“Anything can become excusable when seen from the standpoint of the result.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Chapter 4: The Horned God
Then:
At the start of the new year, at the foot of the sacred Firepeaks, the prophets of Tauruskhan had brought forth the Word to His people.
The time of living history is upon us, the shamans of the Iron Hoof had decreed. Long has Tauruskhan sheltered the seed of Tulgar, in His Own land. Is He not Good? Has He not made your lands flourish, your herds thrive?
When the roar of ritual affirmation had died down, they went on.
The Horned Conqueror calls, and the Twenty-Six Tribes must answer. Know the will of the Supreme Herdsman! The tribe that offers the hecatomb shall be first amongst equals, so the People shall know who stands tall in Divine Chief’s sight. Those of their blood shall flourish, until the sons of their great-sons have fallen to dust!
It was then that the first troubled murmurs had gone up. The hecatomb called for a sacrifice of one hundred of the finest oxen, a display of both incredible piety and staggering largess. No one tribe could afford such a sacrifice, not without facing the ruination of their herds.
And so, mightily troubled, the chieftains of the Twenty-Six Tribes, blood-heirs of Tulgar the Invincible, asked:
Great is the Master of the Grazing Lands, and holy is His Word. But how can such a sacrifice be made, without bringing about our own ruin?
In this, their voices were joined as one. They knew of the blessings and feared the punishments. Yet, the will of their God had set them an impossible task.
And the Custodians of the Divine Horns answered:
Tauruskhan cares only that He receives what He is due. Render unto Him what is His!
Imagine the silence. All those minds working very, very quickly. Sorting through the implications, coming up with a plan of action.
Then looking around, and realizing that everyone else was thinking exactly the same thing.
Less than a day later, the war began.
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All along the veldt, there had always been some level of internecine conflict between the tribes. Nothing too serious, of course. There were always minor disputes and clashes, mainly along the lines of personal feuds and clan grievances. It was nothing organized, with no formal declarations of hostility or clashing armies.
Most of the tribes were, in some capacity, nomads. The eternal search for grazing land and water precluded all else. Only the most reliable wells and watering-holes, as well as sacred sites like the gold-horned city of Jal, allowed for permanent habitation. That ruled out outright conquest, and left raiding as the most viable way of seizing enough cattle for the hecatomb.
Of course, gathering that many oxen in one place made for an irresistible target.
I’ve heard it said that, in a conflict, the defender has the advantage. I don’t know if that’s true, to be honest. All I know is, choosing when and where to strike is a potent weapon of its own. It meant that the prizes kept changing hands, potentially several times in the same day, which kept the constant low-intensity tribal conflict going.
That was Tauruskhan’s goal, of course. Through his proxies in the priests and shamans within each tribe, he could watch his people hone their warrior skills, sharpening each other the way steel sharpens steel.
More importantly, he knew the complex web of blood-ties and obligations that bound the Twenty-Six Tribes to one another would keep things from getting too far out of hand. While there were fatalities, each clash was usually resolved by hostage-taking and the payment of ransoms, both in silver and in pledges.
Many would-be champions would live, albeit somewhat battered, to fight again another day. Some would even learn from their mistakes.
The problem was, after the first brisk frenzy of raids and counter-raids, a kind of unstable equilibrium was reached. The advantage, naturally, swung between the largest tribes, those best positioned to withstand loss and capitalize on opportunity. But as soon as someone was clearly in the lead, their rivals would team up and mount multiple strikes in rapid succession, too many for any one tribe to see off.
Usually, the attackers would get away with at least some of the prize. Of course, that left them vulnerable to assault, too…And then they were back to square one.
This is where I enter the picture, incidentally.
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The Summertime War, as it came to be known, was (by and large) a private affair. The chieftains shunned the idea of hiring mercenaries, and for good reason. They were an insular people, and approaching outsiders was widely regarded to be against the spirit of the thing. Besides, they knew the destruction that could be wreaked, if outside powers were brought into their holy conflict.
Fortunately, Kayla had been right. Oloin had an in.
His grand-nephew was a herdsman in the tribe of the Graven Star, a distant relative he hadn’t seen for almost two decades. The creaky, perpetually mercenary Godbinder was hardly a reputable figure (I believe they saw Oloin as a somewhat distant, ignoble branch of the family tree, tenuously related at best) but blood was blood, and it was enough for them to hear him out.
Or at least, it got them to listen to his sales-pitch.
In brief, he was selling me. Or rather, he was selling what I could do for them. As it happened, the Graven Star had fallen upon hard times. They’d lost half their herd during the Summertime War, but their fortunes had already been on a steady downward slide in recent years.
There was no one specific incident to be blamed, just a general diminishment over the last decade or so.
The loss of their house-of-spirits to the resurgent tribe of the Crimson Branch.
The destruction of the great hammer Hearthshaker, forged by Rythul the God of Quakes, after a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to defeat a rampaging spirit of earth.
The nasty bout of bone-fever had wiped out the entire line of a well-beloved warrior family, from patriarch to youngest son…
And so on, and so forth. So ran the roll of calamities large and small, far longer than one might reasonably expect.
They needed Tauruskhan’s blessing. Craved it, for they felt it was their only chance of turning things around. Of course, they had little hope of delivering the hecatomb by fair means, which meant that their chieftain was open to…unconventional solutions.
You’d think that marrying into the Graven Star was the easiest way to become part of it, but that wasn’t an option in this instance. Even if someone had been willing to bite the bullet, to give up a daughter to a complete outsider, the priests would never have stood for it.
So that left the hard way, the one I hadn’t been looking forward to. Joining the tribe’s warrior-lodge was the swiftest way of being adopted into the tribe, or (at least) the one the spirits were most likely to accept on such short notice.
In a way, it was my audition. Initiating a stranger like myself required calling in many favors, with substantial sacrifices to lesser gods and spirits alike. By the time the Chieftain Shahin’s shamans were done, his tribe would be facing significant spiritual debt. It would take months of rituals and chiminiage to pay those off, longer still for them to get back into the black.
It wouldn’t be a problem if they won. But if they lost…
As such, the warrior-lodge had every reason to put me through the wringer, to make sure that I was the real deal.Given that they were staking everything on me, they wanted to make sure they hadn’t been sold a false bill of goods.
Measure twice, cut once, as the saying went, and you bet they knew all about measuring.
Frankly, I’m surprised that the tribal council was willing to take a chance on the old bastard, in the first place. I guess they really were desperate.
And so it was decreed that I would undergo the trials of Seora, a gauntlet of suffering through which all aspirants had to pass.
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Say one thing for the Graven Star, they weren’t easily impressed. The trials were many, varied and thoroughly brutal, to the point I had to wonder how anyone survived.
They forced me to drink poisonous spider blood. Buried me alive for a full day and night in a coffin full of white scorpions. Strapped a wooden pail full of vampire ants to my chest and set them on fire.
They lashed me to poles and suspended me upside-down from a racra tree-
Now, I’ve never quite been able to prove it. But I’m fairly certain that they made up most of these trials just to fuck with me.
Fortunately, there were two factors in my favor. The first, you already know: As a delta-grade enhanced human, I was faster, stronger than I had any right to be. Just as importantly, the tests ahead were defined by what lay ahead. I was here to fight, and that meant the more esoteric trials had been pared down or almost entirely eliminated.
The lodge gave me a run for my money, that was for sure. Felling a tall tree with a single well-timed blow and the requisite hoisting of heavy objects had brought murmurs of reluctant admiration from the Graven Star’s warriors, more so when they’d made me do it all over again.
To show them, y’know, that it was no fluke. That I wasn’t some charlatan with a handful of one-off miracles and a mind for profit, like Oloin.
As you might have guessed, they didn’t trust the old bastard at all. Sure, the Graven Star lived like Mongol-era steppe herdsmen, where the stirrup and the composite bow were the height of technology, but it didn’t mean they were stupid or primitive. Moreover, they had a low tolerance for bullshit, and knew that it was the mettle of the man that mattered, not the toys he brought with him.
I was going to have to earn the right to fight for them, and if I couldn’t make the grade, I would just have to fuck right off.
No pressure.
Hard eyes, set in unsmiling faces, watched me the entire time as I walked barefoot over hot coals, only to receive a ritual pummeling from a gauntlet of the Graven Star’s best warriors. More than once, I got the feeling they wanted me to fail, to show myself as weak, unmanly and utterly without worth.
Like I said, it was a tough crowd. Still, I was proving myself exceedingly hard to kill or break, which went a long way towards establishing my worthiness.
The problem was, my patience was rapidly running out.
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“-This is bullshit.”
Two weeks in, and I was just about done with all this. My mood was exceptionally foul, made worse by the six-on-one bout of ritual combat I’d just limped away from. The horrid aftertaste of the foul concoction they’d drugged me with clung to the back of my throat, and I knew it’d be all I could taste in the days to come.
The fight had been a brutal affair, where men with klar hide-shields and raken maces had battered me from all sides. The blessed weapons had sent a stunning jolt through me with each impact, and my nerves still felt like hot coils of barbed wire.
Worse, I wasn’t allowed to return the favor. It was supposed to be a re-enactment of one of their myths, where the masked hero known as the Storm Crow had borne the wrath of the mountain-spirits with unflinching stoicism. In effect, it meant that I had to endure the onslaught for minutes on end, half-blinded from the feathered helmet strapped to my head.
Long story short, they beat the shit out of me. They’d laid into me like they bore a personal grudge, and I had my hands full trying to fend them off. If I wasn’t an enhanced human, I would probably have been pissing blood for days. Even now, I could feel black clouds of fatigue blooming at the edges of my vision, the scar-ward carved into my flesh burning hot, then cold, as it worked to repair the damage.
Oloin was waiting for me, in the (relative) privacy of the yurt we shared. Sitting cross-legged on his ratty old pelt, he’d raised his eyebrows at my bedraggled appearance as I sank to the ground with a groan of pain. The tetza on my skin were agitated, the living tattoos squirming about my bruises, and they itched like nothing else on earth.
“Did you think it would be easy, boy?” he said, cocking his withered head to the side as his gimlet eyes narrowed. “Did you think you’d just…brandish that devil-weapon of yours, and bring them all to their knees? Second coming of Auros Shatterhand Himself, and all that-”
“That’s not the problem, and you know it,” I said, shortly. I wasn’t in the mood for his goading, especially since I’d been thinking that very thing. On some level, I’d been hoping that big muscles and a bigger gun would be enough, but they’d been the subject of polite admiration, at best.
The Graven Star had mystics who could summon lightning, and had fought the spirits that roamed the veldt. Even if they were on their way down, they weren’t easily cowed.
“Then what is? Meat too tough for you to chew?” the old Godbinder snorted, taking a swig of kumiss from his flask. Made from fermented milk, it was apparently an acquired taste, though I always thought it stank like old socks.
“Size of a steer, balls of a qu-”
“The problem is that they’re trying to fucking kill me,” I said, grinding out the words. “Just look at the bastards! They hate my fucking guts. They’d rather lose without me than win with me. That’s just stupid, and you can’t beat stupid.”
I kept my voice low, but Oloin’s gaze flicked over my shoulder anyway. He’d scratched sigils of warding and concealment into the bone frame of our yurt, but word had a way of spreading. Especially in a place like this.
Every bone ached as I leaned towards him, my voice just above a whisper.
“-I’m done with this. Is that enough for you, old man?” I paused, mostly to let the words sink in, but also because I hated sounding petulant. “We’ve wasted enough time here. I say we ditch them, find our own way to Adrijanopolj.”
“Mmmmmn.” He blew out a breath, and went silent for a long moment.
The air felt stifling, all of a sudden. I needed to be somewhere else, anywhere else. With a creak of stiff joints, I hauled myself to my feet. My stomach felt hollow as a drum, and I felt hungry enough to devour a horse, tack and all.
Just when I’d made it to the door of our shared yurt, Oloin’s raspy voice froze me in my tracks.
“Tell me, boy. How’s the hole in your guts?”
He took my silence as his answer, curling his fingers into a gnarled fist, shaking it for emphasis.
“Tauruskhan can make you whole. Whatever’s eating you, whatever’s hollowing you out…The Iron Hoof can cure you. Men have spent their entire lives praying for a miracle like that. After all you’ve been through, you’d spit in His face and walk away? Over a little pain?”
Oloin shrugged his scrawny shoulders, reaching for a handful of jerky.
“That’s your problem, Morgan. Quitting as soon as things get tough. Why not try sticking it out for a change, eh? What do you have to lose?”
He was right, and we both knew it. More than he thought, actually: I’d been offered power on Caldera, and I’d turned it down.
My opponent had not.
That had been a bad fight, one of the worst. Worse than the final, cataclysmic duel with Yanxue, worse than being bested by Ryan Trent. Caldera had been my first loss, and had been all the more dire for that. Beaten to a pulp, the laughter of demons ringing in my ears, it had nearly been the end of me.
I’d been more than half-dead when I fell through the portal. If it hadn’t been Unity on the other side…
-Well, I don’t like to think about that.
I sighed. Shut my eyes for a long, long moment.
“You’d better be right, you old bastard,” I said, as I turned back.
Oloin smiled, his gnarled, leathery face haloed by scraggly grey hair. Ancient as he was, there was something peculiarly vital about the Godbinder. Not just some pact he’d made, but a sense of momentum that belied his hard-traveled and generally weather-beaten form. Something that, in a certain light, could almost be mistaken for wisdom.
“Look on the bright side,” he said, his face splitting in a toothy grin. “You’re already halfway there, at least.”
“How hard can the rest be?”
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He was lying, of course. Everything I’d suffered through so far had simply been the prelude, but Oloin had convinced me to stay the course. Over the next week, I (variously) scaled a crumbling cliff, wrestled a bull drunk on ko and sheer bovine rage, and went naked and weaponless into the mountains to kill a teigar.
The night spent out on the cliffs was the worst one. Forbidden from sleeping or starting a fire, I’d spent hours clambering over jagged stone, hunger gnawing at my guts. It’d been getting steadily worse, the sense of being half-starved nearly constant, now. Each night, I wondered how much worse it could get, and decided that I didn’t really want to find out.
If I’d held onto any doubt before, I now knew that something had gone wrong with my body, something I had no way of fixing.
I’m not, and have never been, a man of science. I’ve always found magic more interesting, certainly, but I’ve never had any particular faculty with it, either. Back on fey-haunted Arcadia, my very first world, I learned all of two spells: A shouted invocation for quick-and-dirty defense against hostile sorcery, and a lengthier, more elaborate incantation for making things cold.
I’d been so proud of myself, so proud of the fact that I could do magic, it took a while for me to realize that the Gentry considered such petty charms to be toys. Or worse, tools - For Marquis Éighir’s wolf-masked huntsmen used such spells to run down their prey, at the behest of their master and his beautiful, cruel daughters.
I’ve got some mileage out of the former, but the latter has only ever been useful in a handful of circumstances. Magic requires focus, you see, a certain state of mind that must be maintained at all costs.
And in a fight, there’s just too much going on to do anything but react.
If I have to make a crude analogy, it’s like composing poetry while trying to win a boxing match. Try as hard as you like, but getting punched is going to blast every thought you’ve ever had right out of your head.
At any rate, the closest thing I had to magical healing was the scar-ward, and I was beginning to suspect that it was part of the problem. After all, it was the rendered-down essence of devils, their vitriol diffused through my body via channels scored into my flesh.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Even through the narcotic haze of black lotus, it’d burned like acid. Fortunately, the twice-damned demonlogists of the Dolmian school knew their work, and had a vested interest in keeping me alive. Ever since then, my torn flesh would reknit itself within hours, broken bones becoming whole within days. Useful, as you can no doubt imagine.
It may, however, have been the very thing that was accelerating my degeneration.
It’d never been clear exactly how long an enhanced human could live. When the end came, however, it came swiftly and without mercy. I’d seen the pictures of men and women in the last stage of decay, and the images still haunted my dreams.
If I had to guess, some unfortunate interaction between them was slowly but surely killing me. How long I had, I couldn’t begin to guess. Kayla had told me that my life was measured in months, but she’d been irritatingly obtuse. Sure, she could have meant death by cell degradation, but that didn’t rule out a faster, more visceral death at the hands of my next opponent.
Or it could have been something else entirely, of course, something I wouldn’t see coming.
Prophecy can be a bastard like that.
With grave misgivings, I’d trusted Oloin with my gear. He’d sworn a solemn oath not to abscond with my worldly possessions or mess with them, but I was constantly worried that he’d find some way to blow himself up with my Furstenburg. Still, sometimes you need to have (for want of a better word) a little faith.
In the end, it was almost a relief when the teigar attacked. Two meters of fanged, sickle-bladed death, the mature female must’ve been desperate. My guess was, it’d just whelped, with a clutch of ravenous hatchlings waiting back at its lair.
I didn’t find it, by the way. It found me, pouncing from an overhang. The first I saw of it were its long and low jaws, parted to reveal a nightmare of dripping teeth. By the time I got my hands up, backward-swept claws were already reaching out to rip off my choicest bits, to turn my guts to ribbons.
It was, of course, unpleasantly surprised to find that I was tougher than I’d looked. It had tried to disembowel me, then started wailing when I got it in a headlock and broke its limbs one-by-one. All the while, the teigar’s reptilian hide swirled with mad ripples of color, trying to confuse me as it mimicked the voices of its previous victims, a jumbled mishmash of death-cries and pleas to uncaring Gods.
That shook me, let me tell you. Over the course of six worlds, I’d seen and heard plenty of strange and disturbing things. Something about that, though, would stay with me for a long time.
It took me until morning to drag my burden back to the tribe. A good thing, too: It gave me all the time I needed to cool off. The mood I was in, I’d probably have kicked down the chieftain’s door and wrung his neck, for all the trouble he’d put me through.
As it was, with Oloin to smooth things over, there were no more questions about my ‘worthiness’. The chieftain of the Graven Star knew a good prospect when he saw one, and - at long last - he was willing to seal the deal.
All that remained was setting our price.
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That summer was a long and, for some, a bloody one.
The weather was fine and warm, the landscape lush and green. In other words, it was the perfect opportunity for the tribes to get to grips with one another.
I suspect Tauruskhan had a hand in it, His shamans bullying or bribing a host of lesser gods and weather-spirits into playing along with His designs. I wouldn’t put it past him, for the stakes really were that high. For if He missed this chance, who knew when it would come again?
Gods feared death as much as any mortal. More so, even, since they had so much more to lose. Tauruskhan wasn’t the first God of the Twenty-Six Tribes, or even their greatest. He was simply the now. One day, like all those who had come before him, He too would go in the willful darkness of forgetting-
Unless He seized the day. No matter what it cost.
His people would be the ones who did the paying. It was a time of nightly raids and casual banditry, of watching the horizon for fear of what might come. A time of battered bodies and broken bones, of wounds that would be long in mending. For while the Gods could soothe hurts, few would deign to heal those who failed to please them.
A time where the strong could do as they pleased, and the weak had little choice but to endure.
For others, it had been a time of glory. The swiftest, bravest and most fortunate had found much favour in the eyes of Tauruskhan. Herds had been won, lost and generally changed hands, and new legends had been forged amid the People.
As for me, I’d been having the time of my life. I can’t say the same for everyone, but I found cattle-rustling to be amazingly fun. After riding with Ihulian Horde, this was almost a vacation.
For one, it certainly involved far less bloodshed.
Generally, there were two kinds of raids: Stealth raids, involving a few men aiming to find poorly-guarded livestock, or raids in force, involving larger numbers with plans for direct combat.
Most of the time, we were on the attack. Riding in like furies, either as the main force or a diversion, making as much noise as possible to draw down attention. Usually, the outmatched defenders would flee for reinforcements, or put up a brief, sharp fight before surrender. Then it would be a matter of rounding up the herd and escaping with the loot, covering our getaway with a flurry of arrows and javelins.
It’s strange to think that horses are about as ubiquitous as humanity. Part of me will never be entirely comfortable with them, but I usually didn’t get a choice. On most worlds, you rode or you walked, and that was the end of the story.
I’d learnt how to ride on Marquis Éighir’s estate, all the way back on my very first world. The second had kept me in the habit, and the fifth had been something of a refresher course. I’d never ridden a steed into battle, however, and there was no time for the horsemen of the Graven Star to teach me the trick of it.
Oloin, bless his greedy soul, had thought of a solution. He’d presented me with a bridle of harpy’s hair, god-worked to keep a mount from panicking or bolting. When I asked how much I owed him, he’d merely cackled.
“Think of it as an investment, boy,” he’d said, patting me on the shoulder as he did. “It wouldn’t do either of us any good if you fell off that nag of yours, eh?”
The old man had winked as he’d said it, trying to pass it off as a joke. I could tell he was worried, though. A prize like this didn’t come by often, and getting past the trials was merely the first step. If I couldn’t deliver, if I couldn’t bring the Graven Star the victory they so desperately needed…
Well, I had a feeling that Oloin would be persona non grata for many years to come.
It was nice to know that it wasn’t only my ass that was on the line.
Still, his part in things was mostly over. The heavy lifting to follow would be entirely my responsibility.
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On that front, at least, Oloin had nothing to worry about. As I’ve said, the warriors of the Twenty-Six Tribes were no strangers to magic. However, even in a world where gods spoke with men, the powers I could draw upon quite eclipsed their own.
Something about the high, shrieking wail of my pulse rifle, or the electrostatic burst of a disruption blast, utterly panicked horses and men alike. Often, a few bursts into the air was enough to send most would-be fighters fleeing. They might not have known what I’d unleashed, but they knew enough that getting in the way was a bad idea.
Occasionally, someone especially brave or well-armed would choose to make a stand. This was usually when things would get interesting, because it was often some tribal champion, and that meant single combat. It was generally agreed that a duel, sometimes to first blood but more often to incapacitation or surrender, was the best way to go about things.
I suppose it meant less collateral damage. Less flailing around, where amateurs could get seriously hurt. Besides, the purpose of the entire exercise was to find a worthy vessel for Tauruskhan’s power, and ‘the mightiest warrior of the tribes’ made for a good yardstick.
Needless to say, that was my field of specialty. Sure, there was occasionally a surprise or two, but it was rarely something that I couldn’t handle.
For instance, Braze Jai of the Cloud Riders had (of all things) a lok as his steed. Eight-legged and jewel-eyed, with venom-dripping fangs, it was an arachnophobe's worst nightmare made manifest. When it came scuttling towards me, sword-like limbs articulating furiously as Braze brought his lance up to spit me like a pye-dog…Well, let’s just say I’ve had better days.
I won, obviously. I can’t fly, but I can jump higher than anyone might reasonably expect. It was worth it just to see his jaw drop, his face go pale when I came hurtling towards him. A single punch took us both into the dirt, and then it was just a matter of yanking his limbs in ways they were never meant to go until he cried uncle.
Then there were the Kubah twins, who (rather unfairly, to my mind) felt that doubling-up was their best option. They were one soul in two bodies, they claimed, and so it was only just that I fought both of them at once. I couldn’t see that holding up in any court, but I agreed, mostly because it was the only way to get them to fight on foot.
That turned out to be their mistake. On horseback, they’d have run circles around me. But man-to-man, even their wrackwhips couldn’t save them. Two right hooks and a left straight brought down Sabet the Elder, while a single haymaker and three steel-toed kicks to the ribs (one to keep him down, two to grow on) did for Maka the Younger.
You might say that wasn’t very sporting of me, and you’re probably right. But they’d kept going for low blows, and I’d felt those. Still, both of them would fight again, with the only long-term damage done to their pride.
Well, Maka would walk with a limp for the rest of the season. He’d gone for my eyes, and I’d really taken that to heart. Still, the twins were rich men, even by the well-to-do standards of the Emberwind tribe, and they didn’t dwell on their loss. They even paid their ransoms in hacksilver and amber with good grace and a minimum of fuss.
In fact, the practice of ransom was my favourite part of the whole thing. Most warriors paid well to avoid the humiliation of capture and imprisonment, with the canniest having their soul-price close at hand. You might think that it would mean storing up trouble for the future, but it worked surprisingly well, all things considered.
Generally, after their first defeat, most tribesmen weren’t eager to repeat the experience. Few were willing to double-down, and a serious loss was good enough reason for one to remove themselves from hostilities. It was all in the spirit of things, I suppose, though the subtleties of it escaped me.
It might amuse you to learn that I was effectively a pauper all over again. Sure, I had a small fortune in gems from the sacking of Rastuvian’s temple, but the Twenty-Six Tribes placed little value on such things. A good fur and a saddle, a decent lance and stirrups…Now those were things of value.
Regardless, a few successful fights soon improved my circumstances immensely. Most of it went to food, the rest to plying the local spirits and gods for their favor (and believe me, that cost), but there was still enough to make me nouveau riche by anyone’s standards, even after Oloin took his cut.
Especially after he took his cut.
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We’d agreed on an even split, right down the middle. Oloin had wanted to make it sixty-forty in his favor, but I’d put my foot down and he’d let it go. In truth, I didn’t really mind: I had more than enough to meet my whims, and that was all that mattered.
It’s funny. Back on Earth, money was a constant consideration. My family was well-off compared to others, but it was forever a yardstick of measurement.
What do you do for a living?
How much do you make? How much can you make?
What’s your plan for making more?
Don’t get me wrong. I left college behind a long time ago, and even then I was never really political. I fully accepted, even welcomed, the paradigm our world revolved around. I’d carved out a comfortable niche for myself, and had a long, steady (if slightly under-cooked) career-track to look forward to.
Every time the upward climb seemed too difficult, I could always look down and tell myself:
At least I’m not one of those losers.
Sure, I may have been something of an underachiever compared to my sister, but I made enough to be respectable. In every sense of the word that mattered, I was a fully-rounded, functional adult, capable of standing on my own two feet.
As I’ve said before, I wasn’t unhappy. Rather, I’d say I was unfulfilled. Bored, stagnating, eager for something new, but not ready to take the plunge.
Until the portal, of course, but we’ll get to that later.
Needless to say, my priorities changed as soon as I crossed worlds. On Arcadia, as an honoured guest of the Gentry, I had absolutely no need for money. One world later, the brutal, demon-haunted land of Caldera taught me to appreciate how swiftly and violently life could end, and how all the gold in the world couldn’t change that.
I’d taken those lessons to heart. Now, I spent money as soon as I got it, guided by a simple principle: It wouldn’t matter in the next world. For all I knew, the next fight might kill me stone dead. In the face of that, what was the point of hoarding?
I’d spent my entire adult life finding ways to make ends meet. Throwing money around, spending vast sums with no thought for the future…There was an odd, reckless kind of freedom in that.
That thought stuck with me, during those long nights spent guarding the livestock. The tribe’s cattle grazed the plains during the day, but were corralled at night to keep them out of trouble. Of course, this proved an irresistible temptation to raiders, their ingenuity long since honed to a razor’s edge.
With a Summertime War still raging, there was a new urgency to take every chance, to seize opportunity as it arose. Even a few heads of cattle might be just enough to tip the scales one way or another towards final victory, which meant that every beeve, cow and ox mattered.
You’re probably asking yourself: Hey, how hard can it be to hold on to a hundred cows?
So did I, at least at first. But that was because I had no idea what it took, not really. There was far, far more going on behind the scenes than I was privy to, ferocious rounds of wheeling and dealing that made the actual fighting look tame.
As the Graven Star’s stock rose, so did the clan’s commitments. Lesser tribes had to be bought off, pacts of non-aggression signed and consummated, grazing rights secured for the ever-growing herd.
This wasn’t limited to the mortal realm, either. The fetches and lesser gods of the steppe wanted a piece of the action too, and that called for elaborate rites in their honor. Of course, the shamans and seers had to be compensated for their time and effort, and Gods help anyone who kept them from their due.
It was a racket, all the way to the top. Looking back, I’m frankly in awe.
But all good things have to come to an end. And so, the word had come down from on high, through the Horned Conqueror's ever-vigilant priesthood. The curtain, Tauruskhan said, is to be lowered.
The Summertime War was, at long last, to come to a close.
Divinations had been made. Spirits had been consulted, and on one thing they all agreed: The omens were propitious. Long had Tauruskhan awaited his sacrifice, and come the new moon the hecatomb would at last be delivered unto Him.
And so, as the seasons shaded to autumn, the twenty-six tribes of Tulgar came together for the last time.
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Beneath the great shadow of the sacred Firepeaks, the tribes had assembled in great numbers. Vast camps had sprung up, the pitched standards of scores of individual warbands fluttering in the wind like kites.
At night, the perimeter fires lit the darkness like rivers of flame, black smoke breathing into the air. The beating of kettle drums and the rolling murmur of voices blended with sounds of industry, for there was much work to be done.
Through the effort of many hands, a great, circular platform - at least thirty feet tall, and twice as wide - had been raised, positioned for maximum exposure. The sacred icons of Tauruskhan, as old as the memory of the Twenty-Six Tribes, held the place of honor: A brazen bull, the ox-tail banner that was His personal standard, the stave of petrified wood with which His prophets had worked their miracles.
When the time came, the cattle would be driven up the wooden steps to their final destination. Adorned with garlands of flowers and crowned with straw, their hides bore the sun-and-horns brand of the Iron Hoof Himself, for they were destined for His own herd.
There, the final slaughter of the hecatomb would take place. Their blood would run along channels cut into the stone, rolling down into the basin below like a crimson waterfall, filling it with their lifeblood.
Then, at last, the greatest warrior of the Twenty-Six Tribes would make his descent, to commune with the God Himself. If Tauruskhan found him worthy, he would arise as the Champion of the Horned Conqueror, sanctified through devotion and sacrifice.
In theory.
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Of course, before that could come to pass, there were a few last details to be hammered out. Eight tribes had the capacity to make the hecatomb, but only one could receive Tauruskhan’s blessing.
Eight tribes. Eight champions.
At any other time, perhaps, a full nine days of games and trials would have been held, with the losers to be celebrated and fêted every bit as much as the ultimate victor. But this year, the stakes were far higher. Not just for the clans of Tulgar, but for the God Himself.
To challenge the Platinum Spire was a singular opportunity, one that would never be repeated. Ascension was the prize that Tauruskhan, like all gods, cherished over all else…and the one who delivered it to His waiting grasp would be honored above all others.
In the end, it would come down to the force of arms and the sweat of toil.
But mostly force of arms.
And so the shrine of Tauruskhan would become an arena, for the blood to be shed in the coming days would be as much an offering to the Supreme Herdsman as the hecatomb itself.
There were rules, obviously. Only the most fundamentalist or belligerent of the tribes wanted matters to be settled ‘as on the battlefield’. While an eight-way, free-for-all deathmatch was certainly a definite way of resolving things, the aftermath would mean trouble.
The champions that had made it this far were, to a man, individuals of great puissance, political standing or both. Most were oldbloods, claiming direct descent from Tulgar himself, or one of his myriad descendants. Given how far and wide the legendary warlord had spread his seed, they may even have been right.
Every death or maiming in the ring would be a great loss to the clans. These were the leaders and heroes of tomorrow, and none truly wished to risk having that shining future cut short.
Me too, of course. But I didn’t count.
There would still be fights, but (to the disappointment of many, I’m sure) it wouldn’t be mortal combat. Submission was the name of the game, with the pummeling continuing until one side cried uncle. Alternatively, unconsciousness would do, which would at least spare the loser the shame of declaring defeat.
In the end, it was all about counting coup. Keeping score, if you will, of where each clan was on the totem pole. Not that different from the combat-by-champion fights I’d been fighting this whole time, but the stakes were far higher, now. In addition to the blessings offered, it was a singular opportunity to serve Tauruskhan in a personal capacity, to be declared the One-Above-All.
Men would kill for that. Would die for that, even.
The difficulty was in making sure that they didn’t.
Given the circumstances, I was expecting every dirty trick in the book to be leveled against me. The thing was, every clan thought the same way, which largely cancelled each other out. The bargaining, the clawing for advantage, would’ve made for an epic tale of its own, but that was hardly my problem.
For I had resources the others couldn’t hope to imagine, and could never anticipate. The purists of the Altai thought they’d secured a certain victory in the first round, by insisting on a cage match with spiked cesti and no armor. They further stacked the deck by putting me up against Ganezzar Man-Killer, the biggest bastard in their entire clan.
Eight and a half feet tall, he was the size of a barn, with a frame to match. Even at rest, he towered head-and-shoulders above me, his rumbling laugh like an avalanche as he cracked his knuckles and squinted down at my (to him) puny frame. Apparently, giant blood ran in Ganezzar’s veins, the result of a long, sordid story that would take too long to relate. Suffice to say, it was the result of an unwise bargain, and his line still struggled under the shame.
“Fear not, outlander,” I remember him saying, as we squared off. “-there is no shame in defeat.”
“You’re wrong,” I answered. “There’s nothing but shame in defeat.”
That got a smile out of Ganezzar, which made me like him a lot more. There was a sense of humor to him, a soul. Sure, we were about to mangle each other, but there would be no hard feelings after.
He was a tough bastard to try conclusions with, but I had the edge. Ganezzar was strong, but his strength was the product of his lineage, not deliberate engineering. Besides, I had Vaircona’s blessing and a disruption charge to draw upon, and that meant I hit him far harder than he had any right to expect.
His first blow nearly took my head off my shoulders, his fist ploughing through the air like a battering ram. But in that single, perfect moment of absolute clarity, I slipped inside his reach - looking for all the world like I’d planned it - and shattered Ganezzar’s lower mandible with my counterpunch.
I still remember his look of utter surprise as my fist cannoned into his face. He was, after all, intimately familiar with the degrees of strength and toughness that he could hope to expect. This was something beyond all that, and I could actually see his certainties crumbling as the hinge of his jaw broke under my spiked knuckles.
Oh Gods, his expression said, clear as day. This idiot is actually going to kill me.
A brutal crunch, and Ganezzar fell the way a statue falls, with no bending or crumpling. He was rigid all the way to the ground, as if his bones had turned to stone. The sound his body made when it hit the ground was like an entire slab of frozen beef being hurled to the abattoir’s floor.
There were no cheers, as he went down. Just the frozen silence that came with pure, unalloyed shock. I remember my hand aching like fire as it swelled, shreds of his flesh clinging to my cesti as I shook the sting away. Looking up, chest heaving, at the thousands of cast-bronze faces peering down from the rows of seating carved into the stone.
Thinking: Are you not entertained? Is this not why you are here?
That dates me, I’m sure. If it helps, I promise never to do it again.
The crowd only started shouting (roaring, really) when the tusk-bedecked priests scrambled into the arena, to do what they could for Ganezzar’s broken face. The half-giant had been a favorite to win, and his utter, abrupt defeat (at the hands of an obvious outsider, no less) had soured the mood.
I suspect that, sacred ritual or not, they were a hair’s-breadth away from throwing things by the time I made my exit.
That’s showbiz for you, I guess. Everyone loves an underdog, right up to the point that the wrong man wins.
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To my surprise, the rules worked for me as much as they worked against me. Less than a day later, I was against Shahmat Varro, ritualist and willworker of the Twilight Veil. The fifth daughter of Chieftain Yerhirch, himself a fifth son, she’d been marked (or was that cursed?) for sorcery since birth.
It was well known that the Twilight Veil were only barely observant followers of the Bull-God’s cult. They trafficked with spirits and other entities, took counsel with the host of lesser gods that called the steppe home. Normally, that would have been grounds for persecution, but Tauruskhan Himself had decreed that they were true to the blood of Tulgar.
This wasn’t mere compassion on His part, mind you. Rather, the Iron Hoof was shrewd enough to know that the shamans of the Twilight Veil could be a useful asset. By all accounts, He was right. Thanks to their assistance, He was able to give potential rivals a good slapping before they could gather enough of a following to challenge Him, and all it took was a minimum of tolerance on His part.
It didn’t mean that the Twilight Veil was popular, of course. The general mood towards them was a kind of wary distrust, given how far they’d strayed from the other tribes. In truth, most of that suspicion was justified, with the Veil’s reputation for manipulation, double-dealing and overall underhand dealings being well-known.
Their current chieftain, Yerhirch, was a forward-thinking man. He didn’t just want to bring his tribe to prominence, but also to restore its good name. To rehabilitate it in the eyes of the others, by showing they could hold their own in a straight fight.
As such, Shahmat had to endure certain limitations with good grace. She was barred from bringing her singing-staff, the goad of spirits, to the fight…But then again, that meant I couldn’t bring the Furstenburg, either, so maybe that was just good sense.
I remember how it felt to face off against that slight, almost doll-like figure, her flesh caked in a chalk-white layer of sacred ash. They’d swathed her in the grey robes of a shaman, ropes of shell-beads and finger bones looped around her limbs, but it only emphasized her lack of stature.
At fourteen, she was exceptionally young for a shaman, and that was one of the reasons for her remarkable power. Children are an irresistible lure to spirits, who see them as easy prey. Gods see them as much the same: The young are impressionable, easier to sway, and don’t expect as much for their faith.
And so Shahmat was surrounded by a constant, roiling cloud of almost-there presences, right on the edge of perception. Shades, sprites and almost-gods, imploring, weedling, commanding. Doing everything they could to attract her attention, her devotion.
Most would have folded, beneath the perpetual assault of hissing, whispering voices. In fact, plenty of spirit-talkers and shamans spent their time either in meditation or doped-up to their eyeballs for some respite. The constant presence of the invisible world could and would grind your sanity down to nothing, unless you had a will of iron or some seriously hardcore drugs.
It’s why I never even tried to learn their brand of magic. It was less of a profession and more of a calling. A curse, even. Some things are better left alone, and I can’t imagine how my life would be improved by having a dozen extra voices in my head.
But relentless training had taught Shahmat how to command the host of spirits. How to bend them to her will, the way starved dogs could be driven by the promise of meat. A gesture was enough to unleash them, boiling across the distance in a torrent of phantasmal horror.
I remember the sound they made, like the cycling buzz of crazed cicadas, as the flood of half-real faces and limbs surged towards me. Giant shadows, tall as men. Bestial specters that howled into the night as they loped forward, talons and claws bared.
Fortunately, I had magic of my own.
During the Summertime War, I’d held back on the use of my tetza. The warriors of the Graven Star knew they were more than just tattoos, of course, but that was as far as it went. My fists and pulse rifle had been enough to deal with whatever threats I’d faced, and so no-one had any idea of what they could do.
Not even the Twilight Veil.
When I called upon the ahtitlak, it was like I’d scored a home run. There were cheers, gasps, shouts of disbelief as the segmented horror tore free from my flesh, still trailing the ink that had spawned it. Coal-bellied and venomous, winding like a serpent, it scythed right into the churning mass of spirits, mandibles working furiously with single-minded hunger.
Ahtitlak are omnivores. They’ll eat anything, but they prefer meat. Usually, they’ll feed on carcasses (It’s less work) but when they’re angry or gravid, they’ll actively hunt down prey. Now, I don’t know whether it was the long exile or the urgency of the moment, but this one was ravenous.
Blade-tipped legs ripped astral flesh into tatters, pincers spearing choice morsels as the ahtitlak ate its way through the phantom swarm. It tore into them, tore through them, like it had a grudge, gobbling up anything it could reach.
There were even more cheers, when I sent the raiton at Shahmat herself. Even as I sprinted forward, even as she chanted frantic invocations to keep the four-winged predator at bay, I could sense the edge of mockery to their adulation. Sure, I may have been an outlander, but I was also brawny, muscular and male - the very image of a warrior, albeit an unorthodox one.
And I was beating the Twilight Veil at their own game.
When you got down to it, really got down to it, they wanted me to win, not her. Better someone like me, the general mood was, than some witch-spawned freak. No, it wasn’t fair, but that was simply how things were.
In the end, it proved to be decisive.
You can feel it, deep in your gut, when the crowd turns against you. It’s not just the noise; it's the energy, the hostility, the sense of being singled out and attacked by a large group. Of being the enemy of all.
Shahmat may have been incredibly gifted, but she was still a child, and I could almost see her wilt under the jeers and boos aimed her way.
Never mind that she’d worked an incredibly complicated ward to hold the raiton at bay and scourge it with whips of lightning. Forget that she was putting every iota of her focus into mustering the whirling tide of spirits, keeping the ahtitlak distracted as she summoned power for a banishment.
In the end, it was the disdain of her own people that did her in.
A single kick sent her sprawling, and I planted my boot on her chest before she could rise. Not too hard, mind you. Just hard enough to let her know the fight was over, and to give her a chance to do the sensible thing.
And, you know, I saw the damage I was doing. How the humiliation of this moment, the shame of her failure, would dwell within Shahmat forever. It was another degradation, heaped on top of the ones she’d already endured - For her father had been merciless in her training, as he’d forged her into the weapon he needed. His wrath, as severe as an austere god’s, was the only thing she feared.
She never spoke, but her eyes told the entire story.
Kill me, they said. For that way lies peace.
I could have obliged her. I didn’t, even though it would have been a mercy.
I can be a coward, like that.
Still, as the men of the Graven Star flocked around me with back-slapping, shoulder-punching camaraderie and manly congratulations, I spared a glance for that crumpled figure, suddenly too small for her robes. She lay there, silent and unmoving, until the bull-masked priests closed in to take her away.
I wonder what happened to her, after.
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Now and again, I think of the what ifs and the may have beens.
I’ve heard it said that we live in the best of all possible worlds. For me, at least, I think that may be true. If I’d never followed in May’s footsteps, if I’d never stepped through the portal, my hypothetical life would have been a far lesser one than the one I have.
Lesser, but also calmer. ‘Less cataclysmic’ seems like a safe bet, too.
It’s a pattern I’ve come to notice, across the many worlds. I usually arrive at the point of decision, right when things could go either way-
And inevitably, I tip the scales towards chaos.
I don’t think it’s on purpose, mind you. It’s just that I have a habit of getting into fights, and every fight isn’t just against someone, it’s for something. Maybe it’s the nature of Thresholders in general, but we have a tendency to make things spin out of control.
If I’d never arrived on Phospiach, history would look very different indeed. My guess is, Shahmat would have seized the right of the hecatomb for the Twilight Veil and taken on the mantle of champion. After more than a century out in the cold, her tribe would have finally - finally - won the acceptance of the others and redeemed their good name, such as it was.
I don’t think she’d have survived the Platinum Spire. Jeru was, after all, one of the hardest bastards I’ve ever known. Most likely, she’d have died on the point of his spear, after doing her level best to claim victory…But the Twenty-Six Tribes would have endured, and the Twilight Veil would have remained foremost amongst them.
A new era would have dawned. One lived in greater harmony with the spirits, where mysticism was as important as iron. Tauruskhan would have continued His guardianship of His people into perpetuity, His chance at ascension having come and gone.
There would have been peace of a sort, under His watchful eye. Life would have continued, much as it always did.
Thanks to me, however, all bets were off. The last I heard, open war raged on the endless steppe: With the Iron Hoof’s attention elsewhere, there was nothing to stop long-held hatreds (made raw by the Summertime War) from boiling over. Foreign mercenaries were brought in on all sides, cults of new and alien gods taking form as faith in the Great Herdsman began to falter-
All because the hecatomb went to the Graven Star, and Tauruskhan’s blessing descended upon my shoulders. The little I heard about the fate of the Twilight Veil was less than encouraging: The conflict was an ideal time to deal with idolators and borderline-heretics, and certain enterprising tribes had taken full advantage of the opportunity.
None of that would have happened, if not for me.
But that’s just how life is, sometimes. It’s a bitch, and then you die.
Could I have done something? Maybe, if I'd cared enough. I had the power: All I needed was a reason to use it. To spare a thought for anything other than my nemesis, and the sickness eating away at me from within.
Then again, I never claimed to be any kind of hero. To thine own self be true, the saying goes, and I know what I am.
For how could I ever hope to be anything else?
TO BE CONTINUED