Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Page 33

  Backwards they fell into the icy waters, rolling swiftly, passing under the massive stone toad’s squatting underbelly and out into the open air. Dereas felt ice chunks rake his numbed body. The water was so cold—colder than hell’s winter—and it sent burning shivers up his spine. His head broke the surface, the first hint of exposure taking its toll, and he gasped, shivering, and was swept over the edge...

  Eyes swimming with stars, Dereas felt a certain weightlessness, a tumbling, dreamland rush. Natural forces gripped him, in a free fall of spinning horror and nightmare. Faster and faster his body spun, with the roar of falling water in his ears, while white foam and spume sprayed everywhere. His descent was broken by snatches of blue sky, as azure as the day it was ever breathed into being by whatever dream god was responsible for the whole of existence. The desert plains lay choked with an unwholesome brown, and boulders reeled and rocks thrust cliffborn. The sky was one minute his horizon, the next, a raging wash of crushing liquid. Then, the foaming water was spent, and he tumbled into a maelstrom.

  Splash! Down into a murk-haunted, greenish pool. In water cold as ice. Dereas’s lungs cried for air, his muscles screamed. But all three rebels tumbled like rocks, rolling in greenish-white froth. Over the rim of the world they peered, down another cascade and a rolling spray, at least eighty feet down...

  Dereas and Rusfaer’s shredded mail was light enough to keep them from getting hopelessly dragged under the roiling spray; luckily, the current swept them to shallower water and closer to a bank where they could wallow without drowning.

  They looked to the cliff above, in between the rough rises and dunks through the spume of the cataract, and Dereas thought to see a slick, scaled head of a beast peering down malevolently over them between the two fangs of rock where the waterfall cleaved. The ogreish face glistened in the saffron light more than a hundred feet above and the creature was terrible and gleaming to behold in its hour of glory and victory. It was mightily flanked by gargantuan statues carved in the cliff itself: one, a raging serpent, grim twined about an ornate throne, the other a hideous lizard rearing on its hind legs and roaring at the sky. Dereas recalled these statues while clutched in the talons of the Eakors, though now he could see both statues faced each other as timeless, eternal enemies. The twain flanked the place where the water fell and where the Rgnadon stood with the lizard king and his staring hordes.

  Sputtering and choking, Dereas paddled toward shore, wading through lizard corpses that had fallen with their heads split or throats cut.

  Shaking a quaking fist upward, he lolled finally chest deep in a tranquil lee of the pool. “Behold,” he croaked, “the end of your kingdom, you fiend.” His mind surged with the pleasant reassurance that the mother lizard had finally died in the belly of Pygra and could birth no more vile eggs.

  But this bitter summation was not entirely accurate.

  There would be other queens to crown.

  And still the Rgnadon lived...

  The creature ducked its stone-battered hide back into that black-mouthed gap and bashed about, smashing its armoured snout repeatedly against the cavern walls.

  Dereas stared in dull wonder. What could it possibly be doing? He shuddered as a section of rock face slid free and a massive rib of the mountain collapsed in a crumbling heap—capsizing the great leering serpent statue to the left, sending it and whole scree-sloped arms of the mountain crashing down the cliffside. Trees and bushes crushed like wheat, and a rubble-strewn path cleared a way for the lumbering beast and its chattering horde to scramble down the cliff.

  No, it was not possible! Dereas crowed madly. He shook the fog out of his brain and grunted with torment, as he struggled still for shore, but his frozen limbs hardly obeyed him. The gargantuan lizard did not go away, nor did the chanting, gnashing horde that came streaming out of the gap, down the steep ramp of fallen rock and shattered trees that marked the place very close to their own forlorn landing.

  The water slowed in a series of foaming eddies, and lungs bursting for air and limbs numbed to the bone, Dereas lifted his aching arms in an attempt to dog paddle near to Rusfaer and the mountain king whom he saw floated spent, also catching their breath, wallowing near the shore. Almost half drowned, the fugitives clawed their way to shore and lay in ravaged, pallid heaps, trying to slap the warmth back into their ice-numbed bodies.

  The time was midday. A pale light streamed down from the sky and stung their eyes. No broken bones reigned amongst the company. Large shapes hovered in the air, Eakors, roving in dark circles amongst the sheer flanks of the impassive mountain. Not far enough away for Dereas’s comfort.

  Black Balael! Could the day turn any worse?

  Dereas swept his blinking eyes amongst the low sagging palms clinging to the ragged slope and scoured the irregular shores of the pools that bulged outward from the main rush of water. The rough tumble continued zigzagging down the mountain side, in a distant white froth that hugged the avalanche-wracked landscape and the boulders and blasted flints that trailed like shattered bones down the slope, before it met the hard-baked desert plains far, far down at the mountain’s foot.

  There was no sign of Jhidik in those bleak vistas and Dereas’s heart lurched with a sudden strange, panged distress.

  Maybe the blood-spattered warrior had been swept farther downstream? Perhaps he lived still?

  The hope seemed dim, judging from the rough cascades tumbling down the white surge and the hostility of the terrain blossoming up like fungal growth. Either his friend had drowned or been torn away by the mighty stream—or, as he thought grimly now, hauled away by the unspeakable Eakors hovering greedily amongst the cloud-cloaked cliffs.

  The idea was hideous, and Dereas directed his morose thoughts to other possibilities.

  Rusfaer stumbled to his side, leaning rough hand unsteadily on his shoulder. “If he is dead, then I’m sorry for him. He was a valiant warrior. I regret not complimenting his courage while I had the chance.” He had divined his brother’s thoughts and Dereas was appreciative of the acknowledgement. Genuine remorse shone in Rusfaer’s expression and Dereas felt a quiver of comradeship upon realizing how far his brother had progressed since that grim skirmish before entering Vharad.

  “Perhaps he lives still,” muttered Dereas defiantly. “He could still be hiding in the brush somewhere.”

  Rusfaer shook his head. “The Pirean would have called out. If he was alive and near here, he would have.”

  Dereas choked on the fact and the truth of it. He hung his head in limp, silent resignation.

  Biting back his sorrow, he turned away and Fezoul likewise dipped his head in mumbling tribute to Jhidik who had fought many battles bravely throughout the trials in the haunted mountain and had saved all their skins many a time over.

  Dereas accepted these disclosures with lips furled. He moved grudgingly away, treading a path through the low prickly cactus and weedy vegetation that followed the pebbly shore of the stream. He hoped there was something they had missed...

  A scrap of Jhidik’s blooded cloak they found in the mud and sand washed up on shore farther down. One of the short blades that comprised the splint Dereas had fabricated for him lay glinting dully in the pale sunshine not a few yards away. What did this imply? That his weapon was not abandoned here too, could mean many things. Dereas ran his eyes savagely about the terrain, but in the dark shapes in the sky he saw the only truth.

  The mountain king moved a step closer. “Recall, your friend was stung with the mark of the serpent.” He narrowed his eyes in cryptic anguish. “The serpent always demands a sacrifice—like it or not.”

  Dereas rounded on him in angry denial. “What do you mean, ‘mark of the serpent’?” But Fezoul withdrew, shrinking under Dereas’s gaze. As conveyed by all Fezoul’s prophetic words, the ‘mark’ was hint of the blood prices to be paid. When Jhidik had willingly thrust his hand in the stone serpent’s mouth, he had struck a bargain with the dark gods of Vharad themselves, and it did not bode well for him.


  At that moment, a raucous sound drifted from above and forced them scrambling back into the shelter of a patch of withered bushes, pre-empting any more search for Jhidik.

  They sought shelter on stumbling feet, or any means of escape from the swarm of lizards that were scudding down the slope. They hunched, bent-kneed amongst the tall, willowy weeds and the blasted boulders and flints. The purl of distant waterfall rushed to their ears—it rose above the sigh of the wind and the croaking of scavenging Eakors. With a sad acknowledgement they stared forlornly at the dominant cliff, gripped with the sudden awareness that their weapons were useless—swords had tumbled free of scabbards in the roil of water and only their dirks strapped tightly at their hips remained.

  Jhidik would have to wait for another day, Dereas sighed, if Balael wished it.

  He frowned, assessed his wounds. Blood seeped from a mess of gashes on his breast, shoulder, arms and legs. Rusfaer was bleeding from a score of old and fresh wounds. The mountain king remained remarkably unscathed, escaping any serious injury, only minor cuts, and luckily, no wrenched joints.

  Dereas’s mind wandered upon a phrase he had read in a distant place, a recollection of a childish fable of the past: “And terrible beasts shall wander the world.”

  A queer tingle shuddered up his spine. An old memory jogged in his head, a series of surreal but vivid images. He remembered now of old, while wandering lost in the shalelands of Zim—in an ancient land full of dark secrets and ruined edifices of an elder age, that he had stumbled on one of those cursed temples of Amar-Amon-Reth, the Telamon King, where thousands were butchered in dark sacrifices to nameless gods. It was a place of earth, stone, filth and fire. He had blanched, swallowing hard, blinking back the curse of ages seen in those carven glyphs in a tumble of fallen masonry. They were sculpted on a toppled entablature, a ghoulish script of soul-disturbing warning—Of terrible beasts, clawing their way down from the top of mountain, to rule Darfala...

  A gurgle escaped Dereas’s throat and at the same time, the naked truth lay bared...as the roar of a feverish beast interrupted his ghastly reverie.

  He shook his head, gripped his lizard dirk in torment. What had he loosed? Would he be remembered as the black pariah who had helped slay the ‘great worm-serpent’, only to release the ultimate scourge that broke Darfala? No, it couldn’t be, not his legacy!

  And yet, the terrible hints were in plain sight. He could no more stop the hands of fate and the lizardish march as fly to Zim’s bloody, sacrificial-soaked altars on a winged stallion.

  Fezoul’s voice, whether from delirium or prophetic insight, came as a sibilant murmur. He whispered, “One day the lizards will come forth and overrun the world. When that day comes, the creatures of Drafala and her innocent peoples should fear—aye, fear, beastslayer—fear for their souls...” And with that prediction, he closed his eyes and fell in a swoon.

  Rusfaer recoiled and crossed himself in the old tradition of the Huughite warrior warding off a curse. Dereas accepted the king’s bleak finality. Some part of his primitive spirit knew that the gods had spoken through this mountain king, that a spoke had broken in the wheel of fate and that time had shifted.

  With the destruction of Pygra, the yoke on the depraved lizards had been lifted and now there was nothing to stop them from their lusty assault abroad.

  Ever were the lizard king’s cries a darkling imprint on the natural environment and tree, leaf and rock cringed at the jubilant shouts that polluted the ravine. The lizard man’s direful commands rose on the eastern wind, soaring like the mock cries of hellion gulls over the sea.

  “Now onward to Tuyokton!” his shrieking wails caromed. “I rally you forth on a mission of the Rgnadon!” Rising in his seat, he launched his subjects on his twisted, perverse crusade.

  Rank upon rank of the fiends marched down from that dark slab of the mountain, threading their way like black-green flies.

  The throng switched-backed down the precarious defile flanking the waterfall, like teams of ants—hordes of them, great green-black gleaming things, jabbering in filthy tongues, with a hive-mind mentality, lapping at the heels of their mad leader on the back of the Rgnadon. The creature swung its plated bulk like that of an ancient ogre, its head swinging back and forth like a lumbering belamyl, a rambling beast on the prowl for dominion.

  Crashing through the dwarfed, shredded trees, it snapped boughs and trunks like twigs; it kicked and batted boulders with its immense snout, making waste of the landscape and anything in its path. So the beast advanced, and the lizard king slapped his knees and bobbed like a pompous, yellow-eyed peacock.

  The mad king thrust out his sceptre and called out in a belligerent voice. “If you can hear me, unbelievers, then be dismayed! You must know by now this age of yours has come to an end! You rabble skulk close in the brush somewhere. I can smell you, like a batch of cock beetles and dung mites!”

  And the king’s throng’s chants rose in a gusty crescendo of reptilian fervour.

  “We will carve out an empire!” the monarch gusted and his screech rose over the roar of the falls and his voice seemed to gather weight in the tide of his maniacal crusade. His followers’ screeches echoed dimly down the side of Vharad. “Perhaps it is providence that you prematurely hatched my pet, the Rgnadon!” he called out fiercely. “Come out, come out, wherever you are, skulking dogs!—become one with the Lizard! I can make you great yet! You cannot persist in these parched wastes. Become a lizard, while you can!” And down into the ravine his saurian beast sauntered, crunching great strides through the broad-leaved trees and rocks and prickly brush, until there was a long line of lizards flooding in his wake, tramping the wild goat paths and the hidden landings not far from where Dereas and his weary gang huddled in strange, shivering defeat.

  “I would have waited another hundred years in my caution!” he boomed, chuckling in his jaunty humour. “The time is on us now. The Time of the Lizard!”

  And they were a thousand strong, that frenzied host. For as far as the eye could see, lizards shambled out of the blasted cliff and came padding with their instruments of war to smash Tuyokton, and other cities, Dereas guessed. A march to the plains, ready to take on mighty kingdoms—even Yismin, the olive-river kingdom of the far south, with bone tulwars in their hands, like a skeleton brood of renegade mercenaries from a dark distant land of nightmare.

  The Eakors, circling in expectant hordes, caught sight of the lizard vanguard and flew down in savage, hungry knots in a flurry of anticipation. They picked off marchers one by one, pulling them into the air like green locusts, and tore green limbs from their sockets or carved grisly hunks from their backs or scaled limbs.

  Undaunted, the lizards bore baskets of darts with them, weapons formed of Tyrannus bones. These darts they had amassed, the same Dereas had caught glimpses of earlier.

  The lizards fitted them to their slingshots and trained them up at the diving birds and shot them out of the sky.

  The Rgnadon whipped back his wattled neck and snapped low-fliers out of the air, cleaving their skulls whole and spitting out the bones in clumps of filth into the bushes.

  Dereas grit his teeth. He had hoped the Eakors would win this fight against the lizards that advanced on Tuyokton, that ancient city whose king had precipitated the mountain people’s exile centuries ago.

  The first ranks of the lizard army had come level with the companions’ position at two-hundred yards, where they stared from behind a knot of fallen boulders and gillborse bushes. Dereas tore off a segment of his ragged cloak to wrap a gaping wound on his left shin. He loped away, crouching for cover, and urged the wheezing mountain king to keep up with his hobbling trot. Rusfaer, wax faced, still in shock from narrowly escaping the snake’s coils, followed on Dereas’s heels. The trio left the chanting hordes behind to pick their way through scree and boulders and bushes like scavengers themselves, while the fervid lizards pushed onwards down, ever down toward the plains where they might fulfil their accursed mission.
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  The ragged fugitives did not crane their necks over their shoulders or pause to watch that marching horde any further. They slunk away from that vulnerable position and blended into the foliage, sliding on a zigzagging path down through patches of wild scree, using all the protection of low-lying bushes and stranglewood hedges. To be spotted by Xabren and his throng at this time would be a grievous error. Down in the boulder-choked ravines and clumps of forked cacti, streams of lizards had poured from some hidden exit near the base of the mountain, wheeling and manoeuvering rams and catapults. Thousands strong, they advanced, raising weapons in one wild rush in salute for their king whose very appearance proved he had emerged victorious over the snake.

  Dereas did not know what to think of this new development. Numbed and shaken, he led Fezoul and Rusfaer away from that grim place. Shelter they found at last near a small brook overlooking a grove of palm trees, fed from the falls they had left behind.

  The smack of webbed feet and the roar of beast and birds and lunatic king faded in the whine of the wind and Rusfaer, after drinking his fill of water, fell into a dazed heap in the downy weeds by the creek.

  Dereas watched his brother, all muscled, sweat-soaked, mail-torn iron mass of him. Rusfaer slid painfully on his side, groaning, and slept the dream of exhaustion. From time to time the corners of his lips would twitch or he would roll over on his weedy pallet, snatch at his blood-tatted beard and call out in his sleep. Dereas did not relish this aimless flight of his brother’s slumber. Who knew what roving horrors flitted back and forth in his brother’s mind’s eye under the dark veil of Vharad?

  Dereas, too, sagged to a supine heap beside his brother, envying the rising and falling of his soft breathing, still stunned by the combined lizard advance and the king’s ambition. He curled his knees up and took long draughts of air himself, let his eyes flutter, and the ache of endless anguish to wash away from his wracked limbs. He clutched at his beard and heard the silken words of the mountain king in his ear after a time: