by Chris Turner
The companions gathered their senses. They were so weak from hunger that they were wobbling on their feet. True, they had picked and eaten tufts of the leafy, dark green arizoi plant that grew from cracks in the tunnel walls, but this was meagre fare and certainly not enough to feed grown men. Dereas feared that being famished to the bone and suffering the privation they had, would bring them to the point of collapse.
In a fit of frustration, Hafta beat the torch on the ground to burn the hide of a limp, mangled rodent. As it sizzled, the smell of roasting flesh had the men’s mouths watering. He grabbed the creature impulsively by the tail and started to toast it over his torch. The others gazed dreamy-eyed at the roasting rodent, licking their lips with longing. And yet, in no time they were taking turns braising meat on their own swords. There were three rats to a man: unpalatable fare, but in their ravenous condition these hunks of coarse gristle went down their gullets in well-needed, grimacing gulps.
They set their backs to the wall, legs outstretched, chewing their rubbery fare, skewered on swords with a certain, subdued satisfaction.
Rusfaer, in between gulps, jocularily suggested they go back and fry some of the lizard hides gutted back at the geode cavern.
The joke did not go far. Dereas in his musings, pondered over the possibility that this very instant, the lizard corpses were part of Pygra’s own diet. He shuddered, thrusting the thought aside as he glared at his half-finished rat, which he tossed aside now, his appetite suddenly dulled.
Lulled by meat and the warm glow of a hunger momentarily sated, they lay down in mutual exhaustion, unable to keep the weariness out of their bones any longer, with Rusfaer muttering grudgingly he’d keep first watch.
An unknown time later, Dereas jerked awake, startled by an unfamiliar sound. A sudden, shadowy shape ripped through their company, snapping at their shins and poking at them with a shiny blade. The figure was like a shiver of wind—curses and reptilian chitters filled the air. Dereas scrabbled to his knees, jerked off his feet. Snatching for his sword, he groped for balance. But the blade came not quick enough and the shape bolted under his knees, upending his and Fezoul’s cap of Vitrin, plunging them all in near darkness.
There was a tangle of legs and a waving of arms. The half-eaten rat that Rusfaer had been gnawing prior to dozing off was ripped out of his ham fingers. The big warrior lurched to his feet, stumbling and cursing a sulphurous oath. The hellion sped on down the tunnel, leaving a dusty cloud and torch smoke in their faces, as if it had never been.
Dereas sat for long seconds in a wretched silence. A chill ran down his spine as a childish reptilian laugh echoed back through the murky tunnel.
The hand of Draba was in all this harum-scarum roguery.
“That little spook,” hissed Jhidik through his yawns, waving a fist. “I’ll lay the rotter full of good iron when he comes nipping at our heels again!”
“You will, will you?” Rusfaer gusted, venting a derisive snort. “You have to catch the weasel first. He’s a lot faster than you think.”
“Faster than a speeding lizard,” Dereas jested.
The Pirean snorted, “My patience is long wearing thin.”
Rusfaer shrugged and croaked out a laugh. “You’ll need more than ‘patience’ with that pesky sneak.”
Needless to say, it was less than humorous to be left in the pitch dark with a horror that was Pygra lurking about. Dereas groped his way through the sudden blackness, tapping with his sword. The others stumbled about on their hands and knees, grunting like hogs in a lightless pen.
Now without light and confined to a steep, stone-littered tunnel with nothing but rats and a mischievous trickster haunting their every step, they were like old men tapping blades like canes.
With appalling suddenness, a familiar serpentish slithering echoed from a distant tunnel. Dereas held his breath. It was a hair-raising sliding of slimy coils on rock—from far back down the way they had come. He felt a slimy tingle to his skin and the air freeze in his chest. Ironically, it came from the place that Draba had dissappeared into.
The sounds of the snake ramming its massive beak on stone should have been familiar to them by now, but not the childish reptilian chittering and eldritch laughter that rose above the tumult. It was like something out of a dark dream and Dereas’s face creased in an ugly grimace. He swore it was as if the lizard boy had lodged himself in a crevice and was actually goading the snake.
He crouched in the murk, his teeth bared in disbelief. How could the imp have managed to survive such an encounter? Or even conceive of such a ploy, if such it were, to bait the serpent? It was madness!
As if reading his brother’s mind, Rusfaer muttered an uneasy curse. “How I hate the murk and the march into sheer gloom. Quietly now. Let the imp get himself mauled by the snake. ’Tis not our time to die.”
Dereas stared into the inky spaces idly, his jaw loosening. “Not our time to die,” he echoed mechanically. Lips peeled back, he pulled the mountain king out of his frightful crouch and bunted him forward, a frail figure whose tongue seemed to have frozen to his palate.
“Your little bogeyman is a menace,” hissed Fezoul.
Dereas waved a weary hand. “’Twas your rebel’s priestess’s sorcery that made him so.”
“Aye, turned him into a ghoul,” growled Hafta without warmth.
The mountain king shrank back in his grimy robe, having no reply to offer that sullen group.
They felt their way along the rough tunnel walls, crawling on all fours like blind moles. Slowly and silently they arched a path away from the wretched tumult. So far no surprises or screeching rats had caught them unawares.
The moments passed in a progression of painful gropings and stumblings and their parched lips and aching muscles grew.
For how long had they crawled? Dereas squinted straight ahead into empty blackness. He shook his head in utter weariness. He rubbed his eyes in surrender. Not many times in his life could he count a hundred, dread thoughts swarming in at once. He felt a man on the rack, his fingers scored on rough stone and shale, his palms raw from supporting his sagging weight. The others too were haggard and disheartened, knees bruised, faces blackened with grime and filth, creeping on through the pitch black tunnel in wretched single file with the echoing fright of a serpentine thing haunting them jowl to toe. Lizardish drums had begun to thump, distant and booming, adding to their crawling fear. Such thuds heralded the fresh beat of the ‘Time of the Lizard’, thought Dereas. Even the acres of surrounding rock could not contain it. Like the throb of doom, it rose and fell, each cadence terrorizing their souls and chilling their blood.
Their only grace was that the tunnel was too narrow for the bloodthirsty serpent to slip through, but it was no joy to crawl on all fours through its endless drift without light, and with only a dreadful watchfulness that seeped from the crannies, following them on closely guarded heels like a salivating phantom.
Whether little Draba still lived to walk away from the trap the snake sprung for him was debatable. Perhaps his horseplay had finally caught up with him. Who was to know in that weird, soulless place? What foul god had manufactured this sinister warren? thought Dereas. Mazoma? That Draba had made it his playground, despite the horror of the snake, boggled his imagination. It was clear his new lizard-honed eyes were uncannily sharp and could flesh out the patter of a scarab beetle in the murk and make a wolf’s gaze into the moonlight look like the blind starings of a bull ox.
The men of Dereas’s company still wished to live, unlike Draba, not die tangled in the coils of an abysmal snake...
Aching and stiff, the wanderers took weary turns leading their way through the stifling murk, feeling damp stone ahead, hoping that nothing untoward would leap out at them and tear them to bits. But the wish was somewhat naive, considering the violence of the past, and even then, the swish of something sinister surprised Jhidik who jerked back in grunting confusion as a rock spider scuttled across his trembling hand.
The Pirean c
ringed and vowed that if he ever got out of this burrow, he would squash lizards like bugs. But such were the sputters of fools, thought Dereas and he shivered at the thought of facing those repulsive halfbreeds ever again, nor did he ever want to see the open maw of the thing they called ‘the Rgnadon’.
Dereas felt increasingly cramped and stifled in this rats’ den. At times he felt his head fogged like a harbour ghost-misted at dawn. He cursed the closeness of the air which was too rank for his liking and he cringed at the thought of crawling days on end through this sunless labyrinth, driven mad by starvation and terror.
Even so, he sensed Pygra’s breath ever at his heels.
It was something he felt rather than knew, for his instincts were sharp, as a Bosselian lynx, its blood pulsing in a timeless hunt for prey. His broad shoulders twitched under the threat of butchery that could erupt at any moment. He could almost hear the sounds of rending flesh and snapping bones, nay the gong of fate of slaughter, booming at his feet, groping for his throat and tearing out flesh and sinew. He could hear his brother grunting ahead of him, like a fretting sow. He smelt the sour-sweet reek of the mountain king’s sweat pouring from his skin. Deliriously, the dwarf scrambled on, struggling to stay abreast of the others—a large part of him wished not to stray an inch from a human body in this den of horrors.
At last, a faint glow finally winked out of the murk that stretched like an unending blanket into the distance. The glimmer of light radiated from a high place overhead—a square patch, like the casemented bars of a high prison wall.
In a spurt of hope, Dereas and the others crawled up through the last stretch of tunnel, nursing scraped knees and bashed shins. Their scrabble was like that of men lost in the desert wastes who see a mirage in the hazed distance of a well and crab toward it in hope of slaking their thirst.
The musical tinkling of water came to their ears—a sound rich and cool and refreshing in this world of forbidding stone and drafts. Dereas poked his head through and saw they could crawl into a dim chamber. It was lit bluish-green and rich with a modest waterfall that fell foaming from a height of thirty feet to empty into a small dark oval pool, black as pitch, in the bowl-like hollow below.
Down the slick rock they scaled their way—with shaking feet, searching for footholds and plunging trembling fingers into wet niches to crouch on a bare spot on the ground where they lay in heavy silence for a long while.
Their musings were like the reverie of gods, who breathe dreamlike thoughts.
They seemed to have found some oasis in a hostile world, a reprieve gifted by the hand of a merciful god.
After a time, the company stooped at the water’s edge and quenched their thirst, washing away the grime from their faces and bloody limbs. Dereas blinked—after rising from the pool and walking on numb feet over to the waterfall, he scowled at two grotesque statues carved of solid stone straddling either side of the plume of water. They were carved in the likeness of ‘bird men’—disturbing, squat, anthropomorphic figures, no larger than a man himself, gripping serpent-twined staves of omen, wearing grim, primitive faces. Their goblin-like wings were tucked in at the back, like seraphims from a violent time of the past.
Rusfaer, hunching at his brother’s shoulder, grunted in the ghost light and was the first to speak, “Here’s a lovely pair of shrews, if I’ve ever seen any. More grotesque things to haunt our dreams?” He winced through his teeth.
Fezoul smoothed the flaxen locks on his sweaty scalp and gestured in bemused fascination. “They were carved an age ago, these effigies, I suspect. Guardians. Etched from the oldest stone of Yarim-Id itself.”
“The trail ends here,” muttered Jhidik indifferently.
“We’ve never come to a dead end before,” announced Hafta, “especially one this intricate. ’Tis odd.”
“What isn’t odd in this hellish place?”
Hafta clucked in a rasping tone:“Let’s search this grim burrow. There’s no time to dawdle. The lizards are coming. Can’t you hear their wretched, booming drums behind us?”
“Yes, Hafta, we all hear it,” growled Rusfaer. “If it’s our time to die, then let us die. I will stand and fight, make no mistake.” He hefted his heavy sword, letting it glint with green fire aside the frog-coloured glare of the rushing water.
Dereas snorted at his brother’s contradictory and brainless chivalry. “Foolhardy to die when we can use our wits to live, brother.”
The uncanny glow of the water continued to bathe the chamber in its unearthly radiance. It was a source of fascination for the men, whose falling sheets illuminated the slabs of slanted rock around them in a ghostly grandeur.
They all examined each other and their surroundings with nervous fatigue, and not without a flicker of brief distrust and a certain distaste, avoiding the pool, not knowing what creature or creatures lived there.
It was a wise move. For the horrors of Yarim-Id pounced with singular and furious purpose. The high place from where the water fell was difficult to access, Dereas saw, because of its steepness, thus not a practical target. Above the cave mouth from where they had entered, loomed sheer rock carved in a myriad, evil faces not dissimilar to the ones that gazed forth from the grim guardians. The place from where the water issued was barely large enough to admit a man.
“No joy there,” Dereas grumbled pensively.
“There must be a way,” murmured Hafta. “We can’t sit here idly!”
“Don’t get your breeches in a knot!” chided Rusfaer. “We have enough troubles as it is, without you and our mountain king lifting your skirts at the slightest sound of a wood mouse or beetle.”
Hafta bridled at the comment and mumbled a half-strangled oath.
Fezoul stared at the carven statues and his memory seemed suddenly jogged by a tremor of the past. He stroked his round face and fiddled with his sleeve. “I remember, once—there was a legend told by our mystics, of a ‘hidden way’—a mist-veiled universe in itself—a portal to the damned, some passage behind the ‘Falling Curtain’.”
“What brings this high myth to your fanciful mind?” sneered Rusfaer.
“’Twas told by our earliest explorers,” explained Fezoul. “’Twas passed on by philosophers and bards of generations of repute. This ‘falling curtain’ most certainly means this waterfall.”
“How so?” grunted Rusfaer. “Seems an awful stretch to me.”
“You have not heard all,” exclaimed Fezoul. “The legend spoke of half birds and men, statues that would one day mark the portal to nevermore.”
“All very nice,” remarked Dereas, “but your portal to ‘nevermore’ seems a very vague fable and smacks of a mummer’s whispers... How does that help us now? I see no ‘portal’ or hidden universe, only a gleaming roil of frothing water.”
“’Tisn’t babble, Beastslayer, but the words of the old ones, their counsel,” retorted the mountain king. “The legends were always honoured by the skalds, whose visionary depth disguised profound truth in their poems and riddles.”
Rusfaer grunted in scepticism. Sheathing his sword, he blustered, “Well then, mountain king, let us see—” A few nimble strides had him straddling the nearest bird-man’s stony lap. With shoulder braced in the crook of its thick, bull neck, he jammed his sword backhandedly through the water.
There was no answering clank of metal on stone.
Rusfaer grunted. The gathered men blinked in puzzlement.
Hafta blundered up to perch ox-like alongside his glowering chief. He tested the waters with his own weapon and the blade passed through the rushing water, with again no answering clink of rock. The two exchanged quizzical glances and eyed the strange rush of water through narrowed lids. Hafta, with a cheerful salute, took a daring leap through the icy water, his body swallowed in a wash of greenish foam.
Dereas stood jaw agape. He counted the seconds pass.
Reflecting. Perhaps Hafta alone had dared plunge clean through the other side, because of over-impatience, to be away from the brooding crypt
s and endless tunnels and the grim echo of lizard drums. He did not emerge for a time and Dereas began to worry for his life. He hopped across the narrowest neck of the pool to mount the sinister bird-man’s twin on the other side of the falls, which crouched repugnantly. He stared back at Rusfaer. The brothers brooded with conflicting emotions. Both felt insignificantly impotent and bewildered and Dereas felt naked under the sombre gaze of those bloodless statues.
Dereas twitched, readjusted his grip on the muscular-ribbed shoulders of the gargoyle. Just as he was about to plunge in after Hafta, the New Wolves’ henchman staggered out, a sodden heap of dripping muscle. He crouched at the feet of Rusfaer’s guardian, his long tulwar clenched in a white fist, wearing a massive grin on his hardy face.
“There is a tunnel. You wouldn’t believe it!” he gasped. “Blackness, and cavernous echoes, but straight and dry. Hurry! You must see for yourselves.” The warrior’s matted locks bounced and coiled on his shoulders and his dripping mail and overcloak made him look like a bear-man, thought Dereas.
Hafta plunged his frame back in, and after a brief pause, they all took their turns, including Fezoul, deciding to brave the tumbling froth. And so, they left the sombre bird-men behind.
The beastslayer’s first sensation was a pricking chill as he dropped down several feet into a shallow depression. The initial shock of the icy water raining on his skull almost stopped his heart, but he shook out the water and stumbled on, banging into Rusfaer who hunched nearby and erupted into a spate of curses.
The tunnel was narrow and the fugitives were forced to crouch, familiarizing themselves with the perimeter of the passage. A dank, earthy smell permeated the cramped confines. Yet an eerie greenish glow illuminated the bare walls and the uncluttered confines, compliments of the Vitrin stream that ran lightly up the middle. Far ahead another rude opening emitted a wan light, perhaps a hundred yards distant. They clambered to reach it, their dripping weapons brandished and their boots sloshing on the puddles in the wet stone.