by Chris Turner
Dereas was appalled at the sight of Draba, now one of the detestable lizards. Rusfaer was in too much awe of the flames and confusion to give much notice to the freak that was Draba.
The lizard-man ran alongside them with a surprising speed. He darted in and out, like a dog herding sheep, nipping at their heels.
“Curse this zombie hound!” bellowed Rusfaer. He grit his teeth, slashed left and right, stumbled, grunted, and lunged again. But the obnoxious shape dodged and greeted him with a snuffling grunt and snuck in to play bite him on the shins.
The New Wolves’ chief loosed a barrage of curses, arched his sword in flailing cuts and sweeps.
Dereas turned. He tried to sideswipe the creature, but it darted out of range with a sinister clucking and threw a handful of pebbles at his eyes. Dereas shook off the dust and charged on. Draba’s cacophonic chittering was like the laugh of a hyena; into the press of the throng it faded as he veered away.
The lizard king, twenty strides away, seemed not to notice any of this horseplay, in anticipation of the capture of the two bloodthirsty brothers and their hack-happy rabble. Other members of Dereas’s band mauled and pierced lizards near the shadow of the castle wall. Yet the lizard king’s eyes glowed in fervour at the size, strength and speed of the Rgnadon, his champion. He seemed to overlook the trampling of his citizens—in favour of the creature’s potential for butchery.
The monster charged up before the male Kruger and stopped full in its tracks, exuding challenge. The two reared up on their hind legs, windmilling front paws, sending deafening roars to the roof.
The two brothers crouched mesmerized, oblivious to their peril. They caught their breath and dove behind two overturned cauldrons. Here they watched the dynamics of these titans as others of the lizard kind stopped and stared in no less wordless astonishment, their weapons hanging slack, jowls drooping.
A strange dynamic passed amongst the three: Greta, Kruger and Rgnadon. Baying, snorting and head-butting, the males chased each other around in a ring, as if seeking dominance, as would a twain of alpha dogs do in a surly pack.
The Rgnadon was testing, even eclipsing Kruger’s dominance and size. And yet still, the creature was but a babe compared to what it would become. Dereas had seen such behaviour before exhibited amongst the wild wolf packs of the steppes. He noted that the Rgnadon was extremely protective of Greta—he left her alone. They were obviously somewhat different species, but an unspoken bond of kinship passed between them. The elder creature was immediately wary of the new lizard on its turf. But to its credit, it opted to yield to a superior force, especially after a vicious attack left a gory tooth mark across its left shoulder. Kruger bowed its head in submission.
Dereas could not help but feel humbled in the presence of the primitive ritual.
The great beasts moved in tandem back to the centre of the compound, as if in instinctual unison, to confront the lizard king and his ring of attendants.
Before the forbidding fort they halted where the lizard king stood with steadfast conviction, hands folded on his chest. The other lizards quivered and quaked, shrinking back like so many mice into their hidey-holes or behind cauldrons and barrows. The lizard king walked boldly out to greet the three giant saurians.
Was he invincible? Insane? thought Dereas.
Then he witnessed a miracle. Jaw agape, he saw that the lizard king, with a royal authority, sidled forth to mount the great Rgnadon from the tail section, with no fear at all. He clambered expertly up its bony back as if it were only a toy ladder. The Rgnadon did not seem to mind, only stamped a foot and bared its teeth, like any wild horse might do if a cocky rider attempted to dominate it.
The lizard king had an affinity with beasts. He harboured a voice of command and a presence among men and lizards, otherwise he would not be leader of this depraved race. He took a position between the dorsal turrets on the great lizard’s back close to the repulsive fan flowering hideously on its neck. His brow sheened with rich triumph with this new transcendental position of power; none dared dispute it.
“The Time of the Snake is over!” he called loudly over the din of the assembled chaos. He waved his sceptre like an exalted demagogue. “Pygra shall die in pools of her own blood. Die, I say! Let us see to it. The Time of the Lizard is upon us! Behold your god!” Thus the lizard king spoke, in his shrillest, loudest voice that none could fail to hear, as one who takes up the call of the mad hunt to lead men and beasts into howling slaughter.
“The New Order begins, now!”
The mob took up a fateful chant in frightful voices: “Hail the Gnador! Rise the Rgnadon!” Their demonic crescendo rose over the roaring of the lizard beasts in awe and mindless fervour.
Dereas covered his ears, struggling to block out that horrible din. The thrumming insanity of it brought a quiver of nausea to his throat. But he shook this off and muttered in a tone of bitter anger, “Let us be away from this madness, this haunted place!”
Rusfaer sneered, “I couldn’t agree with you more, brother” and he grabbed Dereas by the arm and they fled, stumbling through the foul smoke, aided by a broken smouldering torch here or a glimmering mass of embers there.
They caught up soon to Jhidik who crouched in the confusion with Amexi, Hafta and Fezoul: a circle of sooty faces and blackened limbs. They coughed, assaulted by clouds of smoke billowing from oil and rags that had caught on fire.
The bunch looked haggard, disoriented: Jhidik, leg trembling, breath rasping, grimaced. A wax-faced Amexi was white as a ghost, and showed eyes darting fearfully in their sockets around in all directions. Hafta, head bowed, hunched in battered mail and torn hides, a bloody tulwar dripping in his hand. The mountain king sucked in a wheezy breath, his fingers clutching a lizard knife. All had secured weapons at least. They were desperate, bedraggled men.
“Well, rogues,” breathed Rusfaer in a rasping undertone. “There are worst places to be—but we are alive. With few options. None good.”
Dereas cursed. “The castle is out of reach and the exits blocked by lizards and saurian horrors.”
Rusfaer grunted his agreement. “There is only one of these stray aqueducts that run up the cavern’s face. We can make it up, I think. I know at least one of the spillways connects with some of the tunnels.”
“Let us make the ascent!”
Amexi’s quizzical frown challenged them. “Can we hope to find refuge in any of these places? The tunnels are haunted by Pygra, remember?”
“Forget Pygra!” rasped Rusfaer. “Better than remain here. Three murderous saurians rage two stones’ throws away, and a thousand of these little lizards with their pesky picks and gnashing teeth are ready to rip our guts out.”
“More of the pack coming at us all the time,” agreed Jhidik.
Dereas bit back a snarl. “Then to your order, let’s go.”
The reptiles were indistinct masses in the smoke wreaths stirred by new fires. All was a disorded confusion. The reptiles could not see them, nor could the company see them, a situation which in hindsight was a good thing. Raging bellows rang in the chaos of the saurians’ stand off.
The fugitives scrambled through the common ground, cleaving their way through stray lizards wielding tulwars and the smoke-wreathed gloom. They slipped and stumbled on filth and offal amidst the sea of overturned cauldrons, smoking debris, and dead lizards’ body parts. They paved a helter-skelter path through carved boulders and riven cobbled ways, but came to a close halt, breathing ragged gasps, at the sight of a winding ramp that swarmed with too many enemies.
They leapt back. Rusfaer’s cry rang in their ears as they ploughed a path toward a smaller aqueduct that lurked in the shadows. They scrambled past the roughhewn arch, dodging the spears and pikes hurled like javelins at them.
“Quick, the bridge!” cried Dereas. “It’s our only chance! Make for the bridge behind the fort.”
“There?” growled Jhidik. “It’s an evil place. Why there?”
“Better than here!...Pray it’s
a place where the bane does not roam!”
“What of the serpentish horror then?” called Hafta. “It will rend—”
Rusfaer bellowed, “Run, you sods, run!”
The common ground was a flurry of activity. Grunting lizards reeled about in untold numbers. Burning pitch and cauldrons of oil blazed. A new pit doused with oil ignited in a whoosh of flames—flames which licked at the feet of an armoury and the half-assembled siege weapons nestled there. The three huge saurians roared and fumed, with the lizard king mounted on the largest, screaming and bawling at the top of his lungs.
The companions raced for the bridge, on whose dark rock faces torches guttered. Lungs burning, they coursed along the littered ground, weaving between scattered knots of blood-soaked lizards, at the edge of exhaustion. Rusfaer’s gleaming blade cut swathes amongst the advancing ranks of lizards. Dereas’s blade took two at a time, steel-capped heads cleaved in a single stroke. Dereas, a wild figure of terror and wrath on the causeway, sword upraised in cleaving flight, carved gory ruin. Jhidik’s blade moved in and out in no less savage rhythm, whistling like a scythe making mockery of the frenzied mob, stabbing, parrying, sundering, taking out eyes, ears, and limbs.
Up and over the causeway the companions surged, leaping over abandoned barrows, drays, carts. The stray victims they encountered fell, kicking in their death throes to the black abyss that yawned below. From the depths, hideous man-sized bats flew up, obscene things with hooded crests, peaked ears and flat featureless faces. They caught the doomed lizards as they fell, and their bodies were like none that men had seen, only grey-furred things with membranous carapaces showing the pulsing lungs beneath. The creatures were attracted by the flowing blood, relishing the carrion that fell freely from the lizard walks.
One blasphemous fiend flew close, lifting its prey in a clammy clutch. Grey skin and sinewy wing-flesh flapped. On closer scrutiny, Dereas saw these mutants had no eyes or nose, only a shark-like roundish mouth filled with vampirish teeth.
A shiver raced up his back. Teams of the creatures hooked claws, now onto a single lizard, and carried it aloft. To their rank eyries in the chasm flanks they flew. To do with those what they liked—and what Dereas dared not imagine.
At a far point on the span, Dereas saw a gang of bent-backed lizards hauling stone carts filled with crystals and rocks. The rolling crew grunted in confusion and the misshapen wheels ground to a halt. Several of them groped for bone tulwars and clubs, thinking they were being ambushed. The fools obviously had no idea the prisoners were on the loose. They were cut down to a lizard in a sea of red. Draba, the pesky ghoul he was, had sprinted up behind them and struck Dereas a glancing blow. Dereas overstepped his mark, attempting to dodge a lunging lizard. His effort was in vain as the lizard, eyes glazed in mortal agony, clutching the tulwar in his side, managed a lucky slash across Dereas’s forearm. With a growl of frustration and pain, Dereas smashed the lizard in the face knocking it off his blade.
Surprise and agony pulsed up his arm; he felt a bright line of blood blossom on his skin. Rusfaer cut the attacking lizard down from shoulder to sternum. It slumped in a ragdoll heap. While its life blood poured out on the slippery stone, Dereas scrambled to catch up with the others, cursing his inattention. He tore a section off his cloak and bound the wound as tightly as he could as he ran. Though he was languishing from exhaustion, he felt buoyed by the nervous energy coursing through his limbs. Draba was nowhere to be seen.
They cleared the bridge, staggered into the black gaping tunnel beyond that loomed like an open sore. The passageway was huge, arched, probably formed by an upheavel in the crust. The tunnel was spacious enough to admit two breadths of the Rgnadon—and it was lit only by a handful of torches hung on high brackets in the rough stone.
Other stray lizards barred their path, but these they bowled over, and for the most part, the passage remained empty. The tunnel ran in a boundless straight line through near pitch blackness. The echoes of activity rang behind them, but were fading: a garble of groans, howls, lizardish yelps, shrieks, and a mournful blaring of horn. There came the smashing of many mallets on drums as the lizards gathered their forces and sallied out seeking vengeance for their losses—all in a wash of mania that defied his comprehension.
A light shone ahead. Dereas squinted his tired eyes. How long they raced he could not know. He thought he detected a small leering face thrusting itself out of the murk—Draba! What was the galling pest up to now? The lizard seemed to appear and fade away like a phantom—a gibbering prankster, one taking profane delight in setting teeth on them or foisting some mischief or sabotage.
The momentary lull in pursuit did not last long. The light became a broader beacon and the noise of pursuit louder: elephantine tramps, monstrous bays, reptilian growls and grunts of fury. The clash of weapons on mail rode on their heels and now the blowing of a forlorn horn sounded again. The pad of frenzied feet on stone echoed in the murk and followed the doomed company, then came the hooting and cheering and chanting of nonsensical phrases from the throats of mindless lizards led by a mad monarch.
From the dim tunnel the fugitives burst, with Fezoul flagging on tired feet. Their nerves were frayed, their energy depleted, but they stopped in a blaze of red light almost too bright to the eyes. It was, as Dereas witnessed: the ambient sum of countless firebrands and distant fires kindled in the upper confines of the cavern. Down below, they reflected the burnt ochre of the vast space they had entered. The cavern was dim by daylight standards; they had just been underground too long, like the beetle that crawls in the dark crevices and is blinded by the contrast of the faintest light that shines on it.
Dereas’s grimed jaw sagged at what he saw. A lizard warren that went on forever—a vast underground valley and network of bridges over chasms, aqueducts snaking every which way—a transportation hub of water to every massive tower and fort in sight. An illimitable hive, a veritable metropolis under the mountain!—and all hidden from the world.
As far as the eye could see, only lizards loomed in their leather and their steel, marching on paths of rough, flinted stone to and fro like ants. They came and went from the dozens of towers in the valley up the cavern’s flanks. Here, the lizards toiled tenfold compared to the inhabitants of the last cavern.
The company had skirted only the edge of the lizard’s depraved world, Dereas realized. He staggered back dumbstruck.
Industrious as insects, the lizard folk had manufactured siege engine after siege engine and weapons of war. They had transported alchemic oils, bones, pastes, powders and liquids vitalized by the magical Vitrin water from all quarters of the cavern. Castles and forts they had built and war machines of Tyrannus bone and iron, while seeding their realm with imp after imp from the lizard’s womb. For what evil purpose?
By the dozens Dereas saw pens and cages clustered in cavities and pits below, hundreds of glinting scaly hides and evil glittering eyes. Scores of the enormous lizards were caged there like the seed-bearing monsters they were, perpetuating the lizard race, vast and intimidating.
The lizard king was right! Dereas realized with sad wonder. They were setting the stage for an empire! Equipping an army. How had this menagerie evaded notice so long? Dereas’s brain reeled.
More of the castles rose tier on tier up the sides of the cavern. Their gleaming-white towers and carven images of grim deities evoked flashes of past bestial nightmares.
Strange lights and fires flared from the tops of the towers. Parapets gleamed awash in blazing fires. Dereas felt a primal stir in his gut—that a great awakening had begun, as it had been prophesized in the old testaments of Amar-Amon-Reth, overlord of the age of Saeth, the Telamon king.
News of the birthing had passed quickly to the other communities evidently. A thousand great fires blazed in unison in celebration of the Rgnadon’s birth. Behind the banners and drums and the lizard regalia, a procession emerged from the tunnel the fugitives had just quit. Horns and bugles blared; lizards beat bone femurs on kettle d
rums of lizard-skin, bashing a dreary, celebratory dirge—an echo of an apocalypse. Lizards garbed in vests and mail padded from all quarters, running, hopping, or crawling on all fours, come to rejoice and join the ghastly marching beat.
The speechless crew looked at each other in hopeless lassitude.
Fezoul’s lower lip quivered. “I never imagined the lizard realm was so vast...We thought it was only a rebel’s hideout, a few dozen ragged renegades. Now there are thousands! ’Tis Xabren’s doing!”
“For what purpose?” murmured Dereas dismally.
“You don’t know him,” said Fezoul, shivering. “He’s obsessed. A spirit possessed of dark impulses. A cursed maniac, and yet—a genius.”
“He has really become this ‘Lizard King’?” grunted Rusfaer, as if he still couldn’t believe such a yarn. “You recognize him of old?”
“As you see,” Fezoul affirmed, “whatever there is left to recognize... ’Tis his work, the plotting of decades. Possibly a hundred years,” he added with a miserable scowl.
Dereas was so stupefied by the vista that he stood rooted with the others. They were straw men on a doomed mission. Grimly Jhidik prodded Dereas, a signal that the host from the tunnel had emerged and would be bearing down on them before long. They stumbled down a crumbling path that dropped into a steep, veering ravine, where no lizard enemy seemed immediately placed.
“We can’t face such a multitude,” muttered Hafta. “There are thousands of them down there.”
The metallic glints of helm and weapon broke the surface of gloom in the sprawling valley. A jumble of stones and eerie clear pools met the eye.
The band shrank back into the shadows, taking cover behind some stray boulders.
“More to challenge our wits,” muttered Dereas with ill-concealed frustration.
Hafta half sagged. “You yourself, dwarf, said that these citizens of yours only numbered in the few hundreds. So where have all these others come from then? Your race couldn’t have seeded a whole nation.”
