by Chris Turner
“Brother, I wish you wouldn’t—”
But the Beastslayer didn’t finish that thought.
A hideous creature burst out the water, fat as a grouper, sending forth a spray of sludgy water.
Crayfish? Clam? Neither was apt.
The blood froze in Dereas’s throat, no less Rusfaer’s—a terror which knotted the pit of both men’s stomachs and sucked the life blood out of even the bravest man.
On spindly legs, a wild, crab-like creature scuttled shoreward, leaving Rusfaer, who stood gape-mouthed nearby, transfixed. Water poured from the beast’s domed carapace. Algae and grey moss threaded down its hard outer shell to cling to its six forelegs like a grizzled garland. The water gleamed green in the monster’s advance. Whether scorpion or crab, the beast was a horrid caricature of neither, the embodiment of beastliness itself.
An algae-coated pincer shot out to snatch at the warrior’s thigh.
Rusfaer jerked away, avoiding the rake of those sharp nailed vises across his bare flesh. The creature scuttled forward, eager to snag any appendage, arm or boot and drag his body into the water.
Rusfaer struggled, hacked at the appendage and gasped out curses, aghast at the orange-toothed maw that was moving in on him. Hideous chirping sounds issued from its mouth as the beast’s crab legs clacked and splashed around him in a frenzy.
Rusfaer’s sword hammered full on the creature’s leg, splintering crusty shell and joint. Then the glittering edge of the sword fell on empty water as a tentacle pulled him forward and the sputtering warrior was turned over and over in the seethe of blackish water.
And yet, all this infernal commotion had alerted some new terror in the deeps.
A rumble of horrible, subterranean ghastliness came boiling up from the middle of the mysterious depths.
Rusfaer was nearly crushed as a wall of water exploded in his face. Out of the blackness burst a gigantic, wedge-shaped head, straight up from the sinister pool, with spotted snout.
The behemoth was all scales and slimy skin, a nightmarish serpent from the pits of hell. Dereas gaped at the size of its mottled worm-like head and scale-plated snake’s body. It opened its maw wide, clutched the blue crablike creature in its triple fangs and crunched. The thing struggled uselessly, eye stalks crushed, wavering under the press of muscles too powerful for even its impressive girth. The prey was doomed and could hardly be recognized as the same finned thing that he had spotted earlier poking its eldritch antennae above the water.
The pincer gripping Rusfaer’s boot heel was jerked back and snapped in two as the warrior fell back in a backwash of cold water. The worm, serpent, or whatever it was, had a trunk wide as two men. It reared out of the water and sucked the monster crab down head first with primitive zeal. The captured creature’s hind legs thrashed and pushed against the gummy flesh holding it, but the serpent opened its fanged mouth a tinge wider and hiccuped, or some obscene mimicry of it, and with each grotesque spasm, the bristles on its inner tract tilted and pulled backwards and sucked the doomed creature deeper into its disgusting, wattled throat.
Rusfaer slapped at the water, trying to get away from that slimy horror. But the thing’s head rose up to break off an end of a grey-glistening stalactite. Then the monster turned, for an instant, to shine its one glaring eye on him.
Dereas could see in a brief flash, that the breadth of each evil loop of its coils wrapped underneath, were larger than himself. From where had it come? The snake must have slithered up from some underwater hole.
Now the mutant crab was completely engulfed by the serpent-thing’s mouth. The throat worked. It snapped shut its fanged maw and dove underwater, quick as it had come, sending a tidal wave showering them all.
All reeled under that assault. Rusfaer struggled to stay afloat, grunting entreaties to his gods. He kicked and thrashed like a half-drowned dog toward the shore. His mail shirt threatened to drown him but his feet hit shallow bottom and he pushed off, head breaking the surface once more, gasping for air.
Dereas plunged into the water to help him but his brother jerked himself away, eyes mad as a boar. It was as if he had seen a horde of demons. The big warrior cursed, frothed, rocked his head back and forth in thick, slobbering shock. He dragged himself from the water and staggered up the shore.
Dereas stared in mute horror while Jhidik and the others backtracked madly up the tunnel. Now a low rumble filled the dim cavern. Stones erupted from the water, showering all in slime. The thud of mighty blows sounded shortly after.
Dereas cried out a hurried prayer to Balael. He turned to Fezoul and rasped, “Run for it, you fool!” He sucked air into his lungs. “So this is the Pygra of which you spoke?” Frantically he pulled the white-faced mountain king along.
Fezoul moaned and blubbered, “Dark things dwell in the caverns of Yarim-Id!”
Up the mountain path they fled. They stumbled, reeled, clawed their way through narrow twists in the tunnel, too narrow to admit the snake that slithered out of the water after them.
Relief blossomed in Dereas’s heart—for something that big could not squeeze through a junction that slim. Could it? But there came a wallowing behind them that froze the marrow in his bones—a wash of terror, a slithering tumult, immeasurably long, sliding, lurching, banging its snout against the tunnel as if the rock were made of soft curd.
The stone shook under the monster’s every heave. The booms were enough to deafen the undead, resounding with a hundred bashes of hammer on drums.
Pygra was not done yet...There came a horrendous scratching and slithering of the most unnerving variety. It came from the tunnels adjacent, echoing fiendishly behind the pool. The serpentine nightmare was not far away, a fact which could only suggest that it was capable of moving with mind-numbing speed.
Dereas felt his flesh crawl. He recalled a tunnel gaping blackly behind the pool and his mind raced. Did the passage connect to the side tunnel they had passed earlier?
He did not finish the thought. He dragged the mountain king along like a sack of flour. “Quick! Before the snake cuts us off.”
“But how can it?” croaked Jhidik.
Dereas waved him off, a terrible cry growing in his throat. The eternal walls caging them in for so long and the madness of this sunless world were shredding his grip on sanity. Yet neither could compare to the unthinkable horrors of being crushed and ripped apart by that horrid serpent. Doubtless the brute knew these tunnels. How it had found some other dark, unknown crevice to slither through was beyond Dereas’s ken.
Sinister movements and rustling pebbles came from beyond roughhewn cross tunnels to their right. Along the way came an eerie whistling and slithering, and Dereas imagined some monstrous thing with flickering tongue scouring every murky escape route. Booms erupted, as if a muffled, colossal body slammed itself against sheer rock. The fugitives scurried on. Blood racing, Dereas thought about what those coils would do if they twined around his torso.
Like crazed men, they stumbled back the way they had come, clawing mindlessly down the tunnel, jostling against each other, scraping shins on rock, boots splashing in cold water. Somewhere behind, Dereas heard Rusfaer’s and Hafta’s heaving grunts and curses.
The Time Wheel was a blot to their left. They swept by it like frenzied fiends without a moment’s glance. Draba, normally sullen and indolent, had taken great pains to rush past with fleet-footed strides, his black-tarnished blade clutched whitely in hand. He was twenty feet ahead in the dull shadows when a sight brought him halting in his tracks, eyes wide with terror. An abysmal wedge of a head reared before him, a bleak mottled beak, elevated on a long glistening trunk, which was part of a longer mass of menacing, iridescent coils undulating on and on into the greenish gloom without end.
His face, a quivering mask of lunacy, betrayed a myriad emotions, each more terrible than the last. Pygra had slithered up a side way through impossible means and now thrust her obscene bulk up at them from the lower ground. A horrible nightmare she was to behold in the luri
d, devilish light. The serpent’s single working eye glared like a beacon; the other was fused shut, the grey-golden brown folds of flesh long melded over from some old wound or deformity. Whether the monster was half blind or victim of some plague of birth, was not known. It diminished her threat in no way.
The snake reared. Her fetid mouth opened in an ‘O’, gushing a rattle of ghastly anticipation. Draba gaped down a crimson-black putrid pit of slime. She snapped shut her mouth, her forked tongue darting in and out between a mesh of triple fangs.
Overwhelmed by surging fear, Draba outdid himself in the way of cowardice. When the mountain king had slammed into him from behind, he grabbed Fezoul’s arms and pushed him toward the monstrous face, using him as a decoy. In the wake of that bestial gaze, Draba turned and bolted, leaving the unlucky, gibbering king standing before the white, glaring eye. For a fractured instant, the dwarf stood paralyzed in wild-eyed fear, then the serpent, though partially blind, uncoiled with venomous fangs and slimy tongue.
In three quick strides, Dereas lunged forward and shouldered Fezoul out of the way. Twisting sharply, he slashed at the end of the snake’s slithering tongue arching toward the king’s neck.
The reptile gave a hissing shriek, missing its mark by mere inches.
Dereas’s white-knuckled fingers gripped his spear for another stabbing strike. The two-pronged shaft thrust deep into her dead eye and she gave another loathsome hiss and wormed her scaly mass forward, dislodging the spear and nearly dashing Dereas and the dwarf against the rocks. Head over heels they tumbled, her foul wind a tempest on their skin.
“Flee, if you value your hide!” Dereas wheezed, his cry drowned out by the wash of the serpent’s reeking breath. In thrashing confusion, having no time to recover from the stench, they clawed their way back up the tunnel toward the Time Wheel.
Scrambling in a half crouch, the beastslayer pulled Fezoul along. Lurching, barely escaping the snake’s mouth and dripping fangs, he shambled sideways down the tunnel. The snake’s usual lightning strikes may have been slowed—as she had just ingested the water creature.
The snake’s questing tongue probed the dim confines for their flesh. She had fiendishly crept up on them all too fast and would devour them if she could get a clear view. He ripped his sword free from the sheath and the arching, dizzying shaft of blade caught the beast’s face a glancing blow off the crusty scales between eye and snout.
The snake uttered an otherworldly gurgle.
Dereas crouched, laid a sinking cut into scaly flesh, deflected a slimed fang.
Pygra sprang to swallow Dereas whole, but caught the upthrust deadliness of his blade instead. In bitter rage, she bit down on the blade, and a strange brownish fluid sprayed forth, soaking the warrior’s mailshirt in gore, as she wrenched the gleaming haft out of Dereas’s hands to dash it clanging against the wall.
Dereas looked up at her dazedly through a screen of filth and haze, thinking that these were to be his last memories. But the snake was clearly in agony, her bleeding mouth pouring forth foul-smelling liquid, and ooze gushing from her maimed eye.
The serpent smashed her mallet-shaped head once, twice against the ceiling. Why? To ease the pain perhaps? To everyone’s dismay, the upper rock began to crack.
Shrieks and rumbles rocked the chamber. The others dashed for their lives. All save Dereas. They fled deeper back up the tunnel. An avalanche of boulders came crashing down, almost crushing the beastslayer.
He rolled just in time. The snake was on the other side of the landslip of boulders. In clouds of dust they could see her evil glaring eye, staring out at them in a sinister defiance, through a slit in the pile of fallen rock, not small enough for the beastslayer’s tastes. Her sight was not lost yet.
“We are lost!” cried the mountain king. His moan was a woeful quaver. He choked on his tongue, eyes blinded by the dust that swarmed in the air. “Pygra has sealed the main tunnel! There is no way out. She guards the escape route. “We are doomed!”
Dereas picked himself up from the rubble and hobbled toward the dwarf. “Shut your mouth, you numbskull king! You are our only hope. Get us out of here. You know these ways better than anyone.”
The dwarf king wagged his head in hopeless futility. “It’s been an age since I’ve trod these glooms and my memory is clogged with evil dreams over the years. The killer fiend is a foe too great for us.” He glared at the cowering figure of Draba in the darkness who itched to stumble blindly up the tunnel, but was unwilling to be a forerunner. “That dastard flung me deliberately at Pygra. You saw it!” he shrieked. He pointed a quivering finger at the cringing Draba. “Why should I help a group of ingrates like you? You are nothing but a gang of thugs—and killers.”
Dereas pinched his mouth tight in anger. “You will help us, you wretch, and you will do whatever it takes to keep us alive.”
Draba sneered back at them. “You were in my way, king. If anyone’s to die, it should be you. Was it not you who bred, nursed and worshipped that black-devilled thing from a babe?”
The king flung back a defensive curse. “So it was ordained.” His words trailed feebly, falling moot in light of the facts.
Hafta glowered at him, crouched warily at a bulge farther up the tunnel. Amexi sank heavily in the dust-clouded shadows.
Rusfaer, who had stumbled out of the darkness, ordered them all to silence, blinking in the confusion, so he could think.
“What’s there to think, brother?” croaked Dereas sardonically. He felt a gloating satisfaction at his brother’s being on the horror side of things. He coughed up blood-speckled phlegm in his palm. “We are all doomed, as the king says. So what is your imperial wish now?”
Rusfaer stared at him in wonder. “You too?” The big man shook his head and glared. “Come on! I’ve heard enough. I’m not going to give myself over to fatalistic mumblings.” He waved the others on after him.
“Better be quick to run to our deaths, eh brother?” croaked Dereas.
Jhidik cast Dereas a meaningful glance. Hafta surged after his chieftain. Up the tunnel the rest scrambled back again toward the stone wheel of time, all save Dereas. There was no comfort in this route, for the snake was thrusting part of her beaked jowl through the hole in the boulder-strewn wall caused by the avalanche. If she followed, they were lost.
Closest to the snake and her coils of death, Dereas could see clearly what she was planning. He struggled vainly to retrieve his weapon. He knew with helpless fury that it was probably buried under tons of rock.
Farther up the tunnel, Rusfaer, too, saw the threat and that they were not going to win this fight by any ordinary means. The snake was too big, too fast, and knew these tunnels like the scales on her back. Rusfaer saw the look of defeat etched on Dereas’s haggard face. But the sudden slope and the old wheel hanging on the wall gave Rusfaer the hint of a plan.
Motioning to the others, he scrambled over to lay hands on the timepiece’s rough stone. “Here, help me with this thing, you laggards!” Amexi, Hafta and the coward Draba who crouched panting and beady-eyed in the murk, stumbled forth to lay hands on the wheel. They put all their strength into trying to jerk it off its axle.
But to no avail. Thick ropes of muscles corded on Rusfaer’s back. Veins popped out on his brow. While all of them groaned, heaving in synchrony, the thing barely budged; not until Jhidik joined in and they nudged it a few inches, but no more.
Fezoul glared at the sacrilege to his heritage. “You cannot deface our sacred stone!”
“Shut up, you weasel!” Rusfaer’s shadow loomed over the king like a pall of death. “Either you help us or back off. Put yourself in the mouth of your snake, if you want.”
The mountain king pursed his lips. Seeing the truth of Rusfaer’s words, he pushed a space between Hafta and Amexi and bent a shoulder to the wheel. It jumped, scraped off the stone axle, giving way an inch with a sudden, grating creak.
Rusfaer let out a joyous roar. The wheel fell three more inches to the stony floor. It started to
roll on its own accord, given the slope of the passage, and Rusfaer, wheezing in a dizzy frenzy, lunged to steady it so that the clunky thing would not topple and crush them all.
Amexi and Hafta struggled to guide the wheel with straining thews as it plunged down the tunnel toward the blood-mad snake—and toward Dereas.
The beastslayer was racing up the tunnel as the wheel gathered momentum, with the snake’s mallet-head and muscular coils smashing dangerously on the rocks behind him.
The wheel rolled faster—a massive missile threatening to crush any idiot daft enough to stand in its path. Dereas dodged its breakneck rush, edging sideways at the last minute. His back and shoulders flattened against the stone with little space to spare as the heavy mass rolled onward toward the snake.
The wheel crashed against the base of the fallen rock and it vaulted upward just as Pygra was about to squeeze her beak-like nose through the crevice. Any chance given her massive scale-glistening body to squeeze through that aperture would have been the end of them. As it was, the wheel rolled up the crumbling slope and knocked the snake back through the opening that she was fighting to wriggle through. Pitched back in clouds of dust and confusion, she uttered a dry rattle of pain and frustration.
The wheel effectively blocked the hole and it lay askew. For now the snake slid back, thwarted...
Silence reigned in the corridor. Only the thuds of her tail and the dim trickle of water purling innocently down the path impinged on the stillness.
The breath wheezed in and out of Dereas’s lungs. Up the tunnel he hobbled, bloody and dust-caked. He joined the others, nursing several wounds. Foul serpent blood had stained his ravaged mail where the monster had dripped foul ichor; his whole frame reeked of snake scent. The mountain king looked at him with an expression of awe and respect. “Thank you, warrior. You of all others saved me from a gruesome fate. Pygra is behind us now,” he asserted, wiping his soiled robe. “We are safe—for now.”
Dereas’s smouldering eyes blazed. His dark face went a shade wilder, feral as a wolf’s after the bloodletting of the snake. Chest heaving, he fingered his mailshirt which was filthy and scored, and only grunted a dissatisfied oath.
