Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Page 24

  No, it wouldn’t hurt...he made a quick note to himself. He stooped and stuffed another handful of stones, particularly spiky amethysts in his pocket. They could come in handy, these weapons. The heavy feel of the rocks in his palm gave him a glimmer of determination and his lips curled in grim resolve.

  Nonetheless, a terrible guilt wracked his core as he took the first stumbling steps up the torchlit tunnel.

  A sadness seized him, with the thought that he had abandoned his clansman Amexi to a fate worse than death. The violent exchange between him and Rusfaer had left him unnerved and he felt as if he needed to shed some dark energy. What better way than to risk his life for someone else? An infectious obsession with the thought troubled him, this feeling of overextending himself, and he shook off the sentiment in light of Rusfaer’s words.

  In a sudden impulse, he doubled back the way he had come. “Wait for me up ahead,” he grunted, “if I’m not back in ten minutes, leave without me.”

  Rusfaer blinked in astonishment. “You can’t rescue your blond boy from a pack of hyenas. Especially single-handedly. You saw, there’s a whole army down there.”

  “Who said anything about ‘rescuing’ him?” scoffed Dereas. He twirled his blade, the corners of his mouth twitching.

  Rusfaer said nothing, eyes working as if grimly contemplating his brother’s words. He grunted in dissatisfication. Frowning, he gave a great rub to his bearded jaw.

  While Dereas slunk back down the treacherous path, his heart lay heavy with the task at hand. But he knew he could not live with himself if he did not at least try to do something for Amexi, even if it meant killing him. Stealthy steps and furtive glances left and right...they had him following the shadowy contours of the rugged, downward slope. Inside the rim of the cliff and down the secret ways toward the valley, he discovered a path winding torturously down a cavernous defile. After a dozen switchbacks, he came to a stair where a tiny light glowed ahead. Crawling through a small space wide enough to admit a man, he came out on a cramped ledge, overlooking the grim lizard valley below.

  On the crumbled stone spread the lizard king’s horde, sprawled at a different point than before. He saw the bone-towered fort loomed up perhaps two hundred feet. The great gates were closed; new torches glowed dimly.

  The beastslayer peered down with ominous thoughts plaguing him. The lizard king, a hunched mass of grinning lizard flesh, perched on the back of his reptilian destrier. He rallied his supporters with more verve than normal. Cheers greeted his passionate cries in the thousands. The lights suddenly flared on the highest of the fort’s towers; then without warning the portcullis began to lift.

  Amexi, he saw, was still trussed up on a pole, but was now lowered and staked to the ground. Dereas perceived his companion was still alive but very pale and grimly resigned to his appalling fate. The priestess of the lizard king’s inner circle was present, standing fervently beside the bedraggled captive, draped in her pale gold-laced gown, sprinkling potions and fanning a foul blue-purple smoke that rose from the fires of her alchemies.

  Dereas ground his teeth; how he hated the sight of that witch! The memory of her tainted rituals and obscene mummery sickened his soul, not to mention the vile newt thrust down Draba’s throat. The shamanic fumes contaminated the area. It was a scent which Dereas had always loathed and made him gag even from this height.

  He shifted in his restless crouch to an easier position and saw that the lizards had readied a man-sized egg for Amexi to crawl inside. Beside the doomed warrior, the priestess chanted and the mother lizard’s eyes grew bright and hard with eager anticipation of receiving a newborn.

  Dereas watched two under-priests stroll ceremoniously from a knot of gatherers to carry a chest and vials of more incense and powders. The chest no doubt contained the horrid, live newts.

  Dereas stared wild-eyed. Could they be bold enough to perform the rites of inception at this moment? It was insidiously evil!

  A murderous scowl contorted his features. He warred with the urge to hurl his sword into the gathering. A useless act. He fingered the amethysts in his pocket, wondering if his aim would be true...

  One stone felt unusually smooth in his palm. He brought it back behind his head and took aim. He hurled it, dropping into a crouch. The projectile whirled end over end and missed his comrade’s brow by a hair, smashing into one of the under-priest’s skulls, bursting it like a melon.

  A sea of lizards trained fervid eyes up to stare at the offender. A ripple of anger surged from below.

  Dereas felt a stab of dismay. Stupid that he had missed! Now the horde was alerted to his presence and he would not get another chance...

  He jumped back, almost slamming into a rigid figure whose muscled contours identified itself as Rusfaer. Whirling, he gripped his blade. The dark figure grinned at him and held out a hand in the dim light. The palm that touched Dereas’s shoulder was consoling; in the other lay three more rocks ripe for choosing. Dereas snatched one and knelt to hurl again while the lizards were still hopping about in madness.

  The stone ripped through the crowd to strike the leader of the supply caravan, knocking him clear off his feet.

  Dereas loosed another which grazed one of the large lizards, the mother, he saw, which started to paw at the earth in fury and toss bellows in the air. The Rgnadon began to stamp restlessly and claw its way up the slope after him.

  The lizard king loosed a barrage of maledictions. He struggled to keep the monster in check. A futile effort. Nothing could arrest the thing’s breakneck charge up the steep slope. Bucked and heaving, the king waved his sceptre up at the speechless rebels in wrath.

  There came an answering hail of rocks from below.

  Rusfaer ducked, grinning in fiendish mirth. He took close aim with one of his own rocks. The Rgnadon went berserk and broke the neck of an overzealous lizard scrabbling up trying to stop it. At the same instant Rusfaer’s stone broke the neck of one of the lizard king’s bodyguard. Another struck the priestess, dislocating her shoulder. Her shrieks of pain echoed in the cavern.

  The lizard king, flustered by the hitch in his plans, shouted down in distress at his followers. “Kill them!” He barely was hanging onto his ill-tempered mount. “They have wrought violence against the priestess!”

  Poor javelin throwers they were...nonetheless, Dereas felt a poignant pride in his work, as did Amexi, whose eyes blazed in wrath and who mouthed cheers from his frothing lips as his fellows risked their lives to spare him the horror of an impending lizard transformation. The clansman’s muscles knotted; he blinked back his grief in a tragedy of frustration while the torches flared and fuming clouds billowed. He struggled in his scarecrow perch, thrashing head from side to side. On that pike he still dangled, toes inches from the ground, but still alive. The look on his face indicated he knew that meant certain gestation. Writhing in his bonds, he made every effort to kill himself, grab a knife, spear, any weapon he could, to slit his own throat, but he could not extricate himself from the pole...

  The sudden violence had precipitated the lizards to fasttrack their rite. While Rusfaer and Dereas ducked back in the caves, pelted from rocks hurled from below, Dereas caught a last, dismal image of his friend being hauled down from the pole, about to have a squirming newt jammed in his mouth and stuffed in that half open egg while the other half was fitted over him.

  Dereas’s heart quailed. He uttered an unfathomable cry of fury. The bitter tang of failure clotted his throat and tore at his soul. Such horror dulled a man’s courage, and with a sickening realization he threw himself up the narrow tunnel. He was hardly able to bear his own guilt trudging those final steps up that torchless tunnel. Rusfaer did not share his brother’s chagrin. He tagged behind, his face a taciturn mask. The two brothers shambled on in grim-faced file, up the murky twists in the passage. They staggered into the cave with the gleaming pool, where Dereas’s despondent expression and bowed head told his fellows all.

  Fezoul, Hafta and Jhidik held steel caps from the
dead, filled with Vitrin, that exuded soft glows. A peek past the shattered aqueduct revealed streams of the mountain lizards clambering up the hillside, scouring any cave or opening where they might capture the escaped humans. The lizard king had been thrown from his mount and continued to screech orders at those below. Frantically he gesticulated like a mad zealot. The three beasts were nowhere in sight.

  They were coming this way, thought Dereas with dismay. His hammering heart quickened with dread.

  Madness! Utter madness! How could they escape this cursed mountain? Now the sounds of something evil smashing its way through the narrowed tunnel down the shadowy way to the left alerted him to a new terror. It was a hellion that hurled lizard-guards every which way. Dereas saw a flash of claws and a black snout poking its way through the shadowed gap in the corridor. The thing was dismantling the exit as if it were made of soft wax.

  On all fours the men scrambled to round a bend up the opposite tunnel while the guttering torches on the walls flared to either side behind them. They had no knowledge of what was happening back in those thick walls of crumbling rock, but it sounded as if the whole reptile clan were hard on their heels. Greta, Kruger and the new young master likely revelled in their new found freedom rather than playing obeisance to a mad king.

  The fugitives sped on fast and furious, leaving the sounds of the scraping claws and rending teeth behind. They would be safe in the smaller tunnel. Whether the saurians would lay teeth, snout and thews to the current tunnel, or find larger ones to support their size was not certain. Those awful guardians would be breaking down the nearby mantle of rock soon.

  8:Tutraken

  In the vaulting caverns of Saeth’s mountain,

  Dark things dream,

  And die,

  Passing into the mist of ages,

  In abysses of doom...

  —Song of the Witcher

  It was not long before the fugitives realized that they were hopelessly lost. The tunnel had ended in a wall of crude, stone blocks, hung with glittering torches. They had stood staring, lungs heaving. In the centre, at foot level, gaped a narrow square gap, cut through eight feet of stone, wide enough for a man to slip by. The opening was flanked with squat lizard statues with teeth bared. Half-chewed rodent bones lay littered about the chamber and dice carved of bone and iron chips lay strewn about, looking as if a game had recently been interrupted.

  Hafta had torn one of the longest torches down from the wall and they had crawled through the gap. Obviously it was a checkpoint guarded by the troupe that had died at their swords not long ago. The stone blocks were similar to those they squeezed past upon entering Vharad, and Dereas could only assume the wall had been constructed by the lizards to keep the snake out.

  Now the last guttering torchlights had faded from sight behind them and they were panting with exhaustion. They still guarded ample light, what with their Vitrin-filled helms. But no creek flowed through this new tunnel and they had claim to no water supply or ambient luminosity. Fezoul denied having any recollection of this murky passage or any part of this network of caves. To dampen their spirits further, they often heard dim echoes of a great bulk being dragged across slippery stone, or the great hissing weight of some leviathan glaring pensively from the mouth of an eerie junction or crumbling cross tunnel.

  Shudders went up amongst the haggard men and sullen grunts grew to hostile jostles and insults.

  Where the main path would split or show multiple pathways, the company would hear rattling rocks or blocks being scraped across stone, the fervour of a scale-crusted reptile surging through a dim passage.

  The men retreated into their own private places of terror. The perverseness of the disturbances pointed to only one source—Pygra, and served to raise all of Fezoul’s fears. “We are the forsaken children of dead Xatu!” he cried. He trembled like a leaf in the wind, stumbled on pained feet, in the forefront with Hafta, tugging at Dereas’s hem like a frightened maid. Perhaps he was recalling the grim fate he would have met at Draba’s cravenly hand. As it was, he was keen on keeping the distance between himself and the snake at maximum distance, with warriors behind and in front. All the while, the companions noticed they kept on a slight grade, going up.

  The wanderers took to the less spacious tunnels, hoping this would deter the slithering menace that most surely stalked them. But this was not always possible, and the semi-wide to wide tunnel that yawned before them was not reassuring.

  “How long to get free of this wretched mountain?” growled Rusfaer.

  “I don’t know,” the mewling king stammered. “These tunnels are unfamiliar to me. Doom awaits us. We are all doomed!” he moaned.

  “Oh, doomed is it, again?” Rusfaer snarled, raising his palm to backhand the king. He threw his hand down in disgust. “You’re a hopeless case.” Bitterness edged his voice.

  “Doomed, I say!” maundered on Fezoul. “The snake knows I am loose—the last citizen of Yarim-Id.” His words trailed off to a murmur. “The fabled Katu, our lost city, cries out for salvation. Can you not hear the voices of our people’s ghosts? The slithering of the fiend’s passage? I can feel it in my bones. We are all doomed!”

  “Shut up, you spineless hound,” warned Jhidik. “Your whickering grates on my nerves.”

  “And ’tis a devil of a bore,” affirmed Hafta.

  The king paid no heed and Rusfaer grabbed him around the head and muzzled him tight against his chest that he might not alert the snake, or any other frightful creature that had ears for his yammering. Dereas cringed at the snuffles of Fezoul’s hate through Rusfaer’s foul, tattered wolf’s-hide during those moments and his whimpering and sobs knew no end. Rusfaer ignored this dull tumult and wiped the dwarf’s protests from his mind, forging ahead with fierce steps, his other free hand gripping his weapon.

  As always, at a split in the tunnel, they halted, distrustful of the yawning gap rich with dank vapours and the spoor of serpent. “Which way now?” Rusfaer grumbled. He released the king none too kindly.

  The dwarf shrank back, gasping, gibbering, saying he did not particularly know or care.

  Rusfaer’s black mood erupted in a snarl. “Think, dwarf, think!” he cried venomously, shaking him like a dog would a lemming.

  “I can’t think when you are shaking me like a rabid wolf!”

  “Nevermind! Our lives depend on this,” muttered Dereas grimly.

  Fezoul wore his misery badly. He wet his lips and quivered, a wash of fear plainly clouding his reason. “We can’t go back. Lizards patrol, they lurk everywhere, and snakes...snakes and lizards. Oh, the nests are too close.”

  “What nests?” growled Rusfaer.

  “The Eakors! They will pick us up like flies.”

  “Oh, are we back to Eakors?”

  The New Wolves’ chief scowled and exchanged meaningful glances with Dereas.

  The dwarf’s lips were peeled back, showing blackened gums. His eyes glowed with an unwholesome fervour.

  Dereas thought dehydration might be the cause of Fezoul’s malaise. The dwarf had become somewhat delirious.

  “Your Eakors are old news, dwarf,” exclaimed Rusfaer harshly. “Have you any new news to share?”

  Fezoul lisped in a toneless voice, albeit one a tad eerie, “Lizards everywhere, lizards and snakes, snakes and lizards.” He repeated the words in a mumbling monotone.

  “He’s mad!” declared Rusfaer.

  The mountain king looked around him, his eyes darting with crazed mirth. He looked up and down the dim tunnel for any hint of shadows that looked like ghosts or serpents. “The only way out of here is up,” he cried. “Up, up, you lizard beaters! Up and up! The mountain only goes up!”

  Dereas and Rusfaer looked at each other in frowning confusion and muttered curses under their breath. Fezoul did a little jig, with elbows flared. Spinning on his sandalled heel, he laughed gleefully while Dereas threw his hands up in defeat.

  The mountain king had stripped himself of his amulet and with a wild look
in his eye, spun it round on its cord like a playtoy. Dereas thought: he was hopeless, a detriment to their mission.

  The tunnel narrowed and the walls closed in on them like the mouth of a serpent itself. The passage flanks bore overtones suggestive of bestial snouts, ears, jaws and claws—demonic slab-sided torsos jutted out at them in odd juxstapostion; they all imagined such teeth and snouts craning out of the shadows to maul them. It made for slow progress and Hafta’s torch had all but burned down to a stub, leaving them in near darkness. Jhidik had dropped his steel cap long ago, locked in a futile fight with Hafta. Stumbling on in his limping condition, the Pirean was ill-equipped to carry Fezoul’s helm-lamp, which left Dereas’s and the mountain king’s lights to guide the group. That in itself made for a feeble illumination.

  A sudden thrumming had Dereas starting in his tracks.

  Tiny feet? A patter of padding feet?

  The sound came from a fox-sized hole directly ahead of them where the wall joined the floor.

  The others ground to an anxious halt. A sudden squeaking clamour had them jerking in panic. Burly shapes, a whole horde of them, burst suddenly out at them like a nest of weasels.

  Hafta crabbed back in fright.

  Rats! A fervid lot of them, whitish in colour, each as large as a possum—spooked by the company’s footfall.

  The vermin teemed in one whirling frantic mass, scampering and racing underfoot like frenzied gremlins in a mad heat.

  Rusfaer, nerves taut, stabbed out at them. He speared a swagbelly. Jhidik, mortally afraid of large rodents, swatted with the broad side of his blade. He sprang back in revulsion as he slashed ferociously, crushing two more underfoot with his hobnailed boots.

  The rats skittered down the tunnel, stampeding in a swarming throng. Their clicking claws diminished and the shrill din with it.

  The company listened, breath heaving in their chests. No sounds of pursuit, from lizards or serpent, only the distant pad of squeaking rats.