Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Page 22

  Fezoul blinked his eyes in cheerless lethargy. “I have been asleep for nigh a hundred years. How am I to know what has gone on under the mountain in that time? For almost a century that madman has been preparing to amass an empire—and likely about to succeed.”

  “It looks as if he wants to rule the mountain,” said Dereas with a scowl, “and the lands surrounding.”

  Fezoul murmured, “Xabren always raved about getting revenge on Yutomay and his followers who exiled us to this mountain of doom so many years ago.”

  Rusfaer pulled at his beard in reflection. “I’ve heard tales come up from the south of an old slave route operated by a gangster Utred the Bad. He operated out of Xarahom. Certain caravan drivers hauled their slaves, teams of them from the capital, around this wretched mountain to the cities and markets of the west—Tusegard, Marimeath. But it closed down.” He fingered his blade. “Many caravans have gone missing over the years. Now it makes sense. ’Tis likely that Utred’s caravans and others were waylaid by these roving fiends, that, or ran afoul of the Eakors.”

  The thought brought a nauseating feeling to Dereas’s gut.

  Amexi mused, “That, or the half lizards must interbreed with each other like Xabren stated.”

  Jhidik gave a curt laugh.“What does it matter? They exist nonetheless.”

  An unsettling horn blared not far away. They pushed on. The path took a precarious descent. All scrambled for sanctuary up a parallel incline, closer to the cavern wall. One of the steep and curving aqueducts was within reach and Dereas hopped over to scale it. The others followed. Dereas helped Jhidik. Amexi lifted Fezoul. The archway, they discovered, was low where the trail joined it—at head height, wrought of crudely-hewn blocks, quarried from the surrounding slope.

  Dereas chewed his lip. He saw the aqueduct’s source sprang from a series of caves high up like the last cavern, if he craned his neck, perhaps an avenue of escape.

  “There are openings yonder,” announced Hafta. “Perhaps a way out of this accursed dungeon.”

  Dereas squinted below. A mire of desolation festered in the stony troughs and dips: salamanders, pools of them, wallowing in mud slime. Who knew what other things bred in those artificial swamps?

  Amexi gave a panged groan. A brown stain spread out from a patch four inches below his armpit. The mail was shredded, obviously a lucky jab from a stray poleaxe. He limped along at an even slower pace, much to Dereas’s dismay. Grimaces and scowls lingered on his face and he leaned on his sword at every dozen paces or so, signs of a failing constitution.

  Rusfaer shook his head in sullen resentment. “Now two of your crew are lamed and likely to hinder our passage.”

  Dereas stiffened at the comment. He forebore mentioning the grief that Draba had caused.

  The Rgnadon suddenly swaggered out of the tunnel, a mammoth brute, sweat glistening on its mottled hide. Its fan of wattled flesh and red spikes bristled about its neck. The lizard king rode behind the hideous collar like some trained champion. The two somewhat smaller lizards, Greta and Kruger, lumbered behind on all fours in obeisance. The long scaly saurians swung necks in rhythm with the stamping fray. A steady stream of followers coursed behind, gnashing, crashing shields, wielding bone tulwars, poleaxes, knives, rocks, any weapon they could get their claws on.

  Dereas gaped dumbly. Could the flight of a few humans have merited such an uprising?

  No, something else was in the works—something more momentous.

  He thought back sourly: the lizard king’s words “Time of the Lizard”, had stirred the citizens to a frenzy.

  Several of the bat-creatures from the chasm had winged their way out of the tunnel and now circled like a swarm of locusts above the lizard pack. Droves of them flew in on suicide angles, swooping to snatch up straggling lizards or those who failed to brandish pikes to protect their heads and flanks. Those inattentive ones were scooped up in fetid arm-wings and whisked back to the creatures’ dark holes.

  Dereas stared in revulsion. Several of their kind dove too close to the Rgnadon. A long neck shot out and teeth snatched winged killers out of the air, crunching them like flies in green-gummed jaws.

  The lizard king pulled back, arching his head in laughing ease. He jumped up and down on a saddle hastily constructed by the looks of it.

  Dereas clenched his fists. He loathed the jesting king and that ludicrous scene. A plan was in order, but what? A frustration washed over him that he had never before known. Doom was their mistress if they didn’t mastermind a way out of this and escape the madness!

  Gripping his brother’s shoulder, he appealed to his tuned instincts. Anxiously he motioned to the levels of bridgeworks snaking their way up to the top of the cavern. “There are more of those archways running up to the higher places. Look! They bring the water down to the towers. Perhaps we can latch on to one and hope for less of a reception than when we first ran afoul of these fiends—and hopefully, not cross paths with Pygra?” Even the brief mention of the serpent roused a leer in Rusfaer.

  “A risk, brother, but I see your plan.” Crouched in the dim shadow of the aqueduct, the chieftain glanced at the dwarf and cast him a repugnant look. “What say you, ‘king’? Does Pygra haunt those tunnels?”

  Fezoul shook his head, blinking nervously under the cold glare. “I know nothing of the geography and can offer no advice.”

  Rusfaer shook him like a rag doll. “We expect you to guide us out of here, rat! Look sharp! Hafta, you’d better scout up ahead and warn us of any traps or nasty surprises. Our king is useless.”

  Fezoul bridled at the treatment. His face was moist with sweat.

  The nose-ringed man nodded. “Will do.” With a silent gesture, he crawled his way down the waterway and tracked off into the reddish shadows, merging into the broken terrain that masked his ascent. He shambled up a straggling path that branched up the left side of the cavern away from the spillway’s dusky arches. Dereas watched while the warrior picked his way higher. The path he trod passed under the shadow of the monstrous, top-heavy fort steeped with seven towers and a central keep. It was of heat-blasted, black-polished stone that was plated with glistening bone—a thousand refulgent ribs of Tyrannus beasts, sporting dozens of spires, as it arched up to the cavern’s roof, tier on tier. A menacing sight, Dereas admitted, and none that he would want to breach. It appeared that lizards like those of Xabren’s brood inhabited the keep and managed it, though by the looks of the sparsely-manned parapets, most of them were toiling down in the valley.

  Dereas’s eyes wandered toward the gemmed ceiling. Closer to these treasures than ever before they now were, mid way up the cliff, some hundreds of feet above the tunnel mouth. Huge diamond and hexagonal crystals hung in glistening clusters. When the torches on the towers glinted, they shone weirdly, with a ghostly radiance that created mesmerizing patterns to the eye.

  Dereas helped Jhidik and Amexi up the waterway while Rusfaer stormed ahead up the rough-cobbled stone. They looked for signs of Hafta below. Another treacherous patch they climbed before they caught sight of Hafta creeping out of the dimness, his face a grim mask. The boom of drums and the thrum of jabbering voices in lizard tongues echoed far up from the valley.

  Hafta was scrabbling back along the rugged flints in a crouching lope with his lungs heaving when he called up from below. “There are a score of them in the tunnel that disappears into the cliff!” His voice trailed off in a strangled hiss. “Armed and dangerous. There’s no way we can get past there without a fight.”

  “Not good,” Rusfaer hissed.

  Dereas sucked in a breath. “Let’s double back and take the next waterway. We can climb the aqueduct the moment it shows a promising angle. It makes for a good place of fording there—” He directed a finger out to a place that ran away from the inimical fort.

  Rusfaer ran his thumb along the edge of his blade. “We have few options, brother. I don’t like the look of that waterway. It’s overly steep and exposed to attack from all sides.” He flourished hi
s sword. “Look!” In the distance, tramping feet crunched on flint-flaked pathways and the glints of many torches careened off steel caps and lizards-at-arms bearing iron-tipped clubs.

  Dereas frowned. There was no other way around, and he began to regret the path they had taken through the rough, flint-splintered pathways.

  He paused and forced himself to think. What to do? Nothing but the chill trickle of water streaming down the aqueduct, room enough for four men to walk abreast—that and the echoing tramp of footfall and drums below and the groans of many beasts. The towers and stone forts yawned below in a haze of smoke and sea of fires. Flint-strewn pathways and rude steps ran through to link the forts. So far they had not been spotted, but their luck could give out at any time. Dereas felt a stab of dread in his bones. They must make an escape! Dead men they were if they did not act now.

  With grimaces and a sense of purpose, they backtracked, while Hafta, stumbling his way alongside the archway, kept eyes trained on the activity below. Dereas, crouching so as not to be seen, loped in a half-shamble down the old stone waterway. Sometimes he slipped on the slick paves and bashed a knee or scraped his ankle. The others followed, in more or less a similar manner. Fezoul almost fell over the edge, so exhausted was he. If it had not been for Rusfaer’s swift hand, catching the edge of his collar, he would have fallen to his doom.

  “Careful where you tread, little leprechaun.”

  Fezoul dusted himself off and masked a petulant scowl.

  They had just climbed down a section of spillway when a barbaric cry and stir of commotion rose from below.

  Dereas stopped dead. Hafta waited crouching on his haunches. He scowled fitfully at the raucous scene below. Both their hawk-eyes discerned that the eagle senses of lizard scouts had finally spotted them at last.

  Black Balael! He heard the lizard king bark menacing orders at his minions. Armed outriders and warriors advanced in solemn knots. Risking a glance, a cloying fear gripped him—he saw the procession winding up toward the place where they stood, via a twisting path.

  Dereas gazed on with sick realization. The meandering route they had taken was not the best choice, nor were the aqueducts that curled deeper into the heart of the largest forts.

  “Quick!” he yelled in a harsh voice. He beckoned those who trailed behind him. “Leg it up, or die!”

  With awful speed, the fugitives scrambled along the flinty slope toward the crumbling arches of the next aqueduct which would take them higher. About a hundred yards distant it loomed. Directly below lurked a mire of connecting pools, each exuding an unsettling feeling of decay and fetor. They were black as basalt, mirror-smooth, and Dereas saw, like the fateful pool that housed the crab, slick and glistening in a fey light. A ripple broke on a pool and Dereas shivered, for he could swear a proboscis or some strange, blue stalk had broken the surface.

  But it caused Dereas a strange conjecture that this is where the priestess Jamuo may have bred and caught her newts which seeded the lizard race.

  He struggled ahead, staving off the crawling feeling of impending doom.

  He reached the base of the next aqueduct, then began clawing up the rude handholds carved along the edge of the stone archways.

  Rusfaer and Hafta were first to pull themselves up the crumbling ramp and gave the two wounded men a hand up. Dereas’s fingers gripped a rough cavity and he wormed his way over the lip to lie flat against the stone. A cool runnel of mountain water ran at his side. He pulled the mountain king up at last and they caught their breath and crouched there several seconds, listening to the cool trill of water. Then they set out on their climb, straddling the chute and wishing for no sudden slips or bone-breaking falls.

  Rusfaer’s observation rang true. The waterway was steep and vertigo assaulted their senses before long. Weapons lay sheathed in scabbards. They struggled on.What Dereas or any of his companions had not counted on, was the blinding speed of the Rgnadon. It had gained the foot of the aqueduct, and raced alongside it, leaving the others behind, including Greta and Kruger.

  Dereas stared in anguish. No sooner had they reached a third of the way up, when the beast’s ferocious head loomed ghoulishly in the gloom, blotting out his view, and roaring through a mouthful of snapping teeth. A mottled, clawed limb swatted out—one which Hafta ducked with only inches to spare. He narrowly escaped a split skull. The monster reared again, loosening masonry and sending flakes of rock and dust flying. Its claws raked the crumbling stone to shreds.

  “Swiftly!” shouted Dereas. “Get up higher—above its reach!”

  The caves were but a desperate dash away. Clawing, grasping, leaving nails split, they scrambled on all fours to get higher, closer to the sanctuaries. The beastslayer’s words gave them hope, but words could not make the ascent any less steep or fly them on winged feet. The snorting, raging Rgnadon would not stop its terrible rush on the besieged humans.

  Amexi, smitten by a stab of pain, suddenly doubled over and began sliding down the waterway, face first.

  Dereas raced to grab him, but his hand closed on empty air. He cursed as the giant lizard swung in, senses fixed in hatred on the beastslayer. Its eyes burned like shady orbs from a midnight sky, murky pools into the depths of nowhere. The blood-riled thing bore down on him, ramming its huge head with mighty, vengeful booms against the aqueduct. The lizard king hung on its back, laughing maniacally.

  Dereas sagged. The waterbridge splintered in a thousand places, sending shards spraying down the incline. Before his feet could react, blocks of jagged masonry scattered in all directions, tumbling down the steep rise. Amexi was carried with it.

  Dereas cried out a warning. He backtracked with vertigo, struggling to avoid being sucked down by the rumbling wash. He watched, agonized, as Amexi fell groaning, stirring faintly amidst a pile of rubble below. The Rgnadon pushed its ugly snout forward to study the Huughite warrior.

  The lizard king sat dispassionately on the beast’s back, witnessing the commotion with a serenity that was at best icy. He raised his hand in a gesture of authority. “Peace, Lord Rgnadon, Peace!” he croaked in a lizard tongue. The monster paused, before it snapped Amexi in two. The beast herded the quaking warrior closer to the gathering of lizards that streamed in numbers now, to a place where he could not escape.

  A gurgling cry of despair slipped from Dereas’s lips. Amexi was faced with overwhelming odds and Rusfaer and the others were too far up to help. More of the lizard folk flocked to secure him. Again the Rgnadon focussed its angry attention on Dereas who crouched some feet above. He scrambled to his knees, sword swinging loose as he struggled to plough closer to those remaining. The monster’s head swivelled in view once again, crowding his horizon.

  Dereas gaped. Teeth snapped out at him, a ravening maw ready to swallow him up. Dereas ducked. The sword leaped in his hand. The flashing blade rose and fell in red spray to carve chunks out of the monster’s jowl. But still the thing came on—screaming in fury, grinding its slimy, fetid teeth.

  Knowing well the after-effect of such an assault on the monster, Dereas ran with a burst of adrenaline up the aqueduct alongside the flowing water. The spillway loomed steeply and appeared almost sheer to his aching muscles. He was only feet from the cave from where the water poured out in a white, frothy stream down the aqueduct, when the saurian swung back beyond the lizard king’s control and crashed its head and forelimbs into the arched bridgeworks, making a crumbling ruin of the rude joinings. In a matter of seconds the battered remains of the bridge gave way. The companions, staggering under the shock, made a last ditch effort to jump into the cave. Dereas was last to tumble in a shallow pool, feeling the icy shock of water numbing his limbs.

  He staggered out, shaking off the water. He and his companions stood shivering in a large, domed cave with countless geodes which threw multivaried colour from walls and ceiling. Rusfaer and Hafta roved about, stumbling, teeth-chattering, intent on investigating the surroundings for traps and foes. The dwarf stared, as if numbed. Dereas hobbled over to
the edge of the ruined aqueduct, peering down to see what had become of the blond warrior. But he could make no determination in the ruby-stained shadows below—only a confusion of swarming bodies, thrashing tails and dark hides.

  He stumbled back into the cave, withdrawn and resigned. Of them all, Rusfaer seemed the least affected by the loss of Amexi. Water poured from five sources on loftier tiers at the back of this cave. It filled the long pool in which they had fallen, which in turn fed the broken aqueduct. Dereas saw two tunnels running from either side of the cavern. One was lit with Vitrin, the other illuminated by crude torches, smouldering in niches recessed in the wall. The presence of the torches disquieted him because this could only mean lizards. He thought to perceive another smaller, ruder tunnel running back into the mountain, but of this he could not be sure; it was wholly dark and the cavern’s eerie creepiness was unnerving him to no end.

  It seemed that no foe was about, but that could be illusory. Dereas winced. No sooner had they breathed sighs of relief when the sound of bare, non-human feet on rock came pounding out of the dimness. Two directions showed blurs of movement. Dereas and the others froze. They were sandwiched between enemies.

  From either end of the cave, teams of saurians burst out of the shadows—flashing curved tulwars and screaming in their guttural language. Likely they had been patrolling the maze of passageways to the aqueducts and had heard clinking weapons and cracking masonry.

  The companions formed a half circle bounded by the edge of the dark pool. Back-to-back they drew their weapons, teeth bared.

  Dereas examined his attackers with a hard appraisal. His dark scowl took in the horde of yellow-eyed fiends in a glace. They bobbed and gnashed before them like a colony of angry monkeys. The snarling, swaying rabble might be itching for a fight, but was not ready to commit to an attack. Twenty rank-toothed rovers circled and chittered at them with evident glee. Obviously the lizard king had spread word to the watchers in these caverns, that enemies were on the loose and to keep the passes into the crevasse monitored. A strategic move, Dereas mused in hindsight, however bad it was for them...