by Chris Turner
“He needs help,” Dereas muttered hopelessly.
“Go, then,” Jhidik mumbled. He had crept up on silent feet to lay a hand on his chief’s shoulder. “I am useless with my lame leg. I cannot climb these walls.”
Dereas forced a grunting acknowledgement. He stood silently, looking past his friend. They clasped forearms in the long tradition of the Huughite warrior caste and free tribes of the north.
Like a banshee, Dereas wheeled up out of the shadows and advanced toward the fortress walls.
As he raced to the section of wall Rusfaer had earlier climbed, he stopped dead in his tracks. Coiling in the dusky shadows crept a willowy, mutant figure of dripping blasphemy that reared up from the eggish slime. Dereas dodged and slashed the thing, avoiding its slimy reach of egg-born weirdness..while to his ears drifted saurian roars of Greta and Kruger who caught howling lizards in their teeth or trampled them at the far end of the cavern.
The beastslayer was just in time to glimpse Hafta in a belated, free-for-all crawl up the rampart. “Wait!” he cried madly. The grim, scar-faced warrior had waited in the shadows, seeing for some time no change of guard or moment of inattention whereby he could launch himself up the wall. “Cover me,” Dereas growled up at him. “Stop them from hurling their spears.”
In a flash he was climbing up the rough stone, pushing hard his heels on rods and gripping stone fangs and claws for support. True to form, Hafta jumped down into the shadows of the common ground, and crouched, ready to deal with any attacker who would scale the wall, craving the beastslayer’s skin. Dereas reached the end of his perilous ascent and gripped the battlements, where a crafty lieutenant awaited him, wielding a bone-white curved tulwar. The weapon slammed down where his fingers had just been.
Dereas croaked out a curse. The lieutenant’s mouth opened in a brazen cry. The enemy slashed out again.
A miscalculated move. The lizard was unfamiliar with the speed or size of the grim-lipped warrior who faced him. In the blink of an eye a fist smashed into its groin as the beastslayer lifted himself up over the embrasure with his other hand. Dereas did a backward roll, which had him crashing up against a nearby egg carrier.
The egg teetered but did not fall. Dereas somersaulted next to his assailant which lay gasping for breath. The tulwar slipped effortlessly out of Dereas’s scabbard to lock swords with another evil-looking captain of the parapet-watch. The lizard’s eyes gleamed in anticipation. A miserable snarl escaped the jowly snout complete with green and red tongue flicking out, before it died.
Dereas had beat the horror back easily for he had the advantage of height. The next guard he pinned against an egg and ran it clear through his body.
Bright red lizard blood gushed out on the stones. The blade went on to pierce deep through the shell and the hybrid within.
A tiny gasping squeal issued forth...Dereas shivered. The egg split in two. He could hardly repress his distaste. He shouldered the egg over the parapet and the dying lizard with it, taking the miserable imp confined within. He did not bother to look down—or see what was left of the mess. Down the parapet he hurried.
A short flight of stairs later, he plunged fleet-footed down the walkway, which curved in a half spiral. The eggs that lined this rough corridor were like jewels on a crown. He was satisfied he had come this far and fled on down the way wide enough for five men to clamber abreast. Some of the eggs were larger here than others. Some glinted dully of different colours, others were garishly painted, and ornamented with gold leaf and jewels.
He did not pause to admire these trophies. He could see a straight stretch above the castle gate and halted, glaring sourly. A clot of attackers leaped about his brother who still held his own, but was waning fast. A thick sweat glistened on Rusfaer’s brow. His mail was rent with new gashes and smeared with blood.
Dereas snorted in disgust. He jigged up behind two attackers who had Rusfaer pinned from behind. He sliced their knees clear through the sinew. They fell in sickening thuds, legs dangling from strings of scaly flesh. Dereas kicked them, or what was left of them, over the side. He let his blade sink into more slick flesh, cutting lizards down left and centre while Rusfaer craned his neck and caught a glimpse of the stormy figure who was his brother wreaking ruin at every step. He loosed a cry of triumph. His eyes were wide with glee when he saw Dereas cutting whole swaths of lizards down that had jammed the parapet, preventing any escape. Rusfaer gave the war cry of his people. “To Balael with these devils!” His sword lanced into furious action and bit like gator teeth into glistening lizard hide, rising and falling in arcs of gleaming crimson. Dereas looked up to see a streaking sword-edge rise under the glare of torchlight, showering blood and gristle as Rusfaer’s great blade split reptile-snouted heads and clove shambling bodies.
How the beastslayer cheered Rusfaer’s fiery resilience! He shook his head in fierce pride—envious at the same time of the skill that his brother showed and his ruthless strength. No less did he admire that bone cleaver of his, snatched from the hands of a dead lizard! It was of a superior cutting quality than the traditional steel of his people and it fit in his hand with a lightness he did not know possible.
The two brothers circled back to back, defending a space that allowed their tulwars full play. They were like spokes of a radiating wheel turning on a hub, guarding their territory with jealous wrath. They slashed wantonly, jumping and dodging the strikes of the lizards, a dancing circle of death, taking foes out, mailed or unmailed by the dozens. If ever a foe penetrated their ground, the other warrior would leap in to strike off a limb or knee an attacker to doom or lop off a head. Some fell screaming to the flaming fires erupting below. Others tumbled on the giant egg looming close, and slipped over the parapets to the paves below. These sent hairline cracks spidering up the shell while others bounced off the surface to land in a crumbled mess of broken bones.
The two managed to batter back the horde, slipping on runnels of blood, launching a storm of cuts and strikes wherever possible. All the while they preserved their back-to-back formation with swords notched and ringing, blunted in the gloom cut by flickering torches. The tough lizard blades took the brunt of the force. The wolfish hardness of Rusfaer’s attack was the stuff of legend. He was indeed a staggering, awe-inspiring sight, though now beginning to falter as Dereas saw. The beastslayer danced and feinted, his lighter frame a moving target that eluded the ever-swift lizards. But a dull ache began to arch up his sword arm. His lips were parched with fierce thirst and twisted in a battle-bitter smile. His flesh shivered in the mists of battle lust. As he rended and hewed, noble images came to his mind—the hours of sweat and exercise he and his brother had toiled and shared together, the endless weapons’ training, the hand-to-hand combat, the hauling of weights up great hills, the climbing of trees, scaling boulders, stalking prey in the woods, scouting the misty forests along the foothills for game.
A lizard fell cleaved from ear to ear. Bloody foam formed on its jowl. Rusfaer went down with it...
Dereas flinched, for his brother had stumbled, missing a stroke that had slipped past his guard. Now the New Wolves’ chief lay fallen under a seething stench of lizard flesh.
For a heartbeat, Dereas quailed; his concentration slipped, his arm went numb under a ringing parry. His hope faltered that his brother would get up.
A twitching hand grasping a bloody sword tore up through the writhing masses. But that was all Dereas could see. In a second, he too was swept away by a tide of lizard flesh. He caught crazy glimpses of twisting bodies falling on the giant egg in the courtyard, the egg battered beyond repair. The shell had started to buckle; wide cracks opened. A guttural cry pierced the air. More and more screams came rippling up from the throngs below. The egg started to tremble; it rocked dangerously as if something untoward moved within, awakening from a violently-interrupted incubation.
Lizards below pointed up at the two rebels. In their guttural tongues, they called for death. In desperation more guards tramped up the steps to g
ain the parapets from the inner court, clad in rough jerkins and steel caps.
The numbers were staggering and Dereas’s heart skipped a beat. He was surrounded by lizard foes and looked back to the place from where he had come. He saw the entire area teeming with snarling, gnashing enemies. Their only escape route lay covered with maggot-like forms. Up the parapet steps lizards swarmed. Down the dusky wall they could not climb, or the parapet steps on the inner wall, without getting hewn down by lizards egging to gut them and cut off their heads. They were doomed!
Dereas’s flesh crawled. Black Balael, how the day had turned evil! He caught a confused string of glimpses of Hafta and Jhidik in the court below flinging rocks at the eggs on the parapets, shattering the treasures. Oozing meat and bits of shells dripped down the walls. A fierce wave of pride coursed through Dereas’s heart in those frenzied moments. It was a diversion of daring scope, he thought, but it was taking its toll. Some of the attention had been taken off his and Rusfaer’s assault and for this, he managed a ghastly smile, though he feared for his friends’ lives as much as his own. They faced a sea of enemies—and two gargantuan reptiles below, and there were scores more lizards swarming at their heels as if that were not enough to plague their daring rock-hurling.
Dereas howled. Smoke billowed up from the flames devouring the cages and anything combustible. He thundered a war curse. In-between hacks and parries, he kicked and tore away three struggling lizards to pull his battered brother to his feet. Dereas’s white-eyed grimace alerted Rusfaer to the peril they were in.
“We all have to die sometime, brother,” gasped the New Wolves’ chief in a deep-throated rasp.
“Die yes—but not become one of them!” Dereas flailed his sword. A swift arc swept clean through the snout of a frothing lizard.
An ugly scowl formed across Rusfaer’s face as he staggered to stay erect. He feinted left, let his dripping blade move with a primal strength. He struck with a zeal that belied the weakening hand behind it. An instinctual sweep severed off another lizard’s head. Perhaps there lay a moment of lull when tiring muscles and gasping lungs had time to recoup. Not always...
A lizard guard pulled Rusfaer forward and two others jumped on his sword arm. Dereas saw his brother grimace in agony as they tried to wrest the blade from his grasp, and take him alive.
He should have been carved to pieces, but on the shrill order of some lizard captain, word was out to make a lizard of him yet—or so it seemed.
A throng of reptilian guards, sensing their chance of victory, stormed the Egg Slayer. Rusfaer thrashed. He snorted and faced them undaunted, blood trickling down his cheeks. A score of wounds showed on his arms and legs. The horde had just gained the parapets and were now eager for victory. An unusually large lizard-guard grabbed Rusfaer around the waist. Despite the warrior’s savage slashes and teeth clamped into the aggressor’s scaly neck, the lizard’s tackle sent Rusfaer reeling and sprawling heavily upon his knees.
Rusfaer was knocked down hard on his back; his breath wheezed out in a ragged gasp. He grabbed onto a forelimb, throwing the lizard-foe off balance and started to careen off the edge. Dereas made a desperate lunge for his brother. He missed, grabbed with straining fervour onto the ankles of the lizard-at-arms to try to prevent the two from tumbling off the parapet.
To no avail. Instead the beastslayer felt himself being dragged forward by their combined weights and his clawed fingers scraping across the parapet’s blood-stained stone.
The three fell from the parapet, plummeting through the swirling smoke...Dereas smashed into the giant egg, knocking every ounce of breath out of his lungs.
The egg swayed and trembled. It rocked back and forth like a foundering ship in a storm. There was something large, something fierce and unwholesomely sinister breaking free.
The pedestal crumpled and fell; the riven egg tumbled free of its flimsy housing to smash on the flagstones. It almost crushed Rusfaer and Dereas. They groped drunkenly to their knees, heads swimming in a blind daze, gulping great breaths into their lungs.
About the inner courtyard the two stumbled, casting vague eyes on a blurred scene of Jhidik and Amexi struggling far off with lizards-at-arms under the portcullis. The brothers tottered away, toward their comrades, shaken and bruised with swimming heads and stinging limbs...The piles of heads and soft torsos of other lizards that had crashed before them had prevented them from a certain death.
7:Rise of the Rgnadon
Man and beast fell into slavish degeneracy,
Twined in sorcery ancient beyond memory,
’Twas a Saeth-bred god’s perfect playground,
When men and beast worship one other,
In blind fever of dominion!
—From ‘Chronicles of the Beastly Ages’, Amar-Amon-Reth, the Telamon king
A blast of rank heat raged at Rusfaer’s and Dereas’s backs, almost sending them sprawling to their knees. Twisting in terror, they looked up—into a horrendous red and purple face which had cleared free of the viscous yolk. The mouth yawned cavernously, its serrated, triangular teeth dripping slime.
The creature’s roar filled the cavern and smote the rebel’s bodies like a blast of thunder. The beast shook off the sludge and the fragments of thick shell as would a dog fling wetness from soiled fur. It stood tall on all fours, eyes blinking redly under the torchlit glare, surveying its surroundings with a dull, critical stare. Dereas thought the newly-birthed reptile looked like a thing out of Kizoi’s hell, so little was it enthused at its first glimpses of lizard and human life in this squalid courtyard. It pawed the ground, fiendish eyes blazing on the staring men, while a repulsive wattled fan of skin flared outward around its neck with sharp spikes attached.
Dereas crabbed sideways, baring his broken weapon. Though it gleamed knife-like in his palms, it was useless to him, shorn in half from his fall. He gaped in incomprehension at the monstrous thing that towered over him. Without proper blade to fight it, he stood no chance. Perhaps the evil thing’s early hatching had spawned some hybrid intermediary. He did not know. He only knew that looming before him crouched some giant salamander-like proto-saurian which held no classification in the known world.
His brother had managed to paw his rusty weapon out of the filth and looked ready to try keeping the thing at bay; but now, he and Dereas crouched stock still, paralyzed in the shadow of the awesome creature.
Then they ran.
In the courtyard, pandemonium reigned. Lizards fled in all directions, trampling each other in herds, grunting in their terror.
The brothers cursed in unison. They flew under the raised portcullis, bowling over heel-rooted defenders who gaped up at the birth of their coming god.
The elephantine legs were thick as logs, plated with scaly hide and it lumbered on feet that were webbed, duck-like things, not at all long, and clawed like a lizard’s. The spiny wedge-shaped ridges lining its back looked strangely reminiscent of shark fins—possibly some weird, ancient defence against enemies—and if one looked carefully, it was possible to see the slit gills on either side of its misshapen face pocked with raw knots and wens.
The lizard king came marching from the court, preceded by his bodyguard paving a resolute path. They shoved aside any who hindered their advance.
Dereas engaged two of the scaly assailants scrambling to meet them. He and Rusfaer cut them down before hacking their way through an aggressive knot of lizard foes that blocked their way. Reptilian faces shone with feverish intensity. Dereas could almost taste the fetid reek that wafted from their gasping snouts. The two kept away from the wooshing tulwars, their legs pumping toward the section of wall near the pens. Their aim was to get Jhidik, Hafta and the others.
In a springing leap, Dereas cleared an overturned grindstone. He cleared a pile of Tyrannus bones, not yet made into blades—then leapt over a corpse in two strides, relieving the dead bodyguard of his curved blade. The new lizard tulwar felt good in his hand, tapered at the end, razor sharp, feather light, and it cast a
dreadful pall on the lizards he met—cleaving flesh as he gutted attackers that stormed him from all sides while he bulled his way through.
The monster roared and cracked archways with its slimy teeth and tail, but now it burst out of the castle gate, mangling the top half of the portcullis with powerful jaws. The bellows of doom were in answer to the distant roar of its fellow saurians. The calls had stirred within it a primitive instinct and it pushed forward, searching every cranny for its kin. Catching sight of Greta and Kruger at the far end of the cavern, it loped to greet them in a swaying, two-beat gait, with head and grotesque body swivelling opposite the leading leg.
But ‘greet’ was a euphemism. Its repulsive features became a more mottled, scabrous mask of unpredictable passion as it struck out like a komodo in their direction. Greta and Kruger had overturned cauldrons and scattered lizard folk every which way, and were now caught in a rage of violence. The frightened lizards that did not get out of the Rgnadon’s way were trampled or gored on the thing’s bristling neck spikes.
Dereas glanced at the misshapen head and shuddered. The horror of it running loose in these close confines was blood-chilling.
Released too from his burning pen, Draba had come to life. The lizard-man was like a disoriented child and a lime-black shadow of his former self. But he seemed weirdly affected by the cursed witch-magic of the priestess. The caricature that was Draba came reeling after them, puppet-like. His lizardly frame shook with great chitters of excitement. He pulsed with what seemed intense memories from a former life, edged with a shiver of nightmare. It was the same weasel-faced Draba he had always known, but now with a lizard’s oval skull and a spotted hide and hideous snout.