jab to his foe’s left, and then thrust at his right, stabbing at the join between torso and pelvis. Again, the Skulltaker’s blade came sweeping down, swatting aside the striking sword. This time the monster followed the block with a sweeping slash from his blade. Smoke stung Dorgo’s eyes as he ducked what would have been a decapitating blow.

The deadly dance began in earnest, thrust and parry, slash and block. The Bloodeater filled Dorgo with such strength that he barely felt the Skulltaker’s intercepting blade as it crashed against his own. He knew that if he could just get through the monster’s defences, if he could once stab his crimson blade into the body beneath the plated mail, that the Skulltaker would be finished. The power of Teiyogtei’s sword would destroy him as it had so long ago.

Against the strength of his arm and the power of his sword, Dorgo was forced to concede his vulnerability. The Skulltaker was far and beyond any foe he had ever faced, combining speed and power in a way that even a formidable adversary like Tulka didn’t come close to matching.

Unlike the champion of Khorne, Dorgo had no daemon-forged armour to guard his body. He had shed his armour before carrying Sanya across the pit. Beside the metal plates encasing the Skulltaker, he was as naked as a babe. It was a sobering thought, when the Skulltaker’s screaming blade came flashing inches from his skin, to consider how deep it would cut him if it struck home.

Dorgo’s sword crashed against the Skulltaker’s breastplate, scouring a deep gash in the dark armour. He quickly pulled back, turning aside the stabbing thrust of the champion’s blade with the hilt of his sword. Even as he knocked the deadly weapon aside, Dorgo felt his ribs explode with pain, the Skulltaker’s armoured knee slamming into him, pitching him to the floor. Hastily, Dorgo lifted the Bloodeater to block the murderous, descending strike of the Skulltaker’s steel.

Then he saw it, hanging from the chain alongside the other trophies lashed across the Skulltaker’s chest: a human skull, disfigured by lumps of metal protruding from forehead and scalp. Like all the others, it bore the brand of Khorne upon its brow.

Long-nourished hope withered and died as Dorgo saw his father’s skull grinning at him from the Skulltaker’s gruesome collection. They had found the Black Altar, and drawn the Skulltaker to them, but it was all done too late. Hutga Khagan had already joined the monster’s victims.

Seven heads: seven vanquished tribes. The strength and power that had filled him when he took up the Bloodeater faded as he felt his stomach turn. It didn’t matter that he had no proof of the thought that burrowed into his brain, he knew his suspicion was right. He knew which head the Skulltaker hadn’t claimed.

The champion’s sword came flashing down in a murderous sweep. The Bloodeater was all but torn from Dorgo’s nerveless clutch as he instinctively lifted his weapon to block the strike. The Skulltaker pulled back for another attack, towering over the fallen Tsavag like some gruesome avatar of death.

Suddenly, coils of blazing blue light crashed around the Skulltaker’s body, sizzling against his armoured plate. The champion spun, glaring at the almost forgotten sorceress. Sanya saw the timeless malice burning behind his mask as he stormed after her. Another blast of eldritch power smashed into the Skulltaker’s body. The monster kept coming, protected from the woman’s magic by the dread power of his god.

Sanya retreated, circling behind the forge, clutching her bag against her breast. The Skulltaker pointed a metal claw at the woman, an imperious gesture that brooked no defiance. He had nothing to fear from her magic, no spell known to man or daemon could penetrate the armour he wore.

Somehow, the sorceress lifted her head, all the hubris of her tribe etched across her features. “Work for it,” she spat scornfully.

A bestial growl rasped from behind the Skulltaker’s mask. With swift, furious steps he closed upon Sanya. Desperately, Dorgo fought to his feet, determined to finish his enemy himself. Then he noticed something strange. Sanya had positioned herself behind the nest of pulleys and chains. Dorgo knew the spot well, having laboured so long to raise buckets from the pit. There should be a great hole in the floor only a few feet from where she stood, yet to his eyes, all that could be seen was the blood encrusted metal floor of the chamber.

Dorgo’s eyes were not the only ones deceived. The Skulltaker did not hesitate in his brutal rush towards the woman. His path carried him straight over the hole, the emptiness that Sanya had cloaked in her magic. With a great, wolf-like howl, the hulking champion, the blood-soaked slaughterer of the domain, plummeted down, hurtling into the burning pit far below.

“That solves the problem of the Skulltaker,” Sanya laughed, setting down her bag. There was an ugly, gloating quality to her voice, her features twisted into a harsh scowl. “It appears that we didn’t need the Bloodeater after all, just a bit of Mighty Cheen’s power employed in a judicious fashion.”

Dorgo wiped blood from his forehead, trying to keep it from running down into his eyes. He wanted to see the witch, wanted to see the terror in her eyes when she understood that she was going to die. He knew that she had worked some kind of enchantment on him, drowning out his suspicions of her with a slavish ardour. It was gone now, shocked out of him by the sight of Hutga’s skull hanging among the other trophies.

Sanya smiled when she saw the merciless hate in Dorgo’s eyes. She folded her hands together, contemptuous in her display of unconcern. “Try,” she said. “Just try to strike me down. You can’t. Ever since we left the domain, I’ve been working my magic on you, whispering to your soul while you slept. You’d sooner destroy yourself than destroy me.”

Dorgo roared, rushing at the sneering Sanya. She continued to grin at him even as the Bloodeater came chopping down. Dorgo struck sure and true, aiming for the woman’s pretty face. Instead, he found his arm twisting around, the blade sweeping harmlessly past her shoulder. He tried again, chopping at her neck. The muscles in his arm grew tense, freezing solid the instant he pulled the sword back to deliver the blow.

Sanya stepped inside his murderous reach, her soft lips brushing against his cheek. “You see,” she told him, “I have nothing to fear from you, my mighty warrior.”

“You lied to me!” Dorgo snarled, his rage only emboldened by the witch’s mockery. “You used us. You used my father and my tribe! You never intended to save anyone except yourself… Enek Zjarr!”

The name of the kahn of the Sul hung in the air, foul with scorn and disgust. Dorgo should have suspected, if he’d considered such cowardly deception possible even for a Sul. If the kahn could make doppelgangers of himself, surely cloaking his form in that of another would come easy to him. The Skulltaker hadn’t been drawn to the Black Altar because of the Bloodeater. He’d been drawn by the one thing he needed to complete his pact with Khorne: the last chieftain’s skull, the head of Enek Zjarr!

Hard laughter rippled from Sanya’s lips as she danced away from the glowering Tsavag. She shook her head, favouring Dorgo with a look that she might bestow on a drooling idiot. “Enek Zjarr?” she laughed. “For too long I allowed that worm to use my body. Do you think I’d let him defile it further to hide from the Skulltaker?”

“You cannot trick me, sorcerer!” Dorgo snarled. He lowered his arm as feeling returned to it, further enraged by his frustrated helplessness. “The Skulltaker needed one more head. Tell me he didn’t need the head of Enek Zjarr! Tell me that isn’t what brought him here!”

Sanya nodded, condescending to applaud the warrior’s reasoning. “Oh yes,” she agreed, “it was Enek Zjarr’s skull he needed, but I’m afraid someone already took it.”

Dorgo stared in disbelief as Sanya’s slender hand reached into the bag slung around her shoulder, the bag she had been so determined to keep with her. She pulled from it the secret treasure that she had carried with her for so very long: the dry, fleshless skull of Enek Zjarr, the rune of Khorne branded into its forehead.

“He’s been dead since before we left the domain,” Sanya told him, “murdered the very night we returned from the tomb of Teiyogtei. His weakness emboldened those who would see him fall. The legacy of Teiyogtei is such that no enemy can kill a chieftain, but as the king was slain by his warlords while he languished from his wounds, so his heirs may be brought to destruction by the hand of a kinsman. Enek Zjarr never saw the dagger I stabbed into him, but I assure you he felt its venom!”

“But the Skulltaker would simply hunt for the head of the new kahn,” Dorgo protested.

“Not if there was no kahn,” Sanya corrected him and the full treachery of that statement was like a physical blow to the Tsavag. “If no one claimed Enek Zjarr’s legacy, if none drew the flesh of Teiyogtei from his heart, then the power would remain bound in his corpse. The head of Enek Zjarr would remain the trophy sought by the Skulltaker. We Sul are smarter than the other tribes. We alone understood that our survival and that of our kahn were not the same. So long as the domain endured, we would endure. Once the Skulltaker killed the chiefs of the other tribes, there would be none to oppose us.”

“And now the Sul will enslave what is left of the tribes,” Dorgo growled through clenched teeth. “They will bring the entire domain under their rule.”

“It is the destiny of those with wisdom to rule,” Sanya said.

“Not wisdom, witch,” Dorgo spat. “Treachery and trickery! That is the coin the Sul know best!”

Sanya sighed, shaking her head sadly. “I could have used you, Tsavag. Thaulan Scabtongue and the other elders will need to be culled if I would be queen.”

“And you’d make me your king,” scoffed Dorgo.

“Consort, perhaps,” Sanya said after a moment of consideration. “After you’d disposed of the elders, of course. But I’m afraid you’d never bend sufficiently to my will. You’re too truculent, too headstrong to make a good slave. The strain of maintaining spells over you is one I can easily do without.”

Dorgo glared at the sorceress, feeling his hatred of her swell with each passing breath. Sanya was terrible in her airs of gloating triumph, revelling in the catalogue of deceit and betrayal that had brought her ultimate victory. All the death, all the suffering that had passed, all the carnage wrought by the Skulltaker, was immaterial to her. It was a mentality as loathsome as it was callous. Even ever-hungry Khorne appreciated each man’s death in his moment of dying.

Sanya strode back across the floor, the skull of her betrayed master in her hand. Slowly, she paced around Dorgo, her fingers playing through his hair. “Too bad,” she decided at last. “I’ll have to find another tool to wield the Bloodeater for me.” Her voice became as cold as a winter tempest.

“Skewer yourself, dog!”

Against his will, Dorgo’s hands closed around the hilt of the Bloodeater. With agonising slowness, he turned the blade around in his grip, pointing the sharp tip of the jewelled sword towards his gut. He strained against the pull of his muscles, struggling against the dominating will that compelled him. Sanya laughed and he could feel her power over him lessen.

He tried to drop the sword, but even as he started to flex his fingers, he felt her will force them closed again.

She was toying with him, making him die by degrees, savouring the helpless terror of his mind. A more sinister torment it was hard to contemplate, where torturer and victim were one and the same.

A strange sight intruded into his terror. Past the trembling fists of his outstretched arms, Dorgo could see the nest of chains behind the forge. He could see them shivering, trembling with motion as though moved by some intangible wind.

Slowly, at first, then more violently, they began to sway. Initially, Dorgo watched the chains only to distract him from Sanya’s torture, but soon a horrified fascination gripped him. Something was climbing up the chains.

As soon as the thought was in his mind, he felt Sanya’s hold on him falter. The sorceress turned away, rushing to the edge of the opening behind the forge. Dorgo threw the Bloodeater from him, letting it clatter across the floor. He scrambled away from weapon and the sorceress, retreating from both with horror.

The sorceress waved her hands in arcane gestures above the metal floor, banishing the spell of concealment that she had evoked, exposing the gaping hole through which the chains passed. Her face turned pale with horror.

Sanya was too consumed by her fear to notice Dorgo’s escape. She was trembling as she backed away from the opening, shaking like a lonely leaf in a thunderstorm. A red gauntlet closed around the lip of the opening, followed quickly by a hulking body encased in armour. The Skulltaker’s metal mask glared at the sorceress, as pitiless as the face of Khorne.

Crackling lightning flashed from Sanya’s hand as she drew power from her amulet. The sorcerous energy shimmered and danced around the Skulltaker’s body, as harmful as summer rain.

The monster moved towards her, each step echoing like the tramp of doom from the walls of the forge. The hungry, surly roar of the forge hissed back into life, welcoming the Skulltaker’s return.

Sanya continued to back away, continued to unleash her deadly magic against the oncoming monster, but there was no pit to hide from the Skulltaker this time, and no trickery that could ensnare him.

Against the champion, Sanya’s magic was incapable of working any harm. It was the Sul’s turn to know how it felt to be powerless.

With a moan of horror, Sanya felt her back press against the iron wall of the chamber. Backed into a corner by the Skulltaker, she made a desperate lunge for freedom. The champion’s mailed fist caught in her flying hair, jerking her brutally from her feet. The Skulltaker ignored the fallen woman, interested more in the object that had flown from her hand to rattle across the floor. He stalked after Enek Zjarr’s skull, reaching down to pick it up from the floor.

Sanya shrieked, desperate courage filling her. She leapt at the Skulltaker, jumping onto his back, trying to pull him away from the fallen head. The champion reached behind him, closing an iron fist around the woman’s shoulder.

In a single, savage motion, he ripped the sorceress from him, bringing her slamming down in an overhead manoeuvre. A sickening, spine-snapping crack sounded as Sanya struck the floor. Even in her agony, the crippled woman tried to push Enek Zjarr’s head from the Skulltaker’s armoured fingers.

“Stop him!” Sanya shrieked as the Skulltaker gained his last trophy. The monster turned away, marching back to the howling forge. The fleshy stump of daemonic malevolence was gyrating and pulsating with excitement, its teeth gnashing in hungry expectation.

“Stop him!” Sanya screamed again, her desperate eyes fixed on Dorgo. The warrior could feel only the faintest tug of her will against his, the witch’s pain befouling her powers.

“If he drops the skulls into the forge, it will be the end of us all!” Sanya cried. Her eyes went wild with terror as she saw Dorgo turn away from the scene, moving towards the doorway of the Black Altar. “It will be the end of the domain! The land and everyone in it will be consumed, absorbed into the realm of the Blood God! Nothing will survive! Think of your people!”

Dorgo turned back. He watched as the Skulltaker dropped the first of his trophies into the greedy maw of the forge. The entire structure shuddered, gripped by some titanic tremor. The howling of the daemon’s spirit rose to an almost deafening din, the blood-stink of the chamber intensifying into an overwhelming reek. Dorgo could feel things scrabbling at the corners of existence, clawing for entrance as old walls began to fracture. Something colossal, a presence gigantic beyond understanding, was looming down from some unimaginable height, casting its shadow of terror across the world.

Dorgo stared into Sanya’s fear-maddened eyes. There was no pity, no mercy in his gaze, only a cold satisfaction. There was enough sanity left in the sorceress to know despair when she saw the ice in Dorgo’s gaze.

“Everyone will die!” she pleaded again.

“Better death than a life of slavery under the Sul,” Dorgo snarled.

The Black Altar trembled again as the armoured fist of the Skulltaker dropped another trophy into the slavering mouth of the forge. Dorgo struggled to keep his footing. There was no hope, only a choice of evils, but it was his choice.

Dorgo made his way back out onto the Black Altar’s jaw, deaf to Sanya’s wailing screams. He braced himself as the structure shook again, as pillars of black flame leapt up from the pit. He moved out along the jawline, climbing towards one of the immense anchor chains.

Whether he fell into the pit or was consumed by the rising flares, Dorgo could take comfort in one thought.

When the Skulltaker dropped his last trophy into the forge, the Sul would know the choice that Dorgo had made.

Somehow, Dorgo was able to cross the horrific pit. Even in the oldest of his tribe’s legends, even in the tales of Teiyogtei, Dorgo had never heard tell of such an impossible escape. Choking vapours, pillars of fire as tall as mountains, the bucking violence of the chains and their scalding heat, such odds even the boldest liar to assume the mantle of shaman would not have dared to tell. Yet, by the grace of what gods Dorgo did not know, somehow he had reached the other side.

He had emerged from the glowing light set into the breast of the bloodthirster’s corpse, scrambling down its charred husk even as it crumbled away beneath him. Dorgo had barely reached the ground before he saw the enormous body collapse, falling in upon itself like a burning log. Even then, the dissolution of the carcass was not complete. The shapeless chunks continued to fall apart, disintegrating into dunes of blackened ash.

Dorgo stared across the horizon, struck numb by the horror that beset his eyes. The landscape of piled bone and skeletal ground was changing, shifting in subtle, uncanny ways. Mounds of bone resolved into familiar peaks. Trees and rivers began to manifest into phantom shapes. Dorgo found that what he looked upon was horribly familiar, that he looked upon hills and mountains that he knew from the lands of the Tsavags. As Sanya had warned, the domain was being absorbed into the realm of the Blood God.

It was not a clean, pure sort of transference. The arrangement of hills and forests was erratic, far different from the way they had existed in the mortal world. The ghastly landscape the places of the domain intruded upon was not banished, but horribly merged into the substance of mortal stone and mortal tree. The strange image of the lands around the domain being stretched to cover the hole where the kingdom of Teiyogtei had once been suggested itself to his mind and would not be unseated. The domain had not been conquered. The realm of Khorne had not expanded.

The domain had been absorbed, consumed, torn from the mortal world and scattered through the spectral borderland of the Wastes. It was conquest in a deeper, more terrible fashion than the cruellest warlord could understand.

Dark clouds gathered in the sky, scarlet lightning flashing through their sombre veils. Red, pasty drops began to weep down from the clouds, a rain of blood. Dorgo could see stretches of the bone-littered Wastes bubbling and frothing as crimson pools spurted up from beneath the earth. All colour drained away as the crimson gore covered the land. The ground was lost beneath the rising tide of blood. Dorgo sloshed through the growing sea, rushing to gain one of the surrounding hills. A roar that was not thunder rolled through the desolation, and he thought again of that hungry howl in the depths of the forge.

Fierce winds tore at the heavens, sending the blood-rain splashing down in nearly horizontal sheets. Dorgo felt the sting of the drops sizzling against his skin, hot with an unholy fire. Tremors shook the earth, great geysers of black flame erupting from beneath the expanding sea of blood. Terror, brutal and malignant, scratched at his mind, hissing words of doom into his soul.

Dorgo at last reached his hill, scrambling up a surface that was slick with blood: trees covered in thorns, grass as bloated and obscene as that of the borderland, rocks with the sinister suggestion of bony arms. Nothing, not even in the most abandoned reaches of the domain had ever been so malevolent, so eager for a man’s blood. He could almost see the thorny arms of the trees reaching out for him, could almost feel the skeletal rocks clawing at his feet.

Always, there was the pulsing, pounding rage pressing against his skull, turning his brain crimson with thoughts of murder and savagery. Death, destruction and carnage, and the lust to exult in slaughter and ruin, pawed at his mind, trying to twist it, to consume it as the Wastes had consumed the domain. Dorgo screamed, trying to keep his last, tenuous hold on what he knew to be himself, trying to keep from being absorbed into something else, something monstrous and ancient and eternal.

The sea of blood continued to rise, swallowing the hill below him. Dorgo climbed higher, ever higher, fighting his way through brambles and brush alive with knife-edged thorns. The stinging rain became a burning deluge, welts rising up from his scalded skin as it struck him.

Then, with impossible abruptness, all was silence. No rain fell from the sky, no rock clutched at his foot. The terror and the bloodlust withdrew from his mind and soul, draining away. The wind became only the faintest breeze and the bellowing roar was a dim whisper. Dorgo found his gaze drawn back across the swollen waters of the sanguine sea, a sea more vast than anything he had ever seen, where only a few peaks and rises disturbed its surface. His attention was fixed, not to the mountains, nor even to the ocean of darkened gore. What he looked at was beneath those grisly waters, a heap of ash drowned beneath the waves.

Tears of blood fell from his eyes, blood burst from his ears and ran from his nose. He bit his tongue as his mouth opened to scream.

The surface of the sea erupted with a violence beyond that of the geysers, lifting in a great explosion that sent tidal waves rippling in every direction.

Immense, gargantuan in its dimensions, the reborn daemon rose into the black sky, its leathery wings fanning the air in great lethargic beats. Molten bronze dripped from its massive hooves, fire falling from its claws. Armour, black and ancient, writhed with the torments of the souls trapped within. Hound-like jaws opened in a victorious howl that ripped across the world, finding its echoes in murders and outrages in a thousand lands. Baleful eyes, black as pits of blood, glared at the heavens with a hate more ancient than time.

Slowly, the apparition faded, vanishing into the ethereal kingdoms of gods and daemons.

Dorgo held his head in his hands, understanding the horror that his revenge against Sanya and the Sul had unleashed. Krathin the bloodthirster, the Lash of Khorne, was free.