Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Read online

  On went the twisted game of lunge and slice, and hack and dodge.

  Pygra became tired of such mousy sport. Her features knotted in recollection of the recent past, how she had outwitted such pretenders and tricksters who had been too stubborn to die. In a moment of cold reptilian calculation, she reared up, hovering like some vast quivering tower, surveyed them with primal malevolence. She waited her turn. With a swift striking instinct, she thrust beak in a feint to Rusfaer’s sword-right, drawing his attention wide and swivelled her body hard to knock him flying, his weapon clattering uselessly on the stones. Quick as an adder, she lashed coils around his husky frame before the startled warrior could scramble to safety. Slimy coils looped tighter in a tongue-flickering hiss of gratifaction. Grimaces blossomed on Rusfaer’s face; his scarred features purpled, the tip of her tail curled like an iron-shod belamyl-shoe around his chin in ultimate mockery....

  Dereas gave a gasp of horror. He could see in his brother’s eyes such agony as he had never before.

  In moments of hysteria bordering on lunacy, Dereas unleashed a savage flurry of strikes upon the beast that held no equal, too fast for the eye to follow. He thrust and cut double-handed with wild abandon. Splattered in blood from head to foot, he rained beserk blow after beserk blow.

  Frothing cries roared from his throat. How his blade skipped and plunged!—darting in and out, raking flesh and scales, ringing off the crusty hide in leaping bounds, notching its keen edge on her toughest parts. In a dancing fury of death, he crouched on the balls of his feet, avoiding the snake’s lethal fangs by inches and the play of reeking tongue and coils that would furl around his chest in a moment’s passing while he laid into the slime-streaked hide with a vengeance that was commensurate with the hateful fate she deserved. But for her grip on Rusfaer, the beastslayer would have been crushed to death in those unforgiving coils.

  Jhidik had skipped out from behind the crumbling statue and joined in the fray, but was suprised by a sudden murderous slap of Pygra’s tail. The whipping flesh was too fast for his failing wits and he was sent flying between the serpent and lynx statue, and on into the pool. Thrashing and gasping, the Pirean broke surface. He flailed in ice cold water. But helplessly he was pulled along by a current too merciless for his tired limbs to combat and the icy water numbed him, his mail dragging him down, and he rolled head over toe, out over and between the legs of the frightful toad-lizard squatting like a barbaric gargoyle, grinning savagely, guarding the gateway of Hell, the Hall of Beasts, and down, down the soulless cliff.

  Dereas gave a croak of dismay. But he could not help him.

  The snake had lessened her ruthless grip on Rusfaer, momentarily checked by the beastslayer’s assault, and Rusfaer managed to wriggle free of her unfurling coils to crawl gasping on the stone behind the serpent idol. He staggered to his knees. A supernatural resilience sparked his blood, as if providence had given him chance once again to embrace his beloved Pameel, and fulfill his life mission.

  He stumbled on weak legs over to the pool’s edge where he grasped his sword. Gasping in the reek of the snake’s filth all over him, he turned to face the monster, but this time with grim acceptance, and the last look of tragic understanding that he could not stand against the snake. One stroke he had before her ugly mouth closed on his body.

  The monster’s tail swished forward. It passed near Fezoul’s crouching place and the mountain king, feeling somewhat useless in the fray, stabbed out his blade deep into scaly hide.

  The snake jerked. Momentarily distracted, she turned her full attention to where the figure with the small blade had struck. She bypassed the staggering warrior and whipped out a loop of tail around the astounded king before he had taken his next breath.

  The mountain king’s eyes bulged in shock. A short, sharp shriek stuck on his lips.

  Dereas watched dumbfounded as the diminutive king was lifted in that rippling coil and the dwarf’s features contorted in a grisly resignation of a fate destined from the day he was born. The dwarf’s lips puckered in a ghastly gurgle. “Aaaaaggh! I curse you, Pygraaa,” he croaked.

  Dereas surged forward and hacked at the glistening coil. A terrible unreasoning rage burned in him at sight of the defenceless king locked in a monstrous loop. Pygra’s grisly trunk sprouted blood. Rusfaer, tottering at his side, grabbed at the king and pulled him to safety, free from the slackening, suffocating grip of the blood-maddened snake.

  Pygra hissed. She thrashed and writhed, her tail a whip of spasmodic rage.

  Dereas threw himself headlong toward the reptilian jaws of death. His brain and every cell of his wracked body was overcome with a giddy sense of nothing to lose. His blood burned with the revived daring and recklessness of his youth—that fearlessness that had earned him the name ‘Beastslayer’. A wild, unheeding battle lust came over his soul. He gripped his sword two-handed and rained thunderous stroke upon thunderous stroke on the snake. The arched midsection of the great Pygra knotted and looped and whipped with terrific anguish. Sword dripped red, as Rusfaer stumbled in again for another thrust. The mountain king, supine, began to roll in a heap, but somehow mustered some resolve. He rose up, eyes wild and fierce, glaring at the snake and cursing demoniacally with smouldering vengeance. This was not the Fezoul whom Dereas knew, but in those transformed features Dereas saw a regal figure standing up to his full height, his heart filled with hate for this ghastly snake. Fezoul staggered forward on small but determined feet, stripped clean of fanatical bond and tie to his hallowed deity, and he hacked and stabbed the snake’s hide without care or consequence for his actions.

  The serpent came rearing back to smite him and the little warrior sagged, but Rusfaer, coughing and staggering, snatched up the king once more and dragged him away from that hissing wall of death before the fang-forked mouth could swallow him in one gulp.

  With the loss of her sight it took a split second for Pygra to use her smell and questing tongue to scope out the new situation.

  The same glinting fangs now aimed at Dereas...

  Dereas blinked, jerked back to avoid her bared fangs. He raised a gleaming blade and with a flying leap and a wild ululation of his people on his lips, fled across the snake’s line of smell and sense, smiting and laying a wicked, slicing arc which parted Pygra’s beaked nostril in twain. Her battered beak parted in a painful gush, and her coils knotted and whipped along the mouldering pavestones. The strange silent statues bore witness to Pygra’s pain and agony. A stray loop flailed and Rusfaer and the mountain king were knocked sideways, inches from the pool’s lapping edge.

  The end was near for them, for the snake was invincible, and could seemingly forebear any human punishment. No human strikes could fell that immortal thing! He panted for breath, his elbows on his knees, sword hanging slack, and he murmured an appeal to Balael one last time...

  But creeping weirdly from the open portal came a cadaverous shadow, a chill larger than even Pygra, larger than life. And from the shadow emerged a hostile dark shape hewing past the dangling hinges of the shredded door, smashing and crumbling rock that held it. The shape snorted steam through a set of flared nostrils.

  Xabren’s mother-lizard!

  In the thick of battle, they had missed the thuds and roars of wrathful lizards.

  Pygra halted to assess the new danger.

  It was the female saurian, who had clawed her restless body into the cavern, driven by the smell of serpent, a spoor for which she hankered and had been tracking for days now. On her hind legs she stood, bellowing like an ox, the volume of a hundred war horns, torn by her loathing for her most hated enemy of her race—the snake.

  Greta’s plated ribs rose and fell in a chest heaving to lusty pleasure, still drunk with rapture at her recent release from the cage. Her front legs wind-milled, her crusted barrel body jacked on hind legs. She might have been mad for snake flesh, however winded or fatigued she was from her long chase through the miles of caves carved in the haunted mountain. But she had pushed and squeezed thro
ugh small places and her hide and forelegs were scored and bloody and notched and rubbed raw in places.

  Dereas’s knees sagged. It was a well known fact that lizard and serpent have been mortal enemies—since the beginning of time, and when Pygra sensed that giant shape swaggering in like a stuffed sow, she abandoned Rusfaer and Dereas and the tiny straw puppet that comprised the mountain king, and she slid with relish to meet the gnashing, roaring lizard that threatened to undermine her domain and snatch away her well-earned prey.

  11:The Time of the Lizard

  The ages drift, and men’s dreams with it,

  And time’s wheel rolls from Snake to Lizard,

  On a day when Drafala weeps tears of blood!

  —Skald’s cry...anonymous

  Greta perhaps did not see the threat in the snake at first. Her newfound freedom to hunt had given her a reckless confidence and clouded her better sense. The serpent’s scent was thick in her nostrils, enough to drive her mad. Caged for so long in her rank pen, she was not thinking right. Pygra was an aged snake, one of the first, primordial creatures of her time, a proto-serpent of ancient cunning, whose primitive hunting instincts had been passed down from generation to generation. Twisted genes carried echoes of gore and slaughter, which had evolved since her ancestors had first dropped into the slimes of faraway swamps—from the time of the primordial egg at the beginning of everything. She had developed a deviousness which far exceeded her ugliness and her small brain capacity and she lured her prey into slippery, death-dealing coils with instinctive skill, without pretence. Stalking was her craft; she was a master at it. She dreamed of hunting her prey in idle moments in the darkest places below Vharad. And yet, if she had any fault, it was insatiable gluttony. It prompted her to eat and eat for slaughter’s sake. After consuming thrice her weight, she could consume a barrow-load more—no different a habit than the tusked dogs of the northern steppes, beasts that tear flesh and rend hide for the pure sport of gorging meat.

  Not surprising then, when the great serpent lunged, the mother lizard fell.

  Greta fell on all fours as Pygra propelled her massive body forward and struck with terrific strength and agility. Greta snapped out her horrific jaws, but quicker still was Pygra, who dodged, faster than the strike of any Eakor. Green teeth aimed for her iridescent trunk only grazed her. Now the serpent ducked once under the plated underbelly and wrapped thrice about the bloated abdomen that carried fresh young.

  Greta rolled thrashing with claws unfurled and snapped with her curved neck trying to throw Pygra off and stop that accursed, constricting death. But the snake had wrapped a dozen loops about her midsection before she could do anything, and she felt the wind wheeze out of her ravaged lungs like an arrow-torn sail. Greta’s spine was breaking, her ribs cracking under pressures of muscles too sinewy to claw through. Her bones were being crushed. She lay wheezing in pain. The crafty serpent loosened her grip for a brief instant to bend her snout close. As fast as the coils had furled, the fanged mouth spread wide and grabbed hold of the crusty, hooded, lolling head and gulped the female saurian down, spasm by spasm, ingesting that still, warm flesh with ghoulish delight. Each convulsion of that repulsive, wedge-shaped head brought the lizard disappearing further and further inside the swollen tubular body, foot by everlasting foot.

  Such was Greta’s demise—and Pygra’s obsession for living flesh. The snake did not flinch or think about the consequences.

  Dereas gulped back his horror—shrinking away, witness to one of nature’s grisliest acts. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the water pulsing out of the waterfall had turned a bleaker hue, a pale amber, after the snake had ingested Greta.

  Fezoul rocked back on his heels, his lips bleating out a fateful warning, “Death in the tunnels! The shadow of death to all!” And his voice rose like the stroke of a gong.

  How it happened that the green water turned to amber, Dereas did not know; only that mystic forces still lived in Vharad, and were at play in this devilish place on top of the world.

  The bulge that was Greta slowly traversed down the curling swath of Pygra’s body as Dereas and the others watched the ghastly feeding with a horror that knew no bounds. But for only a few seconds. Jerking to attention, they willed their feet toward the exit. But escape from the shattered doorway was thwarted. Another terror was coming. A monstrous shadow darkened the threshold of the ancient doorway. A dark head poked through the gap, sent them back reeling.

  The male lizard had sniffed twice, forging its way into that vile chamber, and knew that tragedy had hit the moment it stepped foot within. Kruger was not as naive as Greta who had died horribly and without requital, and it sensed the power of the snake whose body glistened with preternatural vitality and whose maimed eyes stared sullenly—but also it had the advantage of fresh wits, something that the cretinish serpent who skulked sinuously before it did not, so laden and dulled with fresh kill. Pygra was not acting as shrewdly as she normally would. The enormous, cursed lizard she had swallowed was a foul weight in her coiled bulk and the terrible claw-edged monster that lumbered into the chamber now, head moving back and forth like a bear, had its razor teeth pressed in a dangerous snarl.

  Pygra seemed detached, sensing the new presence with perplexity. Then she bristled with excitement and bared fangs. The prospect of so much fresh meat in her belly made her tongue tremble to the scent of fresh flesh. A bounty was hers on which to gorge! Too many dark years had passed of scant feasting on only rats and vermin and the odd careless lizard. She had grown grasping, willful, covetous. Already she had a giant lizard inside her and would have more! How she swished her tail in anticipation of such feasting! And in her excitement, her mallet-like head reared high, smacked the lower ceiling, flaking chunks of rock from the walls and sending boulders falling into the pool with splashes and thuds. She slithered sideways down the cavern in serpentish glee. Her notched tongue flicked and her salivating maw yawned in a mounting hiss of celebration and obscene jubiliation.

  Without warning, Kruger went berserk, rushing forth with the knowledge that its dead mate was inside that gluttonous thing. Pygra was perhaps overconfident in her abilities. Her record of kills was formidable and she rose bristling with looped coils to greet the bellowing menace. Grunting with primordial savagery, Kruger lashed out with gnawing teeth and hewed the snake sorely with its barbed claws, laying bare huge patches of her skin and flesh. Pygra sprang, coiled about its neck, but she was so bloated from her fresh kill that she did not have the strength to quickly despatch the saurian, as normally she would do.

  In one swift movement, the vengeful lizard dipped its head, sank on its hindquarters, raked its front paws across her hide and broke free of her murderous clutch, only to sink teeth into her bare fleshy neck. The serpent slashed about in a perfect circle, her loops still writhing about the big lizard’s body, and muscles still squeezing slow life out of it, but weaker now.

  The fugitives fled out from behind the statues as Kruger toppled sideways, crashing upon salamander and crab effigies. The two monsters beat their tails in frenzy and lay there in a dizzy tangle of limbs and blood-splattered hides and coils, thrashing feebly. Only moments before they had been bent on killing each other. Now the reptiles wheezed out their failing breaths and Kruger’s jaws still clamped on the serpent’s neck, as it bled out on the rocks. The serpent’s snout parted in a rasping gurgle.

  Rusfaer watched in a kind of dazed fascination. Dereas saw his brother crawl to his feet, wobbling on shaky limbs. Their torsos were bloodied and blood-spattered weapons rose in nerveless arms. Pygra, the aged snake, still twitched and flailed, but not nearly as forcibly as before. Nonetheless, she rose with awful strength, one of her fangs now snapped and slanted inward on an angle. She swayed her head back and forth, assessing movements around her. She was a gargantuan tower of supple vigour. Even as the blood pulsed out of her glistening hide in a dozen places, she gained her resolve. Leaving behind the dead Kruger, she slowly moved toward the figures she sen
sed nearby.

  Fezoul held his hands over his eyes, shaking like a torn leaf, cowering behind the safety of the bat statue. Yet moments ago, he had come to Rusfaer’s aid, during his hour of recognition of the horror that was Pygra, stabbing at the serpent’s tail when it swept by his hiding place. Now he efforted to block out the sordid reality of his own death.

  A new threat riveted Dereas’s attention. At the shadow of the entranceway he heard the familiar pounding of clawed feet and the rattle of a hundred tulwars and rustling mail shirts. A sea of menacing faces milled behind a rising shape, pushed in from the back, groping for human flesh—a desperate mob keen for retaliation or whatever deranged cause their king had given their brainwashed skulls.

  Rusfaer and Dereas struggled toward the pool, ready to jump in if need be. A mounted figure and a set of watery eyes rose over the crest of the twitching bodies, a fervid glint in the darkness—the lizard king riding on the shoulders of the Rgnadon. His eyes were bloodshot and glowering with triumph. Somehow, during the long journey up the tunnel, he had managed to tame and ride the beast again.

  Dereas had fought dozens of battles in his life, but this was certainly his most tasking and bizarre. And yet, he was wise enough to know that numbers were not everything and that discipline offered as much as tactics and strength.

  On came the Rgnadon and the pompous, demented lizard king riding upon its plated back. The lizard folk streamed after like lemmings through the mangled doorway, gnashing and brandishing their weapons, driving and dragging small battering rams on wheels and jury-rigged barrows and baskets of weapons, muttering in low, garbled, weird voices.

  Dereas scrambled back behind the stone tortoise statue, his eyes desperately questing for some means of escape. The grille was blocked access.