The Black Shriving (Chronicles of the Black Gate Book 2)

by Phil Tucker

  Could a medusa be residing in the Hide? Impossible. They were long gone, their rule broken, their statues cast down, their altars riven. There was no telling how many years this frozen kragh has stood here. It could be the leavings of a medusa long dead, an ancient kill from hundreds of years ago. Still, Tharok had few options. He was hours from death and without any other recourse. His mind whirled, plans formed, and he decided to act as if the medusa still lived. He would bet his life on it.

  He tore off one of his pant legs, split it in two and tied the ends together. Then he shrugged painfully out of his leather jerkin, clamped one end of his makeshift bandage in his mouth and wound its length as tightly as he could around his chest, putting as much pressure as he could on the wound. Grunting and breathing heavily, he continued until he ran out of cloth, then tucked the last of the pant leg into the makeshift bandage. He pulled his jerkin back on, laced it as tightly as he could, and turned to face the petrified kragh. He frowned and allowed his mind to wander, to summon what lore the circlet contained.

  There had been a time, in ages long past, when medusas had been worshipped by the kragh, feared and loved, back when kragh were little more than animals, sacrificing themselves to the terrible creatures of snake and fire. Always rare, their numbers had decreased with the passing of the centuries, until at long last the remaining few had been driven into the dark by a great uprising and disappeared from kragh knowledge altogether. No longer objects of worship, those few that remained active must have had to hunt for themselves rather than rely on sacrifices.

  Tharok frowned, pushing his thoughts deeper, trying to discern some facts, to derive practical knowledge that he could bend to his use.

  Young medusas ate their petrified prey. Why, then, had this one been left behind? Moving forward, Tharok ran his hands over the cold, unyielding body and quickly discovered why. In its terror, the kragh had shrunk back against the wall, and in doing so had molded his body to the cave's contours, wedging his shoulder under a ledge and his foot behind a protruding rock, effectively locking himself against the cave wall and frustrating any attempt at extraction.

  A medusa inexperienced enough, then, to have to chase its prey into a cave, but old enough that it hadn't vented its fury upon the petrified kragh. Perhaps an adolescent or young adult at the time of this kragh's death.

  Medusas did not range far from their caverns when hunting, whispered the circlet. Its home, if it were still alive, would be close by.

  But where?

  Emerging from the cave, Tharok examined the cascading waterfall which boomed and roared just over a jutting line of boulders. The medusa would have chosen an extensive cave system for its home. Tharok ground his teeth, deep in thought. He knelt and rubbed his palm over the rock, then gouged the rock's surface with a nail, drawing a line. It left a shallow scratch. Turning, he examined the boulder behind him and ran his hand over its surface. There were no lines or obvious striations, no layers. That meant that the rock was not quartzite, for it was too soft; it wasn't slate, shale, or siltstone, for the texture was wrong. Limestone, then.

  He would stick close to the river; the action of water upon the rock would be the greatest source of extensive cave systems possible. Nodding, he turned to regard the waterfall once more. Any cave system would siphon water underground, diminishing the volume of the river on the surface. This waterfall was too powerful to have already been reduced. Any cave systems, then, would be further down below.

  Rising to his feet, Tharok took a moment to steady himself. He would retrace his steps, descend to the waterfall's basin, and then follow the river down until he found the medusa's cavern system. That was as far ahead as he could plan. The rest would depend on how events progressed.

  Tharok returned to the gulley behind the boulders and began his descent. Deprived now of the fire that had heated him during his climb, he found himself stiff, awkward, shivering with greater violence, and desiring to rest, to stop. Instead he forced himself on, pausing to listen on occasion lest the sound of the waterfall mask the approach of an armed party. Down he went, staggering drunkenly down the steep but smoother stretches, sitting to slide and fall over the more precipitous drops. He followed the fall of the cascading water till he slipped through a thick wall of boulders and stepped out onto the basin's edge.

  In the light of the moon, the falling water was majestic. It was dangerous to stand here, for the mist that filled the air was quickly soaking him, but for a moment he wished to simply gaze up at the silvered water and study its fall. He examined it as best he could, then shook his head. The chance of the cave system being behind the curtain of water was so slim that it wasn't worth examining. So thinking, he turned, then froze at the sight of a mountain goat, its head raised in alarm, staring at him from across the basin.

  Thoughts rushed through his head – a source of nutrition, a possible mount – and then stilled. The goat stood frozen. Tharok reached down and took up a pebble, hefted it once and then threw it awkwardly. It sailed over the tumultuous stretch of water before clattering off the rocks near the goat's hooves. The goat didn't move.

  Tharok followed the churning river, and the cavernous roar of the waterfall fell behind him. Fortunately, the river was flowing away from the Chasm Walk, deeper into the Wyvern's Hide. These were badlands, hard to navigate, forcing him to descend into dips and gullies and to climb over smooth beetling ridges and around rough spires of rock. Breathing hard, he paused at a high spot and saw that the river seemed to lose speed up ahead, meandering into several smaller branches that made their way through a maze of rock, towers of stone rising from their midst, channels carved deep. He climbed a spire with difficulty and gazed ahead; where the waters emerged to reform the main river, it was clear that their flow was greatly diminished.

  Nodding to himself, dimly pleased with the veracity of his own conjectures, Tharok descended carefully to the bank of the closest rivulet. He worked his way through the gulches and narrow chasms into the center, searching for a cave entrance fit for a medusa.

  Finally, about to give up hope, feeling too weak to continue, he found it. In the heart of the warren of rivulets and islands, a wide hole descended into darkness, sharp and perfectly circular as if it had been bored down through the rock by human tools. The flow cascaded into it, dropping down in imitation of a waterfall, a diaphanous, semi-circular curtain of water. Tharok knelt by the hole's smooth edge, careful to not topple forward as he swayed, and listened. The echoes within were confused and overlapping, but seemed to indicate a large space.

  Looking about, he saw a smooth ramp threading the inside of the hole, a natural shelf of rock that had been worked in a subtle manner to provide a ramp on which one could descend into the darkness. Tharok pursed his lips, gazed about one last time, and began his descent.

  Moving with care lest his feet slip on the spray-slicked rock, one hand brushing walls that seemed almost organic in their slippery smoothness, Tharok circled the hole once and then twice as he followed the shelf of rock down into the depths. Each time he passed behind the falling curtain of water, he reached out to cup some in his hand and bring it to his mouth.

  It took three whole spirals to reach the bottom. Feeling light now, detached from his own body, pain and exhaustion making him indifferent to his fate, he set forth, walking alongside the murmuring, dancing pool that lay at the waterfall's base. A tunnel had been carved before it, low in height but navigable. He moved toward it, then stopped, shuffled back and straightened once more, hissing in pain. Crouching put too much strain on his ruined back, pulled at the torn and punctured muscles. He rapped his knuckles in thought against the stone walls, and then decided to do one more circumnavigation of the pit, stepping around the ledge's rise so that he walked behind it and then behind the waterfall.

  Yes, there: a second opening. Larger than the first, counterintuitively located, but large enough for him to enter without travail. Tharok stood still, head lowered, and wished for an axe. A sword. Even a well-honed kni
fe. He had nothing but his wits, however, and those were rapidly growing dull. Heaving a deep breath, packing air into his lungs, he shook his head and entered the medusa's lair.

  The texture of the walls was strange, unnatural; they were uniformly abraded to result in a ribbed surface that indicated tunneling by some esoteric means – enlargement, not erosion. The tunnel proceeded for some fifteen paces, wound to the left, and then dipped at the end, a sharp drop that caused Tharok to stumble forward, nearly falling, and spilled him out into a natural cavern.

  Tharok heaved a sigh of relief. There were skylights in the cavern's roof that allowed columns of gentler night to penetrate into the more absolute darkness. The cavern was not of uniform height or breadth, but rather grew shallower toward the edges. Stalactites reached down like cobra fangs, dripping down onto their upturned brothers, giving Tharok the impression that he was wandering into the maw of a snake. Standing still, he reached out with his senses, allowing his own stillness to betray any movement beyond him. He sensed none.

  He moved forward, scanning the walls and columns, his lethargy banished by adrenaline. If the medusa was indeed here, his life was in extreme danger. Any moment could be his last.

  Tharok walked around a broad column, hand tracing its base, and then he froze. Standing before him was the lower torso of a man, soapstone grey legs and abdomen culminating in a frenzy of broken rock. Above the waist, nothing remained. Tharok studied the dark form carefully, and then crouched down and passed his hand over the floor beneath the figure's legs. There was very little rubble. Tharok clicked his teeth together in thought and pushed himself upright once more.

  Adult medusas did not eat the petrified flesh of their quarry. They preferred to entrance their prey with a deliberately weakened gaze and bring them home to be eaten alive. Larval medusas were a different story. Implanted within the living host who was then petrified, the medusa young would eat each other and gnaw their way free till they fell to the cavern floor engorged and ready for live prey, their magical natures unlocked by their first feast. It would seem that this medusa had borne young.

  Moving forward, Tharok came across the remains of two other bodies, petrified ruins that bore testament to their hosting. Then, in the center of the cavern, he came across a shallow depression lined with the fur of cave bears and mountain goats and encircled by bones picked clean, luminous in the light of the moon. The fur had rotted in the ambient humidity, grown matted and marshy, and a small pool of nacreous water had gathered in the center of the pit. The bones were mostly kragh, though there was a fair mixture of goat, bear and even human remains amongst them.

  Nothing moved in the depths of the cave. All signs pointed to this place having been abandoned long ago, a relic to a forgotten monster, a testament to a horror that had hunted his ancestors until it met its own end. Yet Tharok refused to entertain that possibility. If this were to prove a dead end, then this cavern would be his tomb. He was too exhausted and weak to return to the surface.

  Tharok rose, determined to search the cavern in its entirety, circled the sunken nest and made for the back of the cave. Thoughts flitted randomly through his mind. Nakrok, laughing. Shaya recounting her past. Golden Crow riding alongside him. Maur, her body slick with blood. World Breaker. Ogri's frozen form. The city of Gold. Nok. Grax.

  He reached the back of the cavern. It was too dark in these far reaches for him to make out more than mere insinuations of form and curve. The ground sloped up to meet the roof here in the darkness, and Tharok reached forward to touch the wall, groping blindly for damp rock.

  What he touched was scaled, and he jerked his hand back violently, nearly falling over in his sudden panic. Stumbling away, he peered into the gloom, hissing through his teeth, holding one hand with the other as if it had been burned. Scales! Not rough rock, not harsh texture, but scales laid pleated on a rounded mass, a curvature like that of a massive snake's body.

  There was silence but for the thudding of his great heart. Slowly, the back of the cavern relinquished its secrets as he fought to understand the subtle shapes before him. An entrance to a smaller cave beyond this one, the doorway filled with the massive coils of a snake. The coil reached to his waist, and was no doubt as wide across.

  He stepped up to the cavern wall and followed it carefully till he reached the entrance to the farther cave. His questing fingertips reached out to brush against scales once more, hard as rock and blocking the entrance from side to side, if not top to bottom.

  The medusa.

  Tharok stepped back, his mind racing. It would be coiled up within the cave, hibernating. That information was supplied to him, as ever, from beyond his personal realm of knowledge. It had been asleep for who knew how many years, decades if not centuries, resting after the last breeding. How to rouse it? It would have settled down and turned into stone as it slept. He could batter it as hard as he wished, but would be unable to awaken it.

  A thought occurred to him. He turned, staggered away, moved in ever-widening circles, scanning the ground, stumbling over outcroppings of rock, over hidden ridges and knobs. Finally he spotted what he wanted, and with a sigh of satisfaction lowered himself painfully into a crouch.

  The male medusa, its corpse reduced to its carapace and hollowed-out skin by the passing of the years. Three yards long, missing its head, of course, the bronze plates on its back collapsed into the sack of scaled skin that remained behind it. How long had it lain there since being discarded by the female medusa, their mating complete? Still, it would suffice. It would have to.

  Tharok stood and groaned at the prospect of going outside once more. But now he thought he could manage it, could make the trip if there was the prospect of success at hand.

  He left the cave, jaw set in grim determination, ascended the ramp and emerged into the night air once more. Then he traveled over the rough terrain to the bank of the river, and from there plunged into the scarce underbrush. He sought fallen branches until he had a wide armload, and then, so burdened, returned to the cavern's entrance, nearly collapsing twice, his stamina pushed to its limits, fresh blood seeping from his wound, and descended into the darkness.

  Just outside the nesting cavern's entrance, he labored at making a fire. He stripped bark from the branches and set the curlings together in a pile, around which he made a square of snapped-off twigs and smaller branches. With the flint and steel from his pouch, he set to sparking the small mass on fire, and nearly passed out. How long he knelt there, forehead on the rocky ground, breathing shallowly through his mouth, he didn't know. When he finally looked up, it seemed as if the light coming in through the ceiling vents was growing grey. Dawn was approaching. He had to hurry.

  At last, the fire caught. He carefully piled on greater branches, building it carefully, not aiming for flame but for the greatest accumulation of coals. The warmth was welcome, but liable to lull him into drowsiness, so he kept back, moving forward only to place more branches on till all that he had brought down was burning. That done, he dragged the body of the male medusa over, and when he judged the time auspicious, dumped it across the flames.

  The scales began to hiss as they snarled in upon themselves. The grey, stringy matter that held them together from within like webbing blackened and then began to let off a foul, retching smoke. Would the scent of a mate rouse the slumbering medusa from sleep? Tharok kept an eye on the fire, making sure plenty of air could still reach the coals, and carefully coiled the male medusa's body around the fire so that as much of it as possible would catch. Then he pulled off his jerkin and began to feebly waft the smoke toward the slumbering medusa.

  The male smoldered, never truly catching fire, grew wracked and cindered with the heat. The flames rapidly burned out, there being not enough fuel to sustain then, and for a long while only a thin bed of coals remained, growing ashen and dark until only a few red smears still glowed in their hearts. Tharok's arms were leaden, his vision doubled by the effort of continuous wafting, and he sat down with his back against a
column.

  The darkness beyond him had not moved. The smoke had thinned, was barely visible now. There was nothing more he could do. With any luck, he had managed to rouse a slumbering goddess from her world-passing sleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Audsley wanted nothing more than to turn and fly back up the airshaft to the library and lose himself in some more research. Surely he didn't know enough to handle this. He needed to brush up on his demonology. He needed to learn the runes. He needed to understand everything, anything, as long as it kept him from going back into that cavernous room.

  He gazed down at his hands. The runes burning along his blade and gauntlet showed as white in his grayed-out vision. He felt forlorn, felt the fool. What was he doing down here? He couldn't fight a demon. He'd never won a fight in his life. No, his mind was his true weapon. He should retreat strategically and read. Wait for Tiron to come through and arm him with these weapons, allow him to come down here and do what needed to be done.

  Audsley looked back down the length of the huge hexagonal tunnel to the airshaft. A steady breeze was cooling his sweat, while the distant moan from the tortured windows melted into the hummed lament of the trapped demons. What an awful place. His admiration for the Sin Casters had turned over and become horror.

  Audsley closed his eyes. Retreat. Flee – that was the wise thing to do, the smart thing to do. Surely the demon couldn't do any harm in just a few more hours.

  He opened his eyes and sighed, shoulders slumping. Who was he fooling? He couldn't run away from this. He turned back to the great chamber and smiled sadly down at his firecat. "Come on, Aedelbert. Let's go see what we can do about that demon."