David: Savakerrva, Book 1

by L. Brown

  Not worthy of a grunt, Ioso stayed quiet.

  “At least not yet,” said Dahkaa. “David will prevail.”

  Still no comment, Ioso just watched the Zahlen warriors wade ashore, a thousand men with weapons and bedrolls and casks. “Prevail or not, husband, I no longer care. All I want—”

  “You want what I want, Ioso. But whatever happened to our son—”

  “Whatever happened, no one knows. No one but him.” Turning a bit, Ioso focused on Logaht, on his bent-back slog under hundreds of pounds of rolled-up cloth. “And though I’ll never have proof — he did it, your ‘friend’ stole our child. And I’ll believe it till I die, till my very last—”

  “Dahkaa!” shouted someone behind, but neither Dahkaa nor Ioso turned. Recognizing the voice, they pretended not to hear.

  “Stand, Dahkaa!” ordered the General of the Clan of Blood. “We need to speak!”

  Pausing now, having no choice, Dahkaa turned to the General in his warrior-oared skiff.

  “Just drop me,” Ioso muttered. “I’d rather drown.”

  “I’d greet you, General,” Dahkaa called out, hoping the surf muffled her sleight, “but my hands are full.”

  “As are mine,” the General answered, now uncorking a voluminous flask. “So I’ll be quick. Now, we all know how this ends, and when the fly-light dies—” Nodding to Ioso, he eyed the necklace between the cleave of her breasts, the glowing red vial. “Then so will you both, your odious G’mach as well. However — and listen well, this offer is just — if you grant me rights to all you own, by my word, I’ll not harm what you now hold, your ‘property’ from the Tribes. So, my Zahlen brother; you’ll grant her that mercy? Let her live?”

  Dahkaa let the offer float a moment, considered the hooks of his bait. Then, “I assumed, brother, your plans would be fevered less with women and more with G’mach, ways to pierce the J’kel.”

  One oarsmen smirked, another bit back a smile, but the masked eyes went cold.

  “If it’s a fever ailing the General—” Ioso slid from Dahkaa and waded toward the skiff. “If that’s his torment, then should my husband agree to this? I’ll simply dust his food with a poisonous sleep, then drag him to the Ice and throw him in the trench. And if his fevered mind doesn’t kill the J’kel?” She eyed the General. “Then it can’t be killed.”

  She snapped off her lantern fly necklace. Scorching the General with her hot black glare, she then tossed it to Dahkaa and sloshed for shore.

  Dahkaa stayed quiet, his wife had said enough. But holding his ground, the masked stare as well, he watched the General swig from his flask, then kick the nearest man with an oar.

  The skiff departed, followed the warriors still wading in. Standing alone now, Dahkaa first eyed the necklace, then his wife, then finally lifted his gaze to the cave.

  Two warriors put fire to the cold torches, those bracketing the great arched mouth. And maybe it was moisture, the sea close in, but whatever the cause, the torches refused their call.

  Garth abhorred every breath. Breathing meant moving, and for mauling seconds and mangling hours, however many heartbeats had passed, he’d lived the advice of every grizzly tale ever read and played the deadest of dead. Yet he didn’t act for the bears, didn’t lay still in some Yellowstone wood, he pretended at death in the Cave of the Beast.

  But what that meant, what his current surroundings were like? Unknown. He kept his eyes closed and didn’t dare peek, so his world existed only through sound, touch, and scent. And though the rock beneath felt strangely warm, though he heard the buzz of bugs and, farther off, the screech of young Beasts, it was the scent that tortured, that kept him miserably awake.

  The same hideous odor detected before, the air of death and decay both suffused and oppressed. His eyes stayed shut, but he knew he laid in the cave’s foul bowels, some lair of ferment. More to the point, he laid here alone and would never be found, so again without hope, not the slightest chance, he played death to perfection, could do nothing else.

  Then she whispered Dahveed.

  He flinched at that, nearly snapped upright, because Eylahn sounded quite literally here. But if she was gone, if he wasn’t back in the Machine and asleep in the nets? Then besides the Beasts, he also suffered in the grip of delirium, some traumatic stress pre-or-post. Ignore it, he told himself, and gathering his wits, their frazzled remains, he returned to petrified form.

  “Dahveed?”

  Her bewildering immediacy opened his eyes, the uninjured left and his blood-crusted right. But instead of Eylahn, he saw only stone, paleo shades of cave veined with green phosphor glow.

  How he heard her, he didn’t know, but neither could he fathom his unguarded state, the big Beast had gone. Or so it seemed, but staring straight ahead, he couldn’t see much, so with the slowest of motions, Garth turned his head.

  Calcified leavings gnawed and cracked, the bones of creatures didn’t just litter the floor, they stacked. But other shapes piled as well, and as eyes adjusted and forms coalesced, Garth discerned clawed-over carcasses and half-eaten fish with some still gasping, still somehow alive while buzzing gnat bugs fed and bred in this gut of a cave. Survey complete, now wide awake, Garth awoke in the slaughterhouse of the Beast.

  Unable to cope, Garth shut down, closed his mind to the face of nature at her sustainable best. He pitied these creatures, those still alive, but then came the horror, the sure knowledge he was next. Grappling with panic, a whirling despair that dervished his thoughts, Garth wondered why life should bleed out here. Was agony the point, was existence meant to be cruel?

  A screech interrupted. The cry of a young Beast, it grew louder, then joined several more. They were coming, heading his way, and though Garth tried to lay still, resume his cadaverous play, the fear shook and quivered, he had to move. So grabbing the first thing he found, some gnawed little bone, he twisted toward the ear-piercing noise. But instead of Beasts, he saw only a hole, a gap in the slaughterhouse wall through which they would leap.

  Then he saw them, shadows beyond the breech. But instead of attacking, charging on in, they just tugged and battled, fought over… a fish? Red speckled, by the look, maybe the same hauled up the bluffs. But no large Beast appeared, the shadows looked juvenile, just several feet tall.

  So where, Garth wondered, was Kong? If the big Beast that struck him ruled this roost, then if he had left, he would also return. But then another question slipped in, and peering ahead, he wondered if that gap in the wall offered the only way out.

  Head turning, eyes darting, Garth assessed every shadow and crack. This slaughterhouse lair seemed nearly round, a dimly lit cavern under a high, jagged roof. Yet despite all squint, the walls looked solid, hid no other gap. Trapped, in short, and just like the rest of the inmates, he would succumb to the gnaw of the gnats and fangs of the Beast in a slow, masticating death. Reeling at the prospect, unable to cope, he laid his head back down; then discerned, by his new perspective, a carcass in a corner, some long-neck lizard about two weeks dead and an epoch removed.

  Prehistoric, the look, at least in terms of earth. But apparently on C’raggh, the extinction clock ran slow, about two-hundred million years behind. Yet the lizard at least provided a diversion, and quite without intent, Garth juggled two widely divergent thoughts. First, was murder the engine of life, did the universe Bang into existence just so carnivores could eat? And second, what was that?

  Barely illuminated, something near the lizard glinted deep red. Was it rock, some mineral exposed? Perhaps; though how it might help, Garth couldn’t imagine, so he simply ignored.

  Yet regardless of effort, all ignoring intent, the glint persisted, refused to go dark. But if Garth moved, tried to discover the glinting cause, wouldn’t the juveniles attack? Likely they would, but wasn’t that inevitable if he also stayed put? Conflicted at the impasse, the bloody crossroads of die later or now, Garth tried to breathe deep, then tried once more. Then without expectation, just a hot and cold sweat, he began his twenty-fo
ot journey with a first crawling inch.

  And snapped, by accident, a dry, brittle bone.

  Garth braced for the charge, the screech through the gap. But as moments dragged and nothing rushed in, he heard only the usual, just the buzz of the bugs and, from the Beasts, their ravenous chomp and snap. Breathing again, eyeing a path with the least bony snap, he resumed.

  But the pursuit of silence slowed his pace, and as he advanced by mere fractions of inch, the trek to the red glint became a torture all its own. Creeping through kidneys and livers, through ropey intestinal tracts and various unrecognizable parts, Garth slogged through the stuff of life now in decay. Yet despite the horror of the feel and all heinous stench, at least he moved, no longer played at death. But then it got worse.

  Sheeting with sweat, he attracted the swarms, and as the cousins of midges and relations of gnat scoured his skin, Garth suffered in active passivity, for he could neither swat nor flinch, could only endure. Biting never ceased and neither did the din, the buzz blitzing his ears, and when summed with the squish and the stench and the fear of the Beasts about to scream in, Garth knew he wouldn’t make it, would fail once more and this time, for the last.

  Then he saw it, the old lizard’s claw. That fossil-worthy heap waited just three feet ahead, so this was it, the end of his trek, but when he raised his gaze, he found something else.

  Slumped and well-gnawed, the body and face might have once been a man. A young man, by best forensic guess, and though shredded clothes obscured his remains, his rusty brown hair framed a mouth forever agape; a reaction, perhaps, to his missing right arm. But at least he still had his left, and as Garth followed the tattered sleeve to his half-eaten hand, he found the glint that fired his crawl, a ruby-like jewel in a gray steel hilt.

  A blade?

  An X-blade, just one?

  Suddenly roused, Garth checked all around. He searched for the curved, the mate for the straight that would spawn the spark, but despite every turn and strain of his gaze, he found nothing, the curved was gone.

  Worthless, almost, one straight blade would hardly deter a juvenile, much less Kong. Yet still it was something, better than bone, so reaching toward the half-eaten hand, Garth tugged out the knife. Solid, the blade, the steel remained strong, and by the elaborate engraving in the red jeweled hilt, it didn’t lack for artistic flash. But the only flash that mattered was a high-voltage arc, so had this poor man really just lost his blade, was it really nowhere close?

  The possibility roused a fresh search. Desperation quickening his pulse, Garth threw off all caution and raked through the bones, everything hung on finding the curved. But regardless of need, this last frantic chance, fate brought only maggots and flies, one of which now bounced off his cheek, then landed on something above, a dangle of arm.

  Human, by the look. And by Garth’s sweaty squint, it seemed sleeved in the same cloth as the dead man’s coat. So it was his, this severed limb, but the question, all that mattered was what, if anything, its hand still held. Unable to tell — the arm hung by its wrist, was wedged in a chasm two feet above — Garth had to free it, so without further thought, he gave it a yank.

  The arm popped loose with a silver-red glint, with the blade still held by the atrophied hand. Thrilled a moment, Garth now recoiled from the flash of two needle-like fangs. Something was up there, had shared the chasm with the X-blade and hand, and as Garth peered in, a panther-black vaalik growled stay back.

  But the growl soon faded, died in a wheeze. And as the vaalik panted, Garth saw its emaciated state, how ribs corrugated its flanks. More troubling, the creature now flinched, shook its glare off Garth and back towards the gap, and when the buzz of the flies failed to muffle the crack of a bone, Garth never looked, just ducked.

  A bloody fish head whizzed overhead and smacked the cave wall. Then came screeching, the riot rushing in, six juvenile Beasts scooped up bones and threw them at Garth. Or so he first thought, but as the barrage continued, the golech howled loudest when they hit the chasm, the black vaalik just out of reach.

  Reminded of orcas, some playful pod tormenting a seal, Garth watched the bones fly while the vaalik just hid. But if the Zahlen prized vaaliks for their courage, then why no fight? Was it just too afraid, had it lost its will, were we now just the same? A strange moment for empathy, so perhaps it was just the kinship of prey, but whatever the reason, when the largest juvenile sprung forward, so did Garth.

  Yet instead of the Beast, Garth went for the blade, and after ripping it from the dead-finger grip, he squeezed the triggers of the straight and curved.

  The sparked arc defined anemic, just a pale, crackly ffft. Yet weak or not, when the charge raked the soft, young skin between patches of fur, the juvenile’s screech hit the next octave up.

  The scorched golech leaped to the lair’s high ceiling and clung to rock. Suddenly quiet, the pack cocked their heads and blinked, but Garth’s bewilderment surpassed even theirs; were the blades nearly dead, was that their best spark?

  Hoping for lightning, but holding much less, he now recalled Dahkaa’s warning, how the caves impaired the blade’s kick. And as the golech above shook off its burn, the five other juveniles snarled at the prey with one bare foot and two shaky blades. But electrical dysfunction or not, they didn’t attack, the gang of six just stared perplexed, for after eons as orcas, they’d just been stung by a seal.

  The smallest Beast retreated, backed into the gap. Garth could hardly believe it — were they scared? — but the small golech didn’t run, it just paused in the exit, then loosed a long cry.

  The reply quaked the cave. Raging and resonant, the bellowing swells were both utterly incoherent and completely clear, vengeance was coming and would not delay. But with no effective weapon nor other way out, Garth could only backpedal, just press against rock as the big bull Beast shot the gap and leapt overhead, then roared from its perch fifteen feet up.

  Horrific, its wail, but worse was the sight, this almighty Kong dethroned all predacious pretenders, none were close. No Mother Nature could have borne such a beast, yet as Garth shivered in his sweat, he beheld a species outrageously alive, some bastard primate rejected by the tar pit for violations of fur, ragged swaths now vacillating through brown, orange, and red. Its dark claws and darker fangs could eviscerate just by sight, but nothing vexed like its crown, the snarl of horns that thistled its head. Yet if every facet repulsed, the gaze simply repelled, for the jeweled green eyes gleamed with not just ferocity, but sense, an intelligence hinting it knew.

  Kong perceived Garth’s state, the pheromones fouling his sweat. But the alpha golech stayed put, just stared down and seethed. Which didn’t make sense, but as Garth discerned its actual focus, it appeared to be the blades.

  “Back!” Garth rasped, now hoisting them high. “Get back!”

  More taunted than threatened, Kong jumped down with a roar. No choice left, Garth had to act regardless of effect, so squeezing the triggers, he snapped an arc from the straight blade to the curved, a flash so faint, it would barely singe fur. Yet it wasn’t Kong’s tough hide square in Garth’s aim, and though the golech’s state of rage rendered it nearly impervious to pain, that wasn’t so true for its tongue.

  Jolted through the wet of its mouth, the Beast reacted just like a man, and cleaving the cave with an agonized bray, it staggered as if stunned.

  “Stay away!” shouted Garth, hoisting the blades. “Stay back or I’ll do it again!” Then for emphasis, he squeezed the triggers once more. But whatever he thought would happen, the sparks glimmered even weaker than before.

  Kong noticed. And as its patchy fur quilled and colored, shimmered between shades of fire and blood, the big golech leapt back to the ceiling, then bounded off the walls. Difficult to follow, the shadowy blur made Garth duck and dodge and then just dizzy, he couldn’t keep up.

  Kong slammed Garth to the slaughterhouse floor, the splintered carpet of bones. Vaguely aware, but sprawled in a heap, Garth thwarted a follow-up strike with a
blind swipe of his blades. But he knew he couldn’t last, another blow and he’d be the freshest meat here. A fact, it seemed, grasped by the Beasts, and as the young squealed for more, Kong resumed his near-missing bounds, a rabid wilding of slash and wail.

  Bleary and shaking and completely outmatched, Garth knew he would lose. He couldn’t stop Kong, couldn’t slow him or wound him or give much of a scare, his blades packed the punch of a nine-volt hug. So now he would fall and here he would rot, but as he redoubled his grip and tried not to faint, something distracted, a crumpled white page.

  The note? Perhaps more an omen, but there it was, his mother’s farewell had fallen from his pocket, now laid on the bones.

  Then in his head, the old note spoke, just screamed through the ink to notice what piled beneath, the bones so deep and the bones all round. How he missed their telltale shape, Garth didn’t know, but as memories flared with the ashen room of Ioso’s son and the smoky stench of the Greenland cave, every thought blazed into one.

  Could it work?

  Bones shattered and mealy fat flew as Kong crushed a carcass just a few feet away. Fearless again, no longer spooked by two biteless blades, the bull golech reared to his full seven feet, then affirmed its dominance with a deep-bellied roar.

  Hideous, the sound. An aural coup de grace, the golech used it to shatter any last resistance, reduce a victim to grovel and squirm. But instead of submitting, of crumpling like the others larding this tomb, Garth tried something new.

  Stabbing the note with his blades, he squeezed the triggers and crackled an arc, every last spark.

  Then he just watched the ineffectual result, because whatever his hope, it fell short. Ruined by the sea, his swim through the mist, the paper resisted, was apparently too damp.

  Kong sensed it, saw it in the eyes; his scared prey had succumbed, would no longer fight. So true to instinct, what ecstatic bulls do, it jumped down beside and pummeled the bones, just stomped about with dominance, the golech farewell taunt. And though it worked, though it robbed the boy of every last hope, the pummel and stomp also aerated the floor, brought oxygen to bones baked by ages of upwelling heat and lit, just now, by the faintest of sparks.