Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Read online

  Rusfaer let his weight sink gently against the iron bars. It was cold to the skin where his mail and shirt were rent.

  A bead of sweat fell from his brow down into the stream, washed away in the rush of water. He stiffened, not trusting his shaking limbs to not give himself away. But then, he was alerted by an imperceptible movement, a brief flash of skin, almost on the edge of his vision.

  There, a black shadow! He withdrew into the dimness and stared, and then a chill crept up his spine.

  Pygra! Still as a statue, a fiend of multicoloured stone, a snake poised as if dead for a thousand years. The thing appeared fused to the stone wall like an iridescent megalith out of an elder time. Before him, not two dozen paces away, stalked a hunter, a killer!

  The serpent had caught sight of the unsuspecting guard. Rusfaer could barely make out her beady eye staring like a smouldering sentinel in the murk-haunted cavern. She was scouting out her prey. But the guard was not yet aware of the danger that faced it...a danger that would strike the first moment it could.

  Rusfaer thought quickly: If he could ease back off the grate and keep his distance, staying completely hidden, he might have a chance...when, as bad luck would have it, the snake lunged and looked up to see him staring pop-eyed before her.

  He gripped his sword and pinched his eyes shut. He willed himself to concentrate on the task at hand. He let his muscles relax...but a bead of traitorous sweat trickled down his cheek and fell down through the grate, plinking off the sentry-hunter’s steel cap.

  The patrol-lizard jerked up in surprise. It tore off its cap and whirled its thin lizard body around, looked up, tail lashing in wrath. It snorted, raised a hand, uttered a squawking cry. At the same time the snake struck, an appalling mass of death. Slimy coils swivelled in view, wrapped round the lizard’s squirming body, crushing the life out of the figure in seconds. Its face purpled, tongue protruded; the veteran lizard had but time to suck in one hopeless breath before its spine was snapped and the serpent swallowed it in one gluttonous gulp.

  Rusfaer stared aghast at the swift violence of the act. His knees buckled. In the brief time it took him to stagger to his feet, the snake smashed up through the grate, a maddened python of a fiend, a blood-mad brute, hot on the trail for human flesh.

  Rusfaer’s gut sloshed in sick horror. He staggered back in a blundering frenzy. In one blinding motion, he swung his weapon, landing a felling stroke on the serpent’s crown. By luck, it struck just above the snout—a shade lower than the one good eye, but effective nonetheless. The blade arced in another chopping sweep, turning in his hand, but singing true, leaving a gash three feet long, sheared edgewise along the wedge-shaped head from snout to eye.

  The snake shrieked out a grisly howl. Her fetid mouth yawned in a purple, fang-filled oval. The serpent kept coming and Rusfaer felt himself sprawled backwards. He kicked his boots out to avoid those snapping fangs and barbed gums. The thing was almost on him. Balael! It was unkillable! How he regretted discarding the keen-edged tulwar! He flipped on his belly and staggered to his feet, cursing the most infamous of the dark gods, Zecrates himself. He scrabbled his way up the tunnel for his life. The snake’s head shot forth, driven by muscled coils beyond imagining. Behind him he glimpsed her glistening loops pumping furiously as he skidded down a darkened side passage. He scuttled around a hair pin curve. The snake was but feet behind him. He raced down another. Her slippery coils ached to wrap around those ripe thighs of his, leaving a trail of slime on the wet, dank stone. If not for the snake’s impaired sight and her sluggishness digesting her grisly fare, Rusfaer would have been consumed by now. The last desperate distance that Rusfaer took in that mouldering tunnel was with a thundering rush. He clawed his way up a rough, rubbled path, fingernails snapping on the scabrous rock, banging his head on projections, slipping on loose bits of shale, falling, cursing, till he was a bruised, battered mess. Mercifully the passage narrowed—in truth, only a crawlspace. Barely the barest of a glow bit through the murk, even as he felt life and movement in the darkness.

  His bowels threatened to empty in a loose gush. The snake was close behind him. Somewhere in that dimness lurked a fiend. What if the passage should narrow to nothingness? He did not want to think about that. The snake’s tumult dwindled and her hisses and moans merged to a faraway echo. The tunnel was too narrow. The thing could not wedge her massive skull through and his long, desperate scramble had earned him several dozen feet, if not life.

  After a claw-scratching scramble, Rusfaer halted and crouched on all fours panting. He sucked in life breath all around him like a floundering fish. He lay on his back on the rock, raising prayers to Balael and mighty Kizoi and Zecrates and all the gods he knew, thankful that he was still alive.

  A chill thought flitted into his mind. Why did the snake suddenly turn and exit with such definiteness of purpose? Of course! Her dim brain was thinking two steps ahead of him, the cretin he was. The cunning monster! Her devious mind knew alternate ways of cirumventing the barriers that riddled Yarim-Id. He looked up and peered intently and he could make out the rude outline of a yawning opening above, large enough for a creature of Pygra’s girth to squeeze through and lap him up with a single sweep of her putrid tongue.

  Gasping and swearing under his breath, he scrambled back toward the place where the snake had vacated the tunnel. He stifled his curses, forced stealth into his trembling feet, and hoped his intuition was right, and the snake was not there waiting for him.

  6: Rites of Passage

  “A thousand eggs shall hatch, and myriad imps shall squirm free of the egg ere the rise of the Rgnadon!”

  —Jamuo, high priestess of Yarim-Id

  Under the smouldering torches, Dereas passed several hours in the lizard compound, straining at his gag and bonds, battling blankness and despair. Such moments brought him back to the horror with the Eakors.

  A sane man would reject the circumstances and retreat into a cloud of anguish. Dereas was not of such ilk. He floated in and out of lucidity, his body a battleground of pain. His spirits sagged, his mind lulled by strange narcotic fumes that drifted from the cauldrons worked by the lizard women, steeping potions and elixirs. The ghastly purple-grey and bluish-grey clouds reminded him all too nauseously of those brews.

  He shook off his apathy. Though he struggled feverishly, the woody cords did not slacken and only cut deeper into his flesh, rubbed his wrists raw and turned his fingers blue. He could neither rise nor budge more than six inches from the pen posts. All the while he cringed at the ultimate punishment awaiting him: sealed in the egg! Balael, how he would fight to the bitter end to avoid that heinous doom! He would take down as many of that lizard crew as he could, strangling with his bare hands the last creature dragging him to that gruesome fate...

  Lizards lifted long poles up the castle wall and dimmed the censers there, as if in expectation of a dark rite or another abominable event.

  But none came.

  Only drums and the somnolent marching beats of lizards, dark as Zecrates’ night. It was as if they rehearsed for some long-awaited ceremony or crusade. Squads of the creatures drilled; others brandished their weapons in the dark shadows along the far wall of the cavern while a long-snouted captain barked orders at sparring lizards-at-arms.

  The giant saurians, Greta and Kruger, paced their cages in restless aggression. Dereas saw the pens were completely enclosed and a crude doorway ran in between the cages, which lizard-keepers, if they climbed on the mesh, could slide up and down—likely to admit the large male, Kruger, for mating purposes. Behind him, a smaller pen loomed, containing three young lizards, which frolicked and chittered—the same he would be joining if he couldn’t cut his bonds. Back farther still, fell a dark chasm, over which a shadowed stone walkway arched to a tunnel hewn in the far cavern wall.

  Distant weapons continued to clank as Tyrannus blades slid off one another. Mail and bone blade glinted, and the sum of the sparring lizards’ dancing forms writhed under the flickering torchlight,
like a dance of wine-guzzling Kizoi himself...

  Dereas tore his stinging eyes away. His gaze strayed to the castle.

  The ramparts were carved with scenes of menace: a myriad of monstrous lizards stamping on the heads of serpents, crushing the shells of giant snails, or prying open the lids of enormous clams. Some clawed off the rippling coils of underworld serpents which had wrapped themselves around their protruding bellies. Others had come forth to feast on their sacred eggs. Dereas saw a chronology of reptilian legends from known time to the present—a recounting lost in the mists of the past. Whether the lizard folk had acquired such knowledge from their predecessors, he could not say, nor was he privy to such prehistory from his smattering of mythology. Iron spikes pierced the bas-reliefs and poked out of the bare stone, adorning the artwork, or perhaps supplementing its grotesque pictography. It was an odd mix, Dereas mused grimly, yet perfect for climbing, if one could ever get there...

  The eggs on top of the parapets seemed secure in their gold wire-frame cradles—and well-guarded, unlike the ones strewn around the outer court.

  Dereas gazed spellbound at a particularly dire, carved scene. Here, a brood of giant lizards fended off nightmarish serpents and protected their eggs from fanged maws. Reflecting on Pygra’s grim appetite, Dereas had an idea now of what all the broken shells meant lying around the outer tunnels, strewn like gnawed bones about the dim corridors that weaved and branched in mysterious ways.

  Moments passed, and the beastslayer noted the lizard activity had come to a rest and the hordes disappeared into the castle or shambled back into dark caves hewn in the cavern walls. The king who had been barking orders at various workers, had also retired to the castle with his priestess and his servile retinue. Dereas breathed a sigh of relief.

  Several paces distant Jhidik sprawled, ragged and unkempt, enveloped in a thick pall of despair. Back roped to a post, he looked a poor specimen of the warrior he was, hunched in filth, grimacing in discomfort, radiating the same dread as his chief: a journey to the womb of Greta.

  Hafta was strapped closest to Dereas and seemed resigned to his fate. The scene around him left him sunken-cheeked and withdrawn. His head was bowed, arms hanging slack, miserable grunts and half-muttered curses slipping from his blackened lips while Amexi lolled at his side in no different state.

  From the fort drifted peculiar sounds, revelry perhaps, but of the most preternatural kind: disturbing laughter, muted booms, thuds of pain, cries of torture, hideous rapture and ecstasy—sounds he had briefly heard back in the tunnels, faraway echoes of madness from dark crevices.

  Dereas shuddered. Part of him wanted to know what went on behind those closed gates. But if what transpired in the outer court was any indication of that which progressed in that black fang of rock, he would rather remain ignorant.

  The caged saurians were snorting and pacing their confines like hungry beasts, smelling the blood and spoor of the bedraggled captives with ill tolerance. They knocked their armour-plated knees and shins against the wooden posts and sent shivers up Dereas’s spine. The shock of their spear-tipped tails and bearded snouts clubbing the weakest supports did not instil confidence. The posts themselves were made of old mountain wood double-lashed with rope, a poor substitute for stone walls. Should any of the posts splinter...he did not like to think of that outcome. Savage beasts given free reign roaming the compound was a sinister thought. He doubted these beasts much liked their captivity.

  The mother lizard wheeled in restless circles a few dozen feet from them, as if the egg within gestated weirdly. Aided by the potency of forbidden magic? Conjured by the priestess-queen Jamuo?

  He could not help but think of the doomed Draba and he bit back a clot of sour phlegm crawling up his throat. His mind churned over the twisted magic these lizards conjured to dare such blasphemous unions between lizard and human. It was a sacrificial birthing of a wholly depraved nature. How many of these generations of birthings had taken place?

  Dereas felt no closer to an answer. He jerked himself alert, gripped by another horrifying speculation. What if lizardom was not the only stage of their development? Perhaps there were other intermediaries? The insane king had not mentioned the possibility of macabre transitions in his raving monologue...

  To his right the mountain king slumped in a squat heap, moving his sweating head back and forth. He spoke in riddles, incoherent phrases, in and out of delirium, inevitably jolting Dereas out of his reverie. Sweat oozed from the dwarf’s pores, trickling down his high brow and his bare forearms in rivulets. Dereas could finally stand the smell of Fezoul’s sweat and fear no longer and barked at him through his gag, kicking at him with his numb feet.

  Alerted to the commotion, a lizard sentry came scurrying with his partner to test the captives’ bonds.

  Dereas scowled unpleasantly. Oten these louts came in pairs to check up on them, that much was evident.

  It was meal time and the guards stripped off their gags one by one to feed them. Only a thin gruel did they serve the haggard men, in clay pots or stone tureens. Looking down at the unwholesome mash, Dereas saw the clumps of what he suspected were the rank leafy bushes they had seen growing in cracks in the stone back in the mountain king’s hall, or along the tunnel walls leading to this domain.

  After spoon-feeding the victuals down the prisoners’ throats, the guards re-tied their woven gags and gazed down at them with queer expressions, almost envy. The goons! Did they yearn for the grace of re-experiencing birth from inside the mother lizard? An infectious rapture shone on their slick-dark reptilian faces—upturned eyes, tongue peeking from grinning jowl, flared nostrils—and Dereas felt a shiver crawl over his flesh. The image was too hideous to even contemplate—this being inside Greta gestating—and he ground his teeth. He glared at the long-snouted guards with the sharp pikes. Hafta glared at them too with a rancour that knew no equal. Such vehemence and hate was tangible enough to prompt one of the patrol-lizards to kick him in the mouth and conk his ears with the flat of his bone tulwar. Hafta slumped sullenly, bearing the pain.

  A guttural cry pierced the murk and a steel-helmed lieutenant came running and nattering on about sacrilege to Rgnadon. Such physical abuse would have continued in the ill squalor had not the lieutenant berated his lean-shanked junior for an offense against a potential subject of Yarim-Id.

  Rgnadon! What could that be? Dereas’s mind screamed for answers. Could it really be the monstrosity that purported to sit in the mammoth egg inside the courtyard? Was it a deity waiting to be born? Surely it must be some ghastly, horrific reptile that slept in that hideous shell behind the castle walls?

  Dereas shook his head in exhaustion. He was too spent and aching to formulate any opinions. Nor did the nightmare ease out of his skull. There would be no sleep tonight, if that meant anything while on the brink of having one’s humanity stripped of him.

  Dereas stirred, senses alerted by the sound of cart wheels and guttural cries a stone’s throw away. The ruckus issued from the castle—past the carven ramparts, a hundred yards to his left where a chasm thrust itself down to unknown depths. If he craned his neck, he could catch a glimpse of teams of lizards, marching three abreast, passing with lurid torches across a long, wide stone bridge of ancient blocks across the chasm. The throng pushed wagons, carts and barrows heaped with jewels and strange powders and liquids.

  Dereas shook his foggy brain of cobwebs. What were these fiends up to? How had they disappeared into the mountain itself, as if swallowed up in some black tunnel? The lizards clattered on, fading into shadows, and Dereas was left with an insidious chill crawling in his gut, no closer to a solution to the mystery.

  The hours passed. At times he felt choked by the earthy reptilian reek drifting this way. The pad of sentry-lizard feet came and went like sparrows on the wind, amidst unsettling noises, or bestial cackles or clinks of machinery. And the soft purl of water streaming from the aqueducts, or the occasional crackling of fires. The echoes came to Dereas as from a distant dream.
He started, muscles clenched, for Greta was bleating and mewling in a very peculiar way. The ponderous cadence of her cries reflected a macabre change in her. She made curious motions with her tail, heaved her bloated midsection, licked her hindquarters with unease. Not long after she squatted in discomfort and pumped her ribs in an attitude of animated expectation. Then just as suddenly, a glistening orb spilled messily from her hindquarters. The gleaming shell rolled on the soft leaves in a steaming mucous-clad mass.

  The lizard kicked away the rank arizoi leaves and bellowed forlornly.

  Dereas stared, entranced. A babble of excited grunts rose from the lizard sentries and workers that remained in the cavern. They rushed in disjointed packs to gawk at the great lizard nuzzling the egg with her scaly jowl. Though they had undoubtedly witnessed the phenomenon before, it seemed each new time was a sensation...

  It was evident Greta guarded her egg jealously as she bared her teeth when certain ‘midwives’ of the lizard pack came pressing their long snouts against the posts. She roared a menacing warning and raked her claws in a dangerous paw-sweeping arc that had them scampering back from the pen, avoiding the sharp rake of her teeth which could angle between the pales and gore a face as easily as a salamander could lap up a grasshopper. She licked her gleaming egg dry and rolled it around the pen, proud as any mother, prodding it to ensure it was intact and not broken. She seemed unsure where to position the egg, mewling eagerly as if to coax the occupant to life. The shell before long began to shake and shiver.