Tales of the Old World (95 page)

Perimeter fires had been set around the site, around the edges of the old
circular ditch that had stood since before men had memories. Within, vast camps
had sprung up. He saw the pitched standards of a score of warbands. Some he
knew. That was Zar Herfil’s, that was Zar Tzagz’s, that Zar Uldin’s. Kettle
drums beat. Near to the lightning tree, the war tents of the High Zar’s pavilion
had been raised.

It was war then. That much was clear. Not just the seasonal rising of the
clans, the annual gathering for raids down into the bloodless South.

The rumours and auguries had been true. Archaon had come, the deliverer, the
striker-down of thrones and worlds. He had sent out his word, to transfix the
hearts of the warrior bands, to make their very hairs stand up on end, to fire
them for slaughter.

When had a High Zar last come forth for a gathering? When had a High Zar
commended his clans unto himself for a spring driving? Not in Karthos’
lifetime, nor in his worthy father’s age either.

Zar Karthos felt his heartbeat rise, in time with the incessant drums. At
long last, the promised age of conquest had come. The tempest of fire. The
ending-of-times. The Storm of Chaos.

All along the borderlands now, as winter slackened its bite upon the world,
high zars were marshalling their clans around them like this. Enra Deathsword,
Valmir Aesling, Sven Bloody Hand, Okkodai Tarsus, Zaros Bladeback, all answering
the bidding of the strange and marvellous daemon-that-is-also-a-man Archaon.

The greatest of all Archaon’s high zars, Karthos believed, was Surtha Lenk,
about whom this gathering now swelled. If any warlord might break open the
boundaries of the feeble “Empire” and strike down the tawdry crown of its
so-called Emperor… what was given as his name now? Karl-Franz? If any might
strike down his crown and dash out his brains, it would be the great and
malevolent Lenk.

Karthos’ warband rode in through the gathering place. Koros Kyr held the
skull standard high. Warriors turned to watch them pass by. Kul, Kurgan, Dolgan,
Hastling… all manner of men, all manner of standards. Alien faces in strange
wargears watched them go past.

“Be warned,” Odek muttered suddenly. Karthos had already seen the trouble.
The banner of the bloody sword-blade on a red field. Zar Blayda’s standard.

It was not true to say that no blood was lost between the zars. Far too much
had been lost in their lingering clan-war.

Blayda, gaunt and tall in his pitched-black plate armour, etched with the
details of his many victories, strode out onto the trackway into Karthos’ path.
Blayda’s sorcerer, a capering, naked fool named Ons Olker, scampered around his
master’s heels.

Karthos dismounted and tossed his reins to Bereng. He marched through the
trail’s slush to face the black-armoured chieftain. Blayda drew his pallasz, the
long tongue of the sword flashing in the rising sun.

Karthos did not reciprocate, though he heard Odek slide out his sword behind
him.

“You know the law here,” Karthos said, staring at the visor slits of
Blayda’s ink-black helm.

“Do you need me to remind you?” Karthos added. “In the gathering space of the
High Zar, no clan shall fight with clan.”

Blayda lowered his sword. “You are dung-eating scum, Karthos.”

He was being deliberately provocative. Karthos merely shrugged.

“I will wet my blade with your gut-blood and make you a notch upon my helm,”
Blayda added, pointing at a part of his barbute that was not yet marked with an
incised gash.

“Maybe. But not here,” Karthos replied.

Blayda raised his visor far enough to spit on Karthos’ toes, then strode
away, his leaping and cursing sorcerer in tow.

Karthos looked back at his clan. He raised his left hand, fingers splayed.

Koros Kyr planted the spike of their standard into a patch of free ground and
the warband settled. They were encamped not far from the pavilions of the High
Zar. Water and burning wood was brought to them by the gathering’s stewards,
along with meat for cooking, wine, and grain for simmering. Karthos had Odek,
who was charged with the band’s purse, pay them in decent gold.

Tnash came to the zar, suggesting they might also buy a decent fighter from
the slavelord Skarkeetah so that they might undo Zar Blayda in formal combat.

Karthos shook his head. There were more important things afoot now.

The men of the warband were drinking wine as their food roasted and night
fell. Attended by two of his band, Zar Skolt came to their camp site. He
embraced Karthos like a brother, and they drank wine for a while, having many
old victories to remember.

“Will you not fight Blayda?” asked Skolt. “He yearns for it.”

Karthos shook his head. “No, he may wait.”

“Besides,” said Odek. “We are to be pledged.”

Zar Skolt sat up as if he had been stung. “Is that true? Are you pledging?”

“The signs were good. My sorcerer has said it so. Not you?” Skolt shook his
head. “My sorcerer saw no such good omens. Great Tchar, I envy you. Such an
honour no warband could deny.”

“Who else may pledge?” Karthos asked.

Skolt shrugged. “Uldin, I know. Herfil, Kreyya and Logar. And also Blayda.”

“Blayda?” mused Karthos. “Indeed.”

All through the first part of the night, despite a drizzling sleet that came
in from the west, slaves worked in processions to build up the bonfires around
the lightning tree at the heart of the gathering place.

Great flames leapt up, so fierce that the sleet could not douse them. The
hissing of steam filled the sacred place, like unseen snakes. The glow from the
fires lit the tree from below, casting a moving amber light up its bald trunk
and skeletal limbs. It illuminated the iron cages and gibbets hanging from the
branches: offerings, sacrifices and the cadavers of enemies.

Gongs were struck to announce midnight and the time of pledging. Karthos went
down to the ring of fire around the altar tree, where a great number of other
zars and chieftains were assembling. None brought weapons to that hallowed
earth. Herbs and seeds flung onto the fires filled the air with incense and
heady smoke. Karthos felt his flesh sweat from the extreme heat. He saw Uldin,
also Logar, and others he did not know. Blayda’s grim black form was a shadow on
the far side of the fire ring.

A hush fell. The High Zar had emerged from his pavilion, escorted by twenty
white-robed warriors with horsehair crests. They carried bright lamps on long
poles that bobbed like marsh fire as the procession approached.

Surtha Lenk was a monstrous giant of a man, clad in crimson armour. Karthos
shuddered at the sight of him. Two goat-headed dwarfs scurried along at his
heels. Karthos could not tell if they were children wearing goat-masks, or
beastfolk enslaved to the High Zar’s power. One carried a casket of jade and
gold, the other carried Lenk’s war sword. It was so large and heavy, the
goat-thing was all but dragging it.

The zars parted, so that their master could reach the fire ring. Surtha Lenk
stopped. The brass visor of his horned helm appeared to regard them all, yet to
Karthos there seemed to be no eyeslits cut into it.

Lenk raised his massive arms, his huge hands outspread, cased in mail and
thorny steel.

“You are to make the pledge,” he said. It was the first time Karthos had
heard the High Zar’s voice, and his guts turned to ice. It was slight and tiny,
like a child’s, yet it seemed to come from all around and drown out the crackle
of the fire more easily than a bellowing roar.

“Tchar looks to you, warriors. This is holy change you undertake, beautiful
to the Eye of Tzeen. Do you understand this pledge?”

“Lord seh!” the zars called out obediently.

One of the goat-things opened the casket and took something from it. Surtha
Lenk received it and held it up for them all to see. It was a great claw of
frightening dimensions, polished bone-white.

“Look upon it,” the High Zar whispered. “The zar who brings its like back to
me will be called shyi-zar, and he and his warrior band will be accorded the
full honours of that title.”

The claw was put away again in its reliquary box. Surtha Lenk took his sword
then, and held it upright before himself in one hand.

“Pledge!” he said.

One by one, the zars came to him, and slid their bared right hands down the
edge of his warblade without any show of pain. Then each one turned and let the
blood drip from their sliced palms into the fire.

Karthos did so in turn, not daring to show any pride by looking up at his
master’s hooked metal visage. He watched his own blood well up, black in the
firelight, and heard the drops of it sizzle in the flames.

Dawn came, grey and sunless, with sheeting rain and a savage wind that shook
the hide tents and made the great lightning tree creak and moan. Karthos
stretched out his left hand, fingers splayed. The warband left the gathering
place.

They were not the first to depart. Some pledged bands, anxious to begin the
task, had quit the camp before first light. Odek told his zar of the standards
that were missing, Blayda’s amongst them.

They crossed the heathlands to the west, into the driving rain, and then
turned north, advancing into the haunted hills and miasmal valleys beyond. Here,
the crests were granite, and the land suddenly shelved away into steep pine
brakes of mist and darkness where the sun never touched, even in summer. They
sighted another warband on a trail over to the west, but they were too far off
to hail or identify.

Karthos had described the claw to his men, and much debate had followed as to
its nature or origin. Tnash insisted it was in fact the tusk of a doombull, but
the others shouted him down. It was the talon of a predator beast, a dragon’s
horn, a sliver fallen off the late moon and all other manner of things.

The sorcerer offered the soundest council. “Let us not waste effort in
fruitless searching, zar seh,” he ventured. “Let us get truth, and use it.”

So they rode for Tehun Dhudek.

Tehun Dhudek was a fastness in the lonely hills that many men shunned for
they feared it was cursed. But Ygdran Ygra, who knew more of the world’s secrets
than most men, had been there himself, and scoffed at the common rumours. “A
clan of sorcerers dwells there,” he informed the warband, “and they have in them
great powers of divination. If we please them with our offerings, they will tell
us the true nature of the claw, and where we may find it.”

“But the curse…?” Aulkor said.

“Just stories spread by men who have been there to question the oracle and
not liked the truth they have learned. To some men, the truth is a curse.”

Karthos hoped that would not be so for them.

That part of the hills was indeed lonely. The track wound up through the
dismal cliffs of splintered granite, and along deep-cut ravines and narrow
gorges. Their only company was a few bird flocks in the pale sky.

“Someone’s been this way,” Odek said. There was horse dung on the scree of
the trail, and it was not more than a day old. “A lone rider?”

“No, zar seh. Look there, the soil of more than one animal. A warband,
perhaps?”

“One with the same notion as us?”

They rode on a little way further, to the mouth of the sloping gorge that the
sorcerer said led right to the fastness itself.

Odek looked round at Karthos sharply, but the zar had heard it too. Hooves,
the shouts of men, carried down the gorge by the chill wind. And there, amongst
it, the clash of blades.

Karthos drew his pallasz. Gripping it made pain flare in his hand, for though
Ygdran Ygra had dressed his pledge-wound, his palm still throbbed.

His men needed no orders. Their weapons came out. Pallasz mostly: long,
straight-bladed cleaver-swords. Lokas Longham had a horse-spear, and Gwul Gehar
the waraxe he favoured. Zbetz Red-fletch and Aulkmar took out their recurve
horse-bows and slipped on the bone rings of their thumb-guards.

Karthos raised his left hand, fingers splayed.

At a firm gallop, Karthos led the way up the track and into Tehun Dhudek. The
mouth of the ravine formed a gateway in a high ring-wall of dry stone
construction that surrounded a flagged courtyard built upon a shelf in the
cliff. The three longhouses of the fastness, along with an ancient and ragged
tower, overlooked the courtyard from a promontory shelf, with stone steps
running down to the floor of the yard itself.

Murder was underway here. Karthos counted at least nine Dolgan riders
assaulting the place, hacking down the defenders with their hooked swords and
adzes. The defenders were not warriors. They were shaman, acolytes and slaves,
armed with poles and staves. The bodies of many, leaking blood, lay scattered
around the gate-mouth and across the courtyard. A number of riderless horses
milled around the yard.

“Bereng!” Karthos thundered, and the hornblower at his left side unloosed a
mighty blast upon his carnyx that howled around the walled yard like a boom of
echoing thunder.

The Dolgan warriors turned, amazed, enraged. Karthos saw their chieftain, a
bearded and maned brute with arms wholly covered in warrior rings. Karthos did
not know his name, or the name of his warband, for Kurgan and Dolgan were often
strangers if not bitter foes except at times of gathering, but he knew the man’s
face. He had been at the fire-ring at midnight, pledging to the High Zar.

The Dolgans swept around to meet the Kurgan charge, kicking and slashing the
fastness’ defenders out of their way.

“Into them!” Karthos yelled.

The packs of riders met. Karthos’ band had the advantage of surprise and
momentum. Reins clamped between their teeth, Zbetz and Aulkmar loosed their
first arrows. The shafts went buzzing across the walled yard. Aulkmar’s struck a
Dolgan through the chest and slammed him off his saddle. Zbetz sent another
raider to his doom, a red-feathered arrow through his side.