Rise of the Death Dealer

by James Silke

  From his prominent position, he listened patiently to the speeches, all of which were rich with opinion and style, and lengthy. Then he presented briefly his conclusion. Robin Lakehair would be accepted into the camp and given a bed, a blanket and an equal share of wine and food. Then the arguments began as to which craft she would pursue. But, as these entertainers and thieves had no experience with such an abundance of virtue and beauty, they had no idea what trade Robin was suited for, and their disagreements became loud and hot. By tradition Brown John was only to speak when the group was out of words. But knowing that rarely happened, he interrupted firmly, “That’s enough. The discussion is ended. Robin will train as a dancing girl.”

  Mother Drab, Belle and Zail laughed riotously, then Mother Drab arched a wicked eye at Brown John and said with a wry chuckle, “Her! A dancing girl! Why she’s got nothing up front and less behind, and even if she did she wouldn’t know how to toss it, or who to toss it at!”

  Brown John waited until they all ran out of laughter, then fixed an eye fiercely on the troop.

  “She will dance,” he said conclusively, “because she has other attractions which are suitable to the dance. And the stick and hoop will not be her teachers, but the white water splashing over the rocks of the stream, and the swallow in flight, the tree in the wind, the shooting star dashing across the night sky.” He raised an acknowledging hand to Mother Drab, Zail and Belie. “Do not misunderstand. I do not underestimate the extravagant wealth of your bouncing breasts and thundering hips. These are profound and sacred contributions to the dance, and I respect them as profoundly necessary and highly inspiring. But… I have a different vision for Robin. She will not dance as you dance. She will not perform ‘The Pregnant Virgin’ or even ‘The Wicked Wife’.”

  He leaned forward, gathered Robin’s hands as light glinted in his warm eyes. “No, child, your dances will tell the tales the animals and elves tell, and speak of far pavilions, and of gods and goddesses riding the wind, bathing in the sky, and building castles out of cobwebs and clouds.”

  He paused and directed her eyes to the floor of the stage as if it were the whole of ail the earth. He whispered, “You think now, Robin Lakehair, that you are an outcast, but you are not.” He looked into her moist eyes. “You have come home.”

  A month later, when many visitors from the forest tribes had gathered in Rag Camp to celebrate midsummer, Robin Lakehair performed for the first time. It was the opening number, a dance designed to distract the little children so the main entertainment could begin. It was titled, “Tails Up.” She performed as a dragonfly, and wore pea green tights, small yellow wings and a long red tail. Some of the adults had no idea what her dance was about, while others imagined it meant strange and significant things. But their children howled and rolled about with delight, and the tiny ones kissed her nose and petted her tail, so the parents applauded appreciatively.

  A massive armored figure standing in the night shadows at the edge of the forest also watched Robin’s debut. As she moved among the children laughing and hugging them, his body shifted in place as if he would approach her, but he did not. Instead he turned and strode back into the forest night.

  Seventy-three

  THE QUEST

  That night Gath of Baal rode slowly up a narrow gulley toward the top of Calling Rock. About him the darkness held an eerie hollowness and echoed with the soft plodding of the horse’s hooves. At the summit, he dismounted and led the animal through the shrubs and boulders into the clearing beside the naked thorn tree. A lonely silence oppressed the area. Not even the wind spoke among the leaves.

  Within the circle of small blackened rocks that Robin had once gathered for her fire, he placed a few logs and dry leaves. They lit easily. He spread his blankets below an outcropping of rock, and removed his armor. After feeding the stallion, he ate some bread and cold meat, and drank some wine. A breeze moved softly through the rocks, but its faint whistle only enhanced the magnitude of the silence and solitude.

  He lay down on his blankets using his saddle as a pillow, and picked up his helmet, studied it for a long time, fascinated with every detail of its powerful construction and the pulsing life in its steel. Tomorrow he would head for the Land of Smoking Skies to begin the hunt. But not tonight. He set the helmet down and looked at the fire.

  Demons and ogres began to take shape within the red and orange dancing tongues. All the spawn of darkness that the Master of Darkness could send against him seemed to writhe in the red heat to the sounds of night predators creeping and slithering in time with the noisy flames. For a moment he glimpsed an old frowsy wrinkled bukko with laughter in his eyes fighting at his side, and he smiled. He peered past the flames at a small huddled shape sleeping in the embrace of the exposed roots at the base of the thorn tree. When it moved, he could see the long red-gold hair of a girl, and when she turned her face to the firelight he could see her soft, plump lips, stretching and sighing like little red dancers.

  Later, during the darkest hours of the night, when the fire had turned to glowing embers, his sleeping body shifted slightly and he muttered contentedly, like a man in the middle of a dream.

  LORDS OF

  DESTRUCTION

  Death Dealer - 02

  James Silke

  One

  THE INVADER

  The sound of a horse and a jangle of armor came from the stand of fir and hemlock trees crowding the eastern edge of the murky slime. Then a single male rider, moving at a controlled and steady pace, appeared between the trees. Robed in shadows. Wearing darkness as naturally as the midnight sky.

  A shaft of sunlight slashed through the needle cover and splashed across the mane of a thick-muscled black stallion, glittered on the blade of a huge axe riding a saddle scabbard and washed over the black chain mail covering the rider’s body. A slight tug on the reins, and the stallion stopped facing a narrow trail of raised bald dirt crossing Noga Swamp, the sunlight a bar of gold across the man’s sun-dark, handsome face.

  Unruly, almost neck length black hair framed ruddy flesh stretched tautly across bold cheekbones and the bridge of his blunt nose. His lips were wide and flat, creased with a scar that ran to his square chin, and his eyes hid in deep clefts under a shallow forehead, casting black shadows. Enigmatic. Hard. The face of nature’s child, as calm and steady as the sheltering pine and brother to the storm.

  Wine bottles, dried meats and bread filled his saddlebags, and his belts carried a sheathed dagger and sword, a coin pouch and a small earthen jar drilled with air holes.

  Two vultures landed silently on the limb of a naked, fire-blackened mangrove tree, and craned their wrinkled necks low, watching the stranger. Their crops were stuffed, and their feathered bellies ballooned over the branch. Good workers, as well fed as graveyard worms.

  Smelling the scent coming from the jar, they suddenly cawed loudly.

  The stallion reared slightly, snorting and stomping, and a scrap of dappled sunlight illuminated an object hanging at the side of the rider’s hip: a helmet of black metal, with a spiked crest and horns that curled down and back toward the masked face.

  Cawing madly, the vultures spread their wings, lifting heavily into the air, and winged their way up in hasty retreat through a passage between the skeletal limbs of the mangroves.

  The man who owned the horned helmet was no stranger. He had invaded the forbidden lands before.

  Reaching a safer perch at the heights of a tall fir, the two vultures again settled side by side, and looked down at the lone rider. Greedy hunger was bright behind their eyes, not because they hoped to feed on the large man, but because they were certain they would dine heartily on the carnage that would mark his trail.

  The rider, Gath of Baal, gave the birds a routine glance, and held the stallion steady just short of the raised road. The caution in his eyes could have cut steel.

  The swamp’s foliage and waters were totally devoid of their customary serpentine shadows and ominous clicking and hissing. There
was no movement and no sound except for the faint songs of the wind in the tree canopy, the cricket and the blue bottle fly. Nature had used the swamp for a battlefield, and slaughtered the land as well as its inhabitants. The swamp was now one eighth the size it had been when he had first crossed it, a shallow muddy pond.

  To the sides of the road, where the water touched the edge of the forest, it was murky green and deep. But in the main body, it became shallow and slimy, then turned to dark wet mud. Beyond that, the bottom was hard dry mud which had cracked and pulled apart around the burnt and blackened bodies of the mangrove trees.

  On the opposite side of the swamp, tongues of hard lava now curled and twisted down out of the heights of Panga Pass, then spread out in widening fans across the dry swamp bottom and dipped their tips into the murky waters. There steam rose above the edges of the pond. The recently molten rock was still warm.

  The skeletons of oversized lizards, crocodiles and snakes were draped on the black limbs of the trees and protruded from the dry mud bed. Bits of charred skin danced on their burnt bones.

  The land, once a sunless world of shadows roofed by leaves, had been ravaged by rivers of molten lava which boiled away the greater portion of the swamp and set fire to the trees and undergrowth to leave a grey, lifeless land exposed to sun, wind and eye. But other, more unnatural forces, had also been at war. Many of the dead creatures were headless and lay in submissive coils and crouches, as if they had surrendered to execution.

  Gath leaned forward, and the stallion started down the road into the spilling sunlight, using center trail in a manner that said no other had the right. Both man and animal were stained with trail dust, and moved with that easy grace only granted to those travelers accustomed to roads fashioned from mysteries and destruction. But their eyes were wary, hunting the strange, haunted devastation.

  Up ahead, lava obliterated the trail through Panga Pass which the Barbarian had formerly taken. Now he would have to scout out a new trail, a task which would be difficult and time consuming. But this did not bother him. Instead it brought a dark smile to his face.

  The Land of Smoking Skies lay somewhere to the west beyond the pass, and it was not simply one more mysterious, uncharted world so common to that distant time. It was a world ruled by the Master of Darkness and his armies of demon spawn, and for Gath, a world of compelling memories of unleashed evil which tugged at his soul, transforming his dark smile into one of flashing anticipation.

  The demons of the Lord of Death had hunted him long enough. Now he was the hunter.

  Gath was certain that the mysterious place he now longed to dominate, the place where he belonged, was up ahead at the mouth of the underworld. There he would stand guard and destroy the demons of the Master of Darkness as they came forth from the bowels of the earth. There he would find the satisfaction and fulfillment the helmet now demanded. To find it, he had to leave behind all he knew. His home in the rain forest called The Shades, and the only two people he had ever called friend, the lovely Robin Lakehair and the bukko Brown John. But he had no choice. The horned helmet’s magic penetrated his blood and bones. It was rooted in them, and produced a hunger he could not resist.

  Now the helmet was the only friend he had, and he was resolved to dominate its magic, make it the only one he needed.

  His hand dropped to the headpiece and stroked its living steel. It made him the master of wherever he chose to stand, the equal of earthquake, thundercloud and lightning. With it mounted on his head, he would prevail against whoever he faced, and do it in the manner he had sworn he would long, long ago when he was a boy. By himself.

  Two

  THE NYMPH QUEEN

  Far to the west of Noga Swamp, past the Land of Smoking Skies, across the great Barrier Mountains and beyond the vast sea of sand dunes called the Emptiness, lay a small ocean bordered by black-shadowed forests and shrouded in dense fog. It lay still, silent, then the sound of a horn echoed out of the gloom. Faint. Mysterious. Like the wailing moan of all that had died in the last year.

  This was the Inland Sea, a slowly, steadily growing body of water which would one day be called the Mediterranean.

  Only the sun and moon can remember what it looked like then, less than one-tenth the size it is now and confined to its southwestern extremity, only the meager beginning of what it would become.

  In those barbaric days, the sea was landlocked. It was fed by falls cascading over a landbridge which linked the continents which would one day be called Spain and Africa. The source of the falls was the Endless Sea, the Atlantic, to the west. Fed by the melting ice capping the northern continents, the Endless Sea was imperceptibly rising, cutting through the landbridge. In the far distant future it would push through and tear it down to link the two oceans with a passage called the Straits of Hercules, and bury the mountains and deserts and Great Forest Basin under its watery weight. But now it slowly spilled its icy waters into the tropical warm waters of the Inland Sea, content to send up billowing clouds of steam which hung over the western shore.

  There the massive rock which would be called Gibraltar crouched like an animal with its paws extended to the south and its haunches bunched to the north. At that end, sheer cliffs of shale and limestone rose to the heights, supporting a castle constructed of black stone. Pyram, the lair of the Nymph Queen, the high priestess of Black Veshta, whose magic manufactured the demon spawn for the Master of Darkness.

  The low piercing cry came from a horn mounted in the castle’s east tower. It was a command.

  The sound flooded over the blunt, thick ramparts and towers, swirled down through passageways and courtyards. Shutters banged against it. Doors were bolted, and behind them the inhabitants whimpered and covered their ears. But a few children ran through the ruins and perched on fallen walls overlooking the water, thrilled at the prospect of getting a glimpse of their legendary queen.

  The horn announced the ritual feeding of the great Lord of Destruction who ruled the Inland Sea, and only the queen could feed him. When she did, the children would gaze down on her nymphet beauty and see why for the last months the horn had forbidden them to look at her. But soldiers quickly found them, drove them back into their homes and then hid themselves.

  The horn continued to cry out, then abruptly stopped, and Pyram stood still and silent.

  At the base of the cliffs was a large crescent-shaped cave. The blackened pylons of a pier extended from its shadows, thrusting up out of the turbulent waves like giant rotting teeth, their roots washed with clinging greenish-white foam. A moment passed, then a blood-red barge emerged, rode over the waves and pulled away from the end of the pier. It headed for the tip of a blunt rock protruding from the water about a half mile off shore. The sacred feeding area.

  The barge’s hull was a long narrow oval constructed of papyrus reeds. The bow and stern ends turned up, and were molded and painted in the shape of erect phalli. There were no masts or sails. Six oarsmen stood in stirrups on the stern deck plunging leaf-shaped oars into the surf with trained precision. They followed the beat of a pace drummer who sat under a thatched awning on the aft quarter. A weathered waterman stood behind him holding the tiller steady. Each had been deliberately made deaf and mute so they could not hear their queen’s sacred voice, or speak of her sacred beauty.

  At the prow, three elderly priests stood reverently, hands clasped in prayer. They were bald and bare-chested, their loose white skirts held in place by black ropes. The eldest, the high priest of Black Veshta, had three red circles painted on his shiny pate, and his foot rested on a brown-skinned girl who sprawled chained, naked and whimpering on the deck. She was blindfolded.

  Tiyy, the Nymph Queen of Pyram, stood on the command deck, shivering like a leafy bush and smelling of Midnight Orchids. Her diminutive body was buried within a massive bear-fur robe, the hood hiding her head. Only her eyes showed within its shadows, large almonds under level eyebrows as thin as thread, and outlined in black kohl as wide as a child’s finger. The upper li
ds were heavy half-moons blushed with pale indigo. The orbs were a flawless, translucent alabaster surrounding sky-blue irises, and the pupils were dilated, dark compelling doorways into a mind as predatory and cunning as the trapdoor spider.

  A short thin man stood respectfully to the side of her throne chair. His black tunic was ragged and thick with trail dust. Where his flesh was exposed, it was greyish and smooth, almost slick, and blistered. Schraak, a serpent priest in the service of the Queen of Serpents. He had just arrived after an arduous, hurried journey from the Land of Smoking Skies with a message from the Master of Darkness, and the sweaty slime oozing from his worried cheeks said he had not brought good news.

  When the barge neared the tip of black rock, and was too far away from the battlements for anyone spying there to see her features, Tiyy lowered her hood.

  Her hair was dyed a bilious lemon-yellow and cut with flawless symmetry in the shape of a shoulder-length pyramid. Florid pink rouge thickly covered her cheeks, in an attempt to hide the wrinkles in her heart-shaped face, but without success. It was a face which undoubtedly had once been beautiful, but which now had no physical claim on the title Nymph. A withered sack of flesh and bone laced with lightning.

  As the barge slid alongside the rock, she raised a commanding hand. The pace drummer stopped beating his drum. The oarsmen plunged their oars deep, holding them steady, and the barge slowed, came to a stop.

  Tiyy advanced to the front of the command deck, and her robe fell partway open. Her face belonged to a woman in her eighties, but her throat was only slightly slack, and her bare round shoulders were as plump and firm as a girl’s.