To the right of the throne, crouched against the arm of the khagan’s seat, was the withered shape of Yorool, the shaman’s scrawny body nearly hidden beneath his leathery robe and cowl of mammoth hide. A pinched face with sharp, fang-like teeth, grinned from the shadow of the hood, grey whiskers sprouting in unsightly patches from the wrinkled folds that had consumed the left half of the shaman’s face. A little ivory rod was pressed between the folds, struggling to keep them from flopping over Yorool’s left eye.
The eyes of the shaman were mismatched, one the colour of amber, the other a little pit of jade fire. Yorool’s expression, such as the right half of his face could muster, was grave and solemn.
“This one,” Hutga’s booming voice growled, his thick hand pointing at Ulagan, “tells me that only you returned from the Crumbling Hills.” The chiefs statement brought colour into Ulagan’s face and the hunter could not meet Dorgo’s gaze. “You were attacked by Muhak, he says. You were attacked by Zar Lok. This dog says that all the hunters with you, even the war mammoth, were killed by Lok and his cringing jackals.”
Dorgo felt each word like a lash against his skin, the scorn in his father’s voice a fiery welt against his dignity. As each word cut him, he felt his anger grow. Hands clenched into fists, he glared back into Hutga’s contemptuous eyes. “I cannot help what Ulagan has told you, any more than I can help it if you will not listen to truth when you hear it!” he spat. The warrior’s tone brought venom into the khagan’s eyes. Hutga’s muscles tensed, his face quivering with restrained rage. A moment passed and the thin veneer of control was swept away. Hutga lunged to his feet, spilling the heavy hides onto the floor. He thrust his finger at Dorgo as though it were a blade.
“It is enough that my son shows himself as coward!” the khagan roared. “That he is a liar as well is more shame than I will accept!”
Dorgo bristled at the accusation, scowling at Ulagan, before returning his attention to the furious chieftain. “If you have been told the story as it was told to the men who found me in the Prowling Lands, then there is no lie in it!”
Hutga snorted in disgust at the remark, sinking back into his chair. “There is spine in you after all, to dare insist upon lies while you stand in your khagan’s hall! Too bad your courage did not show itself when your kinsmen were being butchered by the Muhak!”
Dorgo took a step towards the throne, shaking with rage. “They were already dead when I made my escape,” he snarled. “There was nothing more I could do for them. I was cheated of even the chance to avenge them.”
“Yes!” roared Hutga, “by a nameless warrior who came from nowhere to strike down the Muhak!” The khagan’s stare bored into Dorgo’s eyes. “You dare to repeat this nonsense to me? One man against a score of Muhak! You dare to tell me this is what you saw?”
“I can only tell you what happened,” Dorgo snapped back.
Hutga shook his head in disgust. “Your lies are overbold, pup! You have the audacity to claim this stranger, this warrior in crimson armour, fought Lok and killed him! Not even another of the eight warlords of the domain could have killed Lok in battle, and you have the belly to tell me some lone stranger killed him and took his head?”
Dorgo was silent in his rage, feeling his father’s ire feeding his anger. He felt the wound in his arm start to bleed as the tension in his muscles tore at the witch doctor’s dressing.
“Take this dog from my sight,” Hutga hissed at Togmol. “Bind him in the smoke lodge until he feels like telling me what really happened!” He turned his face from Dorgo, glaring instead at Ulagan. “Gather the best scouts among the Tsavag,” he told the hunter. “Take them to the territory of the Muhak and bring one of them back with you. If the truth will not shape itself to fit this dog’s crooked tongue, then perhaps a Kurgan will speak it for him!”
Dorgo shook Togmol’s arm from his shoulder as the warrior started to lead him away. He cast one last, hateful look at his father, but Hutga had already turned away from him. The khagan was in conference with Yorool, his head leaning close to the shaman’s hooded face. Whatever emotion might have been on Yorool’s grisly countenance, Dorgo could not see, but there was no mistaking the expression that had supplanted rage on the powerful face of Hutga.
For the first time he could remember, Dorgo saw fear in his father’s eyes.
3
The desert shone like a great ball of silver fire, casting the light of moons and stars in fantastic reflection across the horizon. Great spires of crystal, tall as mountains and sharp as knives, scratched at the sky, their smooth skins of glass shining in the dark. No product of a sane world, the spires were things more akin to trees than rocks, growing with the seasons, sprouting jagged offspring that would ooze from their sides until gravity broke them free. The spires rose from the floor of a great bowl-like depression. The basin was littered with shimmering dust left behind by fallen crystals, saturating the ground with a layer of shard-like ash.
No tree or bush, not even the most desperate of weed or rugged cactus grew in the desolation beneath the spires. No plant could thrive in the glassy ground, and nothing could endure the hideous heat that infested the basin as sunlight was magnified and twisted by the reflective crystal peaks.
Yet there was life in the Desert of Mirrors, a corrupt and abominable breed of life. In caverns deep beneath the blazing shard-sand, things crept and slithered, hiding from the hateful day. In the warmth of night, as the crystals surrendered the heat they had absorbed from the sun, these creatures abandoned their troglodyte existence, emerging upon the desert floor to prowl and hunt and kill. The nocturnal creatures were strange and abhorrent, grisly in form and mien, but there were none so vile as those that clung to the shape of man.
Their burrows beneath the shard-sand were little better than those of beasts, earthen tunnels chewed into the earth by the rudest of tools. Bones and debris marked the entrances, the loathsome stink of those who dwelled below wafting upwards in a noxious fume.
No animal was too base for the cave dwellers to feast upon, the husks of centipedes mingling with the skeletons of rats and the carapaces of stalk spiders. The bodies of men and all his kindred creatures were scattered upon the offal heaps, though these bore the marks of a more abominable appetite.
Flesh was cut, burned and scarred and organs ripped from still living-breasts in diseased rite and ritual, the debased worship of Neiglen, the abhorred Crow God of the Hung. However great the famine, none but the bloated daemon flies fed upon the wreckage of the sacrifices, even the hungriest of scavengers shunning bodies marked with the puckered pox-rune of the Plague God.
As the night engulfed the eerie silence of the desert, the tunnels spewed their wretched inhabitants. Scrawny with privation or bloated with disease, they scrabbled from their holes, scraps of black cloth striving to cover their leprous frames. Most wore masks of bone held together with strips of sinew and leather, each crude helm a rough representation of a crow skull.
Even those without masks bore the image of their god upon them, their flesh cut and torn to display the pox-rune. As they emerged from their holes, the sickly throng was faced with their image reflected a thousand times from the facets of the crystal spires and the shimmering wreck of the shard-sand.
Every night of their lives, the tribesmen emerged from the festering darkness to be confronted by their own diseased images, reminded by the silent mockery of the mountains what they were, how far from the shape of man they had fallen.
Anguish stabbed into their hearts, the bitter misery of something lost and forsaken. Their pain filled them, turning to envious hate. Nothing deserved to live whole and pure; whatever walked or crawled upon the land must be as vile as they were. They would bring the cursed touch of Neiglen to anything that strayed too near the Desert of Mirrors, destroying its blasphemous health with the taint of corruption.