by Alison Baird
“We bring to you the heathen warrior Damion,” the first soldier said to the elderly priest who stood before the plain stone altar, head bowed. “Servant of the Daughter of Night, a victory offering to Valdur.”
“Pah! What is this?” spat the old man, lifting his gray head. His eyes did not turn to them, but seemed fixed on a far corner of the ceiling: their sockets were scarred and he was, Damion realized, completely blind. “Has Khalazar nothing better to offer than the blood of barbarians? First you send us goats and swine; then you send us unbelievers! Is there not a single loyal Zimbouran who will die for his god? In days of old nothing but the sacrifice of many fine youths and maidens would have sufficed for such a petition. Does Khalazar think that for this worthless barbarian’s life Valdur will grant him victory over the Tryna Lia?”
“Blasphemy!” snapped the guard. “King Khalazar is Valdur’s incarnation on earth. Do you think he does not know what pleases him? If he desires barbarian blood he shall have it.”
The old man drew himself up. “It is you who blaspheme. When Valdur comes again it will be in might, as a great warrior, not as an aged dullard who never wielded sword.”
“Ingrate!” the second soldier cried, letting go of Damion. “Khalazar-Valdur shall know of this! He brought your priesthood to power again, old fool: what he gave he can take away again.” He drew his sword with a rasp of steel.
The blind priest did not flinch at the sound, but stood firm. “We owe him nothing. His role in this was foreordained: he was born for one reason only, to give us that power. When Valdur is done with him, Valdur will cast him aside. Already he has outlived his sole purpose, and his presumption grows and turns to sacrilege. As for this prisoner, I will accept him for the altar—but only so that I may bring a further curse on Khalazar. Unholy blood taints the holy place. At the close of the high festival tomorrow I will sacrifice him. He will die with the sun, as is the custom. But no sooner than that will I do it. And if the true god Valdur is angered by this act, then he knows that I am blameless, and his wrath will fall on Khalazar. Your God-king too may not live to see the day that follows.”
The guards threw Damion to the ground before the altar, then strode out of the chamber, slamming the door. At once the sanctum was thrown into deep darkness. There was no lamp—the old priest, of course, having no need for any illumination. For many years he had dwelt within the temple, since he blinded himself to banish from sight the Creation that he held was a deception of lesser gods. He performed his duties by touch and memory, slaying his animal victims by feeling first for their beating hearts, groping his way about the sanctum until habit taught him how many steps lay between altar and doorway, and where in the floor the well-shaft opened, with no cover or raised rim to protect him from the deadly plunge. The acolyte never stirred from his post by the door, save at his master’s command, following the sound of the priest’s voice with unquestioning trust.
Damion lay in the black absolute darkness, feeling the chill stone beneath him, and the tremors that were beginning to shake his body. He had consented to this fate on leaving his circle in the sand, but the flesh had its own will, independent of the waking mind and even of the dream-spinning unconscious. An ancient purpose had been written into its every nerve and vessel, and that purpose was to live. The fleeting fear he had known on the threshold of the sanctum had roused it, and though he had conquered it again his hands of themselves began to strain against their bonds, while his feet made little running motions against the stone floor.
Then the image of Ailia once again floated before his eyes, and he knew in that moment how strong was his love and admiration for her, and how worthy she was of any effort he could make on her behalf—even this fearsome sacrifice. Closing his eyes, he retreated to his own inner darkness and the deep refuge where no pain could come. Ailia’s face followed him there.
21
The Tide Turns
THE GREAT ARENA of Zimboura was a work of ancient times, built by slaves from massive blocks of red granite with a sanded oval floor large enough for whole battalions to fight one another. Here, trained gladiators in the prime of their strength dueled one another, and beasts were baited and slain, or themselves slew and devoured renegade slaves and other prisoners. Paladins had perished here in days of old, and even Nemerei been made to fight desperate duels of magic against still more powerful sorcerers. During Khalazar’s reign the cruel spectacles were held more frequently than ever before, and were more extravagant and larger in scale. It was said that wild beasts had grown scarce throughout Zimboura, as many of them had been captured at the king’s pleasure for his games.
In the upper levels the wealthy spectators feasted as they reclined on divans and watched the battles below, while statues of Valdur and the minor gods gazed down upon them with painted eyes. Far beneath these marble-faced pleasure halls, as if forming a hell to their heaven, lay a subterranean warren of torchlit tunnels and holding pens. Here condemned prisoners awaited their doom, while the captive beasts—bears, bulls, ostriches, rhinoceri, and great cats—paced restlessly behind iron bars, and gladiators honed their weapons and practiced battle strokes before their turn in the arena came. It was a strange combination of armory, dungeon, and menagerie. The dank walls seemed to absorb the anguish and despair of the lives they imprisoned, and to breathe it forth again as a sickly miasma. Some victims had scratched final messages on the reeking stone, in the tongues of the various lands from whence they came. Amid the pathetic graffiti and caricatures were marks a young Jomar had made years ago, as he awaited his turn to fight: insults leveled at the Zimbourans in mute defiance.
He had not known then that he would survive, nor dreamed that he would one day return here . . .
He sat now on a wooden bench, shackled, with several other prisoners: Mohara rebels, and Arainian captives taken in the desert battle. Lorelyn was not with them; he did not know where she had been taken. Some were Nemerei, including the great Ezmon Magus, but their iron bonds prevented them from using their sorcery. They had been here for two nights and two days, after being removed from the dungeons of Yanuvan. The others talked in low voices, but Jomar stared at the grimy stone floor, worn smooth by generations of doomed feet. How many had died here, he wondered—several wars’ worth, perhaps, of helpless victims? And now he was here again—not even as a gladiator this time, but as an unarmed prisoner marked for execution. He gazed with dull eyes at the iron cages a few paces away, which housed a pair of lions with mangy manes and one saber-toothed cat. The latter somewhat resembled a maneless lion but for its bobbed tail, and its fangs: two long blades of bone like scimitars that hung below its lower jaw. The great cat reared up whenever anyone walked past its prison, roaring and thrusting its fearsome tusks through the iron bars.
He shuddered, filled with evil memories of fighting these beasts in the arena above. But this was not the foe he and his fellow captives were to face. There were new and more terrible arena beasts, it was whispered, creatures brought by the goblins out of their own world of Ombar.
A whip cracked on the air: he and the others looked up to see the slave master standing there, his broad scarred face mocking. “It’s time, you sluggards! Up to the arena with you now—move!” The man leered at Jomar, whom he remembered well. He was plainly delighted to have “the Mulatto” in his power again. “You, too, my friend. Thought you’d got away, eh? They often think that, the ones that come in here. Somehow they’ll escape, break free, find a way out. But they all die, man and beast: there’s but one way out of here.” He laughed aloud, as if at an exquisite jest. Jomar made no reply.
Shackled together, they trudged in single file past the iron cages and up the stair beyond, blinking as the short tunnel brought them into sudden sunlight. Before them spread the floor of sand, already patched in places with spilled blood, and all around them rose in tier upon tier the seats and marble galleries. But there was only a scattering of spectators in the upper tiers, and the royal box was empty.
Th
e prisoners clumped together on the hot sand, waiting. Jomar stared at a nearby animal carcass, one of many strewn about the arena. Another sabertooth. The great cat had been literally torn apart, as if by giant claws. He swallowed. What were these beasts of Ombar like?
“I don’t suppose,” he said dully to the Nemerei, “any of you has animal-charming abilities?”
“Even if we had,” said Ezmon Magus, raising his manacled hands, “we would not be able to use them.”
“Take off their shackles and manacles,” said the slave master to his thralls. “Except for those that wear the neckchain: they are Nemerei, and must remain bound with iron. But the others shall have the free use of their arms and legs. If all the prisoners are bound they will die too quickly, and Khalazar wishes to see some sport.”
The Mohara prisoners and the soldiers of Arainia were released and forced at spearpoint to walk on, into the middle of the arena. Jomar now noticed some large indistinct shapes lurking behind the arched entrances of the three holding cells at the opposite end of the great stadium. He walked closer, his heart beginning to pound in a dismally familiar way. These were the chosen beasts, their adversaries—or rather their executioners, for he and his companions had no hope of surviving their attacks. As he drew nearer the shapes resolved themselves into huge creatures, the spawn of nightmares. There was a great bird taller than a camel, with a cruel hooked beak, long neck, and legs as thick around as young trees. When it saw him it rushed at the gate of its enclosure, clashed its beak against the bars, and screeched. In the second cell lay a heap of scales and horny plates that somewhat resembled a crocodile, only much larger. In the third—what in Valdur’s name was it? It looked like an animal whose hide had been flayed off, or like something expelled from its mother’s womb before it was fully formed: “mooncalf” was his first thought on seeing it. It was a shapeless, gelatinous thing, pulsing veins and pallid tendons plainly visible through flesh and muscle translucent as a jellyfish’s mantle. From the center of the amorphous mass a single red eye stared.
A messenger ran out of the tunnel they had just exited. “The king will not be coming after all. There has been rioting in the streets and the guards cannot guarantee his safety. But he desires that the prisoners be executed anyway. There are fears that their rebel allies may try to free them.”
“Well, what shall it be?” bellowed the slave master to the tiers of seats above. “The boobrie bird, the afanc, or perhaps the nuckelavee?”
There was only a roar from the crowds in the lower seats, and the voices of those in the upper levels could not be heard.
The slave master grinned broadly. “Did I hear them say nuckelavee? Yes—I’m sure I did.” He and the other thralls strode back to the tunnel. “Release the third beast!” he yelled as he passed back through the entrance and closed and locked its iron gate.
The barrier to the third cell was raised with a grinding noise. And the glistening bulk of the nuckelavee rose, and thrust out its one-eyed head, and crawled out onto the sand of the arena. Now that it was exposed to the light and no longer lying down, its true shape became apparent to the onlookers. Twenty feet in height, it stood on four splayed limbs, but from its sides there grew many other strange appendages, flat and finlike, as though it were a creature of the water as well as of land. Its head was broad and split nearly in half by a vast, grinning, whalelike mouth. Above it the great crimson eye stared: it was set at the very front of the head, in what would have been the tip of the muzzle in any other animal. The color of the beast’s body was pale purplish-red, and it was netted with dark veins, and the shadowy shapes of the organs and of its massive bones were visible as the suns’ rays slanted through it.
Even a seasoned warrior could scarcely endure such a sight. Cries of terror broke from the prisoners’ lips, and those who had been freed from their shackles huddled in a group, trembling.
“No! Don’t all clump together like that! Separate!” Jomar yelled at them. “The thing’s only got one eye. Confuse it!”
The giant monocular head swung to and fro, seeming to debate which victim to attack first. Then it lunged toward two prisoners who were closer together than the rest. It moved with terrifying speed for something so large: the prisoners screamed and fled, both running in the same direction. Jomar swore and raced after predator and prey. “No—no! Go in different directions! Confuse it, I said!” he bawled at them. They were too panic-stricken to hear.
Jomar looked desperately about the arena as he ran. What was he to do without a weapon? Nothing but sand all around him—not even a stick or stone. There were a few bones from slain animals lying on the ground, but what use would they be against this monster?
Then his eye fell on the carcass of the sabertooth.
Stooping, he snatched up a large leg bone from those scattered on the sand without breaking his stride, and then he turned and sprinted for the dead cat’s body. Throwing himself down on his knees beside it, he began to hammer at its muzzle with the bone, glancing over his shoulder as the nuckelavee harried its prey to and fro. With repeated blows he finally succeeded in knocking one of the huge curved teeth from the dead animal’s upper jaw. As he stood clutching the tusk by its bloody root he felt courage flow back into him. Perhaps it was only the fact that he now had a weapon of sorts; or perhaps, as the shaman had said, the spirit strength of the dead beast was somehow entering into him. He yearned suddenly for Lorelyn, for her strength and speed and her own calm unwavering courage. She would have stood at his side, faced the monster with him.
There was a terrible cry from behind him. A huge bony claw lashed out, knocking one man to the ground and pinning him down. The beast’s fanged jaws opened.
The creature’s only got one eye. Blind it and it’ll be helpless. But that eye was above a huge raging mouth, full of fangs. Could he climb onto its back and get at the eye from atop its head?
Avoiding the cyclopean stare, he ran for the beast’s back and flung himself on it. The gelatinous flesh was sticky to the touch and the feel of it disgusted him, but he dug in the fang of the cat like a grappling hook. Tarlike black blood oozed forth from the wound. The beast, its jaws in the act of closing on its prey, bucked violently. Jomar fell off onto the sandy floor and lay for a moment dazed. Then he struggled to his hands and knees. The jaws of the beast were already filled with its victim, who was still screaming and flailing his limbs about. The nuckelavee shook its head from side to side, then lay down on the sand to worry its prey as a lion does.
At once Jomar ran in, attacking this time from the front.
He leaned over the thrashing man, leaned right into the monster’s hideous translucent face. The single red eye glared out of the central socket in the skull. With his free hand he scooped up some sand, and cast it into that huge orb. A transparent lid shuttered the eye and the beast bellowed. As it did so its open jaws released their grip on their prey.
Jomar gave an answering yell. Then he hurled himself, not backward but forward, almost into the very mouth of the beast, a glistening red-purple cavern, from whose black throat came a foul stench and a deafening roar. He grabbed at the torso of the helpless man with his free hand, wrapping his arm about him, and pulled with all his strength. With the other he made chopping motions at the inside of the mouth and the flailing purple tongue, carving deep wounds into them. Injure an animal’s mouth, he thought, and it may lose its eagerness to devour you.
One great yellow fang scored a bloody gash along his forearm as the jaws snapped shut. But neither man was trapped within the maw: the swooning victim had fallen to the sand, where he now lay insensible both of the danger and of his rescue, while Jomar sprang to one side and waved his arms again to draw the monster to him. The nuckelavee stood for a moment shuddering. Then it advanced, and its tremendous jaws opened wide again to engulf him.
Again he leaped forward, into the very mouth of the beast, using its lower jaw for a foothold. Seizing the upper jaw with his left hand and reaching up with his right, he plunged the cat�
�s tooth into the giant eye.
There was a deafening bellow and the tooth was torn from his hand. He fell backward as the beast spun on its thick legs, flinging its head about and pawing at its eye. It succeeded in dislodging the bloodied tooth, which tumbled to the sand. But he had achieved his aim: it was blinded. Maddened with pain and terror it lashed out in all directions, and its frenzied gyrations brought it ever nearer to the prone body of its first victim, who was now stirring and trying to heave himself up. If it stepped on him he would be crushed. Jomar ran for the fallen cat fang and caught it up again. It was gored and slippery to the touch now: he rolled it in the sand, and then gripped it in both hands. The nuckelavee stood motionless again, heaving and quivering, its shapeless head cocked at an angle. Of course: deprived of vision, it was either listening or smelling for its prey. Suddenly it charged, straight at Jomar: striking out with its forelimbs, seeking to maul its unseen tormentor and avenge its injuries.
Dodging the blows, he ducked his head low and darted between the front legs, until he stood right underneath the sagging belly. Then standing straight again, he stabbed upward. The tooth, designed to pierce the thick shaggy hide of mastodons, sliced into the nuckelavee’s soft underside with ease. It was a good thing the creature’s vitals were clearly displayed, or he would never have known where to strike. With all his might he brought the tusk up, again and again. More black blood and foul-smelling fluids gushed out as he slashed at pulsing vessels and bloated organs, and at the baglike lungs. Then he flung himself to one side, rolling free as the legs bowed and collapsed like broken pillars, and the beast with a final howling cry collapsed upon the sand.
It was dead.
The din of the crowd was trebled. Jomar looked up, rubbing blood and sweat from his eyes, to see people pouring over the barricades and onto the arena floor. Screaming women and yelling men were everywhere. Had he survived the fight only to be torn limb from limb by a savage thwarted mob? One cat’s tooth was no use against this, and his muscles shrilled with fatigue. He tried to rise, and fell back onto his knees.