by Chris Turner
Even Balael seemed to have turned his back on him. For that he gave an agonized cry, for he could not for the life of him understand how he had fallen afoul of his god so wretchedly. There were many who cursed the name of Dereas Barath-o’-Bear, or ‘Beastslayer’, in the northern climes for deserting his tribe.
The grim beat of his heart at this moment bore testament to how ill he felt about that unjust accusation.
Dereas shivered at these sombre thoughts as he flew through the night clutched in the talons of the beast. For in this world, like the land of Darfala herself, all was veiled in shadow, as his grandfather had told him many a time—and that all was not as it seemed...
The Eakor’s talons tightened and the war chief saw through slitted eyes a misshapen peak rise out of the rose-tinted murk.
He shivered. It was a sight that made him quail. For Mt. Vharad, crouching in ominous splendour, was shaped like twin buffalo horns of the bull-god Broasus. Seen from a distance, the mountain was a vast cone, shaped of crumbling rock. Its snow-peaked crown gleamed sullen orange in the breaking dawn.
Could it be morning already? The war chief shook his head in aching stupour. Every sense of time and place seemed skewed.
Even in these moments of anguish, he saw a leaden sea wallow to the east, with no barges or ships or gay ports to grace its solemn shore. Rust-coloured ridges and hard-baked soil melded into desert, marching leagues southward. Northward ran desolate plains, the grassy steppes of his homeland left far behind.
The flock was heading straight for the horned mountain; ever did Dereas feel a soul-wrenching destination approaching. The dawn’s light slowly snuck over the rim of the world to strike the summit and everything seemed different, both dreamlike and distant, for the mountain had a malevolent cast to it—also an evil reputation. Even in his woeful hour, Dereas was wondering how these predatorial beasts had come upon them. It was not natural...The Eakors had found them under improbable circumstances, far from their hunting grounds, if this far mountain was their home.
The birds wheeled closer, raising their tusked beaks to the setting moon, gathering in a crescendo of screeches of recognition. Such tumult could be akin to some code or password to the guardians who protected the cliffs and flocked raucously to greet them. The birds veered around the lit face of the mountain closest to the glimmering sea. Dereas saw a brilliant flash of tumbling water—a great waterfall pouring down from snow peaks, nestled below the two horns that crowned the giant mountaintop. Gargantuan statues of kings or animals flanked either side of the waterfall—only the work of myriad sinister craftsmen! Over centuries perhaps.
Dereas shivered in foreboding as he felt himself falling and cool wind hissing in his ears. The birds arched their way down in a series of slow undulating circles to form silhouettes against the sheer cliffs. He was still far above and could see black dots set against a dun chalky scarp marking the mountain and his hapless peers. Further below, clumps of plumed, long-leaved trees rose up recklessly from boulder-strewn ravines tumbling down the mountain side, or jutted out from the sheer cliffs.
The birds soared and swooped, and Dereas saw they had dropped to the quarter mark from where the mountain rose menacingly above the desert.
When he caught sight of the bristly, ragged nests he knew instant horror. They teetered in a long clustering line, clinging to the cliffside, massive branched ovals of them. Their ‘twigs’ were actually branches as thick as a man’s leg and knitted tightly together as in an artisan’s loom. Some protruded like quills from nest and cliff. Dereas’s heart froze, for it could be no accident that the baby chicks housed in those vile mangers, screeching, fluttering, bald as a gibbon’s behind, were crying for fresh meat, and that they were the fresh meat.
The blood hammered in his head. His mouth worked.
A warrior whom he recognized as Angmir set up a doleful wail a stone’s throw away. His parched lips bent back in grimacing horror as an Eakor pulled him closer to those chicks in their dark nests, reaching, squawking, teeming. Angmir struggled in the bird’s foul grip. With no success. There gleamed a hundred or more nests like that one, each with four or more squirming young, and the beast lowered its glistening talons so its slobbering brood could stab up beaks and snatch at the defenceless man.
Dereas’s thews knotted in a raw panic. That he might be next in those slavering maws with their gnashing, horn-hard beaks was too horrifying to imagine...
The monster that clutched him had caught up to the rest of the flock; he also saw the bird that gripped Rusfaer dip in flight. Jhidik’s and others’ carriers were circling close to the roosting colony now. The air was a frenzy of men dangling from talons and shrieking in contorted postures, the mad rush of beating wings and ruffled feathers mingled with the discord of squawks and screeches. The din was deafeningly mad, and all around him Dereas could see the expressions of fierce anticipation on bird faces with parted beaks. Jhidik was alive; thank Balael for that! but his heart sank when he saw his friend’s wince of agony as he was pushed toward a dark nest, and the awful, frightful suffering of what was to come locked, in that pincer grip.
The first victims, including Angmir, fell screaming into the yawning beaks of blind, frightful chicks. Some of the horses, dead or alive, fell many feet into the yawning pit of black jaws and bills—the owners of some of them, half as big as a mount itself. They ripped into the dangled offerings with twisted pleasure and Dereas’s eyes grew wide with panic at the carnage that ensued in those nearby nests. He watched men he knew viciously and methodically torn apart and swallowed before his eyes. In a gruesome instant he prayed to Balael that he be smitten down.
But no such liberation came. Only the chilling thought that come his turn, there would be no recourse, only a sudden jerk of beak, a reaching of blood-stained gums, and sharp rending of teeth tearing his flesh, as a slimy, mucous-filled palate and gullet worked.
A group of squawking outriders drove in with killing shrieks to ram claws and tusked beaks at their fellows, with curled talons bared. They tried to dislodge the others’ squirming cargoes, some with success, others not. The victors snatched new prizes out of the air while riotous beak wars raged, peppering the air with feral squawks as the losers were drenched in blood and feathers and went skidding back with bloodied jowls, broken wings and snapped talons.
Dereas gulped in sick revulsion. He was bashed sideways, the sudden wing of a passing bird raking his side and almost hurling him into oblivion.
His world swam upside down. He felt thankfulness for a few brief moments more of life, but none too lasting. From the flailing of limbs and shrieks coming from Rusfaer, it was clear he discovered equal horror in being sidejammed by one of the airborne attacking birds.
Yet providence intervened...and perhaps Dereas’s prayer had been answered. A big ugly creature with a grey pelt and large badgerish crown swooped giddily back to tear the neck out of a younger Eakor. It snatched up one of Rusfaer’s howling men. The dying bird crashed into Dereas’s, which upset Jhidik’s carrier before it crashed into the treetops below, ripping into fronds and woody stems and leaves. It hurtled down through the treetops smashing headlong into the rocks.
The beast kept rolling down—down the rough hillside until it was a shredded mass, while the victor snatched Rusfaer’s man out of the air and dropped him into a large nest of four chicks. The warrior, not surprisingly, was ripped to shreds, and devoured in seconds.
Jhidik’s captor now careened out of control, falling and smashing straight into a hellish pit of screaming young. Jhidik was thrown clear. He rolled to the far edge of the nest.
Dereas’s bird followed, crushing half the chicks in it, nearly pancaking Jhidik and his near death-twitching bird.
Dereas released himself from the jumbled sprawl of broken flesh. The injured mother Eakor’s talons had gone completely limp and he found himself faced with a ring of blood-hungry, clucking Eakor chicks. They were twice the size of his own hard-muscled frame. Jhidik was beside him, scrabbling for
his life. Dereas brandished his knife, slashed left and right. Eyes, nose, throats, fetid wings were all targets in this flesh-shredding fight for survival. The mutants were all over him. He scrambled, numbed feet trying to gain a position of defence. But there was none—trapped here like a rabbit in a wolf pack.
The chicks squawked with hunger, thrusting beaks forward; gruesome noises poured from the backs of their throats, a sound which seemed like the cackle of a demon’s laughter. The membranous pink necks showed pulsing veins and youthful flesh glowed underneath; the skin under the wings was wet and thin like goose flesh. Dander from ruffled feathers spilled in the air like chaff. Wings spread wide, the fiends hopped about in mad anticipation of a feast, some trampling on their brethren in a food-finding frenzy.
Branches snapped; the nest’s foundations ripped away from the cliff. With the force of the shifting weights, Dereas and his lieutenant were pulled into space. The shifting clawed feet and the slamming impact of the dead mothers had broken the balance...and now the world slipped sideways in hellish doom for the gasping men as they fell through the air.
Dereas dropped slowly at first and saw the desert loom below him, an unreal blanket of sand. The horns of the mountain, much higher still, lay hidden behind the frowning cliffs. But the dislocated nests floated above and to the sides like dark twisted clouds in a vast open sky.
Dereas groped empty air, feeling his heart leap into his throat. Both he and Jhidik fell from brambly tier to tier, down the cliff while angry birds dove and tore at them, trying to snap up their flesh. But the beastslayer could only laugh—in maniacal anguish—knowing that such effort was in vain, for he was already doomed to suffer a gruesome death.
Yet he did not.
Nor did Jhidik. Dereas’s fingers grasped a tangible thing, a limp brown form and he and Jhidik fell with it, nests and all.
The sudden confusion and violence in the air had given Rusfaer opportunity to hack his way free from his captor. The birds had reached such a pitch of frenzy that their senseless aggression triggered a sudden trail of casualties. It was not surprising that Dereas caught glimpses of Rusfaer and other warriors of their bands tumbling in free fall.
The beastslayer felt fronds ripping into his flesh. A sudden stabbing pain...a clinging vertigo as the slapping branches slowed his descent. He caught a mad glimpse of Rusfaer and the others smashing through the screen of treetops above him in a horror-plumed whorl of destruction and then the breath whooshed out of his tortured lungs as he fell flat on the padded hide of an Eakor.
The beastslayer sucked air back into his lungs, realized he had managed to grapple a dead bird in midflight. Whether it was the one which had carried him so far all these forsaken leagues, he knew not, only that it had further cushioned his fall, and had spared him the fate of a spine snapped in two.
He groped painfully to his knees to examine his wounds. He was alive, no broken bones. The ripping cushion of tree fronds and springy nests had deadened the others’ falls too, likewise the fleshy bellies of the mangled Eakors.
A handful of dizzy human forms lifted themselves groaning from the tangle of bodies. The tottering figures fought to get air back into their heaving lungs.
“Kizoi’s devils!” rasped Rusfaer, mopping blood and feathers from his eyes. “I curse these fiends to the end of time!” He hauled a grey-faced warrior to his feet who had a bloody gash whittled across his bare skull.
Dereas saw through stinging eyes Rusfaer’s men staggering in their boots, taking groggy steps about the wreckage like broken scarecrows from a distant dream.
He shook the fog from his head. The treetops soaring above them had shaded the dim slant of the morning light. They had landed on a broad strip of loose scree and shingle that hugged the cliffside. A trickle of water now purled nearby where shadows in the foliage played through the boulders; a pale light illuminated the winding goat paths around them. The cliff soared a hundred feet above in a phantom loom of mist.
Crumbling boulders and giant sandstone slabs had fallen from the cliff over time and Dereas’s eyes raked over weed-choked cavities and lichen-crusted boulders. The tall cactus-like flowers growing from the base of the cliff with their yellow blossoms offered hiding places.
By a solitary palm a large gaping hole loomed not far distant that seemed blasted by magic. The hole was surrounded by a ring of weathered boulders.
Dereas’s eyes had pegged it immediately. One of the big Eakors was still twitching in its struggle against death and tried to lift itself but could not. Fortunately, its talons were pinned and broken in many places. The beast could only rise inches from its stony cradle with a barrage of angry slobberings, using its twisted wings to try to crawl miserably closer to where the men were stirring.
Dereas moved away from that noxious beak, his lips locked in a contorted grimace. Several surviving chicks were still rustling nearby and he staggered sideways to escape as they raised ravaged wings.
Already the survivors could hear horrid screeches echoing from the air and knew that many sinister dark shapes would be falling on them soon.
Three of the five who fell were dead—Gaylor, Misten, Alapas. Crushed by direct impact or pinned under chicks, or Eakors, these men had no chance. The others stirred with a hopeful hint of survival.
The adult Eakors were either maimed or killed. Dereas grabbed a blood-caked poniard from one of the dead men and fended off a battered chick that had risen from the rubble to snap at his leather-padded leg. He drove the tip through the chick’s throat and caught a last glimpse of the corpse beneath, whose leg and neck were twisted in a fatal angle. Beyond, Rusfaer’s group struggled in the near carnage. His brother, having unhooked himself from the Eakor mass that had broken his fall and that still thrashed about dangerously, searched for some weapon to kill it with, while the maimed bird croaked strident curses for its broken wings and legs. Rusfaer, helmless and riddled with scrapes and scratches across brows and cheeks, groped around blindly, searching for a club. He snatched a bent blade from the bloody belt waist of one of his crushed henchman and ran the slick sword through the beast’s heaving breast before it could wrap its talons round his torso.
The big hulking warrior rose and panted, seemed shocked that his brother was alive. In those hazy moments, it seemed from Dereas’s perspective, he could only regard Dereas with the coldest detached hatred.
Dereas tripped forward on shaky legs, hustling to tend to Jhidik who was pinned under a stirring creature, struggling to rise before it tore off his arm.
The beastslayer hauled his friend to his feet and sent his blade through the thing’s eye. Wiping blood and grime from his own face, he snatched up another dagger from a dead-man’s palm and thrust it into Jhidik’s hand; he put his back to Rusfaer and the other five who tottered around grumbling curses and looking to the giant warrior for leadership.
“Quickly!” Dereas called to Jhidik and another of his men, Amexi. “Let’s be away from this evil place. More fiends are coming.” He saw that Amexi’s face was hardened and bleak, his blond hair matted with dried blood, the black, green and red-dyed tattoos of the animals and weapons on his bare neck and cheeks coated with grime and cuts. Experience had told him that such a man was a survivor, aye, a fearless ally to have on board. He had, after all, walked away minimally scathed from the fall. Training anxious eyes skyward, Dereas motioned a bloody hand significantly to the lightening sky. It was pale and brooding; he gave the sacred protector sign of his god Balael.
Grunting painfully, he hobbled amidst the gathering. The three picked their way through the knotted wreckage of bodies and foliage, and dodged any lump or shape that moved. Back along the base of the cliff they tottered, toward the cave opening, which actually was an ominous gap in the cliff face and seemed to peel back with joyless mirth.
That dark hole in the cliff yawned before them with portentous challenge, finally into the pits of hell itself. Dereas frowned at the threatening way it seemed to reject the morning light like a wizard’s curse�
�rejecting death and life as if both were merely intermediary worlds of blasphemy and perdition.
“Zecrates’s jinxes—” Dereas breathed. He had heard tales of these tunnels into nowhere—of Vharad and the lost mountain, and indeed, the haunted tunnels of Shaerm. Likely this was a gateway into one of those dark crypts. Skalds told of catacombs too, dark haunted places under the mountain that peopled forsaken creatures and lost kingdoms of elder races, unimaginable to even the most colourful story-tellers.
“What an eerie, filthy place to have to die,” muttered Jhidik, squinting into the light-swallowing darkness.
Dereas glared in indecision. Was it an act of chance that had brought them here to this sinister tunnel?—that they might pass through uncharted terrain and on to the other side of mountain? He did not know, only that they must do something in order to escape the gathering fiends ready to rend them to pieces.
He herded his men closer to the cave and Jhidik forced a sullen grunt. “In there? You’ve got to be joking?” The Pirean winced with new dismay. “Curse this game leg. I’ve heard Beren’s ghouls or worse live under this mountain.”
“What choice do we have, Jhidik? Into the tunnel!”
The others hesitated; even in the wake of the killing shrieks echoing nearby, the warriors shied away from that lightless hole.
“By Balael, I’ll kick your hides in if I have to!” bellowed Dereas. But he shuddered and gave pause. Grave tales had been told of what lived in these labyrinths under the mountain. With visible effort, he waved a bloody hand to thwart Beren and his ghouls. Better to contend with a possible ghoul or two, than fight those fiendish raptors again.
“I think it’s a bad idea,” came Amexi’s cracking voice barely above the squawking birds. He jerked backward with a cautious but perceptible limp.
