Vulcan's Fury: The Dark Lands

by Michael R. Hicks

  With a cry of horror, she began to struggle. As she did, the vines began to tighten their grip, drawing so tight she was afraid her bones would break. Forcing herself to relax, she turned to the only weapon she had at the moment: her teeth. Swallowing the bile that rose to her throat, she began to gnaw through the vines that bound her hands. While the individual vine she chewed on tightened its grip, the others didn’t. Ignoring the bitter taste of the sap that was mixed with the coppery tang of her own blood, she severed the first vine and freed her right hand. Reaching down to her waist, she drew her dagger, which somehow had stayed with her through the frightful battle with the sea. Carefully, methodically, she began cutting through the other vines.

  As she did, she saw in the corner of her eye yet more tendrils dangling down, hungrily reaching toward her. The tree did not wish to be denied its meal.

  “May you burn in Vulcan’s forge,” she spat as she sawed through the last of the pulsing vines. Ripping their amputated remains from her body, she rolled away before the others could reach her. She fell to the ground and slithered like a snake under the dense outer wall of vines, breathing a sigh of relief when she at last emerged into blinding sunlight.

  Pausing to spit the rancid taste from her mouth, she took a moment to check her body. Aside from the bruises and several puncture marks, not to mention the loss of some of her blood, she appeared to be all right.

  Looking around her, the scene was much the same as she remembered from the previous night: the surf, much calmer now, washing against the sand of a lengthy stretch of beach that ran into a wall of rocks. Turning the other direction, her heart fell, for she was confronted with another wall of jagged rocks. Turning to face the inland approach, she looked up…and up…to the top of a huge escarpment.

  She thought to call for Hercules and the others, but as she opened her mouth to shout, something made her stop. It was as if she instinctively knew that it might not be the best idea to draw attention to herself. She wasn’t sure how she would find the others if she didn’t call out for them, but for now she let it go. If they had reached these same shores, they would be faced with the same choices as to what to do. Actually, there was no choice at all. She couldn’t stay on the beach where she had neither food nor fresh water, and she knew now that the jungle, which grew tall and thick as it rose up the escarpment, was not a place she wished to seek refuge.

  The only choice was to climb to higher ground.

  Clutching her dagger, she headed back into the jungle, careful to avoid the blood sucking trees as much as she could while wondering what other horrors might be awaiting her.

  ***

  Hercules moved with instinctive ease through the thorny vines, and steered clear of the tendrils hanging from the enormous willow trees where possible. Karan remembered from his visit to this region that the Swords who lived here were fearful of these trees, but they would not say why. He was content to trust Hercules and followed in the big cat’s footsteps.

  They made their way up the escarpment at a steady pace, although they were forced to begin zigzagging in switchbacks to negotiate the ever-steeper slope.

  At one point, they emerged into a clearing in the shape of a near-perfect circle, perhaps thirty feet across, where Hercules paused, snuffling at the air. At the center was an enormous flower of breathtaking beauty rising from a bulbous, bright green base that was nearly as massive as Hercules. The ground around the flower was covered by a dense mat of grass that only grew about an inch high.

  Karan moved up beside Hercules as the big cat warily sniffed the clearing, drawing in the strange scent of the flower. It was a mixture of sweet and savory that was at once intoxicating and repellant. Kneeling down, Karan reached out with a hand to stroke the grass that had such a well defined boundary with the jungle floor on which they stood that it could have been a carpet. The blades were stiff, crunchy, and reminded him of one of the trials during his training where the acolytes had to crawl over a bed of shattered glass shards. Taking his hand away, he looked at his palm and was shocked to see that blood was welling up from dozens of tiny pinpricks in his skin. Pressing a finger from his other hand to the injured palm, he felt a tingling sensation, but no pain.

  He stood up, silently giving thanks that he had used his left hand to touch the deadly grass and not his sword hand. Once the grass’s numbing effect wore off, he suspected he would have to face considerable pain.

  “If the grass does that, I do not wish to find out what the flower might do,” he said uneasily. “Let us go around.”

  Hercules, clearly spooked by the flower, growled low in his throat as he followed Karan back into the relative safety of the jungle.

  After skirting the strange flower, they continued their climb. They encountered several more of the strange flowers and their enclaves of deadly grass, although the higher the two adventurers went, the smaller became the flowers.

  It was late afternoon, and they were in the midst of negotiating a particularly steep slope, with Hercules scrabbling for purchase and Karan climbing on his hands and knees, when they heard a deep grunting sound. Hercules went rigid and Karan silently sank to the ground, his ears trying to pin down from where the sound had come. The big cat’s nose twitched and his eyes darted around. They were more exposed now than they had been at the lower elevations, for the great willow trees did not grow this high. Most of what they struggled through now were ferns, dense patches of gray-green moss and bright orange lichen, and the ubiquitous thorny vines.

  The grunting came again from somewhere above them. Hercules began to stalk toward the sound, his body held low, and Karan followed. The steep upward slope suddenly ended in a plateau of indeterminate size that led to another rise toward the top of the escarpment. But here on the plateau the ground was relatively level.

  The grunting grew louder, more urgent, and was answered by a chorus of grunts, and Karan could hear something large moving through the jungle up ahead.

  Hercules paused and sank slowly to the ground. Karan wriggled up beside him. He saw shapes moving through the brush on the far side of a large clearing (thankfully bereft of the strange flowers and deadly grass). Hercules was staring at them with feral intensity. He licked his chops as a wild pig emerged into the clearing. Another one, then another, came after it, then several more, all females except for two immature males. A group of piglets trailed after their sow, squealing with delight as they chased after their mother.

  Karan’s stomach growled. He was famished, and he knew that Hercules must be, as well. His stomach growled again at the thought of a haunch of meat, roasting over an open fire, dripping with fat.

  Hercules turned his great head to look at him, then returned his attention to the prey.

  The sow and her piglets came closer. Like the others, she rooted along the ground of the clearing, which had clearly received attention from the pigs in the past, steadfastly ignoring the antics of the piglets.

  It was only then that Karan realized how big the sow was. He had seen pigs often enough before, for they were often used for meat to nourish the Swords, but had never seen one this large. It was the size of a small horse, and the piglets were nearly as big as a typical adult pig. Karan reconsidered his desire for roasted pork, for he knew that feral pigs could be ferocious opponents, and he had neither spear nor bow. While he had never faced one himself, pitting the lower level Swords against animals, including feral pigs, was a common entertainment for the Masters. Karan had seen enough of his companions die that way, gutted by the tusks of a pig, trampled, or both. But none of the pigs he had ever seen in the coliseum could compare to these magnificent specimens. The wise thing, he knew, would have been to quietly retreat and wait until they could find a less deadly meal.

  Unfortunately, Hercules, being the supreme predator that he was, saw the pigs only as juicy prey to satisfy his ravening hunger. With his attention riveted on the sow, he gathered his legs under his body and tensed his muscles. His tail swished nervously, then went still an insta
nt before he launched himself from his hiding place, exploding through the brush as he leaped into the clearing.

  Drawing his sword, Karan charged after him.

  The piglets screamed and wheeled around, tearing back to the foliage on the far side of the rutted ground as their mother fearlessly squared off against her attacker.

  Hercules had covered half the distance when another pig burst from the ferns on the other side of the clearing. It was a male with tusks longer than Karan’s extended arm. If the other pigs were huge, this one was titanic, easily twice the size of the largest sow and larger than Hercules himself.

  The male drew the attention of Hercules, but only for an instant. Turning his attention back to his intended prize, the hexatiger swatted the sow’s head with a huge forepaw, knocking her to the ground, senseless, before clamping down on her throat with his jaws. His momentum carried him forward, and he rolled to the ground, flinging the struggling sow onto her back in a great spray of dirt and mud.

  With a squeal of challenge, the male lowered his head and charged not at Hercules, but at Karan, who skidded to a stop, now totally exposed in the clearing. Wide-eyed, he stared at the porcine doom thundering toward him. The beast was so large that he could feel the reverberation of its footsteps through the ground as its vengeful stride ate up the distance between them. He knew he had no chance to outrun it. All he could do was stand and fight.

  Mustering his courage and resigning himself to the inevitability that Death had come at last, and ignoring the ignominy of being killed by an oversized pig, he knelt low and held the handle of his sword near the ground. His only chance, slim though it was, would be if he could force the beast to impale itself on his weapon. But as it came for him, he realized that its maw was deeper than his sword was long. The best he could hope for would be that the huge pig would swallow the weapon as it speared Karan with its tusks or crushed him underfoot, and would later die from a ruptured stomach.

  He watched it come, determined to keep his eyes open until his spirit fled from his body. As if in slow motion, the beast thundered closer, closer, lowering its head for a vicious upthrust of its tusks that would tear Karan’s body apart.

  A great roar split the air as Hercules, lost from Karan’s sight as the male boar charged past where the hexatiger had been wrestling with the sow, appeared, flying through the air to land square on the male pig’s back. The claws of all six of Hercules’s great paws sank deep into the swine’s flesh, followed by the hexatiger’s canine teeth as he fastened his jaws on the pig’s spine and bit down with bone shattering force.

  The huge pig shrieked, and Karan leaped out of the way as the stricken beast stumbled and went crashing to the ground right where he had been standing.

  Hercules released his victim and sailed clear. Even before the pig had finished its tumble to the ground, Hercules had whirled around and pounced again, seizing the pig by the throat while his claws again sank into its flesh, but this time in its soft underbelly. His mid- and hind-paws tore into the tender flesh to spill the organs from within. The pig thrashed and squealed in pain and rage as Hercules simultaneously suffocated and disemboweled it.

  Karan gawked, for Hercules looked like a kitten clutching a far larger foe, but there was no doubt now about the victor of this match. With a final gasp, the pig shuddered, then went still, dead.

  Hercules clung onto it for a few moments more, wary of some trickery on the part of his prey. Then, satisfied that the pig was indeed dead, he detached himself and got to his feet. After giving Karan a satisfied look, he bent his head to the spilled innards and noisily began to feed.

  Beyond the grisly scene, the sow had gotten to her feet. Injured and bleeding, but alive nonetheless, she limped after the other pigs and her piglets that had fled the clearing.

  Karan came and knelt beside Hercules, facing him, and raised his sword in both hands in salutation to his god. When he was done with a long prayer of thanks, he got to his feet and began to search for dry wood with which he could make a fire. Only after Hercules had eaten his fill would Karan take some of the pig’s flesh to satisfy his own hunger. For now, Karan was content to be alive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Valeria looked up from her latest battle with the insidious thorny vines as a primal roar echoed across the jungle. It was faint, obviously far away, but she would have recognized it anywhere. “Hercules,” she breathed.

  The roar was followed by a scream of agony, but not from Hercules, nor from any human lips. Then the jungle was again silent except for the sound of buzzing insects.

  She wanted to scream out the hexatiger’s name, but knew it would be pointless. His roar could carry for several miles under the right conditions, and she had no sense from which direction the sound had come. “But he’s alive,” she said aloud to herself. “And if he is, the others might be, too. I just need to find them. And I will. Somehow.”

  This new and most welcome knowledge provided a much needed boost to her flagging efforts to climb the escarpment. She wasn’t far from the top now, and wanted to get there before night fell. She didn’t know, of course, what might await her, but it certainly had to be better than spending a night on a steep slope, lying on a bed of venom-oozing thorny vines. At least she had worked her way past the blood-sucking vine trees, which did not grow past the upper half of the escarpment, where they gave way to what Valeria had hoped were more normal, if oversized, fern trees. On the other hand, she had seen other strange and frightening things, including what could only have been a snake moving through the foliage. It must have been huge: the part she had glimpsed had been as big around as her waist. She had caught sight of other things, too, darting through the ground cover or peering at her from the canopy above, things with glowing eyes that disappeared as soon as she looked in their direction.

  Hacking at the offending vines with her dagger, she pushed on up the slope. In addition to the dagger, she now also carried a spear that she had fashioned from the trunk of a small vine tree after cutting away the tendrils. The tree seemed to know that she intended to kill it, for the vines did their best to kill her first. She grinned at the thought of the tendrils, writhing on the ground as they wilted and died after she had stripped them from the trunk. If she’d had a flint, she’d have made a fire and burned them. Slowly.

  The spear also doubled as a walking stick, which had been useful up to this point. But now, with more and more of her ascent made on hands and knees, or climbing nearly straight up, it had become a hindrance. Despite the burden, she was reluctant to part with it.

  At last, just as the sun was dipping toward the horizon, she found herself looking up at the underside of the rocky lip that marked the top of the escarpment. She had to move laterally for some distance until she found a place where the rock had broken away and formed a slope of sorts, for it would have been impossible to climb over the protruding edge without the benefit of someone hauling her up by rope. Even so, it was a hard, nerve-wracking climb up the rocky cut, but with one final heave she reached the top. Panting, she crawled to where she had tossed up her spear, then used it to get to her feet. Her entire body was shaking with exertion, but she felt a sense of relief — and no little pride, as well — that she had made it to the top. It was not an accomplishment of which many Roman noblewomen could boast. The thought made her grin.

  Standing upon the bare rock, she watched the sun go to sleep, its reflection shimmering in the waves of the Haunted Sea as the sky glowed with bright hues of yellow, orange, and red. For just a moment, she was captivated by its beauty and forgot that she was alone, shipwrecked, and in a strange and hostile land.

  As the last rays gave way to darkness, she turned inland and shivered at the shadows of the unknown that lay before her. Gathering her courage, she tightened her grip on the spear and began to search for a place where she might be able to safely hole up for the night.

  ***

  Paulus and Pelonius were arguing over the nature of the enormous snake Marcus had killed,
and that they were now eating for dinner, when a familiar sound reached their ears, followed by a spine chilling squeal.

  As the sounds of the brief battle faded to silence, as one they said, “Hercules!”

  “The big kitty survived,” Septimus said with obvious relief. With a look at Marcus, who stared back, dumbfounded, he added, “And if that big fluff ball is alive, there’s a good chance that Valeria is, too.”

  “But where is he?” Paulus asked, looking about the forest around them as if he might be able to see the hexatiger from here.

  “The jungle makes telling direction difficult,” Pelonius said, “but I would guess he’s somewhere within a mile, two at the most.”

  “The sound came from that way,” Haakon said, pointing with his dagger, which had a fist sized chunk of half-roasted snake meat impaled upon it, to the northeast.

  The others looked at him with obvious skepticism. “And how would you know that?” Septimus asked.

  “Because I have great hearing.” He grinned. “I just choose not to listen.”

  Marcus fixed him with a hard stare. “Are you sure?”

  Wiping the smile from his face, Haakon nodded his head. “Yes. Distance I leave to Pelonius. But the sound definitely came from that direction.”

  The centurion got to his feet, but Pelonius stopped him from doing anything more. “Sit down, Marcus. All of us are exhausted, and only the gods know what we might find in the forest at night. Traveling by day was dangerous enough.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Paulus breathed. They had seen one of the vine trees that had ensnared a strange looking, horse-sized animal that looked like a cross between a zebra and a gazelle and was busy sucking it dry. Then they had stumbled on a huge flower in the middle of a circular clearing of bright grass that crunched under their sandals. The beautiful red and orange flower had opened at their approach, then shot a stream of sticky venom at Haakon. He would have been blinded, or worse, had Paulus not happened to ask him something at that moment, and the barbarian had turned to answer him. The fist sized gob of venom had landed in Haakon’s thick mane of blond hair, which was now shorn to a thin stubble over his skull. Then there was the troop of snow white monkeys that had howled at them and bombarded them with feces until Septimus, moving like a mongoose, took the head from one of them with his sword. The rest fled into the greenery, shrieking.