Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Read online

  Pygra? Lizards?

  Fezoul’s body shrivelled with such fears. He stumbled on wildly, lurched into a shallow pool, causing Rusfaer to stare, leaning on his sword, blinking with indifference.

  Could the reptiles have penetrated thus far? Dereas hooked his mouth in a scowl and pulled the clumsy king out of the water. It was not impossible. The hour of the Saeth was upon them—sooner or later the mountain would run them to the ground. When they ran out of dips and turns, what then—?

  Dereas’s worst fears were confirmed, for in the murky distance they spied a barrier and heard the echoing purl of water lapping on stone. Nothing to surprise them, but—

  The winding stairs took them to a T-junction and they gazed up into the eyes of a giant bull skull with curled horns hanging on the opposite wall. The stern face leered at them like a fateful demonic avatar of stony yesteryear. A trickle of greenish water issued from its snout, similar to the serpentish portal with the fox-eared serpent. A dozen skulls and grisly carvings were arranged below and beside, cunningly crafted as to appear part of the rock itself. Big bold characters carved out by a giant’s chisel stood out like the runes of distant lands, speaking some forgotten language which Fezoul identified as an arcane rite of passage in an older, ruder tongue.

  The passage to the right gaped down a wide, tall tunnel, black as pitch, endlessly yawning into gloom, with no Vitrin stream to light it. Cold draughts issued forth, reeking of must and moulder and the most unpleasant dampness; also the sounds of dim thuds came from frightful distances down. Dereas could not help but feel a cloying chill, for that passage was large—large enough to host creatures like Pygra and the Rgnadon, and it did not give him much confidence in their safety. To the left, a drier tunnel wound, though no less spacious, in a direction upward.

  Rusfaer mumbled resentfully.

  They took the leftmost passage. Into a dim alcove they crept, eyes adjusting to the gloom. They stood blinking before a flight of age-cracked stone steps that wound up into near darkness, lit only by a thin trickle of Vitrin.

  They swung heavy legs up. At the landing’s top loomed a massive door, forbidding for its size, half open. On ancient hinges it hung and comprised the first traces of iron since they had left the lizard realm. A peek beyond showed an even wider tunnel, opening up to admit twenty men abreast. Into the corridor they tottered and Dereas wheeled to grasp the portal’s gem-encrusted edge. The stumbling wanderers managed to swing the stony braces creaking shut. With a grunting gasp of triumph, they slid back the bolt. Whether the rusty bar would gain them some real protection against a blooded foe would remain to be seen.

  The chamber was mightily domed, edged with thousands of crystals on its lofty ceiling. Thousands of amethysts and rose quartz and carnelian glistened from heights above and in crannies to the sides.

  Dereas’s aquiline eyes swept about the cavern in awe-struck wonder.

  For a time his breath caught, for there was fresh, colder air here; also the first breath of natural light smarted his eyes in a frisson of brilliant colour.

  A low waterfall ran from the back of the cavern like a curtain of white foam to fall into a jade-green pool covering a third of the length of the hall. It spilled out through an opening that admitted shafts of pale light from the open air beyond. All along the stone gallery at the pool’s edge ringed a mighty pantheon of gigantic carved birds, beasts and reptiles: fishes, crocodiles, lions, wild cats, monster scorpions, serpents, lizards, and iguanas. About their feet ranged chains. They ringed in a wide half moon about the pool, some twice as tall as a man, others squatted like frogs. At one time they had been coloured with exotic pigments, but now they were faded, colourless and grey with age.

  On wary feet the four wandered about, taking in their surroundings with the bright wonder of pilgrims.

  The artisans’ skill however, did not end there. Dereas was quick to see that the rendering of claws, eyes, snouts, legs, wings or talons half lifted in flight or dramatic stealth, was shiveringly real. The figures crouched in aspects of almost magical surrealism.

  The four intruders squatted uneasily on their knees at the pool’s edge to sip the cool mountain water—so cold it was that it stung the temples. The rippling wake carried tiny grey-green chunks of melting ice and Dereas’s eyes rounded. They had climbed so high that they were likely near the source of the mountain stream itself.

  Dereas staggered up as close as he dared to a place along the brim of the pool from where the mountain water spilled—likely from the melting snow peaks, now a noisy small river as it gained momentum to plunge out over the cliff and down into thin air. Despite the fear of the threat at hand, Dereas felt light-headed...and surprisingly, a sense of relief. At last, they had reached some form of their destination, some vague place of protection. It was hardly anywhere near the base of the mountain, but at least miles away from the dreaded lizard kingdom.

  At last they had found the sun! Dereas caught a glimpse of the blazing sky out there, past the outflow that streamed down a towering waterfall to spill out into a pool far below; also the ragged, puffed edge of real white clouds, the copper haze of distant ridges and the yellow-ochre of baking desert plains. He blinked his eyes in joyful contemplation and craned his neck to see farther. He saw the sheer cliff drop in an ice-fed waterfall that fell many feet to a foaming green pool below, shaded by wide-leaved balboa trees. Not a pleasant drop, he mused; no way to easily skirt that raging water and foot a path down to the pool below. Jhidik had discovered a side tunnel hidden in dusky shadows on the far end of the cavern seeking shelter...to this place Dereas now crept.

  The others huddled in reverie and Dereas grimaced in awe as he staggered by, noting the beast-sculptures faced each other in a rough oval, as if they were pitted in some final ritual battleground. Dereas frowned, for he saw that the huge chains coiled to the sides of each massive statue were buried in inches of must and moulder, prompting any number of sinister speculations. He could not help but surmise who or what had forged those iron shackles or what they had restrained in the racing shadows of time’s mysteries. The terrible, ferocious epic struggles that had occurred in this dim, sepulchral world of yesteryear, were unimaginable.

  His mind travelled to an age earlier when beasts might have mastered beasts and worshipped their own gods and held their own rituals in honour of them—creatures hidden in caves from the world of men for aeons in their private sanctuaries...In the same way as men held their own games to the west in the amphitheatres of the bustling markets of Belramus and Toringol.

  Back in the dimness flush to the edge of the waterfall, Dereas saw the tunnel was blocked with stone, admitting only a crawlspace barely large enough for a man to squeeze through. Yet beside the tunnel was a rusted grill, melded in the stone, so twisted and corroded that looked as if it would crumble at the merest touch.

  He took slow, careful steps toward it, his bootfalls no more than a bare whisper in the hall of dusty, smooth-worn stone...noticing some of the animals had jagged cracks running up their middle. Here, a buffalo body had lost its horned head which lay in crumbling ruin at the beast’s hooves, there, a forlorn condor had lost a wing...

  The companions passed eyes over the inscriptions and ancient symbolisms etched on walls and statues in solemn silence, and not without apprehension. Of all of them, Rusfaer’s face remained the most inscrutable.

  Perhaps the most imposing statue of all—was the half lizard and frog whose legs straddled the place where the water gushed out of the mountain. It was a creature not dissimilar to the sorrowful winged man that had died in Tutraken. And its face was a fanged oval peeled back into a mocking snarl—a hideous expression of rapture and horror that the companions cringed back from in grimacing abhorrence...for the lizard-frog wore a crown!

  The second last in the ring was a special coiled snake with a python’s beak encircling the torso of a horned man, and the serpent’s tongue licked the unfortunate man’s cheek with fanged mouth ready to strike!

  Dereas
crawled back in revulsion. The attitude of that ghastly pose was all too real, and familiar. On the upper tiers of the cavern, dark shrines were cut into the rock—cubbyholed sanctuaries, each with its own bestial statue—teetering shapes with slab-sided faces, jackalish snouts and weird renditions of tongue and ear.

  Fezoul wandered around the amphitheatre, blank-eyed, looking humbled with the realization that his kingdom was puny under the shadow of the colossal, bestial grandeur here. Dereas could see lines of doubt carved on his strangely aged face. As if he too had dwelled too long under the mountain, a lifetime in his own individual world, wearing the crown of a people now dead.

  In hurried silence they searched the place, Jhidik poking his sword about the hooves of a basalt belamyl, looking for tools or weapons or anything useful in its litter of dust and rubble to help them survive. Dereas came beside him and his eyes stared in awe at the statue’s perfect form, its hunched shaggy back, and its thousands of carved hairs, a master feat of craftsmanship of its own. The Pirean looked small in the midst of these exalted, omnipotent effigies, which were perfectly and flawlessly hewn. Rusfaer seemed oblivious to the lost grandeur and remained almost contemptuous of the sinister forces of idolatry lurking about that had somehow seeded this realm and given birth to nightmare.

  The first metallic booms came smashing at the portal in ear-deafening peals, reverberating about the stone, blocking out hope and reason. Dereas crouched on his haunches, staring grimly. Every muscle quivered in tense expectation. The access tunnel was too large for his tastes and could admit any number of violent beasts or terrors. There was the rusty grille too, and yet—

  Dust billowed under the cracks of the portal. The bolts shivered. A reptilian snout smashed through, wrenching them from their sockets.

  The fugitives’ bleary, bloodshot eyes widened in lunatic unison.

  Jhidik swallowed hard—and ran.

  Rusfaer, gripping hilt, glared incredulously. The wracked door was beyond reach, not an option. Eyes darted to the cavern’s rear. Escape by the mouldering grille toward which Dereas was gliding, seemed a fool’s venture. Rusfaer swept strides about the chamber, verily dancing from foot to foot in indecision. Here was a desperate man facing a dead end with foes at his back.

  “Quickly, laggards!” he shouted. “This may be our last chance. We are dead unless we find some way out of here.”

  “But how?” croaked Jhidik. “Shall we fly on wings like those mutant, filthy—”

  “Shut up! Do what you must!” Rusfaer yelled. He scrambled vigorously over to seize the rusty bars and try to rip them out of their sockets.

  No luck.

  When the snake did come bursting through that bolted door, the company was completely unprepared.

  The stone and protruding iron buckled in on itself, and a slimy, wedge-shaped head with slab-skinned eyes slid past the jagged hole. It inspected them with incalculable loathing.

  Her immense bulk pushed forward, scattering stone and metal as if they were chaff. Then, she was in the chamber, all vast, glistening glory of her.

  Dereas knew horror, for like Draba, they were on open ground, pitted against a ruthless fiend. Fezoul, his body a mass of loose-running jelly, grovelled on his knees.

  In the dim light the serpent’s head lifted, swayed in anticipation of the gluttonous feasting to come. Her mutilated tongue flickered between triple fangs as she assessed her prey with her inborn sense of smell. They were defenceless, puny things, easy fodder in the wake of her might. Her slanted crown was flayed and scarred from previous bashings as grievous as men could imagine, partly in encountering those sword-wielders who stood before her, but mostly from crashing her head against rock to force her way through the myriad, impassible tunnels. Her once-good eye sagged in a bloody ruin, her body caked with dried blood and coiled calmly, looking more like a gigantic, prehistoric predator than a snake of the present world, shimmering in the greenish gloom. One of the elder beasts, Dereas thought, in meditative contemplation of his impending death, and the other men within that domed chamber blanched upon seeing that mythical snake for the first time in all her stark reality—trapped as they were, alone, in a truly exposed arena—and they shuddered under the breadth and size of her.

  Realizing her prey had no escape, the beast slithered calmly toward their brace-legged numbers.

  Tumult drifted past the hanging doorway, which the snake ignored. Dereas, rooted firmly, raised frozen sword in a killing grip. He knew he would get only one chance before the monster snapped him up in those strangling coils and upended him into her cavernous jowl. One sweep!—and then, victory—or oblivion. From the booming sounds echoing without, there was more hell to come. The broken door smashed inward and from it flooded the disturbing pad of flat feet on stone, a chittering of unspeakable magnitude. Then the gnashing of countless abominable lizards and monstrous howls and baying of something larger still—something more violent. If the snake did not finish them, it would be the lizard king, and his horde of scaly brutes fast approaching.

  Flesh crawling, Dereas began to dimly understand what had happened. Pygra had been stalking them from the very beginning, unwittingly leading the wretched lizards here. The lizard king had vowed to track them down, and that much he had done, as hissed in his last scalding speech. The lizards merely had to follow the spoor of the snake and her trail of carnage to find their quarry—which they had.

  Pygra heeded none of this. She hovered there like a brooding phantom, a courtly length from the ancient doorway, a vast bulk of coiled, human nightmare. She sensed them through hideous flaps of her sightless eyes, but all the time, she smelled their man-scent and fresh blood. Her repulsive notched tongue slicked oddly from her maw after its encounter with Dereas’s blade.

  Rusfaer scuttled toward his brother. Jhidik swayed at their side. Fezoul quivered on their heels. Frantically the four backed away, for to confront the snake on open ground was suicide. Instinct drove them to shelter behind the line of statues by the arching pool. Pygra slithered sideways—a keen shape eager to cut Rusfaer off from his swordslinging comrades, the particular one who at a time before had cut her so badly. It was clear the sharp instinct of her reptilian smell-sense preferred to single out her prey, rather than chance all to band together in a united attack and pincushion her with sword pricks. Painfully she had endured the merciless and cunning slashings from those two wolfish savages, strokes she did not want to repeat.

  With a raging cry, Rusfaer swung good steel a looping feint at the serpent’s toad-warted head. He lured the monster closer to the pool, and Dereas saw his plan—to slash at her midsection and bait her into a vulnerable lunge, then make a break for the open door or the rusty grille. But his hope was dashed—for the snake was too fast and she whipped her brutal tail to batter him sideways and send him smacking against the opposite wall. He fell like a downed ox at the base of the horned ibex.

  Rusfaer looked up in dazed confusion, a look expecting his own death, only to discover the open portal dangling on its hinges and from there issued a distant echo of a lumbering creature more menacing than Pygra...

  Jhidik rushed to the Wolfrunner’s aid, thundering the battle cry of the Pireans, and he slashed a whole section of the snake’s hide where her trunk joined the back of her neck. Dereas realized the Pirean’s assault was effective only while she was focussed on Rusfaer. Warily Jhidik half shuffled back to his place of safety behind the antlered ibex. The serpent, blood-mad at this point, slithered forth with fangs outstretched, but her face met with solid stone and she succeeded only in bashing her slab-shaped head on Jhidik’s protection.

  The beast came at him again, hitting hard, rocking the statue’s frame, and Jhidik hunched back, grimacing behind that adamantine bulwark, swearing luridly, his face a whitened mask of fear and hate and his lungs heaving.

  The antlers of the statue cracked, smashed at his feet, then a hind leg splintered and now it was Dereas’s turn to rush in, charging in a shrieking rush. He raised his gleaming tulwar hig
h and slashed a ruinous line across Pygra’s midsection, laying open flesh and a fetid gash of liquid meat to spew out on the stone.

  The snake screamed, writhed, hissed and curled her ravaged body, whipping snout back and forth to deal with the skulking attacker. Dereas ran lightfooted to pull his dazed brother to his feet and they both scrambled in behind the fanged, serpent statue.

  Pygra smashed her battered head up against the stony effigy in an attempt to send them reeling to their deaths, but they formed a ring around her, dodging left and right while she lunged at them. It was a game of cat and mouse, miss and strike. Such was the snake’s frenzy that she became more demon-like than reptile, infused with the memory of fresh feasts on her mind. She bore the vicious, terrible punishment with stoic barbarism. The cuts and gashes grew like stitches on her face and trunk. She did not relish this heavy dragging of her sizely bulk around that statue to the amusement of those mousy vermin. It only registered in her consciousness that she had feasted a lot of late, with the dozens of tender lizards and the great big man-bat head fresh in her stomach.

  Rusfaer and Dereas had developed enough confidence to bait the snake. They slashed and retreated behind another statue when she got too close. Legs squared, they held great blades two-handed, carving chunks in fiery triumph. They leapt back, while one teased the snake, and the other would cleave and rend its hide from the side. The snake switched to the other attacker, and the other brother would hew her gleefully. Jhidik snuck in to jab and thrust from the side.

  In such baiting the play continued and Pygra’s wounds grew in that bestial, tomb-like hall, with the brothers fighting shoulder to shoulder, racking up revenge on the monster that had caused them so much grief. Dereas caught a glimpse of the brimming wrath burning on his brother’s face and he felt a kinship stronger than ever before—even in their young escapades running wild on the steppes.

  Rusfaer bellowed: “This is for Hafta!” and he slashed right and left at the snake. “And Draba!” He rained blows off the snake’s scaly hide like a blacksmith’s hammer.