Hellblazer 1 - War Lord (30 page)

There was still a smear of blue paint on his mother’s neck; the print of marauding fingers. He had wished to wash it away, but she would not let him put the water on her for fear it would steal the heat of her body.

He had let them do this to her; he had let them kill his father and the others.

He, Konz, the strongest and fastest young warrior of the settlement, had been away from the Tin Mound settlement, had been wandering in search of the gods of the sea people, those who had come by sea from the Fallen Land, from the land that had crumbled into the sea.

Bregg had told him about them; about their great boats, each as big as twenty of the boats of his own people; beautiful boats shaped like ax heads, with scarlet sails; they wore brightly colored cloth so soft it was like the skin of infants; their metals were harder than any bronze. Some of their magic, too, Bregg had learned as a boy when he was a slave to one of their god speakers; he had only learned a little before the colony from the Fallen Land had been wiped out by disease and the depredation of the men of blue paint. He had learned many of the marks and many of their god summonings; he had learned the names of their principal gods. They had been trying to call on their war god, N’Hept, when the raiders had come. They had called him too late.

“They were reluctant to call N’Hept,” Bregg had said. “They had tried to leave the memory of N’Hept behind. They blamed him for the sinking of their land into the sea. But they knew his power would give them strength to destroy their enemies. They put their reluctance aside, but it was too late. The blue paints came before N’Hept could be summoned. The sea people were weakened from disease—they had no strength against the foreign sicknesses of this new land—and so they were easily killed.”

Now Konz sat by the fire, brooding, blaming himself again for the death of his father and the shaming of his mother. “Will you not kill the men of the blue paint?” his mother asked again, her voice rasping.

“I will kill them, Selem my mother. I know a way.”

This was not wholly true. He merely knew a way that he might try. He could go to the old warrens of the sea people. The remains of their colony still stood. Their altars still stood, and some of their wall markings and magical tools remained . . . He remembered the way there that Bregg had shown him. Bregg was dead himself now. The pain in his mouth and fever in his body had maddened him so, he had finally thrown himself off a cliff.

Konz’s mother had stopped panting and shaking. She lay with the inertness of clay and stone.

The great footsteps had ceased their approach. King of Death had come and gone. Konz’s mind had been distant, in the colony of the sea people, when it had happened.

“Good traveling, my mother,” he said.

He waited a while, singing a song to help her to the far land, and then picked up her body and carried it in his arms, to the barrows.

~

Konz led Barasa and Pel into the Grotto of the People of the Sea, at the base of the high forested hill almost within sight of the western ocean. A low stone cliff stood to their left; its brow was mossy, overgrown with drooping ferns. The ferns thrived from the stream that became a sparse waterfall off the cliff; the falling water sparkled in the late-afternoon sun. The cliff jutted over a damp, lichen-spotted undercut riddled with caves.

“I see no colony,” Pel said. He was a short, angry, heavy-browed figure, his face ritually scarred, his nose split by an enemy’s ax so that now his breathing was rough. He and Barasa had been away hunting when the men of the blue paint devastated the settlement. It was a warm afternoon and like Konz and Barasa, a lean man with a twisted right foot from an accident that Barasa had never explained, Pel wore only a girdle of woven sheep’s fur; all three men bore symmetrical scars on their chests, and their hands and arms were painted red, up to the elbows, to signify preparation for battle. All three of them carried wooden spears with bronze points. Barasa had a long straggly beard; Pel and Konz had carved their beards away.

“They did not use huts,” Konz said. “They were building houses of stone, away to the south, and in the meantime they lived here, in these caves. They were here only a hot season when the end came. But—” He pointed. “You see the marks of their fires; and there, the remains of a boat, unfinished . . .”

“You come here because of their knowledge,” Barasa said, “but their knowledge did not save them. How strong could it have been?”

“Bregg showed me things . . . they were true. Bregg knew.”

“Bregg is dead.” Barasa was always skeptical. If you said there was a herd of the great horned beasts to the south, he would say that perhaps by now they’ve moved to the east.

“Come on, let us look anyway,” Konz said.

“You have not been selected to be our leader,” Pel said grumpily.

“Then stay here,” Konz said. “Or come, as you choose.”

Konz strode into what remained of the colony, immediately seeing the white flash of man bones amongst the plants growing along the edges of the clearing, and green and blue cloth flapping in the thin breeze close by them. The remains of some of the dead sea people, he supposed. He walked along the edge of the stream that ran from the waterfall’s pool, and climbed the gravelly path up beside the falls to the caves.

N’Hept!
He called the name in his mind, as Bregg had taught him.
N’Hept! Where are you? I’ve come to sacrifice! N’Hept!

There was no reply in words, but he felt a kind of tugging sensation from one of the caves . . .

The stone over the entrance to the cave was inscribed with a magical sigil: the incisings of the sea people. Konz entered the cave, and after a few steps in darkness, he saw, with surprise, that there was light at the back. Had one of the sea people survived? Was someone else camped back there? There could be men of the blue paint here. He drew his knife from his girdle in his left hand, hefted his spear, and stalked forward.

But the light came from a natural hole in the ceiling of the cave, a rugged shaft, a vertical crack really, that rose crookedly up to the hilltop, showing a little sky, diffuse sunlight.

At the base of the shaft were the remains of a stone altar. On the altar was a broken skull, incised with markings familiar to Konz: the invocation to N’Hept.

But the skull was mostly smashed; an intact skull was needed . . .

“What have you found?” Barasa asked, coming into the shaft behind Konz.

“I have found the place of power I sought,” Konz said. “Where is Pel?”

“He is watching for the men of blue paint.”

“He is afraid!” Konz jeered. A certain giddy energy was working its way up in him. He thumped the butt of his spear on the stone floor and walked back and forth, calling in his mind:
N’Hept! N’Hept!

He looked at the images painted on the walls here: the faces of N’Hept and other gods; he looked at the wooden debris, smashed by the men of blue paint; he looked at the shaft of light overhead . . .

N’Hept!

“What is it you do, here? It is foolishness! Their gods have no power,” Barasa said peevishly. “Let us go hunting instead . . . I am hungry . . .”

“N’Hept!”
He called the name aloud and in his mind at once. He visualized the face of N’Hept.
“I offer you glory and blood!”

“I am going,” Barasa said, turning his back.

Konz shouted,
“N’HEPT!”
and spun about, swinging the butt of the spear, clouting Barasa hard across the back of the head with it. Deliberately not hitting him hard enough to knock him unconscious.

Barasa staggered and turned, snarling, raising his spear, as Konz had hoped; he could not offer a sacrifice of Barasa if he did not fall in real battle. Murder was not enough for N’Hept.

“Barasa is not fully a man!” Konz taunted. “His feet are twisted and his penis, too! Barasa is an infant to leave outside in the cold!”

That was too much for Barasa, who charged him, teeth bared. Konz sidestepped and drove his spear into Barasa’s throat with all his strength, shouting, “For N’Hept!” The bronze spear point drove deep into the soft flesh of Barasa’s neck and severed his spine; the spear head thrust out on the other side, accompanied by a spurt of bright blood. Barasa quivered, his knees shaking, and then collapsed.

Konz felt weak himself and sick to his stomach, but he did not want Barasa’s death to be wasted, so he made himself pull the spear free and then he used his knife to finish removing Barasa’s head from his shoulders. As he did so, he said, “Barasa, you died so that we can take revenge for our people . . . Do not trouble me with your spirit, but give me your blessing in the battle to come.” He carried the head to the blocky altar and placed it in the center, so it gushed blood into the runnel marks on the side. And he gazed at the painted image of N’Hept, a face like two animals and one of the Old Ones, and he called out, “N’Hept! This man was my friend! I have given him to you in battle! Come to me and give me the strength of ten! I have heard of the strength of ten from Bregg, whom you know!”

There was no reply, but he sensed that N’Hept was waiting for something more. It was not yet done . . .

Konz took his bronze knife and—gritting his teeth so that he could bear the work—he scraped away the skin from Barasa’s staring, startled face; he scraped away his scalp, and wiped the bloody bone with Barasa’s loin cloths, till it was clear enough to begin the carving. Then he incised the runes. He knew them by heart; they were carved, as well, on the surface of his mind.

His hands were covered in blood when he was done; his nose was full of the stench of drying blood in the first stages of decay.

He put his right hand on the skull and stretched out his other, palm upward, toward the image of N’Hept on the wall. “I have given you blood in battle! I have carved my intention on him as I was bidden! Now will you not give me the strength of ten men that I may kill my enemies?” And he called out the incantation in the language of the People of the Sea, that he had learned from Bregg.

A voice came into his mind . . .

Carve away his eyelids, so that he may look unflinchingly on the task before him, in the Hidden World.

Konz was shaken by this voice, ringing in his head like the bronze gong rung in the barrows before the call to the Greengod. But he did as he was bid so that the skull’s eyes stared without eyelids, unflinchingly looking at death and the Hidden World.

And again Konz called out,
“N’Hept! N’Hept! N’Hept!”

“Konz!” came Pel’s voice, echoing down the tunnel. “Konz, why did you bring us here? The men of the blue paint are nearby, that was their fire you saw! They have taken this place as a hunting camp! They are coming! Konz, we must run!”

Konz had known the men of blue paint were nearby; he had assumed he and the others would be found here. He had planned for it that way, and now he continued to chant, at the top of his lungs:

“N’Hept! N’Hept! N’Hept!”

“Konz!”

“N’HEPT!”

Then he heard the voice in his head again.

Here is my power, because you have come to me: the one who lives within you and is so easily forgotten. Because you have remembered the god inside you, who taught you and your kind to kill, now remember killing . . . now remember the true joy of killing . . .

Then Konz saw N’Hept himself, his face glowing before his mind’s eye, N’Hept’s mouth opening as if to roar—but out of it came no sound, only a feeling, a feeling that rippled from N’Hept into Konz.

It was like the strength that came into him when he had coupled with Venn, his only mate, who had died two years before.

He still remembered the power he’d felt when driving himself into her, as if he were a god himself.

It was like the strength that had come into him when he’d killed his first man, the man with the braided beard, from the northern tribe . . . The power and the joy of it, roaring through him . . .

But so much more strength than that—ten men more!

“Konz! They’re coming!”

Konz picked up his knife and spear and ran back through the cave. He could see Pel silhouetted against the mouth of the cave, jabbing his spear at something, backing toward him.

“Pel! Feel the power of the War Lord!” Konz shouted. “Feel it, from me! Come with me and kill them, in memory of our people!”

And Konz rushed past Pel and out of the cave, into the group of close to twenty blue-painted men. They were naked, clothed only in blue paint, with red rings around their eyes, shells on sinew string around their ankles and wrists, their hair caked in dung; their spears, mostly of flint, were short but lethal close in.

“Pel!” Konz shouted, as he stabbed with spear and knife, “Call to N’Hept! Feel his power!”

“N’Hept!” Pel shouted, rushing into the fight.

Pel was feeling it then, flowing from Konz to him, and he shouted, “N’Hept! The Tin Mound!” and thrust his spear close in at the men of blue paint, shrieking like a hill cat, and red blood spurted to make blue paint run.

At first the men of blue paint backed away, frightened by their fury, stunned by six quick deaths in seven breaths; many had fallen under Konz and Pel’s onslaught, twitching in their dying, as Konz rushed the others, shrieking.

But then the leader of the men of blue paint shouted in their outlandish language and rallied them and in moments Pel and Konz were surrounded by a ring of jabbing spears. Konz left his knife stuck in a man’s breast and took hold of his spear with both hands and began to thrust, and thrust again. His spear was longer than theirs and it kept them back a few moments more. He felt the power of lightning, snake, and tree in him; he felt the rage of N’Hept. He stabbed and he stabbed and he laughed and he stabbed . . .

Konz turned to see Pel howling with kill fury, and his face, Konz saw, was the face of N’Hept. The face of Pel had been quite replaced by the face of N’Hept.

If the men of blue paint saw this god face they did not react to it, but only pushed in closer, knocking Pel’s spear haft aside, jabbering kill words and stabbing him with their spears, again and again, piercing his stomach and side and neck and eye. Pel went down, shrieking rage as he went.