Avenger, page 35
part #2 of Swords and Skulls Series
The two cut a path side by side through the leather-armoured throng dismembering limbs and slashing throats. Vetra parried and dodged; Basineus ducked and spun. Clinking steel and gut-wrenching howls filled the air and Vetra felt a sharp tug on his left shoulder, realizing an axe head had glanced off his upper arm, somehow finding a rent in his magical armour. Blood spurted from that wound and he snarled in frustration. A minor flesh wound compared to what Tas must be suffering.
The slaves, mobile at his feet, stumbled along, swinging what picks and warped hoes they had amongst them. Many prisoners died in that thrashing agony under the roots of stalks and by the axes of Grebu’s butchers.
Vetra’s weapon, notched and red started to slow; his muscled arm was splashed in crimson and gore.
Tas came clambering through, his boots slipping in blood over fallen bodies, a grisly, gore-splattered bear. The maja had lent him miraculous strength and kept him alive. He blocked the deadly cut of a Karkassian Hillman then stopped another creeping at Vetra’s back who would have severed Vetra’s head. He and Vetra exchanged looks, knowing it was a turn of fate. They wasted no time, lunging ahead, parrying, burying steel in flesh, pushing on through the shouting throng while blood flew everywhere.
Vetra staggered through the wrenched-open door, Basineus next while Tas blundered behind. A bestial look gleamed in his eyes and his jerkin was shredded, face bloodied, but he roared laughter, spitting out blood and a few teeth.
A dozen or more able-bodied slaves clambered after the blood-soaked mercenaries. Those who were not mauled by the ghoulish horde, or the man-eating plants gaped in gratitude at their lucky escape. A few had snatched up weapons of the fallen; the rest had perished under the demonic maja stalks or the sorcerous assaults of the plant king who took up pursuit, screeching orders and flinging malignant pods at the fugitives.
The rebels fled up the ravine the way they had come—a narrow, dim corridor, now washed in sultry hues of the gloaming twilight. Grebu’s shrieks tore at their backs as bolts whined by their ears, clattering on the stone around them.
Basineus stumbled off, half howling as a bolt grazed his side. He pitched forward, grimacing, picked himself up again. Vetra felt a heavy blow smash into his back, his enchanted armour taking the brunt of the hit. He wheeled about, to see, in a flush of florid anger, three ragged shapes of slaves fall shattered, riddled by crossbow bolts. The grime-streaked wretches had no chance.
Vetra fled on with Basineus, and now Tas pushed past, taking the lead. While the light grew dimmer and quivered with leaping shadows, it seemed that madness and death were all around them, that there would be no chance of escape.
IV
Tas sped ahead through the gathering darkness, a brawny shape lit only by the first glimmers of moonlight. Vetra kept an easy pace with the man, his eyes roving for danger while Basineus snuffled not two feet behind him.
The ranger took them on a circuitous route: through shadowy gulches, some no wider than five men abreast, then shadowy tunnels, where rock arched overhead like cathedral grottos. Rising and fading, the blustering voice of the plant king echoed behind them with sinister force.
Vetra cast a backward glance. Twenty-one men remained. Wearying fast, the slaves wheezed and huffed, struggling to keep up while the mercenaries ploughed ahead.
Vetra studied them with critical eyes: a motley group, gripping broken hoes or rusty pickaxes, their eyes gleaming through the lingering starvation and hopelessness plaguing them. It was amazing these old hounds had not been culled from the pack long ago. Basineus, reading the look on Vetra’s face, grunted back at the straggling pack. “The wretches will only slow us down. Get us killed.”
Vetra knew it was only the slaves’ desperation to escape that kept them moving at such a rate.
The clomping bootfalls and howls of the plant king and his minions at last faded, thanks to Tas’s clever manoeuvring. Vetra gripped bloody sword in hand, his jaw clenched. Basineus’s face was a gleaming mask in the rising moonlight, his grinning white teeth shiny in the pale glow.
More often than not, some dark oval opening appeared in the rock face of the canyon which the fugitives gave wide berth. Tas’s white-eyed scowls spoke volumes of what horrors and perils lurked within.
Vetra likewise sensed death stalking through these shadowy corridors. But he thrust this aside. On he loped after the tireless ranger. Tas bled as he limped, and contained his pain in a contorted grimace. How could a man endure such a beating and still be standing?
The transformation that had come over him was terrible to behold. The man seemed to have retreated into an inner hell, without bounds. He had only one bottle of his precious maja left, Vetra noted, bobbing at his waist, his eyes darting to it every few minutes. Vetra saw that his hand moved toward the gleaming vial, but by superhuman will it would go no further. The ranger somehow squelched the urge to lap it down. When that bottle ran out though... Vetra frowned. Doubtless these matters were heavy on Tas’s mind.
Some minutes later, Vetra had a suspicion they were running in circles. “Didn’t we just pass this wind-battered fluted pillar of rock?”
Tas scowled while Basineus blinked. Vetra mumbled an oath. What about that darker than dark entrance of a yawning cavern? All these landmarks seemed the same.
At a mouth of a corkscrew-shaped canyon, Tas paused, bringing them all to a halt.
A rustling of fiendish leaves thrust out from the gloom. On a signal from Tas, they dropped to all fours.
Vetra’s muscles knotted, as if sensing life in those folds of darkness. Nothing. None dared breathe. He heard a thrum-thrum and twitching swish like spiders on rock, that could have been root-like feet invested with life.
Tas edged his bulk forward; they waited until the horror had passed. More of the marching plants! Vetra could see them in the hazy murk, quivering not a few dozen feet away. The plant king must have unleashed pockets of them to hunt down the rebels in the winding canyons with his sinister magic.
A foolish slave whimpered.
The plants halted their sinister motion and reaching to their full extent, jerked backward, like living, abominable things.
A wild and lusty curse rang from Tas’s lips. “You idiot, Besthra flog you!” They all took up voice and ran. The slaves groaned and stumbled on.
Basineus trailed behind to belt the offending man in the mouth. Blood ran down his chin. The slave staggered. The lead plants bristled forward with fiendish expectation and the man slipped. The plants caught up to him and pulled him down, engulfing his frail figure in their writhing masses.
Vetra turned his head and winced. The slave’s screams were as a man tortured on the rack. Leafy tendrils groped and writhed while others squeezed and tore. Roots grasped his twitching body and tore chunks of raw meat off.
Vetra grimaced. He slashed at the offending stalks whipping past to menace him. Dergath, but they were as tall as a bear on its hind legs, waving wild feelers! He scrambled back, hacking, sidling left and right like a prisoner under the lash. Basineus was at his side, slashing with no less ardour. When it was all over, the victim was indistinguishable from any of the blurred stumps or misshapen boulders that stained the woebegone place.
* * *
Far up the ravine they came to another dead stop as Tas doubled over, smitten with a coughing fit, his body convulsing.
Vetra resented halting at this exposed spot, given the horrors that wandered about these nightmarish canyons. But nothing was to be done. The ranger was beset with more seizures, his body bent over in two, quivering in an obscene paroxysm. His face was green under the ghastly moonlight. How much maja had he consumed in the last few hours? Vetra shook his head. The man’s bouts were getting worse.
Tas gave a bitter laugh. Words spilled from his mouth with the spray of blood and phlegm. “I know it will kill me in the end. I’ve seen victims in their final stages. Slavering, monstrous caricatures of living flesh.” His eyes, dilated, mirrored his face, an unreadable shaman’s mask, lit with a terrible certainty.
Basineus’s face was a mocking leer. “Why do you ingest it, if you know how toxic the excrement is?”
Tas’s voice took on a rumble of anger. “You don’t know the evil of the stuff! If you did, you would not pose such a naive question. A few months ago some of the oil spilled on my skin. I was leading an expedition to take out the first band of smugglers, a night job, with my recruits into our band of mercenaries. We intercepted the drug runners and we fought. We lost to the fierce mongrels—juiced on maja, their tentacles twitching like jellyfish streamers. A basket of the bulbs fell and the oil trickled out on the stones where I landed.” Tas’s mouth quivered at the memory.
A slave mumbled, “I know of what you speak, ranger. Ever since Grebu forced me to swallow a bulb whole, I have craved the stuff. It took everything I could to resist that sprinkling earlier Grebu fed us.”
“He’s right,” added another. “Now that we’re hooked, we’re slaves to the maja. We sneak raw, unfiltered bulbs all the time— from the early crops when the guards aren’t looking. Grebu dropped the snap pods on us and most of us just lifted our hands like puppets. You saw the result.”
Vetra shook his head in undisguised contempt. “You’re all weak lambs.”
“What do you know, outlander?” sneered Tas. “You’ve never been afflicted by the stuff. It’s like a coal that burns your insides, creates the fiercest craving you can imagine. Just when I think I’ve conquered it, the image of the red bulb flashes in my mind, like some pulsing demon. If I’ve gone for a few days without it, I feel numb, chilled to my marrow! Even now, I’m resisting the urge to swallow what’s left in this cursed vial at my belt. I’ve tried to buck it, but I can’t. The craving always returns, like some slug from the pits of hell.”
Tas seemed to shake and shiver in an even more uncontrollable palsy.
Vetra grunted. He had seen men wracked by the yellow poppy before, but this was worse. He remembered when he was posted in the far east, in the rebel lands of Condoria. There he’d witnessed soldiers’ delirium from addiction to the roots of the Angris bush. ’Twas was not a pleasant sight. Nor was what he had seen of Kealasa, Ragnum’s daughter.
Tas sat up, coughing. “I curse that rotten hound, Grebu, for this,” he grumbled. “I curse that I was ever put on this wretched mission and crossed paths with that devil.”
Vetra muttered. He shook off the tale-sharing with a shrug. The monsters would be coming soon. No time to delay the inevitable.
The slaves were flagging. They loped on, like dead men in a lost dream. Two keeled over. From exhaustion? Dehydration? Vetra would be surprised if any of them made it to the bridge. No time to bury the corpses or put up tombstone markers.
The mercenaries dragged them into a nearby cave. The less obvious for trackers to detect their passage.
Vetra was convinced they were hopelessly lost now, despite Tas’s valiant efforts. He only knew that they were wandering in a land of shades and terrors.
* * *
A high cave presented itself after some tense scrabbling. They gained its mouth by a steep, winding ledge. No food was to be found in these bare confines, only some old bones dressed in cobwebs in a shadowy corner, long chewed and gleaned of gristle. While poking about for exits, Basineus discovered a small pool of water not far from the cave entrance, glimmering under the moonlight between weathered columns of shale. Perhaps it was a natural spring? Vetra was not sure. The water was brackish, or had some heavy mineral flavour to it. Though his stomach roiled to the greasy taste, he relished it as it slipped down his gullet. Some of the slaves muttered in wonder and washed away the layers of grime caked from their thin bodies. It was a luxury many had never known in the years of confinement in the pit. Their eyes gaped in the moonlight filtering through the cave entrance.
“Let’s wait here, until Grebu’s ghouls have passed,” grumbled Tas. “We’ll backtrack and brave the bridge in first light. He will not expect it.”
Vetra grunted. He did not believe it, but he was too weary to argue.
Basineus grumbled oaths and paced about, unable to contain his restless doubt. “Where did this fiend come from?” he demanded. “I’ve never heard of Grebu until a few days ago. Gods, but he has the strength of an ox.”
One of the bolder slaves, a man with front teeth missing, involuntarily shuddered. “The maja bulb has given Grebu extraordinary powers. To others it brings pain, but him it feeds.” He clutched at the ragged hair trailing to his shoulders.
One of his shaky-handed comrades balled a fist. “The old Karkassian legends foretold of a man with snakes not in his hair, but on his shoulders. He would be a demon amongst men, and create demons of his fellow man.”
Basineus spat out a curse. “You speak of him as if he were a demigod.” He lifted his sword in a blood-caked hand.
The slave shivered. “Rumours run rife. A wizard told a tale of stardust falling from the sky, coloured specks sprinkling a mountain peak. A Karkassian witch woman, Dalkuusa, dozed by her night fire one evening. Then the stardust drifted down and set her crackling flames blazing to life. A star sprite sprang out of the hissing flames and carried her away to a cave in Gromet mountain, not two leagues from here.”
“Aye, I’ve heard the tale too,” murmured another. “From the unholy union of witch and sprite, came Grebu—cast out of the wild tribes, for his ugliness and deformities. These were too much for the tribespeople to accept. He crawled at barely a half year old, wandered the lonely, deserted hills and learned many unusual things. Communicated with the feral animals, he did, the jackals, the vultures. Danced with the bears, talked with spirits of the night, exploring pits and crevices not known to man in these antediluvian hills. It was said he discovered the maja in a high place on the mountain.”
“A wives’ tale, old man,” crowed Tas. “No one could survive that young in the wilds.”
“His sorcerous ability made it possible. From an early age it grew in intensity year by year.”
A shudder passed through the ragged group. They listened to the chirps of night insects and the flit of bats echoing in the stone-crumbled canyon.
“It sounds too fanciful for me,” mumbled Vetra, but part of him felt a certain truth in the slave’s tale, as he did most folklore of the lands.
The company lay down on the cold stone, and slept while some traded guard. Basineus took first watch.
* * *
Vetra was jerked awake as slimy, stinging feelers brushed his cheek. He caught a glimpse of Tas cutting at the rippling vines.
Vetra lunged to his feet, snatching up his sword and slashing green shoots from the walking plants. White milky fluid ran in gobs, sizzling faintly as it sprayed on the cave floor. The ranger stood glowering, as more and more maja stalks came thrashing in. Dergath! cursed Vetra. It was Basineus’s watch. Had the ape fallen asleep? The plant fiends must have crept in through some secret passage in the back of the silent cave.
While Basineus was busy cleaving the tops of walking maja, Vetra joined him and they beat their way through a fiendish crop while being whipped and lacerated by the lashing shoots.
“Dergath’s hells!” Vetra swore. “Is there no end to these nightmares?”
Tas’s grunt was a sarcastic acknowledgement.
With wild abandon, the three slashed their way through the foliage. Spidery roots gripped the stone, questing their next step with hissing anticipation. Basineus’s neck was raw with new welts; barbed leaves tore open his leg; his sword swept whistling arcs in a bloody grip. Tas grinned in feral lassitude. Madness, lunacy. That’s what this place was.
Mercenary and slave crabbed down the ledge, as the plants jostled after with stiff, awkward lurches.
Outside the cave, the first blood glimmer of dawn was upon them, creeping over the rim of the world.
Down through the misty gorge they dogged their way, leaving the plants toiling behind.
The stone showed rounded, carven shapes, smoothed by aeons of wind and rain. Shadows fell over the land like dew-dappled rain. A restless wind blew down the canyon, drying the wet blood on their faces.
The canyon was desolate. Some fresh animal tracks showed in the dirt—likely coyotes. A crow squawked over a trapped lizard it held clutched in its claws. A lone scraggly marpus tree sheltered black ravens that heralded them with baleful croaks, and hawks wheeled in the sky.
Up the ravine, they tottered, the straggling slaves well back. Tas led them in a direction Vetra thought headed vaguely west.
How much time passed, Vetra could not know, for the sun did not penetrate the mist that easily in this land of maja.
* * *
They climbed a boulder-strewn ravine choked with stunted bush, and as the pale morning light fell upon crumbled pillars of rock, Vetra’s hopes soared.
Yet the reek of drifting smoke filling his nostrils prompted a sour feeling to stir in his gut once again.
The Karkassians despatched yesterday in the canyon hung from sharpened stakes like ghoulish scarecrows, as if they were grisly sacrifices, of failure. Offerings to mountain spirits? Vetra had no idea. These hillmen’s primitive superstitions were as foreign to him as ivory was to the Mercian peasant. Or maybe it was Grebu’s ghastly doing?
They passed the corpses with silent unease. Flies buzzed on the rotting bodies; a neck hung loosely with no head, another perched with gaping eye sockets pecked by scavengers.
Up the pebbly ravine they crept in single file. Minutes passed; they entered the open space where they had once held parley so long ago. All was quiet. Too quiet for Vetra’s tastes. Basineus and he traded uneasy glances.
Tas and the slaves padded forward toward the boulders and the slab where they had conversed with the plant king. A heavy mist hung like a thick blanket over the barren stone. The canyon lay like a sleeping snake below, cutting through the mist-laden rock like some titan’s scythe cutting through rock and mist.
Vetra noticed small fires glimmering from the caves carved in the hill above. A lurking danger pervaded all and hung thick like a predator lying in wait. Humans had been here recently, Vetra knew. Grebu had anticipated their destination as sure as more fiends were waiting for them, like vultures at a slaughter.
