Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Page 26

  Fezoul stumbled on shaky feet, teeth-chattering and moaning in a familiar malaise, but they ignored it. The melodic rush of the falls behind them faded to a dull murmur as they stumbled toward the faint watery glow.

  Hafta was first to burst through the opening. The others crowded at his heels and pressing at his back out the end of the tunnel, they halted, spellbound. Below, lay an awesome, unexpected sight—a sepulchral place, huge beyond imagining, haunting and desolate...

  Rusfaer in his foul eagerness, almost fell off the precipice that yawned at his feet. Rocks, pebbles and flakes of shale crumbled under his weight and tumbled down into a never-ending abyss. He caught himself in time, and extended his flailing arms only to be pulled back by his startled but alert companions. They all stood dumbfounded at the edge of an empty, lost world.

  Far down in the depths below, dropped a blue-black chasm. Gulfs of shadow spread endlessly from right to left. About a hundred yards across the fissure they stared at another rock cliff that wound up into the inky darkness, like some towering tomb. A pale light fell from above, from a source unknown. At their backs reared another parallel cliff, rising into gloom untold.

  They sensed ancient death in this world, a forgotten primordial place, dreary and sombre, imbued with an ancient silence as thick as the dust of ages. A mountain within a mountain, marvelled Dereas, and he stared frozen-mouthed for long seconds, from ledge to far wall in a haze of incomprehension—in the inner sanctum of Vharad they stood, at the edge of a mystical, inner peak.

  Blue-black shadows dominated the vast, open, airy space that ruled this kingdom. The purl of greenish water lulled their senses. For behind them, on the ancient rock face, the opening from which they had emerged, was flanked by huge, carven bird-men of similar configuration as those in the last chamber. These figures were ten-fold their mass though and allowed the mountain waters far above to pass between their legs in hallowed blessing, none other than the purling source of the glow they had glimpsed in the tunnel. At the statues’ stone-clawed feet wound a narrow, chalky ledge, three-men-wide, tracing a slow, rising arc around the rim of the inner mountain which split at several junctions to disappear into the yawning stone cliff at various intervals. Each junction possessed a gaping cave eerier than any they had seen thus far.

  Rusfaer was the first to murmur, “At least the lizards won’t be able to stalk us in here...” His words trailed off in a cavernous echo, lost in the open gulfs. He looked awestricken, yet half-relieved, and trying without success to stifle the vertigo he felt, looking down into that bottomless drop.

  “Nor can that pesky cur, Draba, track us here,” remarked Hafta.

  Dereas wiped the river of sweat from his brow, his face crinkling in a mirthless knot. He was weary and uneasy and his mouth was set in a sombre twist. “I wish I could believe it. Seems wishful thinking to me.”

  Rusfaer grunted. Jhidik’s eyes glazed and remained trained on the way ahead. “Methinks there’s nowhere to go but up.”

  “Where else?” grunted Rusfaer. “We have lizards and serpents at our backs and rogues and rats weave in between.”

  Fezoul started at the mention of serpents, gazing fitfully at the descending path that curled around the cliff. Rusfaer caught the expression of anxiety on the dwarf’s face and barked out a wolfish laugh, “What gives, mountain lord? Would you rather take the low road?” He waved his sword in mocking display to the slick, wet path where Fezoul’s eyes had been goggling so long, the place that wound down forebodingly in the other direction, a grim passage of darkness.

  Fezoul opened his mouth, but closed it again. He seemed stirred by a vague thought that brewed there. It was as if he knew something was wrong and he tried to cover it up—with awkward apprehension and wringing of wrists and darting of shifty eyes.

  “Well,” barked Rusfaer, “out with it, you leprechaun! Like it or not, we are well used to your secrets by now.”

  Fezoul, plainly offended, remained clam-lipped. Rusfaer grunted resentfully and they threaded their way up the dusty path, casting disquieted glances at the gloomy caves that yawned unnervingly to the side.

  The strained silence grew to anxious sighs and grunts amongst the company—and clearly, Rusfaer’s glowering resentment fell fully on Fezoul and his batch of endless secrets and reticences—until finally Fezoul burst out in a gurgling rush: “If you must know, our first explorers stumbled across this realm generations ago! We knew it was obvious other proto-humans inhabited the mountain before us. We found their bones in nearby tunnels and their artifacts.”

  “When was this?” inquired Dereas.

  “Within the first year of our landing here. I have not personally verified it, or visited this place before, but I know of it—’tis Tutraken. So it was called of old. ’Twas ages before that an older people lived here—after the great flood, when the world was young. They died out, perished for reasons we do not know. ’Twas they who built the strange statues, the bird-men, so to say—in their own image.”

  Rusfaer’s brows bristled in derision. “What brings you to this conclusion? How do you know?”

  “We know because it’s a simple matter of logic and tradition since our witcher—”

  “Hey, how’d you like that, Hafta?” Rusfaer interrupted with a harsh laugh. He tapped his henchman on the shoulder with the flat of his blade. Down the trail he sauntered and postured rudely before the glowering megaliths with sword a-swing. “How’d you like being one of these monkeys with wings?”

  Fezoul grew hot under the collar. “Do not mock the gods of Yarim-Id,” he warned.

  “Oh, are they gods of Yarim-Id now?” Rusfaer guffawed harshly. “And a moralist among our crew? You are a repetitious mule, sir mountain lord. You picked the wrong company for that—” and he heaved a gust of sour distaste. With visible contempt, he stalked up the path, twanging his sword on the cliff wall, as if to wake the ‘gods’ that Fezoul so secretly revered.

  Dereas pulled at the wet haft of fabric that tugged umercifully at his neck. The echoes of Rusfaer’s tumult could be heard for bowshots and alert whatever horror might be listening in the immeasurable spaces. He and Jhidik and Hafta made fretful steps to catch up to the New Wolves’ chief to stop him. Fezoul fell in behind.

  A strained scowl crossed Dereas’s brooding face. What was this strange, solemn world of the past? It was awful, mysterious, likewise, guarding secrets untold. In the dusky blue shadows tumbling down in the immeasurable distance lurked a hollow silence that was unnerving, like the mouldering emptiness of a lost, forsaken, tomb.

  This dim world of the past was not to his liking, and it brought an ache of melancholy to Dereas’s heart.

  Balael but he wanted out of here! Into the world of the sun!...

  With images of sunlit vistas crawling before his mind, Dereas truly thought he could see slits of sunlight shafting from far, far up the cliff, similar to the vents that powered the Luminon, but he could not be sure. A hallucination of the mind likely, or some trick of the imagination from being confined so long in these lightless tunnels.

  While these speculations went on, the familiar thrum, boom, thrum, thrum, boom came throbbing in distant menace.

  The sound was repeated, in triplets. The companions listened aghast. Far down under the rock they had just traversed came the haunting, echoing rhythm of doom—Dereas breathed and shrank into his cocoon, scrunching deeper within his torn cloak and ringed mail.

  Jerking his head about, he put a knuckled, heavy hand on an ear. Was it the snake he heard pounding through feet of rock, or was it the advance of the lizards?

  Dereas tried to squeeze the impossible from his mind. But could not. That the serpent Pygra could squash her impossible girth through a crevice half her size, was unthinkable. And yet, he had heard that reptiles could suck in their breath and compress their whole body down to the size of a wormlike thread, to capture the smallest rodent, and squeeze through the smallest burrows.

  Wives’ tales! Dereas complained to himself...Or w
as it the wretched drums of the lizards that flaunted their progress of dominion, and their vengeful intent to convert them all to lizards?

  He gave an involuntary shiver. Perhaps neither—for also lingered the mental image of some other unimaginable horror that perhaps watched them in this sepulchral world of ancient recollection.

  9:Death in accursed Tutraken

  On silent feet, death stalks,

  Like a chill draft,

  Seeping through dusky passages...

  O’ daughter of the night, listen you!

  For none escape the claws of Saeth’s children!

  —‘Rhyme of Saeth’s Children’, poet of old Tuyokton...

  The ancient ledge was carved by a lost race out of time—hewn by the same people who had crafted the ageless, winged ones that brooded below in their stony hours of dreams. All wondered of their making, even Rusfaer, who was not much of a historian.

  Up the narrow trail they trudged on a slight grade that had them breathing sharply and wiping cold sweat from their brows. The path wound inexorably around the timeworn cliff, like some coil of a primordial serpent. Deep in their hearts, they knew that they were high above the lizard kingdom of mad Xabren, the sombre realm of his diseased sorcery.

  And still, their feet trudged with heavy purpose. Each knew he faced a senseless, futile race against death, one likely he would lose. The barest of drives kept them stumbling on, pure survival the goal, and yet, there came little other purpose beside that to this desperate crawl.

  They paused to catch their breath, ears sharpening at the splintering sounds of rocks and the distant rumbling and crashing of massive stones in the nethers below. Such tumult did not inspire much hope that their wretched flight would succeed, so they quickened their pace, tightening their strides against a foe that was unbeatable, despite their exhaustion. Nameless chills ran up their spines and loosed claws of fear in every step.

  Something was coming up the ledge. Fezoul knew it and he clutched the primitive amulet around his neck with dark prayers on his lips. Rusfaer, sombre, bent-kneed in the thick shadows, grunted and waved the group on, a brute of a man with his teeth clamped in resolve.

  At the sound of more muffled booms, the companions ducked into one of the gloomy caves that seemed ever-present on this lonely, precarious ledge. The interior was just as dry and dusty as the other gloomy pits they had seen, shaped like a seashell, but showing no adjoining tunnel into which to flee. It was a niche carved by hands or claws that had never seen the light of day...

  Back up the ledge they scrabbled, searching ever for sanctuary. Another cave they discovered, one flanked by more winged guardians, albeit of lesser mass and girth than their grim-eyed cousins hunched in the shadows below.

  A quick blur of movement caught Dereas’s eye. Down the ledge came a rustle of flints and the tinkling of tiny stones falling into empty space.

  Dereas froze in his tracks.

  Into the cave they ducked. The ambient light dimmed quickly as they made these first staggering steps into a chamber of unusual girth, for there was no water here or light-giving Vitrin, only the pale light of the portal from which they had entered.

  They passed with stealthy tread hundreds of yards before any paused to see if anything had followed.

  Down the passage they crept, and a cold fear pierced Dereas’s heart, for an immeasurable form had blotted out the faint light of Tutraken, for an instant.

  The feeble light returned.

  Had the thing passed?

  Dereas started for he could not for the life of him fathom how such a serpent, if it were the serpent, had followed them all the way here, to this dusky, shadow-cursed place.

  Silently into another cross tunnel they pushed their way. The glow dimmed swiftly as they made their way into the shadows. The realm of Tutraken was behind them with its yawning precipice and its haunting airs of desolation and grandeur.

  Hearts pounding, they risked a look back round the last bend of crumbling stone, and Dereas glimpsed a slither of movement—a frightful scaly shiver in the dimness, of some iridescent material lighter and limned against a darker patch of wall—and then the flash of an enormous tail.

  He jerked back, eyes starting out of his head. He gestured the others back into the cave with a trembling hand and suspicions confirmed.

  “He saw something!” howled Fezoul.

  “Shut up!” warned Rusfaer, raising a club-like fist.

  “It’s Pygra, isn’t it?” Hafta grunted.

  “Yes, ’tis Pygra. What else would it be?” Rusfaer growled, suffused with rage.

  Dereas’s rugged face looked stripped of hope. Even after all the efforts they had made—the snake had not given up.

  “Perhaps you are right, mountain king,” he groaned at last. “We are without salvation...” His voice trailed off in a dim murmur. He hunched down on the cold stone, glaring helplessly at a mark on the opposite wall.

  “Well, have you gone completely yellow now, brother?” mocked Rusfaer. “Like our defeatist king?” His voice rattled in Dereas’s ears. Insult upon injury leapt about the cold stone. “Or are you just settling in to have a little nap while we sup on centipedes and wash it down with our own pee?”

  Dereas leapt to his feet, confronting his brother with cold contempt. They glared nose to nose, waves of animosity brimming like whitecaps on a raging sea.

  Rusfaer grinned in his wide, bold way. Scowling shamefacedly, Dereas stepped back into the murk, dispirited and feeling empty. He gripped his blood-crusted blade and crouched grimly before the bend in the tunnel. It was all he could do to ignore the irking jests of his idiot brother.

  Rusfaer smiled plainly, amused at the fact that he had riled him. “I like a man with spirit, beaststabber. If there’s anything you have, is spunk.”

  Dereas glowered at the remark. He pushed past Hafta, intent once again on seeing the company through this nightmare. He struck up the tunnel, and By Balael, he was not going to be baited by his taunting brother!

  All the while Jhidik and Hafta remained stone-faced. They trailed behind in a cloud of brooding silence.

  The tunnel widened; Dereas pointed harshly and struck up a side tunnel. Hafta crept on his heels like a sullen, glowering wraith. Each shafted nervous glances over his shoulders. Every dozen steps Hafta would pause to jerk about warily, as if expecting some slithering horror to jump out at them like a fiendish wraith. The whites of his eyes glowed with a frowning intensity, like eagle orbs glaring in the sepulchral light. At times he looked as if his mind were thick with cobwebs, then his head would bob like a bird’s, nervous tics crawling over his shoulders, almost as if he felt his own death imminent around every corner.

  Dereas scowled. He pulled nervously at his weapon. He had seen such looks in men before they died—cold, vacant, fish-eyed gazes into nowhere. Whether on the battlefield, in single combat or duel, it was all the same. He saw his own desolation reflected in the older man’s harsh-cut features.

  Nor did he like the look of the ominous tunnel yawning up ahead.

  Not more than a few hundred yards had they crept up the wide, lightless passage when terror and death greeted them with open arms.

  Hafta loosed a bloodcurdling cry. A battered, skin-riven, skullish crown rose over him, ghoul-like, huge beyond imagining, suspended from a mass of coiled loops. He leapt back, a manikin of fright. The coils were as thick as giantwood trunks, undulating with a fiendish allure and sickly, deadly stealth.

  Stumbling over his own heels, Hafta was instantly enveloped in strangling loops of springy serpent flesh before he could even lift his blade.

  Dereas swung a defensive arc of bone-carved blade at the writhing shape but the other’s choking cries shivered his soul, echoing about the stony crypt in horrible symphony.

  Hafta was hauled back into an abysmal wash of murk, coils rippling over his man-flesh. His screams were horrible to hear: piercing, agonizing peals of them, as bones cracked and sloppy, guttural feasting began.

  His w
heezing gasps and the final gurgling sobs were a blur in Dereas’s ears. They left a ghoulish imprint on all their minds, as they raced up the tunnel, not knowing where they could flee.

  The beastslayer felt as if he were about to upend his stomach. He clawed his way up the corridor, and Rusfaer, white-eyed, surged no less swiftly at his side. He would not look at Dereas, only abandoned all hope of salvation, shaking his sweat-matted head like a dog.

  How had the fiend gotten so close to them, Dereas asked. All the twists and turns they had taken back in the inner mountain...had they all been in vain?

  It was a question with no answer. The blacksome tunnel was filled with the gluttonous rasping of bristling coils and unwholesome scales slithering.

  The snake was still not done.

  With heart-rending panic, Dereas gripped a claw-like hand on the last amethyst in his mailshirt. He waited for a right moment to prepare himself while Jhidik and Fezoul stumbled ahead in sheer terror.

  The serpent undulated coils after them, a pall of pure killing death, a reek preceding all.

  Dereas was slammed backward, swept up by a noisome loop of tail. Pitched back against a projecting spar of rock, he felt a sharp pang in his back.

  Raging hisses filled the chamber. The monster reared over him in a grisly, ghoulish anticipation. Dereas crabbed back, shaking the pain from his throbbing spine. He swept the haze of dizziness from his eyes as he hurled the crystal. It smashed a hole straight through the serpent’s twitching eye directly into the yellow-jellied flesh. The snake thrashed and hissed—deprived of sight forever. It bunted and scraped its anguished head on the ground, trying to remove the prickly missile, dull the pain of its world and ward off the endless sleep of utter darkness. Where its universe had been at least sheathed in grey, wounded by Dereas’s earlier spear-strike, now it was utterly black...

  Dereas felt a tinge of savage triumph at the deed, though he knew it was probably his last.