Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Page 32

  Seeing no easy solution, he gripped his dripping weapon, struggling to fathom why the lizard king would drive his subjects like cattle all through this hopeless zigzag of tunnels, transporting all those weapons—crates of them, and strange siege engines to boot. Did they use them to carve or blast their way through the tunnels, and provide a way for their obscene reptiles to squeeze through? Another testament of his cruel insanity?

  Dereas furrowed his brow and willed himself to comprehend the scope of the lizard king’s demented mind—this sinister renegade who was once a dwarfed man with the name of Xabren.

  He grimaced with disgust, realizing the ultimate reckoning had come. None could stand against the Rgnadon. Perhaps the time had truly passed from Snake to Lizard...

  The lizard king flourished his arms in a frenzy. “Seize them, you fools!” He pointed a jewelled finger. “They must be punished, suffer ritual abasement and incubation in eggs!”

  Dereas hissed in Rusfaer’s ear: “What I wouldn’t give for a bow and quiver to put an arrow through that miserable wretch’s heart.”

  Rusfaer mumbled agreement, a toothy scowl on his face.

  Dereas held his notched blade ready to fight; Rusfaer grimly planted his bulk at his side. The two swaggered forth, crouched in fighter’s stance, balancing on the balls of their feet. Fezoul pulled himself together and set his toes clambering at their heels, moved by their courage. His poinard was raised and gripped tremulously in his hands.

  The Rgnadon had other plans for the fugitives. Contrary to its master’s wishes, the beast lumbered into the cavern’s centre and studied the lump in Pygra’s middle. It cocked its head to the side, seeing the mass bulbed like a rotten tumour, heavy as stone. Even in its slanted skull, a dim intelligence began to register and a sequence of monstrous connections fired, that Greta had been eaten alive. Its eyes gleamed malignantly; its bestial jowl parted redly and teeth dripped with slavering effluvia as it tossed its head back and threw the lizard king several feet behind on its turreted back. The lizard king, drunk with power, clawed his way back up, hung on the barbs of the long neck, laughing and howling. He was imbued with a reckless confidence, not entirely sane. A monarch he was, but a wild rider he was not. He flirted with death as the beast reared toward the eternal foe, the primordial Pygra.

  With a feral roar, the monster attacked the languid, recumbent snake. The Rgnadon bolted straight for her jugular, ripped green-gummed teeth into the snake’s back. The growing swarm of lizard-folk halted and quaked, enthusiasm suddenly dulled upon sight of the snake and the bloody mass that was Kruger.

  Pygra indeed had come back to life. Baring fangs and hissing, she rose in murky afterlife, and Dereas saw in fascinated horror the force of will that she had. He shrank under the shadow of that demonic reptile. The snake’s coils rippled to ripe life again and Dereas’s mouth hung slack. She must be possessed, he mumbled to himself. The giant lizard smashed its heavy skull into the snake’s crown just behind the ear, grinding sidewise into flesh and sinew. Pygra was stunned, but not daunted. She rocked her massive body sideways and hissed and looped her trunk slithering in a writhing offensive, sidewinding under the Rgnadon’s kneecaps.

  The lizard king was thrown clear, flung to the stone with a resounding thwack to land in a dazed heap before Dereas and Rusfaer. Pygra began to encircle the Rgnadon’s legs, twining her coils and binding him with crushing force. Heedless of the epic violence at play, the lizard king advanced on the warriors, stabbing with his sceptre.

  Dereas parried, stepped inside the lizard king’s instep, struck and elbowed him in the fleshy part of his midsection, hearing a rib crack.

  The king bellowed in pain, swept out again with his jewelled sceptre. The two glared eye to eye. Dereas knocked the ineffectual weapon aside, his quivering blade egging for reprisal, but resisted the urge to run him through. Rather, he used him as a shield, instead of cleaving him scalp to sternum, as Pygra, whose dim brain now realized the significance of this person, loosed her hold on the gasping Rgnadon and reared up like a cobra and whipped hard to wedge a head down to pitch fangs into the exposed king.

  Recovering from the assault, the Rgnadon thrust a knotted foreleg forth and blocked the strike that would snap the king’s head off. It thrust its saw-toothed teeth into the snake’s neck.

  Perhaps it was one wound too many for Pygra. The snake, weakened with the blood-spilling and still heavy with fresh kill, jerked like a kite in the wind. She swayed out of reach of the death-giving teeth. Amidst her fluting hisses and the roars of the Rgnadon, the lizard king clambered back up on the spine of his saurian, tilting back his own head, despite his wounds, flinging a maniacal cry to the crystal-laced ceiling.

  “Kill all!” he shrilled, white foam spuming from his mouth. And the lizards moved forward, sling-darts aimed, ready to pincushion Pygra. But most swayed back, giving grunts of uncertainty, with the belief that they would pierce their god instead. Some iron bolts found their mark in Pygra’s trunk. But many missed their mark and thunked into the hide of their god instead, at which the creature bellowed in wrath.

  Pygra for the first time, shrank in the face of that awful shadow of the Rgnadon. Despite her atrocious wounds, she tried to slither away, but the hideous weight of Greta anchored her like ball and chain.

  For her there was no escape. The Rgnadon snapped like a rabid wolf at the snake’s retreating, uncoiling body, grabbing at a place here, a place there, behind the neck, at the base of the trunk, whipping the snake back and forth as a hound the unfortunate rodent or rabbit.

  The writhing snake flew through the air and landed in a thudding heap amidst the circle of ravaged beast statues. There would be no mercy. A hundred years of ghoulish feasting was coming to an end, and the Rgnadon, enraged beyond measure, rent the serpent ear to ear. The beast knew the foul snake had eaten the mother lizard and killed its male kin. It held her down with its webbed, clawed forefeet and disembowelled her without compunction, while tearing chunks out of her hide and face, ripping the carcass where the great bulge lay, half way down her tubular mass.

  The battered snake squealed a last cry of mournful, desolate agony. Then it thrashed and twitched, and tried to wrap her blood-gummed coils about that merciless foe for one last time, as she had done so many thousand times to hapless victims. But she could find no hold in the slippery blood streaming off her failing muscles and knew that she was at an end.

  Dereas shuddered to think of the succession of carcasses amassed in that grotesque body. For now in the cavern’s ethereal light, the mother lizard’s corpse was exposed, but not the same lizard that had entered Pygra’s noisome gullet. The acid from the snake’s digestive tract had already eaten away at Greta’s skin, turning it from a dark green to a horrid milky white, making it barely recognizable.

  Dereas recoiled at the sight—that repugnant, mucilaginous mass that was once green-backed Greta. He wanted to vomit. Rusfaer and the mountain king both doubled over nauseous, as other nondescript grizzled shapes and egg-shaped lumps poured out with the Rgnadon’s snuffling and clawing into its innards—shapes that might or might not have been Hafta or Draba or any other of the countless lizards that the monster had wolfed down in her grisly gluttony of late.

  The Rgnadon dragged the mother lizard out of the snake carcass whole, teeth bared, slavering, dripping, and snuffling in grief. It bellowed and whimpered, assessed the grizzled skin with tilted head, blinking its blazing yellow eyes. Dereas entertained little doubt that the ruin of the Rgnadon’s sister-kin was imprinted on its lizard mind forever. The beast hopped back in surprise, as the dead, floppy thing that was the mother lizard, suddenly jerked in a death spasm and sighed out a last stream of slimy pus. The egg she had been holding popped out of her genitals—and was the last act the reptile managed, as it loosed a slobbering sigh.

  The warriors stared in glassy-eyed revulsion, bearing silent witness to what they had survived. Dereas did not doubt that the serpent would have killed them all, if her gluttony had not been so o
verpowering.

  The terrible vitality of the snake was even now chilling to witness. Chopped and maimed, turned inside out by the Rgnadon’s teeth and webbed feet, still the lambent eye flickered and the muscles of her invincible body twitched.

  Could she still be alive? Dereas’s mind balked at the concept.

  From aloft the lizard king gave a sudden shriek, “Get them, you fools!” He thrust his staff at his dawdling, sloe-eyed subjects who had stood mesmerized, moon-faced throughout the battle lust. His sceptre rapped hysterically on the Rgnadon’s skull and lanced in the direction of the two, blood-stained warriors who stood bare of arms and gaping with mirthless fatality at the miniature authority who had been the force behind a long series of horrors.

  The lizard king rasped with triumphant awe. “Dawcocks! Did we creep blindly through the murk to avoid the snake and the crab and other dire enemies to stand here like zombies? Attack!”

  But the throng shifted restlessly from foot to foot, staring at each other, an indecisive rustle rising in their ranks.

  “Fools!” raved the king. “Did we let the serpent guide us to these rude, backward cretins, so you could cringe and mewl? Stand up! Do not gad about! Capture the offenders. Or I will loose our god amongst you.” And with a low murmur he goaded the Rgnadon to motion and a shrill cry rose over the stunned gathering. “Defy me, if you dare!”

  Dereas and Rusfaer grimaced with contempt and shifted defensively behind the larger, bull statue. The lizard king spumed froth. He spurred his heels into the back of his reptilian charger, prompting the Rgnadon to jerk forward and peel back its fleshy jowl and send a terrible roar to the roof that rocked the cavern.

  But the throng shrank back, stunned in the jumble of terrible carnage, so great was their fear of the twitching snake that still knotted in unnatural agony. Some semblance of grisly vitality still showed in that glistening mass of loops. The ghost-gremlin light that glared in the dead eye was a nightmare that would haunt the lizards’ souls and be a reminder to all of what had tainted their realm for so long, but yet still smouldered, bright and alive.

  “Cowards! I will have you flayed! Get them!” The lizard king’s raving voice rose in a lunatic howl. “The Time of the Lizard is now! Now, I say!”

  Resolve sprang into the limbs of the lizard people. In a teeming rush they charged the companions, hefting glinting curved blades and sling-darts and screaming as one mad mob.

  “Gnador, Gnador!” The mob chanted, a rising, lurid echo which built in volume, becoming a dim thrum of chaos. It reached a crescendo that shook the cavern as much as the Rgnadon’s baleful roar, and they acted as one again.

  Dereas and Rusfaer snapped out of their dumbstruck trance, considered their few options.

  The Rgnadon sprang forward on a signal from the lizard king, head-butting the big bull statue sideways behind which the companions had ducked. The horned statue fell, split in twain, a few yards from their stubborn crouch. The Rgnadon violently swept the pieces into the pool with its forefeet.

  Without protection, the three slunk back in terror. Dereas and Rusfaer held their swords, prepared to fight and die, taking many goodly numbers of the lizard king’s minions with them. But now a blur of motion and an enemy lizard’s excited cry gave the mob pause. The gleaming egg that Greta had laid started to shake.

  Others halted, bobbed and swayed in superstitious awe as if the birthing of a lizard on a battlefield were an omen. A tiny claw punched its way through the glistening top, while a section of the cap flipped off and sent a wet liquid and a slick snout poking through. The hole grew, admitting a glistening neck and a set of bright round, blinking eyes.

  A hushed murmur rumbled from the gathering. Dereas and Rusfaer stared with wonder. How could any creature survive such a compromised birth?

  The egg cracked, and a slick wet thing, some new being of nightmare, rolled out on the stone beside the pool, wearing its birthing liquids still.

  A being like no other! On superficial examination, the newborn was similar to the other lizards, more white-skinned than greenish-black, a premature entity, cursed with a lizardish head and a man-shaped body and man-limbs, except for lizard-clawed feet and deformed forefeet.

  With ghastly repugnance, Dereas saw that the body of the mother lizard had protected what was once Amexi from the acid of the snake’s digestive tract.

  Several of the lizards scampered out to collect the newly-birthed citizen. As bewildered as he was, the lizard that was Amexi, twitched and crawled in his own slime, and allowed them to herd him back to their huddled throng—a place of comfort and safety, not understanding that the blood and twisted body parts lolling gruesomely around this beastly place of horror, had been his place of entry into the world. His childlike expression eclipsed Draba’s in the seconds of rebirth and the rank setting shattered all illusion of a gentle, halcyon world.

  A growl of anguish burst from Dereas’s throat. Both he and Rusfaer nursed emotions of unfathomable disgust and loathing at the grisly birthing. Dereas felt cheated of justice, being witness to their warrior-comrade taken in by that lizard horde and nursemaided beneath slimy feet. His heart fell when the lizard’s pale misty-grey eyes scanned briefly at their trio and registered no familiarity at all. He struggled forth, cursing and calling on Balael, arching blade, ready to lay sword to end that mutant life, but had no chance. In the teeming wall of gnashing foes that confronted him, the lizards left no crack or file wide enough for him to plunge through. Thin bolts of sharp iron flew wide in close quarters. Dereas dodged the missiles. In a throat-choked frenzy, he slashed hard at the wall of long-snouted, knob-kneed lizards that pushed him back. Dozens died under his scythe-like strokes; others rained tulwars on his mail. His blade bit hard into helm and skull, others went shrieking sideways, crashing to their knees, faces crimson mashes of teeth and brains.

  But that was as far as Dereas got.

  Sparked by the birth of a new citizen, the lizard king took matters in his own hands and spurred the Rgnadon on, surging through the teeming throng, trampling some of his own subjects.

  “Gnador, Gnador!” The crowd parted and started up the chant again until it grew to a hysterical fervour. So was birthed in the perverse chaos a man-lizard, seeded from Amexi and a squirming newt—as a man more than lizard.

  With ever more revulsion, Dereas and Rusfaer fought and slashed and hewed while their flesh crawled.

  The two crabbed back, letting blind instinct and whistling swords protect their flanks, their brains blocking out the sight they had just witnessed. Now the Rgnadon’s evil attention turned on them in force, with red eyes blinking with wrath. The grunting hordes darted between its legs, bobbing and pressing forward in numbers with insidious zeal.

  The lizard king rode his steed with a joy approaching rapture. He stood tall in his saddle, gloating with delight. “Disbelievers! Since you will not join us, prepare to die! The Time of the Lizard is now!”

  Before the Rgnadon could smite them, Dereas and Rusfaer rolled back closer to the pool, dodging missiles aimed for their vitals. The rush of cascading water rang loud in their ears only feet away. Pushed desperately toward the icy water, they glimpsed a towering mass of foam that dropped on high, where the raging stream rushed out of the mouth of the mountain in between the twin horns. The daylight streamed in, stinging their eyes.

  A giant mouth snapped down at them.

  They ducked. The grisly incisors flew wide and while Dereas and Rusfaer beat back the attackers, Fezoul, shaken by the rebirth, eyes staring wildly, leaped amongst the throng in a savage blur, hacking at lizards left, right and centre, his compact blade gleaming and rising and falling. Up and down it plunged, a tiny whirling flame, while Rusfaer joined in, making mockery of the snarling, shambling shapes which threw up scaly limbs in defence and fell in twitching heaps, having underestimated the timid king and his ruthless, sword-slashing companions.

  Dereas marvelled. It was almost as if something had snapped inside Fezoul, having faced his worst fear in
the coils of Pygra’s wrath. Now he was a seething foe, all the timidity burnt out of him.

  Rusfaer and Dereas laughed in maniacal unison; they tore a red path through that motley mix of lizards, shredding reptilian hide with zeal, sending shrieking lizards and their captains lolling headless to their knees or in bloody ruins into the pool, swept away in the icy waters.

  The brothers’ mail was shredded, their swords notched, and bodies dressed in red and awful cuts. But their faces shone alight in the afterglow of slaughter and mayhem.

  The numbers were too great and they were being pushed back in a crushing wall of lizard hide. The blades felt heavy in their hands. They stumbled back against the last standing statues and the lapping edge of the pool. They crouched and darts thumped against the stone. The lizard king made a dramatic motion; the Rgnadon bulled its way forth, cued by its rider’s imperial sweep of arm. It roared and crushed a dozen lizards in its wake. Its great mottled head swung low.

  Dereas held his ground. He slashed mighty strokes across the beast’s raging snout, slitting a dripping nostril as he had Pygra’s tongue. With the Rgnadon’s mighty roar in their ears, they scrambled into the shadow of protection of the sinister serpent statue whose feet touched the pool’s edge. Darts ripped into the stony coils inches from where they had last been. It was a hop and skip from doom.

  The creature violently ripped the hated effigy from its stony roots, and hurled it end over end to land splashing into the pool. It then came lunging at them for the kill, its nauseous snout a rank, bloody battering ram, snuffling, snorting, blowing hot air and rancid breath into their faces while the lizard king rocked like a grinning cherub in his saddle, screeching and hollering at the top of his lungs till he was pink in the face. The cat and mouse game was over. While lizard blades wheeled and foes circled from all directions, Rusfaer, in a growl of hatred and dismay, pushed the two of them roughly into the water as he jumped himself, before the Rgnadon’s feet could stomp them to pulp.