by Chris Turner
“To tarry is folly, your Grace!” cried Jogen with placating earnest.
“See to it!” thundered the monarch. “I am irate and perturbed! The queen lizard is in oestrus, as you can plainly see in her pen, and she struts in a most foul heat. The time is ripe!”
The attendants made haste, given these kingly words. Casting uneasy glances at the snorting creature in the great cage, they grabbed the two aforementioned prisoners and dragged them to a lower pit to strip them of their armour. They were forced on their knees, stone weights applied to their shins, and hosed down with buckets of rank water. If either Jhidik or Draba resisted, they were buffeted with the flat ends of pikes, made of hard white bone.
Jhidik’s two captors herded him toward a small stall near the huge female lizard—a holding ground, Dereas guessed—yet Draba was taken to a place a dozen yards distant, on a cleared terrace. A giant egg, large enough to hold a man, was rolled toward the pinch-faced prisoner. At first the insolent troublemaker glared in distaste, still in shock at his ‘choosing’. Then, with a rude gasp which could only have been construed as fright, he squirmed away from the egg, for something in his gaze caught a glimpse of its being cracked in three carefully-mapped-out places.
Underlings reached into the upper crack and pulled forth the milky-yellow egg-meat to drape over the prisoner from head to toe. Draba objected to the treatment and lashed out with pinch-lipped rage. But his frenzied thrashing was met with more buffets on crown and torso. His mouth was forced open, cups of the raw egg were sloshed down his throat and dripped down his breast. The rascal nearly gagged on the warm, silky mash.
Draba squirmed and roared as they continued to hold his mouth open and worked his throat with their clammy hands. The two caged giant lizards nearby in the pens a stone’s throw away went berserk and gnashed at the wooden pales. They thrust webbed paws through the cracks, reaching for the outlander, as if they were galled that their progeny, the would-be meat in the eggs, would be wasted on unworthy human flesh.
“Not wasted, dear ones,” crooned the lizard king amusedly as if he could read the beasts’ minds. “Patience. You will see! Look up.”
Dereas murmured to Hafta in confusion. “Thanks to your master who recruited this varlet, we are about to become playthings of these lizards.”
Hafta hissed, “I have no control over Rusfaer. You know well.”
Dereas’s scowl spoke accordingly.
Draba, coughing, gagging, was beyond distraught; he shook like a man with a fever. Now the lizard king screeched another order.
In instant response a ceremonial postern gate crashed open in the fort’s nearest wall and a sombre procession of lizardly priests led by a stately lizard-priestess filed out and made its way toward the lizard king’s assembly. She was dressed in woven-scaled headgear, orange robe and slippers and carried herself with an aristocratic bearing. She seemed to walk more upright than the other lizards, including the king. Her face was austere, but shining with a beauty that once signified a vibrant woman. In her thin, robed arms, she carried an intricate chest inlaid with pure gold and jewels. She set it down before Draba and removed a small live newt from the interior. Draba looked at it in bewilderment. She sprinkled it with a pinch of some magic powder which she carried in her robe in a glass vial and without warning, shoved the newt down his throat before he could so much as gurgle.
The scoundrel’s face purpled; she uttered some profane and mystical words while the servants stepped forth and forced Draba’s throat to swallow the small reptile.
Dereas stared aghast. The immediate watchers of the rite murmured in approval. The attendants finished working Draba’s throat, now satisfied that the creature was indeed alive and kicking in his belly, evident from the visible lumps and swells on his stomach. They looked to the elegant priestess for further instructions.
Dereas felt his heart thump with loathing. He could almost forgive Draba his failings, knowing a similar horror awaited all of them.
While Draba’s eyes bulged, his kicks and thrashes were ignored and silenced, if necessary, with blows.
“I know her!” whispered Fezoul hysterically to Dereas. “The priestess is Jamuo!—my witcher, the one who placed the spell on me of dream sleep. I recognize her of old. But how she has changed! I thought she was dead!” He swivelled his body toward the lizard king who grinned with simpering delight.
“What have you done to her, you monster?” Fezoul cried aloud, drunk with horrified sorrow.
The lizard king explained in a casual manner. “Jamuo was found wandering through the forbidden tunnels, a lost soul, ages ago. She was delirious and emaciated. It was said, she was searching for her ‘deity’, her saviour, stumbling in the thick gloom. All her people had fled or perished, she told us. We gave her, her deity. We recognized her as a healer and a druidic sorceress. After she underwent a ‘rebirthing’, her powers increased and she channelled knowledge of the arts from ages past, long forgotten by men or lizards or the hybrids of this world. She sat in an egg for twenty four years, the first to perform the rite on herself. Now she is one of us—the priest-queen of Rgnadon!”
“Rgnadon? What in Balael is that?” cried Dereas.
The lizard king chirped out a cryptic laugh, “What it is, was, or shall be—’tis no concern of yours.”
Fezoul shuddered, spittle sputtering down his chin. “It cannot be!”
“Oh, but it is, dear ‘king’,” mocked the monarch.
For an instant, full comprehension dawned on Fezoul and the mountain king narrowed his eyes in glassy wonder. “Then you are Xabren?”
“None other.”
Fezoul reeled, as if the information and the events of the day had exceeded his threshold of sanity. The lizard king was the rebel who had left Yarim-Id long years ago.
“I am as old as the moon,” the lizard king said quietly, “and as the crocodile which sleeps in the weeds with one eye open, I am lord of my domain.” His eyes glazed over, as if going back to a place distant in time. “I dove too deep. I was separated from my group of rebels. Lost and starving, I followed tunnels of Vitrin far below the mountain and stumbled face to face with one of the old ones. A man-sized gila monster waddling on all fours. We fought to the death. I only prevailed because of my quick wits and the rocks I had clutched in my hands which I used to dash out its brains before it could devour me. The fiend had bitten me in the side, sending poison through my veins. Burning up with fire and delirious, I sated my hunger by feasting on its raw flesh, as it would have done to me. But a strange transformation came over me. I started turning into a lizard, limbs first, then torso, then face. But a smarter, faster, more human-like lizard than any of my subjects, and with reptilian stock in my blood running cold as icy Vitrin, I began to dream of creating a civilization of lizards...”
Fezoul shrieked: “You are mad! Cruel, no less, to your own lizard kind as you were to your own citizens in Xatu.”
The lizard king ignored the dwarf. “Certain of us endure the bite of the Gila and feast on an old ones’ lizard flesh, if we do not die from it, to become ‘greater-lizards’. ’Tis an honour and only done under my command. Actually, one great Gila is kept caged in the castle in a place only I know about, for this purpose.”
“Then what of these brutish horrors you cage in the pens?” growled Jhidik.
“A practical necessity. The ‘middle-lizards’ who gestate in Greta’s eggs for shorter or longer periods, can interbreed, but their offspring, the ‘lesser-lizards’, cannot and therefore are expendable. They know it and accept it. Fathered by my ingenuity, they are in thrall to me, as you have encountered in the tunnels, their unfailing loyalty.
“The greater lizards, like myself, who have the blood of the Gila running in our veins, are revered. You will make superior lizardmen captains—the lot of you!—and possibly will be chosen to advance—if I decide it! Unlike some of my lesser lizards which hatched too soon.”
With calm and didactic pride, the king went on: “All this talk about bi
rths and eggs...I can see, has confused and distressed you. The human is, according to our lore, dressed in fresh egg meat and forced to ingest half of the egg melt. The soft and warm nutrients of Greta’s stock, who as I explained, is deep in oestrus, Greta being—”
“The big female over there, we know,” cut in Dereas curtly. He hoped to disarm the lizard king, keep him busy while he worked at his bonds.
“Exactly, that is Greta,” the lizard king echoed indulgently. “You have a good eye, outlander, for an uncouth stranger. Perhaps you and I will have some stimulating talks before your ‘rebirth’. I use the term loosely. Beside her is her mate, Kruger, or Layhoo as we call him, a scaly, horned brute, from which her eggs were produced. She has great fertility, as you can see from the abundance of eggs scattered about our domain.”
Dereas grunted with veiled disgust. More of the egg slime was forced down Draba’s throat and Dereas grit his teeth. If Draba gagged, the slop was mopped up in ewers and forced down his throat again.
“The ingested meat will help him gestate, of course,” the lizard king proclaimed, “then to assume the form of his new being.”
Dereas and Hafta and the others watched in ghoulish fascination as the demeaned warrior was shuttled on his back, knees bent and tied to his chest, then hoisted into the half egg. With ceremonious precision, the three egg pieces were fitted over him. Three attendants busied themselves with some natural glue to patch up the cracks of the shell, sheltering the captive while the sounds of his terrified shouts and maniacal shrieks reverberated hysterically from within the egg.
Dereas’s jaw sagged in horror.
The lizard king explained in a droll voice, “It is expedient to say that we enclose the victim in the original egg shell for some time. It is said that his ‘old’ body will then become the seed from which the new being will emerge. ’Tis quite remarkable!” The king’s grinning jowl turned away and he called out in a boyish tone, “Isn’t that right, Zonx? Cement the shell too, Memak. That’s right! No premature birthings do we tolerate.”
“How will he breathe?” demanded Dereas, hardly able to speak.
“No need for breath. He will fall into a stupor and the meat ingested will do its work. But first, we must insert the egg back in—ah, but you will see!”
And while Draba’s egg rocked back and forth under his desperate thrashings, the attendants drew back the wooden pales to expose the female lizard that squatted beyond. The egg was pushed, or rather ‘rolled’ through the crude portal and the attendants quickly retracted themselves—for Greta was not an amiable creature when she was in such heat.
Suspiciously she sniffed the egg. She licked it dry, then as if in a sudden premonition, or a primitive rush of instinct, she rolled it about, as if it were a playtoy. Moving it into a familiar spot, she reared high and squatted on the egg, pushing down gently on it with her genitals. There came a liquid squishy sound as of a large object being squeezed inside her. With a languid grin she looked about, yellow eyes betraying the pride of a work well done.
Dereas felt woozy, as if he were about to collapse. The yellow eyes that looked back from king to prisoners were wide and sullen. Hafta and Jhidik seemed to brood long over the last act, staring into vacant space while Amexi made a sick gurgle in his throat. Fezoul paled, gulping down his repugnance and his lower lip began to quiver.
The lizard king sidled happily toward the pen. “Back in the mother genetrix!” he called, his gleaming sceptre raised in proud exuberance. “A miracle. A boon. Greta can take one egg at a time, sometimes two, but that’s a bit of a stretch.” He paused, looking idly from prisoner to prisoner. “No, we will do it the traditional way! A day’s wait and a vat of Vitrin, or snail brine for her to sip, and then we’ll see what hatches.” He laughed and then cavorted, piping a strange, cacophonic chortle. The sound was appalling to the ear as he slapped his clawed hands together with childish glee.
Other lizard folk from the community had taken up their arms in applause as the lizard king did another mad caper. “Joy upon joy! A celebration! This calls for a jubilee. A seeding of highest order!”
Dereas grimaced with speechless revulsion. The whole thing was too much for him to absorb. The maternal lizard took offence at the clamour and circled around her cage, snarling and showing a mouth full of red teeth. She rattled the posts of the cage, her long, pug snout snuffling and the father lizard in the cage adjacent stared mutely and uttered a low moan of rancour? Despair? Anger? Melancholy? Dereas was at a loss. How was anyone to decipher the primitive emotions of these prehistoric creatures?
One of the lizard-guards near Greta’s cage became overly festive and pranced too close to the posts, whirling like a dervish. The lizard’s tongue shot out and wrapped about its neck and chest with a snakelike power. The captive chittered and screeched in a horrible way and efforted to pull away. To no avail. Greta pulled the hapless reveller in again and again smashing it against the wooden bars. The guard was knocked senseless, until it was a mass of pulp. With one final pull of tongue, she dragged the victim into the enclosure where she upended the corpse into her fat mouth in one gulp and raised her neck to the sky and gave a celebratory roar.
The mob screeched in exultation, a pitch that reverberated up to the ceiling. The lizard king screamed in a demented voice, “A sacrifice!” He cavorted with glee around his fellows in a spry, blithesome circle, kicking knees high like an ecstatic dancer. “Jornek! Come out and play! ’Tis a happening of its own making. Isn’t it grand?”
Dereas shook his head in incurable disbelief at this chaos of madness. “Are these creatures all completely demented?” He looked to Hafta who had no answer. Jhidik’s eyes grew wide in glassy, fatalistic defeat.
“Her body heat will keep the egg warm,” the lizard king announced in a cheerful tone. “At the appropriate time, Greta will eject it. Thieves like your Draba may peck their way out in as little as a day, while the highborn amongst us culture for an age. Experimentation and trial-and-error forays have sped up our gestation period. A miraculous happening, don’t you agree?”
“Is it really necessary?” croaked Dereas.
The king’s snout twitched. “Doubtless it is overkill, but—as are so many rites of ours, we follow them religiously.” He hooked a pointed claw toward the snorting reptile. “The new lizard creature, half man, half lizard, will tooth its way out of the egg before long. You will see! Meanwhile we shall revel before the miracle!”
The festivity went on and the companions, sick to their stomachs, tried to block out the wet-rag image of Draba inside the egg, inside the mother lizard while she fretted and stalked to the tuneless capering of the lizard horde’s ritual. But no image could compare to the reality.
Dereas’s eyes blinked and glazed over. He let them trace lazy circles toward the stone-and-iron mass of the castle. Lone lizards filed along the parapets with white pikes in hand. They were curved like the long, rib-like blades wielded by the sentries who had captured them. Some marched two-abreast in lock step in small squads, led by an officious marshall who peeked down to survey the grounds below. Its steel-peaked cap stuck jauntily on its skull and it held a whip in hand to punish any who marched out of step.
Beyond the rib-boned portcullis in the castle’s central court glinted an enormous monster egg nestled on a golden stand. It was easy to see from this vantage, much polished and buffed, and held some macabre significance, the beastslayer guessed.
The lizard king whirled nearby and harrumphed, “Ah, you wonder of our royal treasure?” He clapped his hands in finality. “When the Great Egg hatches, it will grow into a leviathan to rule Yarim-Id! Lord of the shadows! It will eat men and beasts alive! We will be free! Free from our bane of serpents for good, to wander these tunnels and passages at will. No more snakes! No more Pygra. Only lizards!—and then, only free-roving lizards. ’Tis Pygra who keeps us penned down here in these dark burrows, corralled like monkeys in the meanest way. She likes it such. She does not know of the other secret ways out of these c
averns, which we have barred, and there we will bring our machines when the time is right. She cannot penetrate our small tunnel here. She only waits, brooding, prowling, trying to catch us unawares while we are daydreaming, scouting, foraging for food. Whenever our spotters poke noses forth, she pounces!”
“Tragic,” muttered Dereas under his breath.
“Behold the next Rgnadon,” the lizard king cried again. “Ruler of the Mountain! The great Gnador! Ruler Above and Below!” In a thundering voice he called for all to hear.
Dereas gave a strangled murmur. “Not even your ‘Greta’ could have birthed a blasphemy of that size.”
The lizard king flourished his sceptre and his eyes flashed about wildly. “Ah, an ancient egg, a special one we discovered many years before, many levels down, in a quarter of the mountain shut off from the world. We hauled it here with ropes and pulleys via great efforts and many deaths along the way. We discovered that there was a nest of magnificent lizard bones nearby. Aye, the remains of Tyrannus Iguanus, a great reptile! We hauled the bones forth by cart through the endless night and fortified our watchtowers and battlements with the calcified crust. Look! Behold the ribs of the Seven Towers of Rgnadon. They shine with full glory! They are indestructible, fortified with the bones of Tyrannus guarding their flanks. Watch! Even our veteran guards wield bones of similar nature. Forsooth, their bills and maces and clubs. Heed well! Do not fall prey to the smack of their Tyrannus bones.”
Dereas broke out in a sweat at the sight of the giant egg gleaming redly in the court’s torchlight. His eyes darted wildly, half listening to the lizard king’s mad dogma, half trying to contend with his rioting war of conflicting thoughts. Past the portcullis of Tyrannus bone, he could see the gigantic egg mounted on its gilded pedestal, huge beyond reckoning. It was exalted by the passing lizard folk, as if it were a statue of an avatar, or a king or god itself.
