by Chris Turner
Dereas stared, entranced at the hustle and bustle and smells. Great, smoky, bell-bottomed cauldrons brewed a mixture of stews, meats and unknown substances. Elixirs? He could not say. The odours were overwhelming, and he smacked his lips, conscious of his hunger. Yet that sweet, sour pungency of alchemic brews and aromatic abhorrence, reminiscent of the wizards and shamans of the day, dulled any appetite. Instinctively he recoiled at the fuming vapours and the thick clouds that drifted up to assail their nostrils even at this height. The others eased back from the edge in distrust and misgiving.
The area swarmed with lizards, engaged in activities of hard labour, looking tiny from this distance: a phantasmagoria of nightmare and grotesquerie.
Some of the lizard figures walked on two feet, others on four, more often the latter. Certain gangs of them wore light mail and steel-tipped helms, cone-like in shape. Clusters of giant yellow eggs lay strewn about the cavern in heaps of dried weeds, mud or sand.
Dereas frowned. To keep them insulated and protected? The eggs could be the same they saw littering the tunnels between here and Xatu.
Stricken with awe, they caught sight of a massive fort set far back against the opposite cavern wall in the inky shadows. Some kind of a barbaric underground castle carved from the glistening black rock itself. A goliath of an outer rampart protected the inner citadel, all stone and black iron, looming aberrantly, like some stone dragon of yore. Realm of the lizards! thought Dereas. It was the last sight he and his crew expected in these dim confines.
The fort was oval, surrounded by thick parapets, from which rose seven corkscrew-shaped towers, silent as death. The grim ramparts ringed three sides, the back flank protected by the opposing cliff. More giant eggs festooned the parapets, also on the tops of the towers. Some were painted yellow, others green, and the strange folk, half-lizard, half-human, bobbed along the rude pathways with peculiar relish, dragging rocks of various sizes and carrying stone buckets. Crews of the lizards formed loosely-uniformed squads and seemed to be patrolling the outer confines of the cavern—even the passes in and out, whether they be scouts or guards. A central figure, perhaps a leader, gestured fervently to a knot of the creatures huddled before the fort. The lizard-man was taller than the rest, crouched on his hind legs, a good head above the others. His short front ‘hands’, more properly ‘fore-feet’, additionally served as legs when he descended on all fours from time to time. Even from this distance Dereas could see the figure wore a magnificent gold crown with glittering jewels at a jaunty angle on his slick bald head. His robe was patterned in blue-grey and white and his bare feet gripped the stone. In one reptilian hand he clutched a sceptre topped with a golden orb and encrusted in sparkling rubies and other gems.
Fezoul looked on in sombre fascination. He touched his brow in a gesture of supplication. His lips seemed pinched in the briefest tinge of awe, or was it fear?
Amethyst crystals and quartz hung from the domed ceiling, and still far overhead, the space glistened with unknown minerals. Below, the lizard kingdom spread in all its ominous, alien majesty.
Along the top quarter of the cavern, a ledge-like path ran with many dizzying ups and downs and inscriptions carved in the accompanying wall. The half-human creatures entered and left along this access path, to and from side chambers—patrol-lizards, workers, perhaps scouts, hauling stones on their backs or pushing large barrows or lugging stone pails and buckets of water.
Dereas’s eyes glistened. From the main cavern branched mysterious side tunnels that gaped like the mouths of ghouls—some of these going down to dark depths, beside which burned one or more guttering torches. Fire brands hung from cords on the battlements and in sconces on the fort walls and from long poles staked in the ground before the grilled gate.
The lizards had created an ingenious system of drawing water down from high places, he saw—a system of aqueducts which ran snaking from the upper walkways to the grounds below. All the aqueducts stood high on massive stone arches which reared like bowed legs of mantises. Such waterways ran from three-quarters of the way up the cavern down to the fort itself—to continue on into the common area. A particular main spillway weaved its way from the far flank of the cavern, disappearing into a squared-off hole in the fort’s far end. Another length of mortared stone dipped several feet down to let drop a stream of running water before the common ground. On this spillway Dereas saw Rusfaer’s eyes narrow, possibly in the hope of escaping this prison, or he thought sardonically, with the ambition of scouting out more treasure.
To bring the green-flowing liquid down to the common area was a major feat, Dereas reflected, and he saw where it was curiously distributed to various outlets in the work yard; in some, blending into a yellow goo to feed certain noxious pools.
Rusfaer turned to the dwarf and smiled cynically. “So, this is what you were afraid of, eh, mountain king?”
Fezoul stammered, “You do wrong to underestimate them.” His face had grown very pale in the dim light, and his hiss faded to a quavering murmur.
Dereas uttered a throaty growl, “What’s that?” He nudged the mountain king. Somewhere off in the distance, two crude pens housed what looked like giant, prehistoric reptiles.
A crawling sensation inched across Dereas’s skin. A pair, if he did not miss his guess—reptiles from an earlier age, caged in separate pens. Their backs were spiny, their legs armoured and their black and green hides showed dun spots on their flanks. They ranged in squalid holding pens, beasts low to the ground, with greenish necks, luminous eyes, and long slithering tongues of crimson and gold, flickering in and out in evident discontent.
Fezoul shook his head with a shudder. “I know not what these beasts are.”
“Liar!” snorted Rusfaer. He turned to grip the unsettled king. “I can see the deceit writ in your chicken-hearted face.”
Fezoul flushed a deep crimson.
For how long that group lay spellbound, frog-crouched in the murk, Dereas could not say. Fezoul was lost in his dull trance. In the sombre shadows, the beastslayer guessed Fezoul’s thoughts strayed far, to places decades back, hideous recollections of beasts and savage rites and rituals.
Draba was less mesmerized by this terror and had snuck off to examine the corridor a score of paces away—likely bored with the reptilian rustlings and the eerie activities below. He was more interested in chipping off glittering nuggets that adorned the corridor, prizes much more valuable than his peers’ bug-eyed reconnaissance. In the dim passage loomed a vast repository of virgin gold, bunched like fungus or knots of the rare masom root. While the greedy schemer busied himself examining a choice vein, the others watched the goings on below in oblivious fascination. On silent feet, the lizards in the cross tunnel glimpsed earlier, crept back to their post. Several paused to sniff at an unfamiliar scent and pay heed to a human figure running fingers along the gold-crusted wall.
Dereas suddenly became aware of Draba’s absence. His hand instinctually flew to his weapon.
“Where is that skulking Draba?” he hissed. A tinkling sound warned him of danger. The noise came from behind, like a tiny chisel on rock. What was the devil up to? The beastslayer wrenched his frame about. He crouched on his haunches, and quick anger leapt in his throat. “Look at your buffoon!” he hissed at Rusfaer.
The grim-lipped warrior reacted instantly, his eyes catching a glint of steel and an aggressive motion of weapon. He could not miss seeing the rat-faced lout hunched in the shadows, shining the light of his bowl at the wall, tapping at the rock, his eyes glittering.
Unaware of the lank-limbed menace nearby, the fool Draba picked relentlessly at a coruscation on the wall with his notched dagger, to pry forth the priceless gold nugget clinging to the stubborn rock. With a grunt of disgust, Rusfaer clenched a fist as Draba rocked back on his heels, showing a toothy grin. The rogue fingered the big chunk of raw gold he had just chipped from the exposed vein and gave the peering men a thumbs up.
Dereas hissed through his teeth. “Get back here, you
stupid moron!”
Draba gave him a cool, cock-eyed glance.
Rusfaer stifled a curse. Dereas sidled over to brain him with the hilt of his sword, but he stopped in midstep. The shadows had writhed with an unexpected flash of movement, and his jaw dropped in dismay.
Spears and poleaxes thickened in the gloom. Dozens of slapping, padding lizard-fiends burst into the chamber, their little coned helms and light mesh chest mail glinting in the light of their torches. Leather flaps were pasted to slimy cheeks and pulled back far, revealing reptilian maws and flared nostrils.
Draba staggered back, eyes bulging in terror. With a gurgling cry, he almost knocked Dereas to the ground in his stumbling haste to get away from the teeming lizards.
Dereas shoved him away with a disgusted roar. “Get off me, you idiot!”
The blade came to life in the beastslayer’s hand, an animated shaft with purpose and menace. The animal nature in him ignited and like an instinctive tiger, he lunged, muscles coiled in barbaric ferocity. He cut down a gnashing, green-snouted attacker and his comrade in one blinding motion. The lizard-men’s lives drained away in a crimson torrent of blood and brains onto the cold stone.
The creatures behind regrouped. They tramped over their dead comrades and lunged, snarling like hyenas.
Dereas slashed wildly, his mind lost in a fever of grim battle lust. With two hands he brought back his curved blade in a wide sweep. Arching death reached out and felled the foremost lizard who sought to sink teeth in his throat. Three more fell away howling and sprawled in crimson pools as he wheeled about to let them slide by while hacking at their vitals. A lizard tulwar scraped across his chest mail. He growled and smashed the butt of his sword into the attacker’s face, splintering jowl and teeth in one gruesome motion.
The clumsy Draba took a reckless bound into a few square feet clear of lizards. Slashing with his keen-edged sword, he grunted in satisfaction as a dumbstruck lizard’s throat was slit from ear to ear. Another skulking brute, crouching low, jammed a spear at Draba’s ribs to stick him like a pig, but he sidestepped this thrust and chopped at the lizard’s neck and it fell thrashing to the dank stone, thick blood draining like syrup.
Jhidik, Amexi and Hafta came rushing from their hidden place on the ledge, and Amexi’s mouth opened in a snarl. A tooth-snapping enemy had climbed on Dereas’s back and the blond warrior spearheaded it in one thrust.
Jhidik scrambled sideways to parry a gleaming tulwar from piercing his chief’s ribs. With a wicked, backhanded sweep, he sliced the grinning, gibbering lizard-man in mid stride.
Rusfaer and Hafta lent their swords to the fray, roaring and bellowing. Flashing blades seared through light mail rings and bloody gashes opened in two lizards’ scaled chests, vitals pouring forth like abattoir slop. They planted boots on chests and sent the grimacing, frothing lizards hurtling back on their haunches into the mob.
The pack rushed forward, torches gripped in hands and bright red teeth clacking and champing like mad jackals. Their yellow eyes glittered in the snouted ugliness of their faces, little forked tongues darting in and out of bestial maws. It was a mad, gnashing, frenzied throng, and one which brought the fugitives revulsion. Dereas lost ground. He slipped on blood and warm entrails, head-butted a lizard whose mouth came too close to his, so close he could smell its putrid breath. Another fiend hip-checked him off balance. But the beastslayer recovered and retaliated with a hard hooked punch that sent his foe reeling into the outthrust spears of two-score lizards pressing behind. A four foot shaft stuck out of the creature’s chest, like a gory totem pole.
A squadron of fiends burst through the wheezing, foremost ranks, trampling the unfortunate ones in front. They wielded tulwars and clubs, big, thick, rooted things of wood that should never have grown underground.
The fool, Draba, had recovered some of his wits and gripped his dripping weapon with vengeance. He stabbed, letting his whistling blade fly into a lizard’s gullet, carving flesh and slicing up through brain and eye. A razor-edged tulwar was his reward—flailing out of nowhere and leaving a widening gash on his swordarm, sending the shrieking rascal reeling back in a cloud of shock and agony. The creatures, despite their four foot height, were tenacious fighters. They ran nimbly forward on their hind legs, slashing and hacking with gleaming tulwars, guttural noises shrilling from the back of their reptilian throats. More were pouring in from the head of the tunnel. Their lightning fast attack and their growing numbers threatened to engulf the entire company in one noxious rush. Dereas and his companions were hard pressed to stay standing under that teeming mass of lizards.
“Back, I say!” Dereas roared into the confusion. “Close ranks! Fight them! Don’t let them flank us!” But there was nowhere to go...
With sick frustration, he saw too many of them had swarmed the company. Now the hot, blood-reeking air, thick with the stench of death, was dense with black, glistening devils with skin as dark as bullfrogs. Nonetheless, they moved with an agility that belied their ungainliness.
Either cut a swath through this army of Stygian filth or be pinned against the rim of the walkway and forced over the ledge into the abyss below. Captured like wild pigs was an alternative too grisly to ponder and a wave of grisly terror pricked his spine. Yet somehow, a quick plummet to a splattering end seemed the least ignominious of choices. His primal instincts pulsed to new life...either fight off these fiends now or suffer a hellish death.
Rusfaer was sweating and snorting like a bull. He was covered in blood, but in miraculous display of his war-hardened valour, he surged forward, sending snarling lizards to their deaths. But he was steadily being beaten back, overwhelmed by circling enemies. Growling in sheer blood-rage, he snatched a poleaxe from a gibbering lizard and windmilled it about his head. The gleaming construction of it was lighter than a human’s, almost like a hatchet, and he swung it effortlessly in his grip, his face lit with a fiendish wrath.
The lizards reeled back, grimacing and snarling. He whirled the weapon with savage strength. In a frozen moment, Dereas saw the bloodlust etched on Rusfaer’s face, the unfettered vitality of his wolf-like strength. Pride burned in Dereas’s eyes. Though lean lizards with eyes like savage beasts crowded forward, they fell back in ripe ruin at the rending death of Rusfaer’s scythe-like blows.
The muscles in Dereas’s arms corded. He chopped again and again, gritting his teeth at the glancing sweep of lizard clubs ringing against his chest mail. Dodging left and right, he whooped and slashed, inspired by his brother’s courage—Balael, what a warrior!—and Rusfaer struck over and over, tenfold like a cornered animal. Veins pulsed on his naked brow; his shoulders gleamed where rents in his hide cloak showed sunburnt skin beneath. Scars stained red. Tulwars licked at his mail coat, but turned on the fine-steel rings. Rusfaer’s eyes blazed with an inhuman rage, a hate for these obscene creatures. They were filth dredged from the cavernous depths below Vharad, something of human and lizard bloods mixed. The maimed reptiles whined and cringed, more from Rusfaer’s reaper-like shadow and his hulking fury than the threat of his naked blade singing carnage and death.
The wild, insane fury of his attack gave way, however. The lizards re-banded. He gripped two lizard poleaxes—a second snatched from the twitching claws of a prostrate lizard, now one in either hand. He whipped them in synchrony, severing heads, lopping off limbs, goring fleshy underbellies of foes and ruining complete sections of their faces.
The bloodbath raged on, throngs of them taken out at a time. Rusfaer cut a savage whirlwind of slaughter—bodies piled up underfoot, here, above the kingdom of the lizards.
Yet during the heat of the scramble, Fezoul had cornered himself between two slabs of rock. The meek monarch he was, he cringed and whimpered. His final act of appeal was to push both hands palms up, as in offering, as if it would stop the fiends’ breakneck rush. What an imbecile! A gleeful cry rose from a lizard in recognition of a sudden opportunity. It raced to hew down the dwarf—and pounced with a howl.
Dereas
caught a glimpse of the king’s plight, and at the last instant, caught the lizard’s upraised tulwar on his own blade, a stroke which would have impaled the dwarf to the adjoining wall. He struck the scaly aggressor like a battering ram. His role as protector blazed to life. He cut down the lizard in a jet of crimson—and Fezoul’s guts were spared from draping the tunnel’s floor.
Such an act was likely his undoing.
He lost his footing, cursed and slipped on fresh blood.
A leader of the throng with burnished coned helm suddenly pushed through the pack and snarled orders left and right. A flood of underlings rushed Dereas, sending him careening backwards. He caught a glimpse of crude nets and lariats being thrown over Jhidik and Fezoul. Why nets? Did they mean to capture them for some gruesome sport?
A glancing blow struck his helm. Stars flickered before Dereas’s eyes. He grunted and flailed with naked blade.
He struggled to his knees, tried to rise, but staggered back as he saw the lizard captain go down in a flying spray of gore under Rusfaer’s blood-flailing poleaxe.
He swayed, groped blindly. More lizards came at him, gnashing and frothing at the mouths. Before he could retaliate, a smothering press of lizardish bodies piled on top of him, threatening to snap his ribcage. He felt drowned in a sea of scaled flesh. Soles of flat padding feet crushed the breath out of him. Hot fetid fumes steamed from flared nostrils, blowing foulness on his shins, shoulders, back.
Grimaces of agony rippled on his face and anguished grunts wheezed from between his lips. He regretted letting Rusfaer convince him to probe these gold-cursed tunnels. Through the screen of arms and legs he caught a glimpse of his brother’s fierce gaze—a grim interlocking of eyes. Rusfaer’s expression was one of dismay, rather than disgust, as he watched his brother fall. Rusfaer struggled to free himself from the throng of lizards leaping all around him. “Balael! Cursed Zecrates! Why do you let the day dawn so dark, you black-hearted knave?” The uncouth blasphemies blasted from his rasping throat. It was all he could do to stagger farther along the tunnel.