Tales of the Old World (96 page)

Lokas Longham’s spear shattered a Dolgan shield and transfixed the warrior
holding it so that he was torn up out of his seat and off his horse. The spear
went with him, wedged through his body, and Lokas let it go, reaching over to
sweep his saddle-sword out of its long, leather scabbard as the next Dolgan flew
at him.

Odek crossed blades with a particularly large Dolgan warrior, and they ripped
their swords at one another, their terrified horses circling and stamping. Tnash
He-Wolf felled one man cleanly, his pallasz windmilling, and then turned his
steed’s head hard to engage another.

Karthos, with Gwul Gehar at his right hand, went for the chieftain, but he
had two heavy warriors in ringmail and over-plate as body guards. Their wild
eyes flashed under the slits of their tusked helmets. They had swords and short,
stabbing spears.

Karthos clashed with one, driving his pallasz at the Dolgan’s badly timed
sword swing, but the man’s left hand came around to jab the stabbing spear at
the Kurgan zar. Its iron tip glanced painfully off the banding of warrior rings
around Karthos’ right arm. Karthos, struggling to restrain his frantic horse
with the power of his left arm, hacked backwards, and succeeded in breaking the
spear haft and severing the thumb from the hand grasping it.

The Dolgan squealed, his maimed hand coming up in dismay, blood squirting
from the wound. Better balanced in the saddle now, Karthos struck again, and the
man barely got his sword up to block the blade.

From the corner of his eye, Karthos saw that the chieftain was coming for him
too now, sword out, moving in from the left flank. Gwul was engaged with the
other bodyguard, fighting the awkward, laboured rally that accompanied a duel of
sword against axe.

Karthos snarled. He could not break from the bodyguard because the man, due
to the pain and outrage of his hand wound, was hacking with a berserk frenzy.
The zar could not disengage his blade in time to fend off the chieftain’s
attack.

The only option left was to avoid it. Karthos threw himself out of his
saddle, crashing head-on into the injured bodyguard and tipping him and his
horse right over. Men and horse sprawled on the cold flagstones of the yard,
winded and stunned. Karthos heard Odagidor cry out his name, fearing his zar had
fallen to a blade wound.

Wrestling, Karthos managed to pull free of the frantic bodyguard and regain
his feet. The bodyguard had lost his sword, and clawed at Karthos’ legs,
painting him with crimson blood from his ruined hand. Karthos kicked him away
and turned just in time to meet the downstroke of the bellowing Dolgan chief.

The Dolgan’s hooked broadsword resounded off Karthos’ pallasz with jarring
force. The chieftain’s bulky horse backed off a pace or two in alarm, and then
came in again, and Karthos was forced to leap back to avoid the whistling blade.
He was almost slammed off his feet by the tackling charge of the wounded
bodyguard, who attacking him, screaming, with a bear-hug. Karthos’ left hand
was free, so he smacked it round and caught the bodyguard across the face with
the iron rings of his warrior bands, breaking the enemy’s nose in a spatter of
blood. The Dolgan let go. Karthos grabbed him as he staggered, blinded by blood,
and pulled him close as a shield, left arm locked around his throat.

The chieftain hacked again and disembowelled his own man. Karthos let the
ruptured body topple away and ran across the flagstones to retrieve his horse.

Bereng’s horn blew again. A few paces short of his twitchy steed, Karthos
looked round. Nearly a dozen more Dolgan warriors were pouring down the steps on
foot from the longhouses. That explained the riderless horses.

Karthos ran to meet them. Ffornash and Aulkor leapt from their horses to join
with him. Odagidor remained in his saddle and came in close to the steps,
scattering the foot soldiers with his hooves. There was a hissing sound, and one
of the Dolgans coming down the steps sprawled backwards with a red-feathered
arrow in his brow.

Karthos reached the lower steps, and swung his pallasz at the nearest Dolgan.
This warrior had a long-hafted adze, and drove it down at the zar like a
woodsman with a timber axe. Karthos side-stepped, and the man overbalanced from
his desperate strike. Karthos’ pallasz opened him from the hip to the armpit
and scattered broken links of ringmail across the flagstones. The man fell onto
the courtyard floor with bone-cracking force.

Ffornash the Dreamer had famed skill with the long-blade. He was a tall,
lithe man who shunned armour because it slowed his limbs.

Both fists around his sword grip, he danced up the steps, ducking an axe and
sidestepping a stabbing spear, and sliced his silver sword back and forth,
ripping through a neck and opening a Dolgan belly.

Aulkor broke a Dolgan sword against his heavy pallasz, and cut the man
through to the breastbone with a side swing. But his blade was wedged. He tried
to wrench it free as another Dolgan came down at him with an adze. Karthos flew
forward with a howl, and ran the adze-wielder through before his blow could
land. The Dolgan thumped away down the steps, his adze spinning free into the
air as the dead hands released it.

“My thanks, zar seh,” Aulkor gasped, extracting his bloody sword at last.

Karthos did not reply. The fight was far from done. Now Odek, Odagidor and
Gwul Gehar had joined them on foot, battling up the steps into the thick of the
Dolgan pack. Another enemy fell and rolled heavily down the stone risers, hit by
one of Aulkmar’s arrows this time. The steps themselves had become slippery with
blood. Dying men clawed at their ankles and shins. Karthos broke a shield away
and then cut through the haft of an adze, then a forearm, then a throat. He was
changing lives into death. Tchar would approve.

Fighting clear, he reached the top of the staircase. The only Dolgans there
were corpses, transfixed by red and grey feathered arrows. He turned and looked
back, in time to see the act that finished the fight.

Koros Kyr, still holding the warband’s standard high, rode in hard and killed
a Dolgan horseman with a wide blow of his pallasz. Then he reined hard around
and removed the head of the Dolgan chief. It was a superb cut, all the power of
the standard bearer’s arm behind it. The brute’s helmed head flew off in a mist
of blood, and bounced and rolled like a cannonball on the flags. His horse took
off, and carried the headless corpse out through the gate and away down the
ravine.

Broken, the remaining Dolgans tried to flee, but there were Kurgan swords all
around them. Gwul Gehar’s waraxe finished two more. The few that made it to the
gateway, wailing and screaming, were dropped hard by Zbetz and Aulkmar, who sat
astride their tight-circling horses, loosing arrow after arrow.

Zar Karthos, spattered head to toe in gore, lowered his dripping pallasz and
smiled. They had destroyed the Dolgan warband, and with no loss to themselves.

Tchar was evidently with them.

The sorcerer clan of Tehun Dhudek had numbered sixteen, an extended family of
sons and fathers and uncles. A further twenty acolytes had dwelt within the high
stone walls, along with some thirty slaves and womenfolk. Now only thirty lives
remained all told, most of them the women, who had been hidden in the fastness
caves when the raid began. The Dolgans had sought to learn the truths of the
talon from the oracle by force of arms.

Ygdran Ygra had been right. The truth was sometimes a curse, for the Dolgans
had found only death at Tehun Dhudek.

The survivors of the fastness clan regarded Karthos’ warband with some
wariness, fearing that they had exchanged one murdering pack for another. With
his sorcerer, Karthos went to meet with the most senior of the surviving hetmen.

“We came to make fair offering in return for answers,” he told the old man
squarely. “We would not have resorted to violence. You need not fear us now.”

The old hetman sat on a clammy stone chair in the draughty hall of one of the
longhouses. He had insisted on wearing a golden mask so that the Kurgan would
not see his grief.

“What would you have given us, zar, as an offering?” one of his younger
acolytes asked. This young man had a bandaged stump where his right hand had
been struck off by the Dolgans. He clutched it against his chest like a newborn
babe.

“Gold, fine stones from my war chest, salt-meat and wine. Whatever else
pleased you that I could provide,” Karthos said.

“But now we have given you more than that,” said Ygdran Ygra. “By force of
arms and the sweat of toil, we have given you salvation from the Dolgans. What
is that worth?”

Answers, it seemed. For two nights, Karthos’ sorcerer was shut away in the
furthest longhouse, probing the secrets of the clan’s oracle. A great storm came
up during that time, and hammered upon the doors and shutters. The warband
sheltered in the first longhouse, their food and drink provided by the grateful
clansfolk. The storm’s rain put out the pyre of Dolgan bodies heaped in the yard
before they were even half burned.

The storm cleared. A pale yellow light filled the sky above the fastness
peaks. The mountain air was alive with the gurgle of water draining and running
down the cliffs into the valleys far below.

Ygdran Ygra came out of seclusion, tired and hungry. He refused to speak
until he had eaten a platter of pigs’ feet and drunk some watered ale besides.
Karthos had never seen him so exhausted. For the first time, he looked his
years, haggard and worn out.

“It will be quite a thing to do,” he said at last, his voice soft. He dabbed
shiny spots of pig grease off his chin with a kerchief.

“How so?” Karthos asked, unplugging a wine flask and pouring himself a
beakerful.

“I know where it is and what it is,” Ygdran Ygra replied. “But now finding it
is not the burden. Killing it is.” He shook his old head and tut-tutted. “Even
your father, Kelim Karthos, he who was zar before you, even he would have shrunk
from this task.”

“Just tell me of it,” Karthos said.

“A heralder,” said the old sorcerer. “Tchar wants us to take a heralder.”

Karthos feared that if he told the men, they would revolt and ride away. But
they begged to know, and he could not keep it from them. So he sighed, sat down
amongst them in the draughty longhouse, and blurted it out.

For a long moment, there was no sound except the moaning of the wind and no
movement except the drift of the sunlight on the floor as clouds passed across
the sky.

Then Ffornash the Dreamer let slip a low, sad chuckle, and Gwul Gehar spat in
the hearth, and the brothers Aulkor and Aulkmar looked at one another and
shuddered.

“So, not a doombull then?” asked Tnash He-Wolf.

Koros Kyr slapped him for his question, and the warband broke into laughter.

“You will ride with me?” Karthos asked.

“We are pledged, zar seh,” said Odek simply. “Riding with you is what we
do.”

It took four days to reach the Wastes. Four days’ hard ride, and all of them
fatigued and aching from the battle that, they were sure, only Tchar’s will had
seen them win so thoroughly. Odagidor suspected that Tchar had wanted them to
crush the Dolgans because they were the ones who were destined to meet the
pledge and take the shyi honour.

But Bereng muttered that they had been spared and granted victory only to
give the heralder more blood to spill.

None of them had ever seen a heralder, except for Zbetz Red-fletch, who had
been a child when one savaged his home village. He remembered little of it,
except its ravening beak that had rent his father in two. He had been a young
child. It had haunted his dreams ever since.

Lokas Longham said he thought he might once have seen one, circling in the
heavens, high up, above Zamak Spayenya, many years before, when he had been
riding with the warband of Zar Shevras. An eagle, the others said.

“With the body of a lion?” he replied.

“How could you tell if it was so far away?” asked Odagidor.

“Maybe it was an eagle,” Lokas said resignedly.

The Wastes were cold and empty. Nothing living seemed to grow or thrive
there. At all sides, the dry plains rolled away to the limits of the world,
broken only by ridges of crusted rock and scattered boulders. The soil was as
dry as dust, as white as a sorcerer’s sacrificial chalk. The sky was dark,
washed purple by the poisoned light. Thunder rumbled throughout the day, and
around the hem of the horizon, slashes of lightning grazed the air and bit into
the earth like bright and slender fangs.

The air smelled of decay. Wailing sounds echoed over the desolation, from no
obvious source. Amongst the white dust, every few miles, gnawed bones protruded.
Horse, man, man-beast.

On the fifth day out from Tehun Dhudek, Ygdran Ygra rose in his saddle and
pointed.

“There! As the insight was given to me. An outfall of rock, spiked in three
places, like the front part of a crown. Before it, a steep slope of rocks and
stones. In the sky of the west, a crescent of clouds. This is the place.”

Karthos felt fear then, the turning of a long-standing worry into true fear.
He sensed it settle upon his men too.

He drew a deep breath and raised his left hand out, fingers splayed.

They rode up into the flinty slope of stones. All of them carried long lances
now, fashioned from the cold forests they had passed through to reach the open
wastes. Swords would not be enough to do this deed.

According to Ygdran Ygra—and the lore of the Northlands—a heralder was a
most feral beast, twisted from nature and combined by the mutable touch of Tchar
into a chimera. It was in part a lion, but more massive than even the greatest
hunting cats of the Taiga, but its head was that of an eagle or vicious prey
bird, hugely beaked. It possessed wings. In the oldest of times, such animals
had been plentiful and common, plaguing the realms of man, but they had faded
away into the remote corners of the world. Some said the wizards and lords of
the Empire had such creatures tamed as war-steeds.