Beastslayer : Rise of the Rgnadon Read online

  “Gladly,” obliged Fezoul, who had not eaten for decades.

  The king skipped over to a crack in the facade and pulled a handful of the tough, black weed from the stone and stuffed it in his mouth like an antelope chewing its cud.

  The others blinked in wonder. The king ate noisily, greedily, with a hint of green stuff sticking between his teeth.

  “Wash it down with this water,” suggested Rusfaer laconically.

  “A fine idea,” acceded Fezoul. He took Rusfaer’s bowl and added a dash of the bitter leaf, remarking on the health qualities of the Arozoi plant. “It has been an age since I have eaten anything—ironically, longer than you, bully—despite your obvious gaunter appearance.”

  “Spare us the commentary,” growled Rusfaer.

  Draba complained, “Why waste time on this garrulous dwarf? I say put a shaft through his gullet and be done with it.”

  “Like you would have me?” sneered Jhidik. His curved blade arched suddenly toward the rascal.

  Draba ignored the jibe and the proximity of Jhidik’s blade. He sank into a petulant silence.

  With grudging obeisance, Amexi and Hafta followed the king’s lead, ripping off bunches of the coarse weed to bite off tiny nips and gulps.

  “Well, it isn’t so bad,” announced Amexi after a time. “A roast hare would be better. Though I don’t suppose we have any of that, do we Jhidik, old man? No cause to complain after surviving those bloodsucking Eakors.”

  Jhidik gave an absent nod. He seemed self-absorbed, probably fighting the pain in his throbbing thigh.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a hank of beef right now,” mused Hafta. He fanned out his hands behind his head and slumped down against the high wall. The sacrilege to the sacred glyphs and carvings meant nothing to him as he took momentary respite.

  Draba refused to engage in any group activities. He had grown fractious and quiet, still nursing his grudge against Dereas. With a pushed out jaw and a wounded pride, he sat apart from the others, a sentiment for which the beastslayer held no sympathy.

  Rusfaer and the others ate plenty of the black, spongy leaves and Dereas moulded a poultice of it to slap on Jhidik’s wound. “Let’s gather clumps of it for later reserve.”

  “’Tis not a bad idea,” Rusfaer admitted grudgingly.

  The mountain king suggested that they climb to the upper levels of the kingdom to explore the gallery after their meal. “I can give you a guided tour of our most hallowed halls and snatches of our culture! Though it may be but a meagre glimpse of our former glory.”

  Rusfaer shook his head. “Time’s precious, mountain man. We wish to quit this dark slagheap.” He peered around distrustfully. “Curse this greenish glow anyway! In truth, my head still spins with its eerie taint. My stomach roils.”

  Fezoul clicked his tongue in reprove. “The path you speak of is this way, warrior. Let us go! There is no harm in visiting a few gilded halls and porticos on the way.”

  Rusfaer motioned with his sword, chewing loudly. “Lead us on, king, but no tricks,” he warned.

  With reluctance, the group gathered their light-bearing bowls and made their way to the end of the hall; Dereas hung back, stealing many a backward glance at the sacrificial chamber and the carven snake that had so intimately wound about Fezoul not too long ago.

  They climbed the ancient, drunkenly-leaning steps, one by one, gazing in mutual wonder at the rich collection of carven idols, snakes and reptiles of all designs chiselled to either side, only to break out at the top of the landing under the dome of another great cavern hewn by timeless hands. They traversed broken halls and galleries with cracked pillars, and saw indeed that such spaces guarded an air of ancient moulder and decay.

  The galleries gave way to low, squat temples whose columns hung with tongue-flickering serpents or whose architraves were twined sinisterly with more of the same, looped about a carven figure or a hideous bird or some other monstrous thing. Adjoining courtyards and what looked work areas dedicated to stone chipping and sculpture loomed rich with shadows and lonely grandeur. Here in these estranged open spaces, chipped fountains bubbled more of the magical water while toppled urns spilled forth crudely-hammered coins and ornaments. Statues of carven sandstone and alabaster loomed with faces of birds and bodies of snakes and other combinations: these were only a few of the splendours of those halls of Fezoul’s people. Here, an arcade of paved blocks with jewelled chests and arched columns, there carven stairs leading to stone landings above, rich with gold-twined candelabra and paintings of exotic fish, sea scenes, and memories of distant lands, presumably the one these people had all come from. There, side-by-side, lay repositories brimming with treasures, shell coins and heirlooms spilling onto the polished, limed stone, whose paves were now webbed with cracks and rank with the strange leafy outgrowth as below.

  Draba and Hafta greedily scooped up the coins they saw, but Rusfaer barked at them. “Leave them alone. They are worthless gewgaws. Made of only cheap stone and shell. Can’t you see? Not even metal. They will only weigh us down.”

  Grudgingly, the ruffians let the coins clatter to the paves.

  A glow suffused the upper air where the water trickled, pale yellow and amber, augmented by the steady light from their bowls. A magical luminescence caught the water; it infected their mood, and spurred Fezoul’s mood to quixotry. He whistled and skipped down the cracked paves like a child, unfazed by the attempted thievery of his coins. Those arching tunnels that they followed in a haze of aimless wonder were perhaps the same that graced Fezoul’s people in days of yore when times were halcyon.

  Nostalgia and remorse coursed interchangeably in the mountain king. He cried out gaily: “The Vitrin stream has not lost its allure, or charm! Watch and experience marvel.” He sighed in an effort to absorb the jewels of his memory with an air of pride and regret.

  “How close are we to the other side of the mountain?” demanded Dereas.

  “Not far.”

  He studied the dwarf with care. Even his easy garrulity and jovial expansiveness could not hide the ripe tension writ on his face, nor the snatching of many furtive glances into the shadowy corners of the halls and alcoves. Dereas wondered how the dwarf had suddenly chanced to waken at that precise moment after so many years. It seemed odd. Searching his memory, he could only guess that it must have had something to do with his scraping the blade across the statue’s smooth features, that somehow the action had unbound the spell. He watched the dwarf scratch his pudgy cheek and chin and it prompted Dereas to wonder what other secrets the monarch had not told them.

  Onward they trudged through the ruined city, feeling its forsaken ambience seep into their bones, despite the comfort of sustenance and liquid in their bellies. How much time passed they did not know, only that the king led them on, and his gait was a skipping half caper ahead of them.

  The cavernous halls held the look of deserted terraces to Dereas, lonely with only the eerie purl of the water, dribbling down the sculpted walls. Such seeps issued from the highest extents, the snow peaks, the mountain king had told them. Dust motes clung in the air, stirred by the wake of their passing, and now a cold draught, a breath of the underworld, seemed to seep from the very cracks dipping deep in the earth. There was a cold dreariness about this abandoned place which clutched at their marrow, a cold of antiquity that caressed Dereas’s skin with a carrion claw. It made him shiver and finger the scars of old cuts on his limbs and brow and he thought of the memory of dark things that still crept within the earth. What Dereas did not know was the scope of this menace Pygra, which had fascinated and terrorized the capricious king. He just wanted out of this wretched place. As did everybody.

  He gestured with his spear. “When we reach the other side, will you come with us, mountain king?”

  The dwarf’s eyes misted and his dreamy expression grew uncannily distant. “I am bound to Yarim-Id,” he confessed at last. “I cannot leave the mountain. So the witcher decreed. Her hundred-year-old spell bound me to that.
As long as Pygra lives, I must abide here—I, a stone man, wrapped in the thrall of Pygra’s stony coils, a servant of the beast.”

  Rusfaer glared; he gusted air from his nose. “Your snake is dead. Never fear, dwarf,” he promised with a guffaw. “We will get you out and prove it to you.”

  Dereas persisted, “But you can guide us out?”

  The mountain king stared for a long time, then gave a brief inclination of head; though his vacant, puzzled expression troubled the beastslayer. “I am thankful to be alive,” he murmured at last, as he made a silent prayer to the unseen gods that lurked in these subterranean halls.

  4: Haunter of the deeps

  There are places of the earth that people were not meant to tread...

  —Huughite proverb

  The wanderers left the crumbling galleries and once-ornate arched colonnades behind. At last the mountain king took them to a wide staircase crooking down to a tunnel similar to one they had quit not long ago. The passage loomed blackly before them, draped in damp streaks, bringing little cheer. Fezoul guided them warily, for his face was drawn and the dim passage surely evoked old, disquieting memories in him. He cupped his light-giving bowl of Vitrin tighter in his trembling hand. A small seep of luminous water trickled underfoot, though thankfully they guarded their bowls.

  The narrow tunnel curved, ever danker and more depressing than the forsaken kingdom they had left behind. Snakes, beasts and other disturbing carvings jutted out in stark relief from the walls. Such images prompted the wanderers to gaze anxiously at the many side ways that seemed to branch out in all directions at once.

  “I don’t like the look of these passages,” remarked Jhidik.

  Fezoul tossed the Pirean a conciliatory glance, though Jhidik seemed little mollified by that and the king’s nervous accompanying laugh.

  A particularly wide passageway which Dereas could not be sure was a continuation or offshoot of the main tunnel, had him licking his lips in suspicion, for he thought he heard a strange rattle of pebbles echoing from far down the passage—also a hiss of disturbing intensity that gave way to an unwholesome slithering. When he stopped in his tracks, the sound disappeared. Fezoul jerked at the noise, as if a ghost from the past had caught up with him. Only the faraway plink of drops disturbed the thick silence. Fezoul gulped heavily at the air and pulling at Dereas’s mailshirt, looked back longingly the way they had come.

  Dereas resented the dwarf’s timidity and Rusfaer vented his own disgust at the king’s cowering conduct. Hafta continued to glare distrustfully into the gloom of a side tunnel. After a time, with only the tinkle of the stream, Rusfaer gave a surly grunt. “Just a bunch of rats, I gather.” He gripped his sword, waved it at the king. “How did your people come to live in these wretched tunnels anyway?”

  Fezoul sighed. “’Tis a long tale. Do you have the time?”

  “What else do we have?” Rusfaer stared sullenly at Hafta. It seemed the mysterious visitor had departed, yet the grimy-haired warrior continued to jerk his head sideways at every cross tunnel they passed.

  The mountain king blinked nervously in the dimness. Gazing at Rusfaer, he seemed to take his cynical leer as a sign of invitation. “Our ancestors from the southern marches fled to Vharad to escape the persecutions of king Yutomay.”

  “Yutomay? Never heard of him.”

  “He was king of the desert realms of Yismin fifty leagues south as the condor flies—a simple-minded soul who had set his deranged magicians and spellcasters on us—ever since our statesmen tricked him into signing over the fertile lands bordering our territories.”

  Rusfaer gave a sneer of contempt. “Now you’re a dead race, persecuted by a disgruntled king many years in the grave. What’s that say about you, having fled from your enemies to these rat holes?”

  Fezoul’s twitching fingers reached to clasp his amulet. “And what are you doing here, but fleeing?”

  “I ‘flee’ from no human enemy or mortal man. Freaks and bloodthirsty devil birds, maybe.”

  Dereas interrupted. “What of your homeland then?”

  Fezoul gave a wistful sigh. “Ours was a land rich with olive groves—vineyards, date palm trees too and comely women. A veritable oasis in the midst of the hot baking desert. It was a land where pyramids reared, built to honour the living—not the dead like those of Phygus—or distant Lunra, with her timeless spires adorning the palaces like the jewelled citadels of lost Cyamar. Yet a land much a mother lode in phosphoron, the rare magic light-giving metal that crumbles to a powder which we took to seed Vharad’s streams. This is what gives the waters their glow. Yutomay’s magicians could not penetrate the rock of Vharad, nor its eternal solitude, or its eerie mystery. The dripping dampness and its dark secrets thwarted them.”

  “What of the Eakors?” asked Jhidik cynically. “How did you win past them?”

  “Even then, the Eakors were a menace, haunting the cliffs of the mountain. Did you see them? Yes! They came from a diseased breed of condors that searched for prey in the dark ways under the mountain. They in-bred with the beasts that lived in the purple gloom, creatures under the mountain that became the hybrids they are now—” His voice sank into a solemn whisper.

  Dereas recalled the bat-faced slavering countenances of the weaselly-avians and shivered. “So what happened to your people?”

  “Most of them were taken to the bowels of the earth by snakes or other terrible beasts. Our first witcher,” Fezoul recalled, his voice a dreamy and distant murmur, “had a vision while under the influence of Ayoma, a narcotic stalk that grows in the damp cracks of the deepest tunnels. She translated a tablet that detailed the history of Vharad. It told of a realm populated by giant reptiles! They dwelt here of old—Mazoma, the ruler—half serpent and half crab, having the agility of a salamander and the cunning of a scorpion. The creature reputedly roamed the dark and was said to have ancient powers. It dug the main, oldest tunnel with claws, pincers and teeth. We hollowed out the passageways naturally over the years with our primitive tools, our axes and hammers and wedges, to construct the bestial temples. Temples in the form of Mazoma and the elder reptiles, which included Pygra, Mazoma’s successor. Our race became a shorter breed, akin to the dwarfs as you saw earlier carved in the entablature of the temples and facade, and what you see of me.”

  “Mazoma?” Rusfaer uttered mockingly, “another of these mythologies of yours? Like Pygra?”

  Fezoul’s lips pursed into a thin frown. “Be careful of what you speak,” he warned. “Pygra is real, and the gods don’t appreciate your blasphemy.”

  “Blasphemy?” Rusfaer barked. “Against a beast that reputedly swallows humans? And what do you call your human sacrifice? Soul healing? Don’t try to sell me with your hypocritical dogma, you rotten pygmy. We haven’t seen any of your snakes yet either—only heard strange sounds, possibly bats or the odd pokey little rodent. The only bones and skulls we’ve seen are lifetimes dead, if not centuries old... In truth, I think your Pygra is a myth.”

  The mountain king grew crimson in the face. He threw his arms down in vexation.

  Dereas ordered a halt to the pointless debate. Fezoul almost whimpered, “Pygra is not dead! She sleeps only, as I have mentioned before.” Dereas frowned. As of a force of habit, the once king, Fezoul, looked over his shoulder, making the sign of the Seven Crosses, a protection hex—two fingers crossed with eyes closed. He twitched his left ear and faced east. Then he shivered as if a cold waft had drifted up from a cranny to brush the quivering folds of his pallid face.

  Rusfaer, impatient with displays of superstition, prodded the king forward with the point of his sword, his mouth wry and weary.

  The musical echo of running water never ceased. It increased noticeably past a sharp twist in the tunnel. To the keen ear came also a rhythmic scraping of stone on stone, as of some cart wheel trundling on bare rock.

  Dereas’s muscles knotted. The mechanical creaking sounded unfamiliar in this out-of-the-way place. He pulled his blade free of the scabbard and
quickened his pace, long legs carrying him far and fast. In the wider dimness of the tunnel, he stumbled upon a large stone wheel mounted to the wall, tall as a man. The bottom lip was raised three inches off the ground. A complicated series of stone flumes guided the water down to turn the wheel. It was crafted of light, porous stone and was set in slow, creaky motion by a flow of luminous water cascading from the flumes above. Slowly the water caught the cupped grooves on the wheel’s outer edge and set it turning. The curious nature of the device caused Dereas to scowl and rub at his chin. Another mechanism was powered behind it, something which he could see inset into the stone wall.

  His frown deepened. What was it for? Who could have built such a mechanical innovation?

  The king’s eyes lit up when he caught sight of the wheel, his lips curling in a sign of keen recognition.

  “Sunsvaere!” he cried joyously. “How long has it been?—an age since I have seen our hallowed timewheel. How it guides our theosophy! It drives the core of our astrology.”

  “How does it do that?” grunted Jhidik skeptically.

  Fezoul shed light. “It not only tells us the seasons and the time of day but gives us an indication of the fates and workings of the world.” He tapped his nose in a knowledgeable manner. “When one is underground for moons on end, ’tis easy to lose track of time. The sun and moon’s setting, the comings and goings of the stars, all keep us in touch with reality.”

  Dereas turned his eyes back to the queer device. He could see many pulleys, wire cords and gears intermingled above, in and around, working in complicated fashion. For what? To power other accessory metal disks adjacent to the stone wheel? A dial, or some kind of stone claw, was pointed at a marker placed on the nearest section of wall. This was engraved with symbols and numbers which the mountain king explained. “They are control markers and adjustment tuners,” he said with the studied look of a scholar. Now his expression turned to gloomy awe. “Aie! Less time has passed than I had originally guessed. My long slumber has become suddenly shorter...”