Another howl floated down from the mines. There was nothing sane in it.
“I’ve seen a thousand years flash like a comet in the cold voids of space,” Javan whispered. “I fell into the raging sun while my feet scraped across stone.”
“What?” Lod croaked.
Javan’s lips twisted into a horrific smile. “The Rephaim is free. It roams the mines. It used my eyes first. That hurt so badly…” With a frown, Javan lowered his orb-cupping hand.
Lod desperately lunged, clutched the wooden haft of his ten-pound mallet and hefted it with a grunted oath. He twisted around, although he had to latch onto the side of the sarcophagus to steady his knees. In the flickering lamplight, he glared at the corpse inside. It lay as before. That startled Lod. He’d expected an empty casket. He’d thought the corpse must have risen to stagger through the mines. With a strangled roar, Lod swung the mallet. Stone crushed brittle skull-bone and cracked the ancient wood underneath.
Javan wheezed laughter.
Lod whipped around.
Javan raised his bloody hand. The orb in his palm swiveled. Lod’s lips peeled back and his blue eyes shined dangerously.
“My sword drips with the gore of hundreds of thousands of pitiful fools like you,” Javan said. “I roar at the universe to drown out its howl of futility.”
Lunatic shouts floated down from the mines as Javan began to edge closer.
Lod made a savage noise and his grip tightened on the wooden haft of his hammer.
Javan grinned wider. Drool spilled. “You’re no tower. You’re flesh. You bleed. Now howl, foul stink of humanity.”
“I gave you mercy once,” Lod said thickly. “So don’t ask it again.”
With his bloody eye sockets and his idiot’s grin, Javan continued sliding closer. He kept his right hand outstretched so the gory orb could stare at Lod.
Lod’s face grew rigid, although he seemed feverish. Sweat glistened on his cheeks. “May Elohim have mercy on your soul,” he whispered.
Javan wheezed mad laughter.
Lod lurched forward and swung mightily. There was a terrible crunch. The madman flopped onto the tiles, and his eye rolled free.
Lod scrambled away from it. He heard more howls floating down. He took a firmer grip on his mallet, and after a half-second, he grabbed his fallen gad and the oil-low lamp. He then pried the olden sword out of the sarcophagus.
-10-
Lod waded through the chill waters while from above sounds of butchery drifted down. There was a distant rumble and then the avalanching crash of hundreds of tons of rocks and boulders. Somewhere in the mines, madmen must have hewn shoring timbers or dared smash critical rock pillars. The rumbling quit. The stones grew still and silence filled the mines. Then the shrieks began anew.
Lod waded to where he’d first broken through and chiseled handholds. Soon, with the ancient scabbard slung over his back, Lod crawled through the narrow gallery, breathed the hot air and became slick with sweat. He climbed to his feet in the chamber where Kulik had sat on a rock. A slave lay there twisted in death with a gad driven into his forehead.
Near the ladders, Lod found a sick sight. Eight dead slaves lay in a row, many of the slain draped over the legs of the murdered man before him. Blood, brains and hair smeared nearby rocks. It appeared as if each murderer had lifted his rock two-handed and bashed the back of the man’s skull before him. It seemed… as if the first murderer had foully slain the slave before him. Then the slave behind him must have liked the idea, picked up a rock and crushed that murderer’s skull, and so on down the line.
What had happened to the last murderer, the last slave to crush the skull of the man before him?
A skittering of pebbles gave Lod a clue. He whirled around to face a grinning madman with wild eyes, a wretch bringing a rock down toward his head.
Only Lod’s reflexes saved him. The rock grazed his cheek. A descending arm knocked Lod’s lamp-carrying arm. The lamp flew free and shattered against stone. In the darkness, the madman laughed wickedly. Lod swung. The man grunted and slapped down hard against the floor.
“The moist womb of darkness longs for your bones,” the man chanted. “Silence screams to still your futile struggles.”
In the pitch-blackness, Lod struck again. Bones crunched and the chanting ceased with a gurgle.
In the stygian gloom and from above, awful noises drifted down. Time elongated and distances stretched, but Lod kept shuffling. Luckily, a change in the air alerted him. He followed the cooler air until his hand touched wood.
He climbed the ladder and discovered a glorious flicker of light. As he strode toward it, there came a scream around the corner, followed by an odd comment.
“Why don’t you bleed, sahib?”
“The lords of Sheol stand tall in majestic strength,” a man answered. “You have maggots for brains and worms in your belly.”
Lod rounded the corner and he wondered at his sanity.
The guard-captain, the tall, bearded, helmeted soldier, with the golden sash of the officer across the temples of his helmet addressed a severed head. There was a line of such heads, and they watched the swordsman with bitter intensity. Littered about the area were headless corpses and various weapons: swords, whips, clubs and rocks. The guard-captain held a scimitar and he peered at a head with a ghastly slash in its forehead.
“I curse you by Leviathan,” the head snarled. “May he salt your flesh with bitumen and devour you in a gulp. You’ll writhe in his gullet until he excretes you into the depths.”
Lod blinked in horror. The severed head’s lips moved and sounds came forth. Slowly, Lod shook his head. This couldn’t be real.
“Strike, white-hair!” a different head cried. “Bury steel in his spleen.”
The guard-captain whirled around. A torch in a wall-socket lit the area. The flickering light shimmered off the curved blade. Within his helmet, the guard-captain grinned with bloody teeth.
“Your hair is like the snows of Saturn, sahib. You shall be my prized head.”
Lod dropped the mallet and tore out the sword from the ancient scabbard slung on his back. This was an abomination against ordered reality. And the possibility that his head might sit with the others filled Lod with revulsion.
The guard-captain set his left hand on his hip and came at Lod in a fencer’s pose.
Lod bellowed rage, gripped his sword and rushed the guard-captain, swinging. The guard-captain twisted with uncanny ability and neatly parried with a clash of steel. The ancient sword, kept perhaps for centuries in the moist sarcophagus, shivered into pieces.
The guard-captain laughed sharply. “Reality shatters at the stroke of my blade.” He made a fencer’s flourish with his scimitar. “You shall stay and propound upon the joys of mobility.”
Lod struck like a cobra and slammed the broken blade of his sword into the guard-captain’s chest.
The guard-captain stumbled backward even as he flicked his razor-sharp scimitar in an arc. It sliced meat off Lod’s left shoulder like a butcher slicing ham. Blood spurted. Lod leaped upon the fallen guard-captain, grabbed the helmet in his bloody hands and twisted savagely. Neck bones snapped.
That awoke the heads. They snarled curses at the guard-captain and then at Lod.
Lod snatched the guard-captain’s scimitar off the floor, raced to the torch and freed it from its holder.
“Sever his head,” one of them shouted. “Place it sideways beside me that I may chew on his flesh.”
Lod shouted in loathing and ran away from the talking heads. He had to get out of the mines. He had to escape this lair of madness, this corner of Hell come to Earth.
-11-
With strength, speed and the scimitar, Lod fought his way up the levels.
The counterweighted boom blazed with fire. Men there wrestled, clouted one another into submission and tied the defeated with cords. The victors tossed the defeated into the fire. Then they danced in wild frenzy to the burning screams of the dying.
In the lurid firelight, Lod scaled the near vertical height. He slid onto the ledge as madman cavorted. One spied him and advanced in a wrestler’s crouch. Lod thrust the scimitar through the wrestler’s heart and raced away into a tunnel.
Later, a maniac bellowed with fierce delight. Lod spun around—no one was there. He looked up and barely leaped aside. Headfirst, a maniac with his dagger dove where Lod had just stood. Headfirst, the man hit the floor and broke his neck. Lod raised his torch higher. Grinning madmen watched from a ledge fifteen feet up. Another of them seemed to judge distances. Lod ran.
Later, he spied bloodied intestines stretched before him like a rope a foot off the ground. He leaped over the grisly thing and gutted the two slaves who waited in ambush.
On a higher level, Lod found corpses hanging headfirst from a beam of shoring timber. Using hammers and gads, madmen had spiked their feet to the wood. Lod eased past, his features grim. Too often, he spied sudden movement in the shadows. Some men shrieked in fear, sprinting elsewhere. Others charged with lunatic shouts. Lod’s battles blunted his stolen scimitar and his sword-arm grew heavy.
Finally, muted sunlight showed him that he’d reached his destination. He ground out his torch and peered around the corner of tunnel number VI. Sunlight poured down from the great hole above. It highlighted the rope attached to the derrick that stood out of sight in the land of the sun. On the floor lay the cage. Its door was ajar. Bodies lay around it and bodies lay on the pinnacle of ore piles and in the smoldering sheds.
The mace-man who had threatened Lod earlier sprinted into view. He was the burly man with leather straps crisscrossing in an X over his hairy torso. He ran from a howling pack of man-beasts and the giant cave hyena with its spiked collar. The crazed men bounded on all fours with outrageous speed. They closed upon the mace-man. He twisted his head to look back, gave a wild cry, whirled around and swung his mace at the leading cave hyena. The ugly brute was cunning, however. The hyena threw itself aside.
Jehu, the former cheek-tattooed guard, sprang from all fours like a beast and hurled himself onto the mace-man. Jehu sank his teeth into the mace-man’s hip. Other man-beasts swarmed upon the doomed guard. In grim brutality, they dragged the roaring, fist-buffeting mace-man to the floor. There, amid savage growls and yipping cries, they tore at him with their teeth and raked him with ragged fingernails.
Lod soon spied one of the man-beasts slinking away from the savage feast. The beast trotted on all fours with torn, bloody flesh in his teeth. Others still snarled over choicer pieces. The man-beast slyly gazed at his fellows. Then the beast spat out the torn flesh and spat the blood from his mouth. The man-beast stood up on two legs and began to sneak away.
Unfortunately for the sneaking man, the cave hyena raised its bloody head from the mass of quarreling beasts around the corpse. The hyena gave a foul cry. One after another, men-beasts looked up. Blood smeared their faces and some had pieces of flesh between their teeth. The cave hyena howled, and it began to stalk the man on two legs.
Undoubtedly recognizing his error, the man sobbed for mercy. Then he turned and ran.
The pack gave chase, sprinting on all fours, determined to bring down the new prey.
Seeing his chance, Lod sprinted for the rope. As he entered into the radius of sunlight, he saw the man dart into a low tunnel. The pack boiled into it after him.
Lod hesitated. The man had helped him. Lod cupped his mouth and bellowed, “Here I am! I’m sane, free of the Rephaim’s evil! It’s me you want!”
Then he climbed up the cage, clutched the arm-thick, hairy rope and began to shimmy upward. The pack raced for him. While in the shadows, their eyes were an eerie luminous green. In moments, the human members of the pack clambered over the cage and climbed up the rope after him. The cave hyena yipped with fierce encouragement from the floor. The rope groaned by the time ten of the human beasts followed. They howled and chomped their teeth so saliva flew in gobs. Jehu climbed in the lead. Whether it was vile spells, madness or simply that they were fresher, the pack gained on Lod’s fifty-foot head start.
Lod recognized the danger by the time he reached over a hundred feet high. He clutched the rope with his thighs and held tight as he could with his left arm. He drew his dulled, nicked blade and began to hack and saw at the rope below his feet.
Lod had time for three savage cuts. Then mad Jehu grabbed hold of his foot. Lod stabbed at the eyes. Jehu’s tattooed head arched back. He gurgled, lost his hold and pitched off the rope. Lod hacked at the monstrously thick weave. Another man-beast slithered up toward him. Lod flailed, sawed, and as the man-beast’s fingers reached up, strands of rope unraveled and tore under the weight of nine big men below. The rope parted with a snap. Nine possessed lunatics screamed or howled in rage as they plummeted back into the mines.
With a weary grunt, Lod sheathed his scimitar. He swayed at the new end of the rope, resting for several heartbeats. Then he continued to climb.
-12-
Lod trembled with fatigue by the time he crawled off the derrick and onto sun-baked soil. The afternoon sun cooked the stone corrals where donkeys watched him with strange intensity.
Men lay slaughtered here as well. There were mangled heaps of dead and corpses nailed to posts. Several men had been buried up to their heads, their black tongues protruding from their abused faces.
Lod collapsed onto his knees at a trough and plunged his head into the warm water. He drank greedily. As he lifted his head, he exuded as the water cascaded down his muscle-quivering back.
Then movement by the nearest barrack caught his eye. A door swung open. Someone watched him from the shadows inside.
Lod struggled to his feet. He drew his dulled scimitar.
Kulik the Bear ducked through the door. The eight-foot half-Nephilim staggered toward him. Kulik clutched a flagon of wine in his left fist and his rune-etched axe in the other. He went bare-chested. Terrible runes were carved into his skin. A few dripped sluggish blood. Most had caked into scabs. Kulik had wildly disheveled hair and he grimaced like a berserk, grotesquely contorting his features.
A hollow feeling grew in Lod. He tightened his grip on the scimitar and wished for a shield. Even better would have been a spear and a chariot.
Kulik’s bloodshot eyes held madness, but not one completely given over. The huge half-Nephilim halted twenty feet away.
“You mulish bastard,” Kulik said in a drunken slur. He tilted his head back and guzzled wine such that some flowed out the corner of his mouth and dripped down his chin. Then he gasped, blinked and grinned crazily.
“You drugged me,” Lod said.
Kulik laughed. “I hate these mines. I hate being an outcast in my grandfather’s kingdom. I made a mistake once. This was my punishment.”
“What is the Rephaim?” Lod asked.
Kulik shook the flagon and turned it upside down. A few drops dribbled onto the hard-packed soil. He pitched the flagon aside.
“I was going to bring down Moloch,” Kulik slurred. “But I needed powerful allies or an ancient spirit. The crypt—”
Kulik threw his head back and howled a cry of despair. Then he clutched his head with his left hand. “I feel it, you stubborn bastard. It shrieks in me. It’s mad. It torments. This is hell, white-hair. I never deserved this.”
Lod’s grunt could have meant anything.
Kulik’s lips writhed. He clutched his axe with both hands. “I’m the Nephilim among men.”
“The half-Nephilim,” said Lod.
Kulik raised his axe. “I’m the god here.” Kulik contemptuously eyed the heaps of dead. “They could not defeat me. I have defeated everyone.”
“Go down into the mines,” Lod said. “There are others waiting.”
Kulik took two staggering steps toward Lod. “He’s in my mind. I feel his hatred toward you. You baffle him. How can you resist possession?” Lunatic idiocy swirled in Kulik’s drunken eyes. “He’s mad. It drives me mad. Kill me, white-hair. End my suffering.”
A chill
ran up Lod’s spine. Then his blue eyes blazed like a desert prophet on the verge of divination. “If you hate it, tell me how to kill it.”
“You stubborn bastard, he can’t die. He’s a spirit.”
“They sealed him in the crypt.”
Kulik frothed at the lips. It seemed he battled his insanity. “Spells,” the half-Nephilim said heavily. “Spells barred the Rephaim from the living. He… can reach out only so far, that is your answer.”
Lod shook his head.
Kulik threw back his head and howled. Something vile happened to his eyes then. The drunkenness drained away. In its place, a swirling evil peered out.
“Putrid flesh,” Kulik said in the dead voice of the grave. “If I cannot have you—” all of a sudden, Kulik wildly whipped his head about. He chewed his lips and howled, “Get out of me!”
Lod took a step back.
Kulik’s gaze snapped onto Lod. The half-Nephilim raised his axe. It might have been a salute. He opened his mouth. Then whatever sanity had been there fled. Kulik roared and charged like a stampeding mammoth.
Lod pivoted on his left foot. He sprinted for the giant hole. Kulik bellowed greater rage. As Lod pounded across the hard-baked soil, he glanced over his shoulder. Kulik’s lips writhed and blood trickled from his self-inflicted wounds. Kulik had surely carved the runes into his flesh to drive out the Rephaim.
Air burned down Lod’s throat. He heard the close thud of Kulik’s feet. He knew he couldn’t get any nearer the hole. So Lod skidded and wildly turned.
Kulik laughed like death incarnate. He raised his axe, twisted his torso while running and began to swing.
Lod ducked. The rune-etched axe swished over his head. Now began a deadly duel along the edge of the mineshaft. The Rephaim in Kulik stalked Lod, swinging powerful blows. Lod sidestepped some of the wild swings. He used his scimitar and half deflected others. If he had tried to halt an axe blow directly, it would have shattered his weapon. Instead, Lod relied on speed, agility and the possibly that the spirit in the half-Nephilim couldn’t control the body as well as Kulik could have.
The Lod Saga (Lost Civilizations: 6) Page 6
