Warcry by David Annandale

Author:David Annandale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2019-06-14T13:33:08+00:00

VII

The sky was flesh. Wounds wept blood. Some of the mountaintops were lashed with gore, others were bathed in the crimson rainbows of light breaking through the mantle of torn skin.

‘We will leave a trail through this,’ said First Hunter Blackscale, regarding the blood-spattered ground with distaste.

‘No one has ventured into these peaks for years,’ replied Heart-eater Talon Scar. Where the First Hunter was tall and long-limbed, Talon Scar had a squat, broad-shouldered power that suited her as the foremost authority in her tribe. That tribe, the Burned Offerings, trudged up the mountain slope behind her, almost thirty hunters strong.

‘You really think the Brazenwyrm headed this way?’ asked Blackscale. Alone of the Burned Offerings, he was free to speak to the tribe’s Heart-eater plainly, even to the extent of questioning her decisions.

‘The Rotspire Marsh is past those peaks,’ replied Talon Scar, indicating the next bank of forbidding mountains. ‘The wyrm picked the forest clean of prey and now it’s migrating to a new hunting ground. We’ll catch up to it in the marshes. We just have to keep going.’

‘Wherever the prey is headed,’ mused Blackscale, ‘we can’t stay here.’

Talon Scar walked up the loose, bloody stone of the slope ahead of her, cresting the shoulder of the mountain. Before her were the remains of a structure clinging to the edge of a cliff. Its walls had massive foundations but had been torn down or toppled by the elements.

There weren’t supposed to be structures of any kind up here, not even age-worn ruins.

‘Stay here,’ she ordered to her First Hunter. She drew her bow and nocked an arrow.

Old skulls littered the ground around the ruins. She recognised the bone and obsidian weapons of her fellow Untamed Beasts, along with the decaying iron armour of another tribe. It had been a battle, a vicious one, long ago.

Within the ruins, in front of a pair of weathered thrones, was a heap of bones and spoil. Weapons and armour were piled up along with dozens of skeletons. The monument was topped with a spear, and impaled on the end of the spear was a head.

The severed head was that of an Untamed Beast, judging by the dark green tattoos visible around the neck. Its hair was worn in a single strip of braids, matched by the braided beard. Unlike the rest of the battlefield’s dead, the head was preserved, as if it had only been cut off yesterday.

On one cheek was a raised triangular scar where an arrowhead had been inserted beneath the skin. It had the look of one of the old ways, a mark the dead and fallen Untamed Beasts tribes had used.

Talon Scar approached the battlefield trophy. She shouldered her bow again, now more curious than wary. The mountains were so devoid of inhabitants that only born survivors like the Untamed Beasts could hope to traverse it. Now, it seemed there had been others here once, who had lived and died here above the clouds.

The eyes of the severed head swivelled to face her.

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