Avenger, page 20
part #2 of Swords and Skulls Series
The ominous bird-god floated on spindly legs in the dimness, fresh blood on its beak.
The creature hovered with impossible authority, jade wings flapping with a batlike fury. Half of the collar was seared to the thing’s stony neck, still smoking as if it had melted on contact with the jade. The other half was pulsing in brilliant colour at its feet. Balir had hooked the thing, but something had gone awry. The relic smoked and sizzled while Balir hopped about, trying to staunch the flow jetting from his severed fingers. The agonized man wrapped his hand under his tunic, ripped off a portion, and struggled with his good hand to twine a leather cord from the hem of his pouch to secure the bandage.
The miniature god fluttered a few feet forward, eyeing Balir and the knot of quivering figures with disdain. The eyes of the thing were lit with an inhuman burning intensity. As if an alien force had possessed it. The blood water—had infused the fiend with life. But how?
The monster cawed out a guttural shriek. Vetra could only construe it as rancour at the desecration of its temple by the fighting men milling about. With a brisk pulsing of stony wings it gained height and flew full into the fray. A masked ratman came running at it with full speed and an upraised spear. Dapi jabbed out its beak, and pierced the offender through the chest.
The man gurgled out a sickening sound. The stone-carved beast whizzed past Balir, brushing a sharp edge of wing across his cheek, drawing blood.
Wings beat with fury. It tore through the attacking ratmen pack, transfixing another with its bill and plunging it into the foremost man’s mouth, sucking blood. Vetra gaped in flesh-crawling disgust. The others fled back in terror.
Dapi’s throat worked, as if drawing the man’s innards with every spasm—the victim’s eyes went dead, as if his soul had been sucked out of his body. Deeper the beak plunged into the man’s mouth and worked down the bulging throat until he was a blood-soaked mess. Beak pulled out innards while tiny hands caught up the slop to gulp it down like a ghoul. The bird rammed beak in again and loosed a belligerent caw which half blew out the man’s stomach.
Vetra and Kalaman staggered back in horror.
“Get away from it!” Vetra cried out. “The thing sucks up men’s souls!”
The mercenaries from Lausern howled in dismay. The bird quivered at its conquest, wormed its beak deeper into human mouth and flesh. The defenders clambered back into the shadows. The ratmen followed aghast at the husk of man which had fallen away like a butcher’s beef slab. The corpse was completely bloodless and white-faced. Dapi, or whatever the demon god’s name was, burned with a fierce, vampirish glow.
Balir clutched his blade in his good hand and tottered back. He reeled toward Vetra and Kalaman to engage the small knot of masked foes who scrambled alongside the retreating mercenaries.
Despite his handicap, Balir smote with his sword and sprang lightly on his feet, agile enough to foil the clacking spears and knives of the ratmen. His muscular sword arm made up for any missing fingers.
Vetra could not understand why the ratmen continued to menace them in the presence of the ghoul. Was so much priestly blood worth that of a few outlanders?
A clang of a spearhead rang on his helm, sending his head swimming in a dizzy fog. The torchlit gloom wavered. Clouds of mist shimmered before his eyes. A priest had snuck up behind him and outmanoeuvred him, damn his rat-hide!
Vetra roused himself from his stupor, while flashing stars careened about his head. But he ploughed on, shoving merciless steel into human guts, parrying forked spears questing for his vitals.
The priests were bold but ineffective in close quarters. The only advantage they had over Vetra was their numbers, and their long spears which kept whirling blades at bay with their longer reach, helping the wielders avoid a gut slash.
But bodies lay thick in the ghastly splendour. Vetra clashed sword against the spears of the fool priests who still fought him. He wheeled as the god-thing passed within a hair’s breadth. The ratmen fled in terrified droves back up the corridor, nursing staggering losses, calling supplications to their god. The demon bird croaked a grisly, guttural, an utterly un-human sound unlike anything Vetra had ever before heard.
“Back the way of the old keeper!” he thundered. A strange compulsion had him dashing over to where the smoking collar lay. He flicked it up with the tip of his sword, caught it in midair, before pushing through the knot of wild-eyed rat-men. Why waste time on the relic? His mission was botched. But there might be a chance he could bridle the horror that had been loosed. Some other stubborn, sinister reason burned at the back of his mind.
Laskar, grabbing bolts out of victims, slapped them in his leather pouch before scrambling up the tunnel after Vetra and the others.
Balir, pressing his hand to his side, winced through his pain and gripped his weapon with fierce defiance in his good right hand.
How the day had gone terribly wrong! Vetra grimaced as he fled up the tunnel where the old woman had disappeared. If the bird did not finish them, or the wrathful ratmen, there was always Caglios. The old wizard would not forgive this botch-up. Vetra shuddered for the hundredth time at the memory of the wretch who had flouted the wizard’s authority. Dergath’s blood! What fiendish end would come of them all?
The four limped their way along the gloomy passage, trying to put as much distance between the god-fiend as possible. The corridor was narrow and lit with torches hung at sporadic intervals on polished walls.
“What a grand bungling!” Kalaman raged.
“Aye.” Vetra shook the half segment of collar in his white-knuckled fist. He stared at Balir. “Why did you have to snatch the collar out of my hands? I yelled at you to snap it on the thing’s neck. ‘Put the collar on first, lest the falcon's wrath burst.’ Remember the rhyme? Instead, you go and whisper ‘birdie, birdie’ in its stupid ear.”
Balir gave a blood-flecked snarl. “Enough! Dergath’s three hells about the rhyme! I’m a warrior not a necromancer. No bard am I to fuss around with some maudlin verse.” He scowled through his pain, pausing to redress his wound. He sheathed blade in his bloody scabbard and tottered up the corridor to keep up with his fellows.
In the torchlit gloom, dim echoes rang—the bloody hackwork of beak thrusting against bodies, chirping cries, the clink and chop of death dwindling to an unreal nightmare. The tinkling waters of the devil pool faded from earshot.
Vetra saw his henchman was now white with shock. He pulled Balir alongside him. “A bad business getting your fingers snapped off like that. It’s crazy. Was the thing really stone, or something of flesh and blood?”
“Its beak was stone,” murmured Balir in a hoarse voice. “It was like no living thing I ever saw.” He rattled out a gasp. “A devil, Vetra! Not a god. Some cursed thing of the swamps!”
“Quiet down.” Vetra ducked his head, trying to see back down the passage. “We’ve loosed some barbarous horror in these corridors. Or that swine Caglios has, via his macabre magic. It has something to do with his prophecies and that devil pool,” he rasped, “not that everything in this damnable canyon isn’t cursed. At least the god-bird is taking care of our masked pests.” He grunted at Balir. “You, my friend, drew the short straw.”
Balir laughed in sour irony at the remark and coughed up phlegm. “A hefty price to pay for a blunder. I’ll survive. And have my revenge on these rat mongers—plus that conniving wizard of yours.”
“Famous last words,” muttered Vetra. “We have yet to get out of this labyrinth.” He turned the collar over in his hand. The remnant was half broken, blackened, and its rough surface gleamed like obsidian as if at one time it had been subjected to high heat. The primitive serpentine and garnet gems in it glowered with ominous purpose.
“The collar was given me as a countering force,” Vetra muttered. “The old wizard said it was a container, should the deity become too powerful.”
“A little late for that now,” Kalaman growled.
“I had it in my hands,” Balir lamented. “Next thing I know this demon jumps at me like some spider from hell. I should have—” He choked back the words, unable to continue.
“Take it easy, Balir,” said Vetra.
Kalaman stared at Balir’s mangled hand. “I saw it with my own eyes. The collar seared into the statue’s skin. It was animated by unknown forces, a stone goblin if I ever saw one, something that should not exist. It whipped its beak round and snapped the collar out of Balir’s hand, snipping two of his fingers at the same time as if they were twigs in a vice.”
“No matter. What’s done is done.”
“Let’s hope the old keeper kept this way lighted,” grumbled Kalaman. “The glow seems to be petering out—red as the blood water from that damnable pool. We may be able to get ourselves back to the main avenue, if we keep our wits about us.”
On heavy feet they stumbled up the passage, panting and grunting like pigs. The last path the keeper took they followed, leaving blood-stained prints on the floor. The lighted way grew duskier with smoking torchlight. Blinking in the gloom, Vetra noted the irregularly-spaced torches guttered and cast dancing shadows along the rough stone walls.
The paves petered out to bare rock, which lay buckled and heaved up at places. The two-dimensional wall carvings, worn and chipped, depicted ancient priests carrying offerings to winged gods, also sinister beast-headed deities, suns, moons, and constellations. Walls and ceiling ran with them, the latter looming a few feet above their heads. No reassuring open sky in this corridor.
“Let’s move our feet,” urged Vetra. “We need to get as far from that ghoul as possible.”
Laskar gave a muffled growl. In addition to the shallow knife wound, he had lost part of his ear in the fight with the god-bird. Part of the blood that they trailed was his, despite his efforts to cup a hand over it. Kalaman suffered a great clotted gash bulging on his left shoulder. Grunting profusely, he massaged the wound where a glancing spear had nicked him. Vetra flexed his knee which had swelled since he slipped in a slain priest’s blood.
If Dapi hadn’t appeared when it did, the ratmen would have likely carved them ear to ear... The senseless soul-suckings of the god were a mystery and burned in lurid clarity in Vetra’s mind. How had the pool given it life? What kept the god’s essence contained within the stone? Vetra’s thoughts did not grant him any peace.
“Demons only exist to kill,” mused Kalaman, picking up on Vetra’s grimaces. “Being newly-birthed, maybe the thing needs to feed.”
“Or maybe it’s growing,” said Balir in grunting cynicism.
The minutes wore on, and infused with a tense silence. Like wounded deer the company half limped, half bounded down the corridor, as if stalked by a tiger. A clinging dampness infected the night air, which the few lighted torches failed to dispel. Vetra could see great spider webs hanging from the larger torches in the dimming red light. Snatches of fierce, god-like faces leaped out from the shadows at him. Archways led to various other mini-temples in whose dusky interiors he caught glimpses of winged stone dragons, or simian faces of elder apes of doom.
In a rush, it occurred to Vetra what this place was: an accursed network of temples spanning many ages that sheltered multiple, hideous and nameless gods. It was a place where carven facades of temples towered on high—where priests gave themselves over to dark forces conjured by occult means, some monstrous sanctuary where half human, half bestial entities lurked, and very likely used the priests in ways more slavish than the priests believed they used the gods.
Vetra dwelled on the thought with satisfaction, and members of the band eased up their pace. At least there was no further pursuit. He pushed back his dented helm, wiped the blood from his brow. Balir’s wretched grumbling had them all pondering the twist of fate enabling them to flee down this musty tunnel. Not two days ago they had all lounged in high spirits together at the Hetman’s pub, with Kalaman cracking many a ribald joke.
Vetra’s face crinkled, still remembering how he had met the blond-haired ring-fighter. How he and Balir had pushed their way up to the front of that mob of fevered gamblers waving coins in their hands one late night in the brewers’ district, wagering on who would win the next fight. He had scrutinized the combatants in that sweaty pen—a mixture of ex-convicts, bodyguards and thugs. Confidence, brawn, ingenuity—that’s what he had been looking for—someone with the ability to size up an opponent in an instant. Next up was Kal—Kal the Dragon. Vetra recalled the stocky brute casually circling his squint-eyed opponent; then, in a sudden rush and burst of strength a mallet fist knocked his adversary senseless in less than five seconds, though he was the smaller man, and everyone was betting against him.
Vetra had been sold then on the bully-boy and had come striding up to recruit him. Kalaman had looked at him sideways, like a curious panther, with many a scar and stitch around his eye and nose. Kalaman, in his up-front way, had told him his pub-crawling friend Laskar was in need of work and that unless the two of them were hired for the job, he would walk...
Vetra shook his head at the pleasant memory. A far cry from the rude, blooded messes they were, scrambling through a ratman-haunted tunnel in the valley of Gyzia.
At last they stumbled upon a candlelit chamber rudely carved in the tunnel wall. Inside, the old crone who was the temple keeper sat cross-legged on a ledge of stone. Her back was set against the rough wall of the cave-like passage whose ceiling was very low. She was surrounded by tiny wicks suspended in oil. Her eyes were drawn in an eerie, somnolent gaze, fixed on a six-pointed star on the far wall lit with smouldering torches.
So absorbed was she that did not notice them at first. Vetra ducked inside and guessed she was in a trance from the way she sat motionless without a word. The others watched her and looked on, blinking with puzzlement.
Her eyes fluttered a few times then she spoke at last. “I knew ere your coming there would be much trouble in the temples of Gyzia.”
“If you knew,” jeered Balir, “why didn’t you try to stop us? It could have spared my hand.”
The keeper gave a long sigh, seemingly unmoved by their wounds. “It would not have helped. That’s why I give thanks to the Elder gods of the Five Destinies, lest they work against me. My labours have borne fruit. Twice I have outlived my family. Others are long gone, and so I quit not my devotional practices.”
Vetra rattled his bloody sword. “Very comforting, woman, but show us the way out, please.”
She demurred. “’Tis said that Dapi would come to life again, and that he has. Risen again, like a demon prince, the old villain will be worshipped by many as a force of terror. I did not expect to see it in my lifetime...Great Dergath, but this is a foul day. Revered Jano! The visions I had in my last meditation...Do you not know what you have done?”
Vetra’s lips parted in a cynical scowl.
“I can assist you, but I must have time to think.” She raked them with a cold stare, her greenish-grey eyes boring craters in them. “I see that you are not bad men, just misguided, full of blind hopes like most. Seduced by plunder and the misty promise of gold. You have raced to folly. I have no love for the ratmen. Yes, I will show you the way back to the Avenue of Tombs, where you can make your way to the gates of Gyzia, and above, to take your chances with the gate-priests and the watchtower.”
Vetra raised his brows in a sardonic grin and suppressed the urge to contrive a mocking bow. “Any time soon then.”
Showing no pique, she stepped down from her ledge to hobble on stiff legs across the cracked, slightly upheaved pavestones. “Come, this way then.” She pushed a candle in Balir’s cloth-bound hand and pulled a torch off the wall for herself. “Take brands and pay heed to the wandering priests. They war amongst themselves; not pleasant are they to cross. The path of the ancients lies long and winding and mysterious, open only to believers. The ratmen cannot pass; their hearts are dark and their minds heavy with the weight of corruption and the sacrifices they have committed. The spirits will not allow them to pass to the forbidden regions, or the higher realms of the afterlife, or offer them any protection whatsoever.”
Balir beamed ingenuously. “I always knew I had a halo over my head. Must have been all the prayers I recited.”
“Do not ridicule the old gods,” she warned. “They breathe life into this ancient canyon. Possibly the same into your own body. Your life may depend on the gods one day, and their mercy.”
Balir glared at the thought, yet Vetra flashed him a dangerous look, warning him not to rile the old woman.
Down a side tunnel she hobbled, leading them with one hand pressed to hip, the other bearing a torch. They passed along a crude passage barely a man’s height in places. Behind a vague veil of dimness, a murmur of ghastly avian croakings drifted in and out of the ghostly shadows. Sound and movement crawled there: fiendish shouts, the tumult of fighting men, horrid, unsettling bangs with spears clattering against stone.
Nimeska murmured, “Listen to the sounds of strife amongst the children of fools...”
Vetra tightened fist on his weapon, his dark features clouded with unease.
“The night is much alive with mischief,” she announced sombrely, a pale and weary light shining in her eyes. “False worshippers abound in these ancient halls.”
The yawning rock opened up into a fissure above their heads. They caught a momentary glimpse of open sky and glittering stars. Then the mouth of crumbled sandstone folded over them and the tunnel wound on in silence and murk. Boots crunching on shale, all gazed in wordless unease upon endless fissures and forgotten abysses dropped sometimes inches away, black as midnight, wafting cool vapours and murmurs of tumbling water. Squinting, they could make out aged carved faces of outworn deities, untended by priest or cleric—on wall, ceiling and in pit.
* * *
Where they had encountered no foliage before, now battered tree trunks appeared with perplexing frequency in the gloom, thrusting up like silent ghosts. They were thick-boled things, the product of some unguessable sorcery or diseased magic.
The fugitives squeezed around these dark trunks that loomed up in their path. Evidently the trees were nourished by the open air, wind, rain and sunlight that streamed from above. But how they could live on in bare rock was a mystery—the corridor. seemingly inhospitable, supported little in the way of soil down here, where the invasive roots bored through the rock.
