Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Read online

  Dereas’s brother grunted and kneed his mount through the frenzied press, trying to get to Dereas with undisguised intent. His and Dereas’s swords met in clashing sparks, the bright clang of which, sent glinting blades sliding off each other with a strident rasp.

  Dereas’s belamyl reared on its hind legs, windmilling hooves to gouge out one of Rusfaer’s mount’s eyes. Curses and agonized screams of dying men rose above the clanking of armour, the thunk of metal into flesh and bone. Swords flailed in gobs of bright crimson and horses snorted amongst themselves like raging boars. Surging bodies and shattered hopes filled the hollow. Dereas, awash in the lust born of battle, gave himself over to a drunkenness of frenzy. With all his massive strength and its intrinsic brutality, he struck and struck. Sword slid off an adversary’s sword in a desperate, intimate snake dance, but found no hole to penetrate the oiled leather beyond the chain-linked ringed iron. He needed higher ground! His curses rang loud but hollowly. He sought wildly for a break—for himself and for any of his men remaining—from any of this bleak scrabbling that put them in hand-to-hand, close quarter fighting so fatally outnumbered. Then, in a dizzy moment of unpredictable lull, he leapt from his mount and gained a higher point—four feet above where he had crouched on his saddle, ten feet from the base of the hill. Up the slope he clawed his way like a wild cat.

  Even his brother, momentarily stunned, grinned at the daring of that last act, though he was not happy with its outcome, and his blinded mount. He roared curses at his men and tilted his wolf-helmed head back, flinging orders left and right.

  Dereas laughed. His quick manoeuvre had deprived his idiot sibling from an easy kill, yet Rusfaer reined in his thrashing mount and thought to try a similar manoeuvre. It was an act as desperate as it looked and was what saved them from immediate death, for no sooner had both warriors gained access to the slope when a spate of raucous screeches came pouring from the sky. The men struggling in the melee below looked up in speechless wonder. They peered upon huge winged horrors diving from the sky, hideous bat-weaselly shapes, beaks curved as bows, trained to skewer man and belamyl alike.

  The warriors stopped their hewing and raised shields to protect themselves.

  A useless exercise. The dozen or so winged obscenities dropped on them like predatory dactyls. More were swooping down by the second. These creatures were black, flying hybrids: with bat-like faces and ears, bodies of weasels and beaks and wings of condors from what Dereas could see; each thrice the length of a man, and as massive as titans. They gave shrill, bloodthirsty calls while their yellow-snapping beaks homed in to shred man or beast, partial to neither. Anything that moved, horses, belamyl and men, were prey to attack and many fell in pools of their own blood, staining the gully floor a rich crimson.

  Dereas had heard of these beasts, Eakors, grisly terrors from the south, but he never imagined to see them here. Such were devil spawn, carrion creatures of old, birthed from an unholy joining of an earlier race. Aye, the sinister product of past ages forgotten in the mists of time, with the appetites of raptors.

  Whatever foul scent had lured these monsters to their trail, Dereas would never know. Indeed these must be famished brutes, to fly so far north from their haunts. An ill omen, or forsooth—Ahrion’s scourge...

  An ugly red-tailed beast swooped to rake the war chief’s torso and he ducked that repulsive beak and those punishing claws in a pantherish crouch, growling, letting broadsword run a dangerous arc overhead. Notched steel caught the ribbed flesh; sinew parted in its underbelly and a left talon sheared off, squirting a spray of avian gore.

  The outstretched talon flew from the bird in random flight to whirl smack into one of Dereas’s enemies clear in the face. Off his mount the warrior slid, clubbed like a felled ox. A roving avian picked up his limp form from the gully floor and carried him away to some nameless place in the sky. Dereas grimaced in stupefied horror. The weaselly thing that had lost its talon set up a painful outcry, landing crookedly, hopping about in a demonaic agony, unlike the others which squatted to feed on the corpses that bled out in the gully. In its mad spree, the Eakor spitted a horse with its curved beak and the rider was thrown clear before one of Rusfaer’s black-bearded warriors jammed a pike up into the raging Eakor’s throat, spurting a gush of hot blood out on him and his wild-eyed mount. Another of Rusfaer’s unhorsed men ran sword flailing, bawling curses before he too was scooped up in unbreakable grip into the darkening skies.

  For all that these winged devils were, Dereas saw they shared something in common, a greedy purpose, a merciless slant of eyes, and the slavering vulture beaks come to feast on the corpses of the dead in battle. And not leastly, an insatiable appetite for flesh, dead or alive.

  The last feeling he had of the abomination before it was skewered in the gully was one of indescribable horror. At that close range when it had stared him in the face, Dereas could not fail to see that the creature guarded a sinister intelligence; it was mirrored in its greenish, upturned eyes, suggesting a primitive, merciless intent. The older beast-fiends, like that creature, he noted, had a set of tusk-like horns on their greying crowns, making them look like mutant owls.

  Others of his band, Ger and Munes, made play with axes and swords about their helms, hacking the legs of those that would swoop down...only to have ancillary sky maurauders snatch them up in grasping talons. The beastslayer watched three men wrenched from their saddles and lifted airborne; whether they were Rusfaer’s men or his own he could not tell, such was the confused sequence of events.

  Crouched on his uncertain perch, Dereas made an inarticulate sound and readied his dripping sword, exposing himself to the diving monsters. Rusfaer was torn off the ledge closest to him, and found himself in a desperate, life or death, cat and mouse fight, dangling upside down from a gripping talon, yet still clutching his blood-soaked weapon. With superhuman strength, the giant warrior stuck the naked blade up into the belly of the bird, followed by a spike from his shield, and the winged creature danced and writhed in its death throes to crash headlong into the bouldery face of the hill. Rusfaer fell in mid air with it to land catlike on his feet, his fall broken by a maimed horse. The bird-carrier that had snapped its neck was pounced on by another vulturish brute which proceeded to feast upon it.

  The sickening stench of death and rending of flesh was all around. Yet Dereas could not help but stand goggle-eyed in horrified fascination. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Jhidik lifted from his mount, pulled from his fight with one of Rusfaer’s wolf clansmen. The Pirean flailed puppet-like in that grip, unable to fend off his doomed fate. Ominously, another bird joined the fight for the Pirean. Jhidik’s body was caught in a ravenous tug-of-war between birds. He could not tear his eyes away. Graced with a quick, instinctive intelligence, the Pirean lashed out with his dagger into the blinking eye of his immediate tormentor and it fell with a hoarse shriek, tracing dizzy circles to its doom. The Pirean fended off the second Eakor by kicking it with his boot and hewing at its wing as he twirled in midair before it flew off screeching in abject frustration. To his good fortune he was close to the ground. His fall was minor, but as he stumbled about blindly, more Eakors were upon him.

  Dereas shouted at the top of his lungs. His furious waves were an attempt to attract birds in midflight so they would turn their evil attention away from his bloodied mate. A coven of them swarmed about Dereas with shrill outcries, loathing the upstart who straddled atop the shoulder of rock and singlehandedly stood to defy them. They swooped and snapped in one collective effort, and the beastslayer, teeth bared, bloody sword gripped two-handedly, was hard put to fend off their gnashing strikes and lunges. Despite his battle-worn condition, he ducked and stabbed upward, slashing at their grim beaks. Feeling overwhelmed, he fell flat to the stony ground to avoid being snatched aloft. What he saw below became a seething melee; one minute were dim, blood-hazed glimpses of men falling off mounts and fending off talons and beaks, the next, a blinding swoop of a hurtling shape come out of nowhere to hook a
hapless rider—like the brown-bearded Rao caught in a vicious pulling match between predators, similar to Jhidik. One bird had the man’s upper body trapped in its beak, the other had talons gripped round his leg. Rao was not as fortunate as Jhidik...The beasts pulled in fervour—Rao gave a soul-shattering cry and was ripped straight down the middle, drawn and quartered like a prisoner condemned to the torturer’s block.

  Competitive squawks fanned the air as the two birds flew off with their respective pieces. Dereas bit back the dry heaves that would get him killed. The ragged scavengers that had not secured their own meat, swooped to gobble up bloody scraps.

  Dereas’s lungs heaved. He staggered to his feet, blood dripping from a dozen cuts, hardly knowing whether he was alive or dead, only that his last savage strokes had somehow repelled the invaders...

  Now that the war bands were severely diminished or carried aloft, birds below ghoulishly fought over oozing body parts. No human-like figure or human-friendly thing littered the defile. Dereas wished for no such ghastly end, but the truth of what lay before him could not be denied.

  But what Dereas had underestimated was the cunningness of his brother. Rusfaer was born of a wolfish resourcefulness of the steppe that knew no equal, a ruthless skill which few men could call their own. The beastslayer had failed to notice his half brother slinking away from the carnage while his men died and birds gnashed, crouching on his haunches, keeping to the wild gorse-bushes and the twisted weeds to the side, threading his way like a puma. He snuck up on the ledge before some shattered boulders, where unaware, Dereas hunched with horror, staring bug-eyed at the scene before him.

  The wolfskin warrior landed on the ledge beside Dereas, with only a boot crunch to announce his presence. Alerted, the beastslayer whirled in concert and the two faced each other, crouched in fierce warrior’s stance, grimed and wild-eyed, swords raised, hot breath heaving raggedly from their chests.

  Stunned, Dereas studied his brother with an animal’s appraisal. The ghosts of a thousand memories burned in his feverish brain.

  “Back, you swine!” came Dereas’s dry hiss. “There’s nothing to stop me from slaying you, even if you are my flesh and blood.”

  Rusfaer flung back his wolfskin-clad head and hurled a caustic laugh. “Slay away, little brother. We are all of mortal brood here, just mere flesh and blood—both doomed.”

  With a fiendish laugh heedless of any roving Eakors, he rushed his brother and Dereas grunted and scrambled to meet him. The bigger man twisted sideways at the last instant sending his brother skidding off to the lower end of the ledge, a space already ridiculously small for such grim warrior’s combat. Dereas, the lighter of the two, was starting to slip on the loose pebbles, trying with all his skill to stay aloft and not roll down the precipitous incline to the pit below in a blood bath with the Eakors. With a vicious grin, Rusfaer wheeled in and cut him off, spun a blinding arc, another upthrust killing stroke, but ominous screeches spilling from the air tempered his barbaric rush.

  Powerful wings knocked the two flat. Slipping on pebbles and undergrowth, they cursed, thrashed; each tried to throw the other off the slope, but both rolled, grappling at each other like beasts. Before the ultimate doom came, Dereas felt a flutter of wings, and fetid breath as a monstrous shape swooped and tore Rusfaer out of his grasp. The warrior was hauled aloft by heaving flesh, but managed to hold on to his weapon and hack at the bird’s vulnerable pink underbelly. As he fell out of the snapping beak’s range, grasping talons twitched and another bird swooped and tore the weapon out of his hands, scooping him up before he smashed to the rocks. Dereas watched his brother’s weapon crash on the rocks below. While he himself continued to slide, he felt the sudden rake of a bird’s claws curl about his own waist, and with an anguished cry, he found himself encircled in those three-foot talons.

  Dereas felt himself lifted, the breath squeezed out of his pinched lungs. He was drawn airborne like a leaf in a savage gale, the beast’s talons curling round his midriff like a ruthless python.

  Dereas’s leather underpadding saved him. His head twisted on an unnatural angle, he saw a long train of Eakors dangling men and mounts in talons, alive or dead, flapping noiselessly south in a gathering of darkness. The warrior’s silver-chased dirk was at his side, but he could only reach the Eakor’s claws by painstaking effort. Stabbing and sawing with frenzied haste, he managed to hack one of the bird’s toes clean off, but it only clutched him all the tighter till he cried out in pain, and the weapon fell from his nerveless grip. Where were the fiends taking them?

  He peered up through bleary eyes—to see only the feathered underbelly of the weasel-bat horror that carried him. The reek of its mite-ridden hide made him retch. The slobbering beak opened and closed, gnashing in sync with the beat of unholy wings. Dereas bobbed to a backdrop of countless stars as the beast shrilled out a cry in its abominable tongue, the tireless thrust of its powerful wings pushing a foul air to his nostrils. The host passed over a thin divide far below and a dried up stream in a valley. Canyons showed as dun smudges across a dull, featureless void. To the west, distant fires of villages winked, and a larger settlement thrust farther out, about fifteen leagues, he guessed, on the plain.

  From toe to crown Dereas’s body ached. Some of the smaller beasts were not much more than fledglings, he saw—evil copies of their progenitors, well equipped to carry a full horse or belamyl in their clawed feet. But their young clutched only torn fragments of the latter, a section of a severed body, a threaded leg, or a neckless crown. The fact that these beasts carried dead carrion as easily as live caused Dereas to wince with the monstrous possibilities, and the images that awaited them...Sour phlegm crawled up his throat.

  The myriad stars wheeled mindlessly before the beastslayer’s eyes and faded to motes as a bloated moon poked up on the eastern horizon. It rose over the distant sea, a misshapen grinning pumpkin shrouded in a wreath of pale wispy cloud. The killers must be passing the uplands of Erath now, he thought, and onward into Yemestan and the plains bordering lost Karache and Kuewanishe. The piles of corpses such predators had consumed on the battle fields between the cities Jasaroth and Mgnenas...Dereas shuddered. The wars between iron-fisted Yemestan and her less than tolerant neighbours had not been few...

  For an instant his eyes fluttered and he saw the flapping beasts’ lumbersome shapes on his horizon, which in his dream-like daze seemed to be making slow progress in this twilit hour. They flapped continuously to keep their vast bulk aloft, unlike the primitive condors of their predecessors which could glide for miles without moving a wing.

  The birds carried them far—far across a great river, an ox-bowed ribbon in the inky dusk that ran sluggishly with muddy water while the desert plains fell below like a silent blanket of powdered chalk.

  The Eakors, weasel bats that they were, made insidious squawking sounds as they neared their destination, in no way ready to release their holds on their prey. South, ever south they flew, with steadfast precision, wings beating godless cadence through the tortured night. Dereas felt a wave of despair shiver through his wracked frame, knowing that even if his men could break free of those crippling grips at this height, they would be torn and smashed on the sand and rocks below. Their only chance would be to fight—in a mad, unseasoned rush carving their way to freedom upon release. But when? How? It was all so random; alas, it would not be pleasant. In those few moments when the birds decided to do with them what they would, whether they dropped them from a height or ran raking beaks through their necks in a wild orgy of feasting, Dereas vowed to be prepared for that moment to fight for his life.

  2: Vharad

  Ancient mountain hidden under the moon,

  What skeletons moulder in your crypts?

  What beastly horrors skulk in your shadowy halls?

  —Vharad’s Secrets, unknown minstrel

  For how long the warriors flew in the clutches of the giant bird beasts, Dereas could not say. He guarded a cold memory of some wind and damp cloud fleeti
ng by and the hoarse grunts and calls of doomed men. He kicked and thrashed and snarled but the bird only loosed a spate of savage cries and tightened bone-hard claws around his torso. He hung limp and dishevelled, bathed in cold sweat and dried blood, his weary gaze wandering, swollen tongue pressed between parted lips. He could sense that Jhidik, his warrior bondsman-in-arms, floated somewhere in the void ahead of him in that flock of Eakor nightmare, the blue moonlit edge of his baldric glinting under the tireless flap of the dominant bird’s wings. But that too was like something out of a bad dream.

  His tortured thoughts swam in a sea of chaos. Only one man could have tracked him so ruthlessly and doggedly, not to mention engineered the bloodbath that had befallen him and his men.

  The war chief choked on his own phlegm. How well his towering brute of a brother knew him!

  A swift rage tore at his insides. He had lost his tribe. Insidious forces had worked against him. True, he had raised some few dozen supporters, hardened men, loyal men, willing to battle at his side, but it seemed that he faced only resistance—from his clansmen, from the detestable wizard Ahrion, who was dizzy with spite that he, Dereas Beastslayer had thwarted his abominable magic to transform himself and Jhidik into warrior slaves.

  And not leastly from Rusfaer, who had gained support of the outlying tribes by treacherous means, if the whispers amongst the black-gummed nomads who swilled sour goat-curd wine were to be believed.