Sweaty fingers closed around Adalwolf’s arm, quivering as they gripped him. He turned to find Hiltrude’s ashen face staring at him with wide eyes and trembling lips.
“We can’t go on,” she gasped. “Please, we can’t go any more!” Her hand fell away from the mercenary’s arm. Frantically she began rubbing the tatters of her dress, as though she were trying to wipe something unclean from her clothes. “I can feel it crawling on me!”
“There’s nothing there,” Diethelm assured her, trying to use the calmness in his voice to counter the panic in hers. “You are safe.”
Hiltrude was unconvinced, her head making erratic jerking motions as she looked down at the stairs. There was utter terror in her eyes now. Her boots, rotten from the jungle, stomped relentlessly against the steps. Adalwolf lower his torch and felt a chill race down his spine when he failed to see anything except the courtesan’s feet.
“She’s out of her mind,” van Sommerhaus declared. “Forget her and let’s get out of this hell hole.”
Adalwolf glared at the patroon, his fist raised to break the merchant’s aquiline nose. “We’re not leaving anybody,” he growled.
“Look at her,” van Sommerhaus persisted. “She’s gone mad! A mad woman’s only going to slow us down! Ruin our own chance to escape!”
“Only a little while ago, she spoke up for you when you wanted to stay with the underfolk,” Adalwolf snarled at van Sommerhaus. The reminder visibly shamed the patroon and he looked away. The mercenary turned from him and grabbed Hiltrude by the shoulders.
“We have to go,” he told her. “It’s only a little farther,” he added, feeling guilty as he spoke the lie.
Hiltrude didn’t even raise her head but kept staring at the steps, stamping her foot against every shadow. “Snakes everywhere!” she almost shrieked. “Don’t let them touch me! Can’t you feel them!”
Adalwolf had to admit there was something beyond the heavy reptilian musk filling the air. There was something else, an oily sensation, like phantoms running their wispy hands along his skin. Diethelm had said it was aethyric power the mercenary sensed, that the pyramid was saturated with magical energy and they were drawing near to its source. The thought made Adalwolf even more uneasy. If there was one thing that would goad that horned ratman into braving the snake smell, it would be the lure of power.
“There’s nothing there,” Adalwolf assured her, ignoring his own doubts. He lowered the torch again, lighting the steps for her. “No snakes, see.”
The woman shook her head, but at least some of the fear had drained out of her eyes. With a little more time, Adalwolf was sure he could make her see reason.
Unfortunately, time was one thing they didn’t have. Hiltrude’s panicked shouts would travel far within the stone vaults of the pyramid and Adalwolf wasn’t sure what might have been listening. Already he fancied he could hear something moving far behind them on the darkened stairway.
“I need you to hold this,” Adalwolf told Diethelm. The priest looked at him with some perplexity as he placed the sputtering torch in Diethelm’s hand.
Without warning, Adalwolf spun about again, his fist smacking against the side of Hiltrude’s head. Her eyes fluttered and he caught her before the stunned woman could fall to the floor. Slinging the woman over his shoulder, Adalwolf motioned for the others to hurry up the stairs.
A last worried look into the blackness below and Adalwolf trudged after them.
It was some time later before Hiltrude recovered her senses. She struggled in Adalwolf’s grip, beating her fists against his back until he threatened to knock her head against the wall if she didn’t stop. The courtesan was a good deal more reasonable than before and quickly relented. Adalwolf breathed a quiet sigh of relief. It meant she wasn’t mad as van Sommerhaus had insisted, just afraid. Handrich knew she had every right to be.
“You can set me down,” Hiltrude told him. “I’m all right now.”
“Happy to hear it,” Adalwolf answered, making no move to slide her off his shoulder. He trudged onward, keeping his eyes on the flickering light of Diethelm’s torch.
“Really, I won’t cause any more problems,” Hiltrude insisted, a trace of annoyance in her tone.
“I know you won’t,” Adalwolf said, still climbing the steps.
“Look you filthy pirate-stabber!” Hiltrude snapped. “Tell me you’ve never been afraid of something!” Adalwolf could feel her body shiver against his. “It was the smell. The smell of those slithering…” She shuddered, forcing Adalwolf to steady her with his arm. “I’d rather be back down there with the ratkin than…”
“And that’s why I’m not setting you down,” Adalwolf told her. “The smell is getting worse, not better. There’s a snake nest somewhere and I fear we’ll have to cross it before we get out of this place.”
Hiltrude’s fist pounded against his neck. Adalwolf brought his palm cracking against the firm bottom draped over his shoulder. The woman yipped in alarm at the stinging slap.
“A guilder says your arse wears out before my neck,” Adalwolf warned her. Hiltrude relented, sagging desolately against his back. It pained the mercenary to hear her soft sobs. It was for her own good, he couldn’t trust her to master her fear. The idea of her racing back down the stairs and into the clutches of Thanquol was something that sickened his very soul to think about. She had to face whatever was waiting for them above, whether she wanted to or not.
Adalwolf stopped as he saw Diethelm’s torch finally go out. He heard van Sommerhaus and the sailor cry out in agony as the light died. Terror gnawed at his own mind as they were plunged into darkness and he felt his legs wobble beneath him. Only the thought of Hiltrude’s dependence on him steadied his nerves. He had to stay strong or they were both lost.
Gradually, as the darkness surrounded him, Adalwolf’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. With a gasp, he saw that the blackness was not absolute. There was light ahead of them, distant but distinct. He forgot his fear of verminous shapes stalking after them from below and shouted the news to his companions.
Thinking it was the light of day beckoning them, the men raced up the stairs, fatigue and horror overwhelmed by a surge of renewed hope. Van Sommerhaus and the sailor were well ahead of Adalwolf and they were the first to emerge from the darkness and into the light. Their jubilant cries drifted back down the stairs, making even Hiltrude forget her fear. Adalwolf set her down and together they climbed the last section, eager to feel the clean light of day against their faces.
The light wasn’t clean and it didn’t come from the sun. It came from dozens of great stone pots and the fires that flickered within them. The smoke of whatever smouldered within the pots had a thin, pasty taste to it but almost no smell to call its own. It did nothing to overcome the musky serpent reek of the place, which had now grown to the nigh unbearable. If Adalwolf had wrapped a python about his face, he couldn’t imagine the smell being half as bad.
The room that sheltered the stone pots was immense, so big that the Cobra of Khemri and three sister ships might have been set stern to prow across the middle of the floor and still not touch the walls. Great curled columns rose from the floor like a stone forest to support the ceiling of the chamber, their spiral contours seeming to writhe and slither as the flickering light set weird shadows dancing upon them.
As far as they could see every wall was covered from floor to ceiling in strange glyphs, sometimes broken by great stone murals. Adalwolf shivered to stare at the murals for there was an air of impossible ancientness about them. They depicted the lizardmen making war with creatures that defied imagination: foul cyclopean devil-beasts, dragon-like centaurs and daemon-things of every description. There were men too, huge and horrible and hoary with evil, wearing armour made from bones and carrying stone axes as they waged war upon the reptiles. The lizardmen, however, were no easy prey and Adalwolf could see ranks of huge scaly warriors fighting alongside the smaller reptiles they had seen upon the steps of the pyramid and the giant guardians of the
spawning pool. Sometimes there would be a bloated, toadlike being depicted on the murals, but always rendered in such a way as to compel the same sensation of awe and reverence as had moved the chisel of the artisan who carved it.
Many doorways gaped in the walls, dark passageways that led back into the depths of the pyramid. One glance at the simple number of these openings made it clear that this was the centre of the structure, the very heart of the temple. Adalwolf noted with a start that each archway glistened in the flickering light, for each of the gateways was edged in gold and jade.
It was not this wealth that had made van Sommerhaus and the sailor cry out in glee, however. The two men stood in the middle of the chamber, having ascended a short dais that rose from the floor. At the top of the dais was a great altar. Adalwolf shook his head in disbelief as he gazed upon it, for the altar was bigger than a ship’s longboat yet it shone with the same lustre as the gilded archways. The immense altar was made of gold!
Caution vanished as every avaricious thought he’d ever had thundered through his heart. Adalwolf released Hiltrude and dashed across the chamber. He ran his hands lovingly across the sleek surface of the golden altar. It was cunningly wrought in the shape of hundreds of serpents, their coils intertwined in a complex lattice of priceless wealth. The gleaming eyes of each snake were picked out with the finest rubies he’d ever seen, their blue tongues were crafted from crushed sapphires and their shining fangs were made of pearl. The mercenary could only gawk at the display of wealth beneath his hands. A man could repay the bribe that had bought Marienburg’s independence from the Empire with this altar and have enough left over to lease the entire city of Carroburg as well!
“And you thought I was crazy!” van Sommerhaus boasted, running his hand along one of the snakes. “Here’s enough gold to choke a dwarf!” The patroon laughed. “A dwarf? Handrich’s Purse, there’s enough here to choke a dragon!”
The sailor began trying to pry one of the rubies from the altar, having twisted his belt buckle into a crude chisel. He cursed lividly as the stone popped out and bounced away. He groped for it for a moment in the darkness, then cursed again. Turning, the seaman raced down to one of the fire pots and tore a strip of cloth from his tattered shirt. Holding it over the fire, he soon had a serviceable torch. As he swung back around to run back up to the altar, however, he froze in place and pointed dramatically at the columns.
“They’re edged in jewels!” the sailor shouted. He forgot about the lost ruby and pounced on the nearest of the columns, grinning greedily as he studied it. “Emeralds! Sapphires! A diamond as big as my fist!”
Adalwolf shared a look of jubilation with van Sommerhaus and both men rushed down to see what the sailor had found. As they ran towards the column, Adalwolf felt something snap beneath his boot. He bent down, picking it off the floor. Colour drained from his face as he found the object he had stepped on to be an arrow, its obsidian head still wet with blood. It was a stark reminder that this place was not abandoned, a cold slap to cool his dreams of gold and glory.
“We must leave this place,” Diethelm’s whisper sounded in Adalwolf’s ear. There was a look of mute horror on the priest’s face, an expression that was almost primal in its terror. “I feel that we stand in the house of an alien god, one who does not look upon our kind with friendly eyes. We must leave before we arouse it.”
Adalwolf tried to shove the priest away. Diethelm’s words of warning made an angry resentment swell within the mercenary. What did a simple cleric of Manann know about the worth of gold? What did he know about trying to keep an estranged family fed and sheltered? What did he know about having enough money to buy a new life for himself? With the gold he saw on display all around him, Adalwolf would be wealthy and respected! He’d be somebody, not just a pirate-stabbing sellsword! He’d be able to afford the love of a woman of quality…
He glanced about to find Hiltrude. He saw her and a sense of relief filled him. She had quite forgotten her fear and was just as enthralled as the rest of them. She raced like a schoolgirl to help van Sommerhaus and the sailor pry gems from the columns, her face bright with the rapture of wealth.
Then her face went pale and her eyes became pits of despair. She froze almost in midstep, staring in mute horror into the gloom of the temple.
Adalwolf heard a sound like sailcloth being unrolled and following it he discovered both its cause and the source of Hiltrude’s terror. He fell to his knees as every muscle in his body seemed to turn to jelly. The darkness of the temple wasn’t empty, but what it had sheltered was an abomination that made even the horrors depicted upon the stone murals seem tame.
Gigantic, the great serpent slithered from the shadows of the inner temple. Its sleek body glistened wetly in the firelight, armoured scales of brown and black rasping against the columns, leaving slivers of grey, lifeless skin behind. A blunt head as big as a river barge rose up from the floor, the black pools of its eyes staring across the temple, the blue lash of its forked tongue flickering and dancing before its snout as it smelled the air. The enormous snake continued to crawl from the darkness, coil upon coil of its scaly bulk undulating across the floor until Adalwolf thought even this vast chamber could not contain its titanic dimensions.
Van Sommerhaus and the sailor were late in realising the peril that crawled towards them. It was only when the seaman again lost a gem he had pried loose and started to chase it across the floor that he became aware of the giant serpent. He shrieked as he saw the monster and dived back to cower behind the column. As he ran, the great snake lunged at him, driving its enormity towards the sailor.
Narrowly it missed the sailor, but as the man tried to seek refuge behind the column, van Sommerhaus thrust him back, unwilling to jeopardise his own sanctuary by sharing it with the man. The sailor sprawled on the floor, the great serpent looming above him. Its cold eyes stared at him for an instant, then great folds of flesh snapped open on either side of its neck, making its terrible head appear three times as immense. The blunt head struck, the great jaws opened and the sailor was gone. Hideously, Adalwolf could still hear the man’s muffled screams rising from the serpent’s maw and he could see the horrible bulge in the snake’s throat as it pushed its meal down towards its stomach.
The serpent was not content with one victim, however. Its tongue lashed out again and it began to study the column behind which van Sommerhaus shivered in terror. First from one side, then from the other, the snake studied the column. Its lash-like tongue almost brushed the patroon’s cheek as the snake sniffed for more prey. Van Sommerhaus, crushing himself against the column, did not move a muscle throughout the ordeal. The snake’s body trembled, angry hisses seethed through its scaly jaws, yet still it failed to find the man.
Suddenly the great serpent spun its head around. Again its tongue flickered and tasted the air. It began to slither forwards again. At first it seemed the monster was interested in the altar, then it swung back around. Adalwolf’s stomach turned when he saw that it was staring at Hiltrude.
The courtesan was still frozen with terror, unable to look away from the giant snake. Even as it began to slither towards her, Hiltrude did not run.
“She’ll be killed,” Diethelm shuddered.
Adalwolf clenched his fists with impotent rage, his only weapon a broken arrowhead. A desperate thought came to him. “If she doesn’t move, maybe it won’t see her!” he gasped. “It couldn’t find van Sommerhaus.”
Diethelm shook his head. “It couldn’t pick him out from the column,” he said. “It could still smell him. She doesn’t have a column to hide behind and confuse it.”
Terror dripped from Adalwolf’s brow as he watched the snake’s steady progress towards Hiltrude. He knew it was death, but he couldn’t watch such an atrocity unfold before his eyes. Gripping the arrow like a dagger, he made ready to charge the reptile. Diethelm’s hand restrained him.
Before Adalwolf could shake him off, Diethelm pointed him towards Hiltrude. “Save the girl,” the priest to
ld him. “I have no idea if this will work. Most likely I walk to my death, far from the face of my god. But even my death might buy you the time you need.”
Diethelm walked away, marching straight towards the monstrous serpent. He shouted and shrieked at the reptile, then began stamping his feet on the floor. The giant snake swung its head around, its flickering tongue pulling the priest’s smell from the air. Slowly it turned its body and began to slither towards him.
Understanding came to Adalwolf in an instant and he marvelled at the boldness of the priest’s plan. The sharp sting of shame pained him at every step as he abandoned Diethelm to the approach of the serpent, but he knew if he didn’t get Hiltrude away then the priest’s sacrifice was for nothing.
Adalwolf reached Hiltrude at a bound. He struck her across the face, trying to snap her mind back from its terrible fascination. The woman screamed, clutching at Adalwolf, trembling and moaning in his arms. She pointed at the great serpent and shrieked again.
The mercenary risked one look back, then hesitated. He blinked in disbelief, but it was true. Diethelm sat upon the floor, his body slowly swaying from side to side. Above him, its awful hood of scales open on either side of its blunt head, the great serpent was likewise swaying back and forth. The priest had done the impossible. He had mesmerised the great serpent, just as he had done to the jungle viper days before.
Now, more than ever, the mercenary felt the impossibility of abandoning Diethelm. The priest had made a bold gamble and won. Adalwolf knew he could never call himself a man if he left such a courageous soul behind. He stared hard into Hiltrude’s eyes, trying to find any flicker of reason beneath her fear.
“Go down that hallway and stay there,” he told her, praying she would understand him. The doorways were too small for the serpent to crawl into, if he could get her into one of the corridors she’d be safe from the giant snake. But there was no sign of understanding on her ashen face. “Please,” he pleaded. “I have to go help Diethelm. You must go down the hallway!”
02 - Temple of the Serpent Page 18
