by Chris Turner
“Little Draba’s time came to an end too soon,” Jhidik rumbled, shaking his head. In his slack palm his dulled weapon dangled.
Dereas turned his gaze from the lightless chasm to face his strangely solemn brother. He frowned. “Draba saved your skin back there—all of our miserable hides truthfully. Though ’twas you who killed him by surprising him with your bared blade.”
“I don’t play nursemaid to my men,” Rusfaer muttered savagely. “’Twas his own fault, baiting the serpent unnecessarily. It could have been any one of us that fell back there—” But the warrior’s words hung hollowly in the air and bleak echoes fell in their wake down the vast chasm of Tutraken.
In disgust and some guilt, he stalked up the path, grumbling. Dereas gazed moodily after him, sensing the weight of the world shackled on his brother’s shoulders. He knew the thought of Pameel disturbed his soul in those restless moments. Only the strange light gleaming in his eyes reflected the inner fire which kept Rusfaer from ultimately succumbing to crippling madness and grief. They had lost three of their number now—and likewise more soon. The snake was behind them, a deathly shadow...but for how long that luxury would last, none knew.
Nor did they pause to gloat over the advantage. Up the ledge they shambled, like lost souls from Saeth’s hells.
With increased regularity small square caves made their appearances, cut sharply into the cliff face. But these they saw with apathetic eyes. Within lay triangular stone slabs, crude altars of sorts, blackened by age-old fires and peppered with decayed stray animal bones—presumably reptiles. Listlessly Rusfaer prodded these bones and his sword lay limp in his hands as they crumbled to dust right before his eyes. With a wordless grunt, he grumbled, and up he marched on with the others who followed his lead in sombre monotony. Countless images they saw carved in those walls, once painted with bright pigments, but now pale and dulled by aeons of moisture and decay.
The cliff face fell into shadows and they thought to see strange faces carved in its knotty hollows—of gods and celestial beings, winged lords, bestial and half man, interwoven in a frightful pantheon of scenes unheard-of, chronicling some rich elder mythology, almost incomprehensible. A fairyland orgy, a fantasy of otherworldly gods, bestial and profane. How the builders contrived to chip and carve those disquieting, larger than life bas-reliefs, Dereas could hardly fathom.
They came to witness other evidence of marvel, proto-human culture too, lost in those mists of past ages. Tall beings of stone, thin and brutish, not unlike the squat winged hominids that guarded the tunnels earlier. They seemed to be scattered everywhere in this desolate world—some straddling the pathway, forcing them to skirt it with awkward hops; others up the wall at shoulder height; others huddled below the ledge. Presumably these statues were the work of ancient peoples who worshipped winged gods, avatars, or some form of demons with characteristics of hybrid man and bird, both squat and tall. Perhaps they were of the same stock? Albeit disparate races that supported mutant threads of evolution? The genealogy was unclear and Dereas’s mind grew befuddled with such conjectures.
Cautiously they swerved round a sharp bend and ran nose to nose with a pair of mammoth statues—nay a single eldritch monument. Dereas saw they were carved of serpentine jade that guarded an ancient ropeway spanning the dusky, blue-shadowed chasm below. The monument also guarded the entrance to a massive gate, one branch which led back into the mountain—a dark, silent tunnel, hauntingly eerie that raised hairs on Dereas’s neck. Directly opposite, stood another which gave way curiously to an intricately twined bridge which sagged heavily on frayed cord over the daunting chasm to gain a similar vantage on the opposite cliff.
At this the wanderers gaped in awe, for it was of such sight to belie common understanding. The gateworks consisted of two, huge, megalithic statues clinging in ghastly symbiosis to each other, both poised on a sinister stoneworks of thick flat slabs. Squinting in the gloom, Dereas saw similar statue-works in the dusky distance brooding across the chasm. They guarded the black tunnel at the other end of that frayed, faraway rope way.
Dereas saw cords as wide as a man’s leg run in places across the bridge—brown and rotted things hung with many thick tattered threads knotting together slats of wood. The disturbing guardians watched sternly, entrance and exit to the gate, things of perverse origin and configuration.
He craned his neck, strove to take in the hideous stoneworks in a glance. The ropes hung danglingly from the raised palms of one of the statues—a tall, thin, winged man, perhaps thirty feet high. The cheerless effigy hung from its toes, gray-green wings tucked back in miserable supplication, dangling upside down from a giant stone gibbet suspended in the curved beak of a colossal bird, larger than the man, but with hoary wings outstretched and beak slightly ajar, perched on a rude, dark mantle of solid jade. The bird’s eyes glowed with prehistoric force—they were fierce, individual, invasive orbs, and omniscient, while the bestial face of the man was curled in an oppressed rictus of utter woe.
The whole panoply set Dereas’s nerves a-tingle. He gripped his lizard blade with new fervour. The image lent such monstrous insinuations as to sicken his soul and to provoke such inquiry as to why any race would sculpt such grotesque monsters or dare to step one foot on that bridge. Who were these morbid builders to fabricate such infernal architecture? Were the grim sentinels markers of some passage of rite of death? To the nether world across the chasm to the other side?
None would never know. Those strange mortals who had lived and died aeons before him, had taken their dark secrets with them.
Dereas scratched his chin with wonder. Beings such as those might have worshipped beasts akin to the Eakors—beasts that may have been privy to even more monstrous doings than their present day cousins.
Muffled tumult suddenly boomed below—a large creature crashing on stone?—the snake’s head perhaps? It appeared to issue from a cave carved scores of feet down in the side of the mysterious underground cliff. The noise echoed and the tumult rose nearer and Dereas felt a quickening of blood and panic. The mountain had a limited ceiling as he observed now, hazy outlines of a grey-black rock slitted with daylight peeking through vents too far up to discern. On this evil oasis they were now trapped, with the snake toiling below them in fury, on this inner mountain of doom. A predicament, Dereas mused gloomily—as doomed as any which had assailed them thus far.
The rope bridge would perhaps be their only recourse, he thought. The snake could not navigate the structure, surely? Its weight would crumple any man-made construction. The old ropes would snap, if it followed?
He rapped Rusfaer hard on the shoulder, directing his attention toward the bridge.
“What are you insinuating?” snarled the warrior. He regarded the bridge with impatient eyes and quirked his lips in a grimace of contempt.
Before the New Wolves’ chief could spout his criticism, Dereas caught a faint blur of movement—a whisper of smoky grey far down in the chasm, the stir of a great dim shape.
Dereas shrank back from the edge.
At the same moment some cavernous, gurgling croak as of a giant tortured raven poured forth from far below—and Fezoul’s eyes widened in terror.
A familiar monstrous green and brown wedge-shaped face suddenly reared itself up behind them at a bend in the ledge. The hypnotic head transfixed them with dread in the shadowy nearness.
Without warning Pygra leapt. Fezoul grabbed for Dereas’s legs with a whimpering sob. The beastslayer lunged with his own grunt of terror. He grasped for the open palms of the statue at the ropeway, while Rusfaer and Jhidik clawed fast on his heels.
Grunting in horror, the four had hardly clambered over the bird man’s outstretched stony palms, before the beast had manoeuvred her scaly hide in the space where they had last crouched. Raking her slithering tongue across the criss-crossing of ropes, she lunged. With a tremendous surge of strength, the creature sprang in a vicious ‘s’-shape, nearly ripping Jhidik’s and the mountain king’s legs from underneath
them. Its hideous mouth gaped and a wash of putrid vapours poured forth at their backs like a septic sea of ancient filth.
Gasping, they picked themselves up, running, tripping down the ropeway as the ancient ropes swayed back and forth but the ladder bridge held where Rusfaer and Dereas struggled ahead, scrabbling on in horror and confusion.
Cords shredded. In a nightmare of dismay, Dereas reeled back, felt the bridge lurch under his feet. The snake was on the bridge. He watched as cords severed from under him, and the snake behind blew fetid vapours from her flaring nostrils. The serpent dug disgusting fangs into the toughest wood of the bridge and held on. Like a pendulum, the fragile ropeway began falling, drifting, a dreamlike lifeline through space. With breakneck speed it whistled toward the opposite cliff while the four hung on with claw-like grips in utter despair.
The bridge was a renegade sail now full of a thousand holes with no wind to stop it; ghost-like, it fell across the gaping chasm.
The descent was everlasting and Dereas felt as if his heart leapt into his mouth. His eyes rolled upward. For a lunatic second the roar of wind rushed by his ears, and he felt his life pass before him, for the rope was overlong.
The snake thrashed and hissed now mere inches from his ear. Time stood still. Death stalked openly. Splatter by impact seemed imminent, for the fast approaching cliff teetered into view and the grey bestial faces carved in the sheer rock loomed ominously, hurtling nearer by the second.
From the gulfs below came a strange winged shape, emerging like a ghastly phantom like nothing ever before witnessed in this unholy mountain. And with a breath of underworld gods, drifted an otherwordly wind-like flapping, churning a dank breeze.
The tangle of ropes was no more than fifty feet from smashing into the cliff wall. The titanic winged thing swooped, lifted the writhing serpent in its claws.
The shape rose, bearing the body of man and the wings of a great bat, lifting the ophidian terror with the supreme power of titans while the flapping of its grey-skinned wings pounded like a scourge on the tomb-like air. The crippling burden on the ropeway suddenly lifted.
Dereas’s jaw hung open even as he swung in limbo. The upswing of forces and the play of thrusts of inconceivable magnitude careened in the opposite direction. It stopped the terrible momentum of the bridge. The ancient ropeway lightly crashed against the stone wall, sparing them an impact which would have crushed every bone in their bodies.
Dereas bowed to fate. Rusfaer, Jhidik and the mountain king hung like fish in the tangled rigging, gasping, heaving, sucking in great breaths of air. The mangled ropes spun in midair, banging and twisting against the cliff wall uneventfully.
Dereas looked up the sheer face. It was a hundred feet up to where a gigantic jade statue, not dissimilar to the one they had just left, hung in macabre, inverted poise. Below spread an ancient ledge, similar to the one they had vacated.
Rusfaer hung possum-like in the twines above his brother’s head. His rippling thews worked to climb those straining ropes and gain the ledge, the place where the gigantic bird-statue loomed.
Jhidik twirled slowly below in a tangled mass of shredded ropes. Directly above him, Dereas grimaced. He strove to gain another few feet up the twines of that impossible ladder. One hand was hooked into the mountain king’s robe, another gripped the straining ropes. He pulled the moaning monarch up to a stable perch where he could grab the jiggling cords himself. The mountain king did not fall to his doom as was fated, prey to the shadowy abyss below.
In morbid curiosity Dereas’s eyes strayed to the struggle across the gulf between winged creature and serpent—an eerie battle between inner mountain and sky. As a man in a dream, the beastslayer watched hypnotized as the tall, winged man-shape made play with talon-like feet—to clasp Pygra tighter and croak out a terrible, ravenish rasp. Swiftly it beat its ribbed, condor-long wings to keep the two of them aloft.
Dereas skin crawled. What was it? Bat? Gryphon? Man?—it was not evident. The strange being had secured its prize and now traced slow wide circles down to the place where it had come from—the place it had slept, the sleep of death, for an aeon with the patience of a martyr.
Squinting, Dereas perceived that the creature’s torso looked human, but the breadth of its eccentric body was altogether avian—and completely ghastly. The feet depending from the barrel torso housed claws, which had gouged rivulets into the snake’s hide, at roughly its middle section. Bat-like ears crowned a face with a crow’s beak. It drew greenish blood dripping in frothy streams down into the fissure. In this grip the snake writhed—if torment was any word for it, an emotion that Pygra could feel—that caused the bird-man to sway drunkenly in its meandering flight. The beast circled down, down slower and slower in broad loops.
But Pygra was not one to know defeat. She whipped her tail up and over the man-bird’s head. How, was a mystery only the gods could know. She was graced with a dexterity that Dereas could only marvel at. He saw that her body whipped faster than the strike of a cobra, and that she coiled gummy loops around the winged beast’s chest, faster and faster, pinning wing and constricting the thing’s lungs. The defence, a miracle in itself.
The bird-man arched in ghastly anguish and with a raucous roar lashed out its curved beak to snap at the slimy loops that plagued its flight. The dance of death caused the creature to jerk in midflight, but as it did, even its wretched lurching could not penetrate Pygra’s log-thick, steel-sprung coils. While she wound and wound, tighter and tighter, hissing fiendishly, a gurgling cry rasped from its throaty beak and its ribs splintered, bone by bone, vertebra by vertebra, spine snapped like a rotten twig.
Across the chasm, the fiendish roars and hisses caught the clinging companions broadside and they grimaced upon hearing its agony trumpeted as it died. The eldritch thing fell like a stone, but on an angle that was nearly diagonal, straight for the opposite cliffs. There it smashed headlong, cracking its skull open on a ledge, a few hundred feet from the place they had traversed.
Pygra quickly unfurled her coils and sprang from the lifeless corpse. She latched herself onto a stone projection abutting the ledge. Part of her glistening body was still wrapped around the thing’s neck, and while the mass slid down the sheer slope, the bird thing’s own weight ripped the grisly crown from its frame in a stringy spray of gristle and hanging tendons.
The great serpent widened her flexible mouth and fed on the gory head even as torso and wings slithered down into the abyss. In one rocking, swallowing motion she upended the head, and with massive throat muscles rippling and digesting fresh meat, the gory clump was gone, as if it were no more than scraps left out for the dogs to chew. The small bulge grew smaller as it travelled down her bulbous gullet and into the swelling coils as had Draba, Hafta and countless other beings...
Pygra turned and arched her ophidean head upward. Nostrils flared, she flickered tongue up at those who clung hundreds of feet across the gulf, sensing from that vast distance that their desperate crawl up the frayed ropes would do little to escape her. Her dead eyes fluttered, caught the dusky light twice and projected an interest and a sinister intelligence.
10:The Hall of Beasts
Each beast was worshipped in blood,
As a champion of ages,
Throughout time,
In cloud-wreathed Tutraken...
—‘The Rites of Passage of Vharad’
Even as Dereas stretched corded muscles to pull and heave his way up the tangled rigging, Rusfaer struggled for the ledge, his boot heels hitting Dereas full in the face, causing him a grunt of anguish. As he clawed angrily after his brother, a thousand questions poured through his wracked mind. Had Balael seen to their survival? What was this strange, sad creature that had died back in the abyss, crushed in Pygra’s coils? Something akin to the hideous bird thing carved at the steps leading up to the landing? What were its motives? The questions ran deep in Dereas’s brain, and he quailed.
The pain and shock of the impact still throbbed in his joints. He won
dered if yet there were more of these sombre, misshapen beasts slithering down in that abyss.
The thought made his blood curdle. He sent eyes scouring the frowning grey shadows for movement. But he could detect no sign, no hostility, nor hear any answering flap of barbaric, cruel wings come to sweep them away.
The creature seemed hauntingly similar to the one that hung upside down from the gibbet, but at the same time, different. Much broader of face and squatter of frame, and more gruesome than the thinner, smaller-winged, man-like version teetering in the dimness above. But then, who had dared craft these perverse effigies? Perhaps the carven creatures had evolved to their present day grisly renditions?
Slowly the companions heaved themselves closer to the statues, inch by lung-bursting inch. The cord-twined ropeway had turned ladder.
Dereas looked up aghast through the wreath of webs, into the stone-carved face of a bestial hawk-like vulture not a dozen feet up. Which evil was worse?—that or the real thing that had crumpled in a mangled heap somewhere below?
For an interminable instant Dereas’s senses refused to believe that the monster guardian looming above was not real but just some stone facsimile of the thing on the other side of the chasm. In any case, an inverted visage peered into his own.