In The Shadow Of The Beast

by Harlan H Howard

  ‘What are you doing here Cal?’ asked Sigourd.

  Cal winked, that playful, damnable gleam flickering in his eye that was so much a part of his charm.

  ‘Come now lad, you didn’t think your dalliances with the raven haired lass were going to stay secret from old Cal did you? When this shit storm came down and I couldn’t find you I figured there’d only be one place you’d go first.’

  ‘You should leave, it’s too dangerous here.’

  ‘Leave!’ exclaimed the old soldier in shocked disbelief, ‘I’d sooner leave both my arms on the battlefield than leave your side lord.’

  Nodding, Sigourd turned his attention to the fluttering nightingale once more, reached up to unfasten the delicate latch on the door to the cage. He pulled that tiny door open, and in an instant the little bird had darted from the cage, zipping across the room to alight on the mantle above an old brick fireplace.

  It hopped and danced there, chirruping all the while.

  ‘Odd little bugger,’ said Cal.

  But Sigourd had noticed something inside the fireplace, toward the back where old soot and grime coated everything. Parchments, thrown casually onto the floor near the foot of the fireplace were fluttering ever so slightly, as if stirred by the gentlest of breezes.

  Sigourd crouched down to better see the source of the draught, and was able to see that the back of the fireplace was actually a carefully concealed hatchway that rose up the inside of the chimney, about half the height of a man.

  Cal crouched beside his lord, craning his neck to better study this new discovery.

  ‘I’ll be, I haven’t seen one of these in quite some time,’ said Cal.

  ‘You mean there are more of these hidden doorways?’ asked Sigourd.

  ‘The castle used to be full of them. Convenient means of escape in times of peril. But your father had most of them filled in before you were born....Our position was more certain in those times.’

  Sigourd reached out his hand, pushed open the door to the secret passageway beyond, and as the ironwork creaked open, the little nightingale zipped through the opening into the darkness beyond, chirruping as it went.

  Sigourd shared a look with Cal, before pushing the trap door open entirely and moving cautiously after the bird. Cal shrugged, resigned to the impetuousness of his master’s youth, before following him through the secret door.

  The courtyard was like a scene from ancient myth, where men and their lands burned in hellish fires delivered upon them by wrathful gods.

  Everywhere there was chaos as soldiers struggled to suppress the raging fires, and women and children ran crying from their homes. Many others had gathered to witness the destruction, staring on in horrified disbelief at the damage that had been wrought to the castle.

  More soldiery and civilian aid was streaming up the hill from the city itself, officers of the watch shouting orders above the noise and confusion, trying valiantly to organize the rescue of the castle from this abominable tragedy.

  The Baron looked on through it all. Standing apart from the madness a safe distance from both the fire and the terrified crowd.

  If one were to look upon the face of The Baron Mortaron at that precise moment, one could be forgiven for thinking that the man was witnessing nothing more remarkable than a servant polishing his shoes or serving up a midday supper, so serene was his aspect. So calm and composed in the face of such unspeakable destruction. So calculating.

  An officer of the household guard, his face and armor blackened with soot and filth, hurriedly approached The Baron, snapping to attention as soon as he was close enough to be obliged to do so.

  ‘Report captain,’ said the old Baron.

  ‘It’s as we feared my lord. The powder stores were deliberately lit.’

  ‘Deliberately? You’re sure?’ asked Mortaron.

  ‘Yes lord, we found the duty officer and his retinue. From what we can determine from the remains they’d had their throats cut.’

  The Baron considered this news, studying the flames creeping higher around the east wing of the castle. Another building went down, crumbling in upon itself in a plume of smoke and dust. More screams.

  ‘What are your orders, lord?’ asked the guardsman.

  As The Baron considered, heavy footfalls, crunching across the gravel heralded the approach of another. Huron emerged from the cover of night to stand before Mortaron and the guard captain. The guardsman gave the towering knight a nervous sideways glance, uncomfortable at being so near to such a fearsome battlefield killer.

  ‘Secure the castle, captain,’ said The Baron.

  The guardsman saluted and hurried off to carry out his orders, running back in the direction of the fire shouting orders to his men.

  Mortaron turned to face the towering Huron.

  ‘I have found no sign of any intruder, lord,’ said the knight.

  From across the courtyard, a cry went up, ‘Hail The Regent, The Regent approaches!’

  In the distance, the lord of the realm of Corrinth Vardis was riding at the head of his personal retinue to see first hand what damage had been done to his home.

  The Baron cast one final look back toward the still blazing ruin that had until very recently been the weapons stores for the entire city. After a moment he turned and swept from the scene of the carnage, he would relate to his liege lord exactly the details he deemed worthy of note.

  Sigourd pushed open the iron gate, its heavy frame scraping oh so quietly against the rough hewn stone of the floor. Beyond the entrance leading onto the stairwell, all was darkness. Just a few stone steps leading into the flickering candlelight gloom of the catacombs below, and who knew what else.

  Sigourd hadn’t realized that for the last few moments he’d been holding his breath, too swept up with the tension of the moment to remember to breathe. Quietly he let out a sigh, the breath whispering out of him to faintly steam the cold air in the stone chamber. In response, a fetid gust of sepulchral stink, cold and damp, wafted up out of the depths of the darkness ahead of him. It carried upon it the scent of minerals and mold, and something else too. Some sweetness that tickled his senses.

  From his side, Cal sniffed at the air, picking up the same teasing bouquet that now lingered between them. ‘Honeysuckle and Lilacs?’ He said after another perfunctory sniff.

  ‘Perfume,’ said Sigourd.

  He eased past the gate and cautiously began to make his way down the steps into the gloom.

  Behind him, Cal removed a guttering torch from its lead bracket on the wall, held it high and in front trying to throw its feeble glow as far as he might ahead of them. Even with the torch they could only see a few meters, their eyes slow to adjust to the poor light in these warrens so far below the palace.

  They continued to descend for what seemed like an eternity. The stone steps curving in on themselves, the turns treacherous in their angle, the stairs themselves treacherous in their small size and the all pervasive grainy dampness that seemed to coat everything down here.

  ‘If I break my neck on these damned steps I’m going to be in a most irritable mood,’ quipped Cal.

  Sigourd didn’t respond, he was too busy trying to pick up the scent again, but the pallid breath of the catacombs had died down and the faint aroma of Isolde’s perfume had disappeared with it.

  Finally, the pair reached the bottom, Cal bringing up the flickering torch behind Sigourd, its firelight dancing over stone walls a trickle with melt water and glistening with mineral deposits. They were within a chamber carved from the very bowels of the palace, squat stone pillars and stubby archways lent support to a ceiling so low that Sigourd could almost feel the crushing pressure of the world above. A constant driving malevolence trapped in this forgotten place.

  Carved directly into the rock walls large shelves supported ramshackle offerings of bones and skulls, scraps of rotten fabric lying amongst piles of human remains.

  The catacombs were home to hundreds of such offerings, a throwback to the time w
hen the royalty of Corrinth Vardis had interred their departed ancestry in these warrens, before ritual and practice had given way to the mutability of time. Custom had long since moved on to the consummation of the dead in the transcendent flame of a sanctified funeral pyre.

  The empty eye sockets of Sigourd’s distant relatives, some who might have lain here undisturbed for millennia, glared out at him accusingly. He felt the wrongness of the place, knew that he had infringed upon the rest of the hallowed dead.

  ‘I feel it too,’ whispered Cal, ‘like we’re trespassing.’

  ‘It’s just your imagination old friend,’ said Sigourd. Cal gave him a sideways glance, and Sigourd could see the lack of reassurance in his friend’s grizzled face.

  The noise and madness that had engulfed the palace was not even a whisper down here, and Sigourd couldn’t help but wonder at the state of things in the world above. He was undoubtedly needed by the palace, his people...his father. He felt the familiar nag of responsibility tugging at him, but that guilt was quickly replaced by a more pressing concern, an uncomfortable knot in his gut that seemed to throb more painfully with every new second of consideration. He had to find Isolde.

  A noise from further up snapped Sigourd’s attention back into the warren tomb. Something like scraping or maybe shuffling, Sigourd couldn’t be sure. A nod from Cal confirmed that it had not been just another innocent gust of sepulchral breath pulling at the tattered remains of the catacombs’s long dead inhabitants.

  Then the noise came again, and an instant later the nightingale shot out of the impenetrable gloom to alight upon one of the corpse shelves. It chirruped encouragingly once before darting off again.

  ‘Quite sure of himself isn’t he,’ said Cal ‘Which, down here, is more than I can say for myself.’

  Moving with more haste, the pair followed the flight of the nightingale, tracking the curvature of the catacombs, the firelight revealing yet more of the shelves stacked upon one another in even greater profusion the further they went. Endless empty eyes to witness the pair’s progress as the flickering light of the torch chased the darkness away, only for that darkness to pour back in behind them, following like some predator kept at bay but for the sake of the timid light.

  Soon they reached a fork in the tunnel, branching left and right there seemed to be no indication as to which way they ought to proceed, not sight nor smell nor sound.

  Sigourd was about to suggest they split up when suddenly it came, echoing distantly out of the long darkness of the leftward tunnel, a woman’s cry.

  That cry decided it instantly, the two men plunged into the murk, and this time they were running, their feet pounding over the uneven ground, the sound of their heavy footfalls pinging with a strange urgency off the darkly glistening limestone.

  Not long after it came again, that woman’s cry, an undeniable note of terror written in it. It struck such a chill chord within Sigourd, his mind raced with a multitude of possible horrors, and each imagined horror caused his thundering heart to tighten painfully in his chest.

  The tunnel, curving steadily the entire way, suddenly straightened out to reveal a natural stone basin, some thirty feet in circumference. Its floor sloped to a distant opening in the rock wall, towards which three figures were struggling to make their way.

  Isolde, fighting with all her might against two men that were hauling her unceremoniously toward the opening.

  Isolde’s captors were large, powerfully built beneath long coats fashioned from dark leather, their faces hidden beneath the shadow of deep hoods. They moved with an almost animal quality, certainly not in the manner of any race of man Sigourd was familiar with.

  He called out with an authority bred into him from years of military schooling by the likes of Cal and the other war masters in his fathers employ; ‘Release her!’ his voice echoing brazenly around the stone basin.

  The two cloaked captors did not turn, did not even give a moments pause as they continued to drag Isolde towards the opening at the far side of the basin.

  Withouts another moment’s hesitation, Sigourd’s blade flashed into his hand, and he had thrown himself down the sloping rock face into the basin.

  ‘Hold, my lord!’ called Cal after him, but Sigourd was past any careful consideration of the situation, his blood rushing in his ears and the fire of his passions burning white hot.

  He slipped and skidded down down to the floor of the basin, his feet hitting the solid earth at a run, the momentum from his breakneck descent throwing him into a full charge.

  To her credit Isolde was putting up as much of a fight as she could muster, ensuring that their progress was slow enough so that Sigourd would be upon them in moments. Sensing the onrushing danger, first one and then the other of the captors began to turn, the deep shadows within their leather hoods reminiscent of the watchful empty eye sockets of the grinning skulls of the catacombs.

  Some strange sensation stirred within Sigourd as he neared the trio. Outrage certainly, at the intrusion of this mysterious pair, of the apparent kidnapping of a citizen of his fathers realm and Sigourd’s own lover at that. But also something more akin to excitement. Even as he charged, he puzzled at the odd contrast of sensations within him, that even in the face of this obvious imminent threat he could feel so...alive.

  It was then that something large, moving so fast and so quietly that he didn’t even register it coming out of the dark, crashed into Sigourd with a bone jarring, teeth clattering impact. The world spun away from Sigourd in a flash, consciousness taking flight, and then a second brutal impact as he hit the ground with a pained grunt.

  The something loomed over Sigurd, who lay upon the floor in a tortured daze, struggling against a darkness that crept inexorably over him.

  He looked up to see what thing had bludgeoned him from his feet, his vision swimming with the mad verticality of the rock faces. there was something else there too. A glistening smile of razor fangs in a mouth salivating with the anticipation of the kill. That wicked smile seemed to hover there in the murk of Sigourd’s delirium, floating above him disembodied and dreamlike in mocking delight.

  Sigourd’s end loomed over him, an ignominious demise for the heir to the land of Atos, slain down here in the damp and the darkness of these warrens within the world.

  And then Cal was there, his sword dancing before him, a cry of rage and defiance upon his lips.

  The old soldier threw himself between that glittering wicked smile and his liege lord. In a brief exchange that Sigourd was only dimly aware of, Cal’s sword danced a duel of death with the faceless attacker. The polished steel of the old warriors blade striking sparks as it clashed with talons that cut the darkness before the looming shadow. That glittering smile now vanished into the greater darkness of a hulking mass.

  Cal was an expert with the blade. Be it knife or axe or sword, he maintained a masterful discipline with them all, and had used them all to cut short the lives of more foes than he could begin to count. Across countless battlefields littered with the maimed and the dying Cal had managed to slice and stab and sever his way through every conflict. He was one of the finest killers in The Regents stable.

  It counted for nothing.

  The exchange was quick, and its brutal end seemed quicker still as those talons battered aside Cal’s blade, and tore out his throat in a rushing geyser of blood that sprayed across the floor of the cave. Sigourd could feel the hot richness of Cal’s life’s blood splash across his face.

  The faithful retainer fell to the floor beside his lord, gurgling bubbles of blood from a throat that wasn’t there anymore, replaced instead by a vicious ragged wound rent in the flesh of his neck.

  Like a sliver of moon appearing from behind black clouds, that razor smile appeared once more to hover over Sigourd. He reached out feebly to try to grab at that teasing smirk, to snatch it from his sight.

  Somewhere distantly he could hear Isolde crying out as she struggled with her captors.

  ‘It saddens me no sm
all measure that tonight will not be an end of you, young prince,’ spoke the glittering smile in a voice as cruel as the bitter cold of midwinter, ‘but soon enough. Do not fear death, half man. It is but a small step in the direction of the greater good.’

  Suddenly, Sigourd was struck another hammer blow, this time across the side of his head. In that instant everything flashed like the white of that malicious floating grin, and Sigourd knew no more.

  CHAPTER 5

  The final word...

  In the red sky racing clouds swirl like clotted blood down a sink hole, moving through the vast expanse above with unnatural speed.

  Eyes in the dark glitter from the shadows, many pairs of golden eyes that watch from the unlight between arthritically twisted trees.

  The thing, the nameless dread is nearly upon him, but he is done running. He will face down this horror even if it is to be his doom.

  He stops to face his pursuer, a shadow racing across the desolate wastes like a wraith, it gains with such inhuman rapidity.

  He can make out details within the dark blur that rushes toward him, a hood covering a face he cannot see, hands that are thick with muscle yet gnarled like the roots of the old trees. Brutal looking talons that will tear his flesh like a hand waved casually through the gossamer of a spider’s web.

  The shadow is almost upon him, mere feet from away and as it readies itself to pounce he catches sight of a smile, a wicked, mocking grin that floats in the darkness of this nightmare thing. A mouth full of razors, the guarantee of an agonizing death...

  Sigourd awoke with a start, gasping for air as if drowning. In an instant he is lanced with an agony that reaches into his bones, his face, his head. The reality of his injured state settling upon him in a flourish of pain.