Death Mark

by Robert J. Schwalb

  “Me see snake. Me drive off,” said Uglier.

  Ugly shuddered and rubbed his forearm where a snake-man had bitten him long past. “We go. Not here to kill snake-men. Kill Melech and take women, yes?”

  Uglier showed a mouthful of blackened teeth.

  Alaeda, who watched the exchange after killing a snake-man who had tried to catch her off guard, slipped back behind a rocky outcropping. The fools were not just going to kill the thief, whom she guessed was Melech, they would kill them all.

  She wiped the black blood from her stabbing sword. The thing still thrashed at her feet. A clawed hand tried to stanch the blood pumping from the hole Alaeda had left in its neck. Alaeda ignored it.

  It was a horrible thing. The creature was a snake-man to be sure, or yuan-ti by their proper name. Some thought the snake-men were human once, demon worshipers driven underground for their wickedness. Their wicked masters twisted them into a vile race of half man, half serpent. Abominations and mutations were so common, no two looked alike. The one she had killed was almost human. She was not fooled. The gleaming yellow eyes and snake fangs gave it away.

  Alaeda had second thoughts about being there. At the edge of the muls’ torchlight, Alaeda could see more shadows move. To leave, she would have to fight her way free. She could not guess how many snake-men stood between her and the way out. She hoped Melech and his companion knew another exit.

  The tunnel sloped deeper into the earth, below even Under-Tyr. The passage burrowed into the rock until it reached the tunnel complex known as Tembo’s Teeth. The place took its name from the rock formations jutting up from the floor and from those hanging from the ceiling. The formations were quite old and brittle. Broken stone littered the floor.

  The tunnels were all wide enough to accommodate an army, which was why Kalak sealed them off in the first place. Some said they led out of the city, into the Ringing Mountains to the west.

  There were few thief signs, suggesting they had moved into unexplored territory. The walls were not, however, unmarked. Melech could make out queer paintings. Serpents cavorted with men, devouring humans and slaughtering them too. A great horned snake appeared in many scenes, a terrifying figure with fire for eyes.

  Melech lit his second torch, and they turned down a straight passage. At the end, he made out a heavy iron portcullis. The barrier didn’t surprise him; the material did. The rusting obstruction could keep Melech supplied with water for the rest of his life.

  Kep moved down to the tunnel’s end. Melech wasn’t eager to see what was on the other side. He stayed a few paces back. He tightened his grip on his knife.

  Just as the halfling knelt before them to inspect the chain looped around a metal hoop bolted into the stone, a figure resolved itself at the edge of his light beyond the bars. Melech yelped. He caught himself before he looked any more the fool. Kep hadn’t expected the visitor; he had fallen on his rump.

  Melech thought the figure was a man, yet as the stranger moved closer, Melech could see his original assessment was not quite right. The creature was naked, skin the color of a bruise. There was a tremendous stink coming from its body, almost as if it were rotting. Red eyes glared out from a twisted face, the worst part of which being the mouth filled with sharp black teeth.

  It hissed.

  Kep cursed and ignored it while he worked on the chain. Kep slipped Torston’s key from a pouch and slid it into the padlock.

  The visitor barked and turned back to say something to the moving shadows behind it. There were more creatures, just like the first.

  Melech stared and thought, These are Torston’s secret visitors?

  The first creature noticed and made a rude gesture with its mouth. Melech looked away, disgusted.

  More cursing from Kep indicated the lock wasn’t cooperating.

  Melech thought he should help, but he didn’t want to get any closer to the ghoulish creature beyond the bars than he was already. Behind the creature, he saw a few more men shuffling around. They didn’t move like men awake. They puttered as if sleepwalking.

  Kep turned the key and backed the lock’s hook out from the top. He swung it free and pocketed the device. Locks were valuable. Two more ghouls, which was what Melech guessed the creatures were, came forward and lifted the gate until they slipped its bottom bar into a hook hanging from the ceiling. The beasts pulled the cart forward—more ghouls and gray-faced human soldiers dressed in bloodstained armor and sporting appalling wounds followed. The lead ghoul patted Kep’s head as it walked by.

  The halfling looked ready to eat the ghoul’s arm yet showed incredible restraint.

  Melech gulped when the ghoul came close. It smelled of the grave. It hissed, “Well done.” The thing’s breath was worse, rank with rot.

  “Any—anytime,” said Melech. He stepped away, unsettled by the ghoul’s nearness. “Er … Kep. We have that thing to do?”

  Kep looked confused.

  “You know that thing?”

  The ghoul laughed. “Run away, little ones. We’ll be seeing you soon enough.”

  Melech took the creature’s advice and didn’t bother waiting for his partner. He got a few paces away when he heard Kep’s following footsteps behind him.

  He looked back. “Let’s get out of here. Who were those guys?”

  He could see them bringing the wagon up after them. They were about twenty, all the same, and had another hundred undead warriors with them.

  Kep had no answer.

  “What did we just let into the city, Kep?”

  Kep said nothing.

  The muls stopped a few paces ahead, and for the first time since setting out, they were quiet. They had even extinguished their torch. Alaeda expected darkness, so she was surprised to find there was light still. A green radiance came from mold growing on the walls. Although dim, it was enough for Alaeda to see the muls take positions behind a great jagged stalagmite thrusting up from the floor.

  She herself had chosen an outcropping extending out over the cavernous room to hide. She pulled herself to the top and lay on a narrow, flat section. She could see the whole room. A tiny, glowing blue spider dragged off something struggling in a little net it had spun. Alaeda hadn’t sheathed her sword since killing the first yuan-ti. She expected to use it many more times before she left.

  She and the muls waited.

  There was a square passage cut into the chamber’s far wall. Melech came out first. Even in the gloom, she could see the dark circles under his eyes, his swollen and crooked nose. Blood flecked his youthful features. The halfling followed a few paces behind him.

  Melech muttered. He walked toward the spire where the muls hid, oblivious to the danger waiting for him. Alaeda watched the halfling draw a knife. Commotion sounded behind them. Wheels crunched over uneven ground. Chittering echoed from the passage.

  The way the halfling moved, his grip on the knife, and his attention on Melech’s back all told Alaeda he meant to kill the young man. For a reason she couldn’t explain, she felt as if she should warn the boy. She reminded herself he was nothing to her and if she showed herself, she would be as good as dead.

  Shrill screams sounded from the chamber’s entrance. The muls jumped.

  Melech noticed them. “Hey!”

  Before he could piece together what was going on, the screaming’s source revealed itself. Scores of hideous cloaked men and women boiled out from the cave’s entrance opposite the passage from which Melech had just emerged. The yuan-ti had come.

  As much as Melech didn’t care for Ugly and Uglier, he was relieved to see them. A bit more muscle would make certain he and Kep got out alive. But why were they there? Then he knew. They weren’t there to help. They were there to kill him. He turned to warn Kep and saw the halfling coming at him, knife raised to strike.

  Melech cried out and rolled away from the halfling. His momentum carried him forward toward the muls. Ugly gripped a nasty axe in both hands. It was a wedge of stone mounted on a stout, wooden handle. Uglier heft
ed a wooden club with teeth hammered into the end. Kep caught himself on the stalagmite and twisted around to press the attack against Melech. Before the halfling could spring at him again and before the muls could close in to help, a mob of cloaked shrieking mutants spilled into the room and washed over them.

  A spry old woman leaped up and wrapped her scaly legs around Ugly’s neck. She drove her flint knife into his ruined face. She giggled when the mul dropped his weapon and reached up to tear her away. Another freak leaped out from the shadows. Uglier caught it on his club, striking it in the head and sending a shower of gore splashing onto the ground.

  More snake-men converged, swarming them all. Kep pulled a second blade and spun and danced, slashing and stabbing wherever he went.

  Their efforts were not enough, not by a long shot. There were too many, and more kept coming in through the chamber’s entrance.

  The first to attack Melech had a man’s body with the head of a hooded snake. It stopped and opened its maw wide, ejaculating noxious venom in a stream at Melech’s face. The thief ducked out of the path to avoid the spray so it struck the rocks instead. Where the venom fell, oily, yellow smoke rose. Melech flung his knife at the snake-man’s face. It sank into its eye, and it fell to the ground, clawing at the blade. Two more appeared to replace the first. One had snakes in place of eyes. The other was a comely woman, scales all over her naked body.

  Melech cursed himself for throwing his weapon away. Panic rose in his chest. He cast around for anything he could use as the savages advanced.

  Ugly fell. The same hag who had blinded him was busy ripping out his tongue with her teeth in an awful kiss. Six more hideous freaks surrounded Uglier. Blood streamed from hundreds of cuts in the mul’s body. Snot and tears poured from his face. He wept when he heard his partner’s wailing. The halfling broke free from a snake-armed horror and rushed at Melech.

  Melech looked up to see a woman fighting her own battle on an escarpment not too far from the gap leading to escape. Who was she and what was she doing there?

  Alaeda shoved her sword into the monster’s bloated gut and kicked it off her blade. Its O-shaped mouth worked as it dropped, trailing a fountain of filth from the wound as it fell. The moment it hit the ground, its body flew apart into squirming, slithering, banded serpents.

  Her breaths came in hitches. She had killed six so far, enough to make her attackers think twice about joining their dead fellows. She flicked blood from her blade and used the reprieve to survey the battlefield. The muls were down. Melech was unarmed and had been backed up to a stalagmite by two yuan-ti, with the halfling not far behind. More screeching sounded from the darkness. More were coming.

  Then a wave of gray- and purple-skinned horrors boiled out from the passage where Melech and the halfling emerged just moments earlier. They ran on all fours like beasts and sprang at the snake-men, slashing with claws and rending flesh with their teeth. Alaeda watched in horror as the snake-men stiffened and fell with just a touch from those claws, paralyzed.

  Behind them came forth a mob of armored men. They shuffled, almost as if in a trance. They raised their weapons and chopped at any yuan-ti who came close.

  It was past time to leave. Alaeda needed to find a way out.

  The yuan-ti closed. The naked one hissed, running her clawed hands on her thighs in a sickening, sensual manner. Snake-eyes extended his appendages, fanged heads snapping. Melech retreated and felt his back hit a stalagmite.

  Kep, his body slick with gore, walked toward the snake-men.

  “A little help, Kep?” Melech asked.

  Kep stopped his advance, as if willing to let the yuan-ti do his dirty work.

  More screams drew their attention to the passage. The wagon had come free, and the ghouls and the undead soldiers had joined the battle. The ghouls ripped through the yuan-ti as if they were nothing. Their sudden appearance caused the snake-men to waver for a few moments, but they regained their resolve when another fifty yuan-ti joined the fight with an even more hideous monstrosity in tow.

  It slithered out from the tunnel and straightened in the large cavern until it stood twelve feet tall. A giant snake’s tail supported a humanoid torso and arms, though the head was a green serpent’s. Great yellow eyes glowed in the gloom, and its forked tongue tasted the air. It gripped a crude blade of steel, twice as long as Melech was tall, and roared out a challenge in a strange language.

  Melech knew he had found death and there would be no escape.

  Alaeda was convinced she was going to die. She abandoned her position and slid down the rocky slope. The new monstrosity closed off the way she had come in. The way out was through the ghouls. To get through them, she would need help.

  On reaching the slope’s bottom, she sprang forward to stab at the snake-eyed yuan-ti menacing Melech. She cut off one of its eyestalks and put her shoulder into its body to knock it, wailing, to the ground.

  “Here, fool,” she said and tossed Melech the steel dagger Talara had given her. He at least had the wits to catch it.

  She spun in time to stop the clawed nude woman from ripping off her face. Instead, the black talons dug into her shoulder and tore at her skin. Alaeda grunted and pulled away. She slipped around the monster and drove her sword into its back. It slid off her blade. She looked around for Melech.

  The thief and the halfling circled each other, feinting and slashing with their blades.

  “Idiots!” she shouted. “You can kill each other later. We have to get out of here.”

  As if to prove her point, six yuan-ti charged them. She slew one and parried a heavy axe strike from another. Melech and Kep abandoned their duel and joined her to face the attackers.

  Melech vowed he would marry the woman the first chance he got. The last wave of snake-men to attack convinced Kep to abandon his effort to kill him and join forces to fight off the common enemy. Back to back, they slashed and stabbed at the nightmarish forms spilling out of the gloom. The woman fought alongside them. She split a snake-man’s horrid face in two and pulled her sword free from its chin. The dead yuan-ti gave them an opening through the press.

  “Let’s go!” she shouted. She ran toward the ghouls and zombies. The monstrous, giant snake-man loomed into view.

  “Through them?” Melech answered, laughing.

  Kep punched his blade into another snake-man’s groin and followed the woman.

  Melech saw the abomination closing on him. He feinted to the left. His current opponent, a knot of snakes tied up in a humanoid form, followed his movement, giving Melech the chance he needed to run.

  That’s a shame, then,” said Korvak when the guest in his cell said nothing. “I’m quite thirsty.”

  The visitor was not much more than a moving shadow. The torchlight shining through the window in his cell door made it impossible for him to see more than a silhouette. His left eye had swollen shut. He had to give the Watari fellow credit. He knew pain well and could inflict it in many interesting ways.

  He hurt everywhere. He recalled the hours before the guards tossed him in the cell as a hellish panorama of blood, pain, and a leering face. The halfling had cut him. He had carved chunks of flesh from his body and ate them in front of him. Korvak didn’t have the strength to take inventory of his body. He was too afraid to look. He felt wet between his legs. The halfling had taken his manhood while he had blacked out. A small blessing, he supposed.

  He squinted with his good eye. He saw a pale face watching him from a shadowed corner. Short and blocky, a dwarf’s build.

  “I can’t hurt you. There is no reason to be frightened. Come forward. I can’t see you. The guards shouldn’t be back for a while now.”

  The shadow hesitated then stepped so Korvak could see his suspicions were correct. His visitor was a dwarf. She was bald like most of her race, and quite plain. He sighed and fell back to the wall. He felt cold. He suspected he would be dead in a matter of hours.

  “If you’re just going to watch me die, you could at least tell me your
name.” He closed his eye.

  “P-Pakka.”

  He chuckled. “Well, P-Pakka, what brings you here? Not to rescue me?”

  He was so tired, though, so weak, he didn’t bother to open his eye, at least not until he felt a warm hand resting on his brow. The dwarf’s face was very close, and he could smell her breath, a sweet smell, life, rain evaporating in the sun.

  “I … I … can help you,” she said.

  “Doubtful, dear. Very doubtful,” he said. He had no reason to lie to himself. He was going to die.

  The dwarf whispered something. Korvak could not understand the words. They weren’t Dwarven nor Common. Her words sounded like a stirring of the wind. Her hand grew cool. Beads of sweat broke out all over his body, joining those others dampening his robe. Each cut, each scrape, awoke in searing pain. He felt burning in his left eye and knew it wasn’t gummed shut but had been torn from his head. He felt the gouges in his flesh where the halfling’s sharp spoon had dug out bite-sized bits of living tissue. He felt the absence in his groin, and he cried for his loss.

  The pain intensified. He screamed for her to stop. Even then the pain didn’t end, wouldn’t relent. He writhed and through it all, her hand remained on his face. The cursed, agonizing touch would not lift; the pain would not abate. He wondered how she was doing it, why she was torturing him. He felt his consciousness slipping away, death closing over him. Death enfolded him. It was over.

  She sagged and collapsed on his chest. They breathed as one. Their chests rose and fell in time.

  They laid for what could have been days. Her weight was not a burden; it was a comfort, a startling reminder he still lived and, thanks to her, might still live. He raised his hand and put it on her shoulder.

  She pulled away and fell back to the blood-slick floor. “I … I … am sorry,” she said.

  Korvak struggled to rise. He was still weak. And he hurt like hell. But still he lived, and he did not know how or why.