Inferno volume 5, p.2
Inferno! Volume 5, page 2
‘I heard a rumour that we’re here to take the pass,’ continued Ferenk, which was met by a muttering of dark laughter. ‘I say we’re here to take some heads! Let the rest squabble about who owns what. We are Spire Tyrants! We turned the sands of the arenas red, and we do the same to the Bloodwind Spoil! We kill and break and tear, and when there’s no one else left, we take what we want!’
The other Spire Tyrants warbands had their own leaders, and they were stoking the fires in their warriors just as Ferenk was. Some of them had started their careers doing the same thing in the arenas, in Carngrad and elsewhere in the Bloodwind Spoil, whipping the crowd and their fellow fighters into a fury that could only be sated by blood.
Their words mingled with the howl of the coming storm’s winds and the shrieking of the Corvus Cabal. The crow-warriors were a dark tide descending from their high ground onto the treacherous slopes above the blood-clotted pass. They had been expected to hold the heights and wait for the Spire Tyrants to come to them. They had instead chosen to force the battle and, by advancing, join it on their terms.
It did not matter. The battle plan still held. Straight down the middle, and kill them all.
The leaders of the Spire Tyrants couldn’t have held them back any longer if they had wanted to.
Voleska felt the ripple of fury running up and down the Spire Tyrants’ lines. The ex-gladiators broke into a charge down the slope towards the advancing Corvus Cabal. She was a part of it, carried along on their tide, and she felt her heart hammering with anticipation. It was the same sensation she had once had when the doors of the arenas were hauled open and she saw the enemy for the first time. A hot, tingling spark of anticipation that ran from her core down her arms and legs, a cousin of fear but something rooted far more deeply in her mind.
‘They’re fast,’ gasped Kyryll as he ran beside her, his twin jagged swords in his hands. ‘They’ll go for the tendons.’
‘Not my first tumble, little Kyryll,’ replied Voleska.
The distance closed. Voleska could hear the birdlike shrieks and caws of the Cabal, a battle-tongue other warbands could not understand. They wore black feathers and avian skulls. Their faces were smeared with black warpaint. She hauled her hammer up onto her shoulder and felt its familiar, comforting weight on her.
The two forces slammed into one another. The Cabal were fast and cunning. The Spire Tyrants fought with a straightforward brutality. Blood sprayed across the shale and a dozen people died in the first seconds. A gladiator’s head was sheared clean off by a razor-sharp blade. A feather-clad Cabalist was rammed through the gut by a jagged two-handed sword. A Spire Tyrant a few strides from Voleska fell back, screaming, his face torn wide open by the finger talons of the Cabalist who had dived under his guard.
With a howl, one of the Cabal leapt off an outcropping of rock. He dived down at Voleska feet first, and the murky sun glinted off the talons built into his boots.
Voleska was faster than he thought.
She swung the hammer to meet him in mid-air. The weapon’s head slammed into the Cabalist’s midriff. It was a blow the crowd had always adored. They loved the crunch of the spine and pelvis, the elongated grunt as the air was forced out of her opponent’s lungs. They loved to see the body, lifeless as a rag doll, thrown down to the bloody sands. She flung the Cabalist’s body off the head of her hammer, and she could almost hear the cheering.
Kyryll was alive, wrestling with a Cabalist who had rushed him. The two rolled on the gory slope, in danger of tumbling down into the pass. Their weapons were pinned at their sides as neither was willing to let go of the other. Voleska grabbed the Cabalist’s feathered cloak and hauled him up into the air. The Cabalist dropped Kyryll and slashed at Voleska, but her reach was such that the dagger’s points skimmed past her throat.
Voleska slammed the enemy back into the ground. He rolled to a kneeling position from which he could stab and slash at her abdomen. But Voleska was wise to it. She was already in mid-swing by the time the Cabalist’s head was up, and there was no time for him to even throw out a hand in defence.
The hammer smashed into his face. Voleska angled the blow upwards, into the chin, a trick she had learned in the arenas when the gladiators had been given the maimed or condemned to fight for the crudest entertainments of the crowd. The Cabalist’s head snapped back, the neck gave way, and his head was smacked clean off his shoulders.
If there had been an audience, thought Voleska, they would have screamed with joy and bloodlust at the decapitating blow. They would have chanted the name of the Gift-Giver.
She corrected herself. There was an audience. They were watching from the peaks overlooking Bonebreak Pass.
‘Get up, little Kyryll,’ she scolded. She turned to the rest of the battling Spire Tyrants. ‘Onwards! Straight down the middle! Don’t give these vermin the time to draw breath!’
The Spire Tyrants surged. Bodies tumbled down the slope into the coagulating gore flowing down the pass. The Corvus Cabal fell back and counter-charged, some finding soft flesh for their blades, others finding only a swinging sword or a shield boss to the face. Voleska swung her hammer in a huge arc and the Cabalists scurried away from her. The Red Sand Raiders ran into the gap she opened up, and they set about the fleeing Cabal with an efficiency born of a lifetime of killing.
Ferenk was among them. The jagged steel head of his spear found a Cabalist in the back and he pinned her to the ground, rushing up to her and slamming his foot down on the back of her head.
Voleska had a split second to gather her thoughts. She risked a glance away from the carnage, up the slope towards the peaks surrounding Bonebreak Pass like the spires of a crown.
The watchers of battle were there, unmoving. In the flashes of lightning she could see how their black armour was banded with steel. Their shields were inscribed with glowing runes and hung with strings of skulls and severed hands. Every peak in the Fangs seemed to have one of Archaon’s warriors atop it, watching the various fronts of the battle unfolding in Bonebreak Pass. Some were observing the bloodshed on the other side of the pass, where Voleska knew that the Unmade and the Splintered Fang were butchering one another. Others were watching the Corvus Cabal and the Spire Tyrants.
They were watching Voleska. They had seen her pair of kills.
‘Killing is not enough,’ said Voleska to Kyryll, who was scrambling to his feet to join Ferenk’s advance.
‘What?’ Kyryll struggled to understand her above the din of clashing steel and screams.
‘They’re watching. Killing isn’t enough. We have to show them. Like in the arenas! We are the spectacle!’
She shot her friend a grin. His face showed only confusion, which passed as he refocused on the battle unfolding around them.
She knew now what she had to do. She understood why she had fought in the arenas, and why she had broken out in a night of anarchy and bloodshed on the streets of Carngrad. Why she had joined Ferenk and the Red Sand Raiders, welding a coherent force out of so many disparate killers. It was because one day, in the chill and storm-lashed Bonebreak Pass, the eyes of Archaon would be on her at last.
‘They’re falling back!’ gasped Kyryll. The Corvus Cabal were scurrying back towards the heights, leaving dozens of dead and maimed in their wake. The slain tumbled down the slope into the thick gore, which was swelling and foaming with the rain.
‘It’s a feint!’ shouted back Ferenk as he finished off a Cabalist on the ground with spear thrust to the throat. ‘They want to draw us in.’
‘Then let them!’ answered Voleska. ‘Tyrants! They are watching! Finish these vermin! Fill up this valley with the dead!’
She held her enormous hammer high over her head. The whole Spire Tyrants force could see her – she was a head taller than most of them and her gore-clotted weapon was like a standard of war brandished as a rallying point.
Some recognised the Gift-Giver from their days in the Carngrad fighting pits. Others just roared in appreciation of the bloody hammer and the toll it had reaped. They surged forward again in Voleska’s wake as she ran after the retreating Cabal.
Some of the Cabalists were too slow. They were trampled underfoot or killed with blades when they stumbled. Voleska slammed her hammer down on the crown of one Cabalist’s head and drove his shattered skull into his chest. Kyryll kept up with her and slashed at the hamstrings of another runner, sending him face first into the bloody scree to be despatched by the Spire Tyrants behind him.
The Corvus Cabal scrambled up the slope to the heights. They had banked on the Spire Tyrants waiting to exult in their victory, licking their wounds and regrouping, not pursuing them heedless of the trap the Cabalists were trying to spring. They never made it to the eyries strung with battlefield trophies, where thousands of crows roosted among the thorny trees of the Fangs. The front ranks of the Corvus Cabal were forced to turn and face the Spire Tyrants before they were overrun, well short of the ridge where they had hoped to mass for their counter-charge
The warriors on the peaks were still watching. They had not moved, save to turn their heads and keep the thickest of the fighting in view. They showed no reaction to the bloodshed.
Voleska had to get their notice. She had to go further.
A leader of the Cabal stood proud of the enemy lines. He stood on long steel legs, like stilts strapped to his shins. They ended in talons that he wielded as skilfully as a bird of prey, clotted with torn flesh and hair. He carried a pair of hooked blades and he shrieked in anger beneath his bird-skull helm. his arms were pierced with hundreds of feathers so that he seemed to have a pair of bloodstained wings.
Voleska had seen other Spire Tyrants killing with a flourish – a skilful decapitation, a flamboyant disembowelment – and she knew her spectacular hammer kills had competition. There was only one target for her in the unfolding bloodshed.
Voleska ran right at the Cabalist leader. He loped towards her, towering over even her prodigious height. He leaped with improbable agility, stabbing his talons down at her. She pivoted to one side and felt the claws raking down her shoulder. She roared in pain and let it fuel her, as she had learned in her first few hours as a killer in the arenas. She would always be hurt. She would always be wounded. It was her choice to use it, and not let it defeat her.
Voleska had the strength and the enemy had the speed. As fast as he was, he could not fly up out of the reach of her hammer. She held the weapon near the butt-end and swung it in a wide, circular arc, ignoring the Spire Tyrants who scattered out of the way. With a clatter the hammer knocked one of the Cabalist’s stilts out from under him.
He hopped onto his remaining stilt and let out a series of staccato, shrieking syllables, a war cry in the battle-tongue of the Cabal. Voleska shifted her grip on her hammer and lunged at her enemy, driving the head of the weapon towards his midriff.
The Cabalist easily jerked sideways out of the way of the blow. His twin blades ripped into Voleska’s unwounded shoulder and down her upper arm. He spun on his stilt and lashed out again, slicing a deep gash into her cheek and another into her other arm.
She had known she would be hurt. There was no way, with her relative slowness, to get into position. She had made a career in the arenas taking blows and refusing to let them debilitate her. She would feel the agony later. For now, she was right next to the Cabalist leader, his bloody wings unfolded over her, his wicked beak grimacing down.
Voleska swung the hammer down and up again, feeling her torn muscles fighting to power it out of its lowest point.
The hammer arced up and slammed into the Cabalist’s groin.
Bones crunched. The Cabalist’s pelvis shattered. The roar of an imaginary crowd filled Voleska’s mind. Severed heads and heart thrusts got boring eventually, but every crowd loved to see a kill-shot to the groin.
Voleska couldn’t leave it to chance. She had to confirm the kill before she could play to the stands and exult in her victory. The Cabalist toppled off his stilt and landed on his knees. Voleska hefted the weight of the hammer over her head and swung it down like a labourer driving a post into the ground. The hammer came down on the back of her foe’s neck.
The blow compressed the enemy’s body, folding it in half. The ribcage collapsed into the abdomen. The spine was turned to pulp. Blood and gore spurted out through the Cabalist’s torn torso, spraying to either side in crimson wings to complement the false pinions of black feathers.
Every kill needed a final flourish, an exclamation mark. Voleska swung an underhand blow into the shattered mess that remained of the Cabalist leader. She caught him under his ruptured chest and flung him high over the battlefield. He trailed blood like the tail of a comet and thumped into the middle of the Corvus Cabal.
Voleska could feel the tide of despair that rippled out from the corpse’s impact. The dismay of the opposition was as sweet as the appreciation of the crowd. Whether they loved or hated her, it was the reaction, the emotion she sparked in the hearts of the onlookers, that drove her on.
The Spire Tyrants roared at the death. They rushed in around her and dived into the Corvus Cabal. The enemy were shattered, their feathered bodies beaten down to the scree or held aloft impaled on spears and blades. They fought back till the end, and there were Spire Tyrants whose throats were cut or whose hearts were pierced even in the moments of victory, but for every fallen gladiator, five or six of the Crows were left butchered in bleeding heaps.
Drops of blood pattered down onto Voleska’s shoulders as she paused. The thunderclouds overhead swelled deep crimson, and the storm broke. With a hiss and a roar, the blood rain fell again.
It trickled down the scree in hundreds of tiny streams, mingling with the river that now flowed through the pass, foaming pink around rapids formed by piles of bodies. It streamed down the faces of the Spire Tyrants and spattered against the armour of the warriors on the mountain peaks. It sluiced down the mountainsides. The sky was rent and bleeding, as if the fury of the battle below had dealt a mortal wound to the sky itself.
Voleska panted with exertion and leaned on her hammer. The pain of her wounds was starting to hit her now. Both arms were streaming with blood, and not only from the crimson downpour. She looked up through the red rain at the watchers on the peaks.
Would that be enough? Did they care? Had they even seen her butchery of the enemy amid the swirling bloodshed? Plenty of Spire Tyrants had made spectacular kills in the last few moments alone. What made her stand out compared to them?
And then she knew.
A Spire Tyrant fought alone. They might form alliances in the arenas, and then join greater alliances outside it, banding together under leaders like Ferenk for mutual protection. But they were not born to such allegiances. Even her friendly rivalry with Kyryll had its roots in a genuine desire to outdo, to defeat, to step over on the way to something greater.
There was nothing for her on that bloodstained slope, nor in the camp where the Spire Tyrants would drink and boast past nightfall. A true gladiator did not make herself a part of that. She stood alone.
She knew what she had to do. She had never been more certain of anything in her life.
She turned to Kyryll. He looked similarly exhausted. His flesh was covered in nicks and cuts, and his arms were slathered in gore to the elbow. He grinned up at her, smearing the blood rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand. ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Not so different from Carngrad after all. Never gave them a show quite like this, though.’
Voleska felt the weight of her hammer as if she was lifting it for the first time. No one else in the arenas had the strength to wield it. No one had thought she could either. She had proven them wrong.
Kyryll never had the time to let the smile fall off his features. Voleska’s hammer blow caught him square in the face.
It was good that she started with him. He was the hardest to kill. Once he was down, his face staved in and ruined, the rest were easy.
It took the other Spire Tyrants several fatal moments to realise what she was doing. They were drunk on victory and their bodies were sluggish with the fatigue suddenly catching up with them. Voleska crushed the skull of one who had his back to her, then knocked the legs out from under another and finished him off with a stamp to the back of the neck.
The first Spire Tyrant to react turned to her and wrestled his blade back out of its scabbard. ‘What are you…?’ he gasped before Voleska rammed the head of the hammer into his chest, driving the air out of him. She swung the hammer up under his chin, shattering his jaw and snapping his head fatally back with the crack of snapping spine.
They tried to swarm her. When they came into her guard, they were mown down by the swinging arc of her hammer. They leapt at her and she swatted them out of the air where they could be killed down in the scree.
Surviving Cabalists took advantage of the sudden confusion among the Spire Tyrants to leap into the fray. More died in one-on-one struggles with the Spire Tyrants. Others were caught within the whirlwind of blood that surrounded Voleska. Crowded around by enemies, stronger than any of them and with a greater reach, she could not help but catch an enemy or three with every swing of her hammer.
The pain was gone. Her strength flowed back. The hollow inside her, that had been temporarily filled with the adulation of the crowd and the rush of victory, was brimming over with a certainty of purpose.
Ferenk faced her through the carnage. He loped over the broken bones and pulped torsos towards her. His face was a furious mass of scars twisted with anger. He led with his spear, blinded by his anger at Voleska’s betrayal.
