The Isle of Torment

by Andrew Hunter

  Tyll squealed in pain as her sister pulled her up as well.

  “They’ve got me!” Tyll cried.

  Tanys laughed when she saw a single red ant, clinging tenaciously to the girl’s bare bottom.

  Berra leaned across and smashed the ant with a stinging slap that left Tyll’s backside bouncing and red from the blow.

  “Thanks,” she growled, giving her sister an angry glare.

  “Anytime,” Berra said.

  “Let’s go,” Tanys sighed, pointing at the crimson carpet of ants that now coated the walls below and had nearly reached them.

  “Jorva know the way,” Jorva said, motioning for them to follow him into a vine-choked tunnel as he held Naietta’s hand.

  They followed him into a dark, drippy tunnel that curved slightly upward until he paused, sniffing at the mossy wall.

  “Nope, find shortcut,” Jorva said. He released Naietta’s hand and then hunched his shoulders before slamming both of his hands, flat-palmed, against the tunnel wall. The ancient stonework trembled and fractured beneath the blow.

  “Jorva, what are you doing?” Tanys demanded, eyeing the roof of the tunnel warily.

  Jorva did not answer but slammed the heels of his palms into the wall again. This time, one of the stones gave way, pushed backward into the wall as its mortar crumbled to dust.

  “Bugs coming!” Tyll said with a worried tone. Her hand went to her injured backside as she looked back toward the wriggling vines at the mouth of the tunnel.

  “Whatever you’re doing, Jorva, hurry up!” Tanys said.

  Jorva grinned as he struck the wall again, and a large portion of it collapsed. Tanys heard a loud splash as the stones fell into the dimly lit chamber beyond.

  “Shortcut!” Jorva beamed, and then he leapt through the hole in the wall. Another, dwarf-sized, splash sounded from beyond.

  Naietta glanced through the hole and leapt after him.

  “Follow them,” Tanys sighed. She stepped to the edge of the hole in the wall and looked through it, seeing a large room beyond filled with large pools of water and various cages along the walls… the animal pens where Brynn had kept Ghodn. She wasted no time in jumping down into the pool below her.

  Icy water swirled around her ears for a moment before she surfaced again, spitting out a curse. He knife had slipped down all the way to her lower back beneath her silk suit, and the tip of it was jabbing painfully into the top of her left buttock. She tread water as best she could, trying to ignore the pain as she swam toward the edge of the pool where Jorva was pulling Naietta from the water. The stained fabric of Naietta’s dress clung tightly to her shivering body, but she seemed unharmed.

  Two loud splashes sounded from behind as Berra and Tyll jumped down.

  Tanys winced as her dagger point traced a shallow cut across her backside, but she was almost to the edge of the pool now.

  Something scaly brushed against her leg beneath the surface.

  “Oh, shit,” Tanys hissed.

  Berra’s howl of surprise swiftly became a gurgle as something dragged her under.

  “Berra!” Tyll shouted.

  Tanys spun herself around in the water to see the ghostly white coils of an enormous serpent roiling in the dark water where Berra had been a moment before.

  Tyll watched the sea serpent disappearing with her sister beneath the water. Her eyes were filled with a desperate fear, and then she dove after it, naked and unarmed.

  Tanys reached behind her back, going under as she felt at the outline of the dagger’s grip beneath her suit. Pinching it between her fingers, she twisted the grip, wresting the dagger’s blade against the tight silk of her bodysuit. The silk surrendered with a soft tearing sound, and cold water spilled in across Tanys’s rump as the knife sheared through the thin fabric.

  Tanys surfaced again a moment later with the knife in hand.

  “Jorva, help!” she gasped before slipping beneath the surface again.

  She made out the pale shape of writhing serpent coils about ten feet below the surface through the churning muck of the dirty pool. Tanys clawed her way through the water toward the beast, glimpsing the flash of tanned skin between its coils.

  The serpent’s head swung around into view, and Tanys saw the younger sister, Tyll with her powerful legs clamped around its throat from behind. She was prying its fanged jaws open with both hands, even as a stream of bubbles escaped the girl’s lips.

  Tanys kicked hard, angling her blade toward an exposed gap of the creature’s throat.

  Suddenly, Tanys felt the snake’s tail wrap around her waist. She tried to jerk her body sideways to escape it, but it was too late. The serpent’s coils tightened around her hips, dragging her backwards and deeper into the churning silt.

  Tanys plunged her dagger into the serpent’s tail, filling the water with a blinding billow of blood. The snake’s muscles cinched tighter still as it turned her over, rolling her in its coils. Her blade arm was suddenly trapped against her side as a thick coil closed around her chest.

  The end of the creature’s tail now tightened around her legs, binding them together. It rolled her over again, and Tanys found her face pressed against Berra’s wriggling toes as it pulled her up toward the binding of its original prey.

  The air trickled from Tanys’s lungs as she struggled against panic, and the coils around her chest tightened, squeezing her breasts painfully against her ribs. She twisted the knife in her hand, carving shallow cuts in the serpent’s coils but doing no real damage.

  Berra’s toes stopped wiggling as her body went slack.

  Tanys pushed through the panicked thoughts in her mind, reaching outward with her inner sense, feeling for something to grasp ahold of. She found the serpent’s mind and forced her way inside.

  The horrible pain of drowning suddenly subsided as she found herself in the body of a thing that could hold its breath without effort, a thing at home beneath the surface. She felt the distant pain of the cuts in her flesh and the dull ache in her jaws where something prevented her from closing her mouth. It didn’t seem to matter. There was always some pain involved when taking larger prey. It never lasted long, especially when taking prey from above… they never lasted long at all, once you brought them below. She tightened her coils, reveling in the delicious softness of the prey trapped inside.

  Tanys shook it off, remembering herself again. The agony of burning lungs tinged the edges of her thoughts, but she was the snake, and she was Tanys.

  She willed herself to release the prey, to ease the tension on her coils and set them free.

  The snake’s mind struggled against her. This went against every instinct she possessed.

  Tanys felt her own will grow weaker by the moment. She fought to stay focused, trying to convince the serpent that the prey was somehow bad… poisoned. Tanys began to lose her train of thought. She needed to breathe… needed…

  Then Tanys’s face broke the surface of the water, and she sucked in as much breath as the coils around her chest would allow.

  “Come on, snakey!” Jorva cried, “No more swim time!”

  Tanys caught a glimpse of the tattooed dwarf at the edge of the pool. He was dripping wet with his feet planted on the stone rim of the pool and the tip of the sea snake’s tail grasped tightly between his hands. Then Tanys went under, and the snake squeezed again.

  Tanys felt the cool water of the pool wash over her skin, sweet and safe in the mind of the snake… dark and terrifying to the girl trapped in its coils. Tanys formed in her mind a burning image of the desert wastes of Cashuun. She remembered with absolute clarity the bleached bones of a sand snake she had seen, pecked at by vultures beside the dusty road.

  The body of the sea serpent convulsed wildly as it struggled to escape this vision of hell that suddenly filled its mind.

  Tanys found herself cast adrift, her body left spinning in the wake as the snake fled into the depths of the pool. She struggled weakly toward the light above, gasping wetly as she surfaced, her
knife still clutched tightly in her right hand.

  Jorva and Naietta pulled her up onto the stone walkway beside the pool. Tyll was rasping for breath as short distance away, half laying across the unmoving body of her sister.

  Berra lay, staring wide-eyed at nothing. A pink froth bubbled up from between her lips, and dark blood ebbed from two parallel rows of tiny puckered holes in the wet skin of her left breast.

  “Poison,” Naietta gasped.

  Tanys’s blood went cold, and then she struggled to her knees, slipping her knife through the ragged hole that she had cut in the back of her suit. She sliced the fabric free all the way around her waist to the front and then slipped her hand inside, reaching down to the little bundle of herbs she had tucked safely between her legs.

  “Put this in her mouth,” Tanys said, passing the herb bundle to Naietta.

  Tyll forced her sister’s mouth open, and Naietta pressed the sodden herbs between her lips. They watched in tense anticipation for any reaction.

  “It’s not working!” Tyll sobbed.

  Suddenly Berra coughed, her eyes rolling wildly around. Her body shook and spasmed, and Naietta was quick to slip her hand beneath Berra’s head to prevent her from injuring herself against the walkway.

  Then Berra made a horrible retching noise and rolled onto her side, vomiting all over Tyll’s lap.

  “You bitch!” Tyll laughed.

  Berra vomited again, and again, until nothing more came out, and she groaned with dry heaves, clawing at her sister’s legs with her trembling fingertips.

  “What…” Berra croaked, “What was that?”

  Tyll and Naietta only laughed in relief. Tanys joined them as well, looking over at Jorva who stood, watching her with a look of awe-struck wonder on his face.

  “Tanys!” he gasped, “Where you get magic crotch weed?”

  “That’s what I get for fucking a ghast,” she laughed.

  Tyll washed herself off at the edge of the pool as Naietta helped Berra rise shakily to her feet.

  “Which way now, Jorva?” Tanys asked as she cut away the ragged edges of her ripped bodysuit.

  Jorva started to speak, but a girl’s scream cut him off.

  They turned to look toward one of the tunnels leading from the pens.

  “That way,” Jorva said.

  Berra and Tyll scavenged a couple of long, hooked spikes from a nearby rack. Tanys ran to check the cage where Ghodn had been held, but the tiger was nowhere to be seen. She hoped that Brynn had kept his word, and Ghodn would be waiting for her at the cavern of the sea beast.

  They followed Jorva down the tunnel from which the scream had come and did not have far to go before they found its source.

  Pale daylight filtered down through a natural skylight in the cavern beyond the tunnel, illuminating a scene of desperation. A small knot of nearly twenty ghasts huddled together in the center of the chamber’s floor, surrounded by a churning sea of red ants, held at bay by some unseen force. Scattered throughout the living carpet were the moving bodies of ant-enslaved warriors like the guardsmen that Tanys and Jorva had fought, their faces and heads obscured by layers of wriggling insects that were somehow controlling them.

  Tanys gasped when she saw that Brynn, Vael, and Anavaiel were among the terrified group of people in the center of the deadly ring. The princess and the faceless boy were supporting the injured beastmaster who was awake, but looked to be on the verge of collapse as he focused his concentration on something. Wherever Brynn turned his gaze, the ants retreated, only to push forward on the opposite side. Brynn seemed to be using his powers to hold them back, though it was obviously costing him dearly.

  “Come on!” Tanys said.

  Berra and Tyll rushed forward at her side, but then faltered in their steps as they realized the nature of the foe they now face.

  “How are we supposed to fight that?” Tyll demanded, a flutter of fear in her voice.

  The swarm seemed to take notice of them then, and a red pool began to sweep across the floor to meet them.

  “Shit!” Tanys hissed, stumbling to a halt and then falling back a step as the swarm advanced on her.

  “That a lot of bugs,” Jorva said, awestruck by the sight.

  “Come on!” Brynn yelled, pulling free of his assistants to stagger toward Tanys. “Push through with your mind, Tanys! Drive them back!” he roared.

  Tanys steeled her will and pushed outward. The ants piled up like waves breaking against a reef at the edge of her invisible will, and Brynn pushed through from the other side, opening a narrow path through the sea of gnashing jaws and stingers.

  Ghasts rushed through the gap, fleeing toward Tanys and the others with panicked-stricken faces. Tanys felt as though she were being smothered beneath a thick, wiggling blanket of hate as some vast, controlling will crushed down upon her. She saw Brynn stumble and fall, and the ants crashed in behind him.

  Ghasts screamed as the ants behind Brynn poured over the stragglers, dragging five of them, screaming into the mass of insects. Anavaiel and Vale hauled Brynn to his feet and got him into the relative safety of the clearing in front of Tanys.

  Tanys felt a sharp pain in her mind as though someone had driven a blade into her brain, and she swooned, catching a brief glimpse in her mind’s eye of a woman’s body, encased in a tower of living resin.

  “Get back!” Berra shouted, catching Tanys before she could fall.

  “Lysette,” Tanys sighed, pressing her hand against her throbbing temple.

  “Who?” Berra asked.

  “She’s controlling them now…” Tanys said, “The girl in the wall.”

  Berra gave her a confused look, but then shoved Tanys clear as she turned to meet the charge of one of the ant zombies that came at her with a garbled roar.

  Berra bashed the man’s skull with the haft of her pole hook, sending ants flying. She spun the weapon around and drove the spike through his throat before he could recover.

  Beside her, Tyll jammed the butt of her polearm into a crack in the floor and dropped low, driving the spike end into the belly of another ant-thrall. The man vaulted over her, impaling himself on the pole. Its hook dragged a length of intestines with it as it burst from his back.

  “Well now you lost your fucking weapon!” Berra chided her sister.

  Tyll only smiled and pulled the shortsword from the dying man’s belt as he fell over on his face with the pole hook slowly shuddering its way though his bowels.

  Berra muttered a curse and turned to drive her fist into the face of another ant-man charging her, knocking him on his ass.

  “Quit playing around!” Tanys growled, severing a zombie’s forearm with her blade as it reached for her. The carpet of ants on the floor slowed its advance as she turned her will against them again.

  “The eel pool!” Brynn gasped, “Get to the pool… It’s the only way!”

  Tanys and the sisters fell back.

  “What good is that going to do us?” Tanys demanded.

  “The pool leads to the sea cave… below,” Brynn panted as the princess and the faceless boy supported him between them.

  “You mean we have to swim for it?” Tanys groaned.

  Brynn nodded weakly.

  “Fucking fuck… Fuck!” Berra roared.

  “Jorva, this way!” Tanys shouted.

  Jorva looked back, red-faced with an ant-thrall’s liver dangling from his teeth and at least a dozen ants tenaciously clinging to his bare arms. He gave her a look like a whipped puppy.

  “Now!” Tanys cried.

  Jorva’s eyes fell and he hopped off of the dying ghast’s carcass to jog back toward the group, crushing the ants from his arms as he gnawed gloomily at the quivering liver in his teeth.

  They fell back into the animal pens with the crawling mounds of insects close on their heels, held at bay only by Tanys’s wavering will. Cold sweat trickled down her body, and her thoughts seethed with the sickening touch of a million tiny minds… minds whose only thought was to drag the
girl and her companions back to their queen.

  Once again, Tanys felt the touch of Lysette’s mind upon her own, but it was not an attack this time. The insect queen’s thoughts brushed against Tanys’s will like a cold caress, a promise of pleasures beyond her imagining. Tanys shuddered as she saw in her mind’s eye an image of herself, clothed in the living garment of the hive. She would be the queen of a new colony, and her children would protect her and nurture her, even as she nurtured them. The hive would take her, enter into her and bless her with the gift of immortality. She would be the mother of a new race, and her seed would spread across the world, finding new queens and new hives, until nothing remained but the hive, and all would be at peace.

  “Tanys!” Brynn shouted.

  Tanys shook herself from the fevered dream to see a living tentacle of ants extended toward her, almost touching her face… Lysette’s hand.

  Tanys cried out, staggering backwards as she pushed them away with her will. The tendril of ants collapsed, spilling across the floor as Tanys turned to run.

  “Not that way!” Brynn cried, but most of the small group of ghasts that had been with him earlier had already run off down one of the other tunnels that led from the animal pens. The few ghasts that remained as well as Tanys’s companions hesitated when they reached the edge of the pool that Brynn indicated they should enter, but Jorva dove in straightaway with a boyish hoot of joy.

  “Come on!” Jorva shouted, surfacing with a childish grin on his face.

  Tanys saw the look of concentration on Brynn’s face and guessed that he was already controlling the eels in the dark pool. “Get in!” she cried, glancing back at the spreading pool of red death that followed close behind them.

  Berra was the last to jump in. She cursed loudly and hurled her pole hook, spike first into the chest of an oncoming ant-thrall and then dove in after her sister and the others.

  Anavaiel splashed wildly, clinging to the stone edge of the pool, her white dress soaked and dragging her down. “I can’t swim!” she cried, her doe-like eyes full of terror.

  Tanys swam over to her side. “It will be all right,” she said putting her hand on the girl’s arm.