by Chris Turner
The great reptile surged forward, feral as a titan. Her formidable sense of smell was awesome. How it would guide her now on her lusty pursuit for living flesh!
The snake arrested its coiling advance. She flicked her questing tongue, hissing in and out in momentary confusion.
Dereas could feel her weighty thoughts: Where had her prey gone? Where would her dim primitive instinct lead her next?
After a dramatic pause the serpent slid her grisly hide forward in a lightning-fast sidewinding motion, her horrific snout tilted in a direction that she thought was theirs.
Dereas breathed in a gust of horror, shaking the gloom out of his skull, for he saw, or rather felt, the cumulative evil that exuded from that beast’s vast bulk.
Rusfaer’s mouth moved in a strangled oval close to his brother’s ear. “I think we should be beating a hasty retreat!”
With alacrity the two of them fled up that grisly tunnel. Dereas coiled fingers round the mountain king’s wrist. They sped for their lives, bypassing an evil-looking side way rearing out of the shadows, discovering the way ahead even more lightless and rank with the reek of serpent spoor than before.
Pygra slid on blundering coils about a twist in the tunnel, her unimaginable weight bashing against the tunnel walls, flaking chunks of debris off like wood chips from a tree under the axe. Despite her inconceivable mass, she drove on; her endless, scaly bulk sliding with tireless energy, rippling thrusts of tail and sinew.
Jhidik, shambling behind in a half-loping painful crouch, was next to feel the snake’s tongue rake the back of his calves. He sagged, gave a convulsive heave, gasping out in sheer terror.
Dereas reached out fingers and hauled him half sprawling to his side. At the same time he kneed the mountain king toward Rusfaer. If the snake’s middle had not been caught in a sharp bend just seconds ago, the Pirean would have been snake bait. As it was, Jhidik darted into the black mouth of a nearby side tunnel—but this was by no means an escape route. Not two dozen strides in, they were all repelled—by a firm wall. Blocked!
The desperate crew scrambled swiftly to the side. They pressed backs against the chill stone, waiting for the inevitable—smothering coils to whip around them. Blood rushed to Dereas’s brain, a horrible panic rose in his throat. Hardly daring to breathe, he hoped the horror had not spotted them enter the lone cavity. But the sounds of the snake’s breath was a death rattle not far away. Its slithering rush had slowed and the rattle of its ghastly scales grew in volume.
The brute stopped short, as if something else had alerted its attention. A small black-green shape suddenly darted from a cross tunnel. It kicked the monster’s tail, as if it were a plaything. The figure raked the glistening coils with a bone-white weapon clamped in a pinched, reptilian hand, then it pelted it with some rocks before backing away—rocks that appeared to have been stockpiled in its rude belt.
The snake turned, hissing with rage, her queer, flaring nostrils bristling in bewilderment and sniffing at what she perceived was an overweening, scrawny shape, spinning around in circles on its heels, chittering and dancing, like some elf, in an ungluttable glee at catching the attention of the snake.
Pygra, driven to ire, unfurled her vast coils and heaved her brutish bulk backward.
But this was easier said than done. Easier to thrash and bare fangs than turn her squat trunk and massive loops about the narrow confines of the tunnel. A kick and three knife slashes in the dimness and the figure was gone and the snake managed to squeeze her head past her own loathsome coils and snap her slavering jowl forward. The little scamp had perhaps underestimated Pygra’s speed and wrath, for there came a squealing shout as if the serpent had caught up with her badgerer. All was a blur in Dereas’s mind. He tried to decipher those mad events and the sounds that preceded it, but the echoes that fled in and about the ghoulish tunnel were indecipherable.
The snake shivered her tail. She slashed out with her fetid snout, then lapped hissing tongue against the narrowing walls, finding it increasingly difficult to turn and redirect her mass rather than storm a victim straight on. Draba darted away back down a side tunnel like some fleet-footed gazelle, far enough away from the snake’s probing tongue to avoid mutilation. Quick as firelight, his lizard feet pumped, his forelimbs danced, spinning wide circles, as Draba thought it was a game, cackling in his pubescent, chittering tongue and darting away in merry spirits.
Dereas edged around the side of the cave. He glared in appalled wonder. How had the fool managed so dextrously to evade the snake? Did he not know what he was playing with?
Rusfaer’s jaw was clamped in disbelief; he clenched and unclenched his fingers on his blade with brooding reflection.
Upon hearing that lizardish chatter, Dereas felt a peculiar chill tingle up his back. Somehow in the course of Draba’s transformation, he had reverted to a child, like a rodentish chipmunk playing in the trees, a place of the past. How old was he? Seven, maybe younger?
Because of his size and speed, Draba seemed able to outwit the snake, and crawl forth in his smaller frame from a niche or rude tunnel unscathed, like some sprite. Eager to taunt it, while it would mash its invincible skull and viperish beak against the rock, trying to ferret out the fresh meat. When the snake was losing interest, the pest would melt into the darkness like some gremlin up the tunnel and be gone to lure Pygra again. Dereas shook his head. Draba’s eyes were like a cat’s; he needed no Vitrin water to light his way, or light bowl to guide him.
In his lizard hand, the wayward imp had clutched a small bone dagger, probably nicked off a corpse somewhere along the nighted way.
Fezoul, creeping at Dereas’s heels past the lip of the cave, moistened his lips. “Thank Jeron for your mischievous comrade. Without him, we would all be dead.”
None questioned this. They wondered what next the little sneak would try.
Rusfaer, with a gesture of finality, prodded them up the crumbling path. “No time to lose,” he hissed. “Let’s be gone, while our fiend stays busy.”
Out of their cramped hidey-hole they darted into the black mouth of a side tunnel crisscrossed with shadows and dust motes. This was by no means a sanctuary. They ran headlong into another sheer wall, and Dereas frowned to himself and forced himself not to cry out in frustration.
They doubled back panic-stricken to a junction, only to find this too was blocked. Dereas saw there was an intersection farther back down the dusky passage up which they had scrambled, but maddeningly that was within the snake’s lurking radius. It appeared they were trapped, with only Draba’s snake-baiting to give them any reprieve.
Dereas halted, flattened his back against the wall. The tunnel was dim, only the fleeting glimmer from one of the cross tunnels bathed the dusty stone ahead in a somewhat navigable glow. It was fifty feet away from Pygra’s current stalking grounds. If they could get there to the cross tunnel—twenty seconds’ stride at a loping run—they could all escape, otherwise, it was sure death. They would be serpent fodder as soon as the monster finished off Draba and came after them.
The snake was distracted however, and the beastslayer sank into his lynx-like crouch and edged his way sideways along the wall. He motioned his surviving, wide-eyed peers along in the shadow. At any moment the serpent might lunge...But maybe not. Beads of cold sweat budded on his forearms; his blood-grimed forehead dripped sweat.
Rusfaer Wolfrunner stalked forward slowly, like a half-crazed animal, his blade tilted low and thrust forward in merciless, killing readiness.
But no such fanged strike came.
They slipped into the side tunnel with no more noise than cats, grateful to be left standing. Their chests heaved in relief, while the hair-raising baiting and patter of lizard feet faded from earshot.
Now they were down to four, minus Draba. It was a crippling realization and left them all depressed. A sinking sensation pricked Dereas’s heart, for the loss of Hafta was a blow. He had been an excellent fighting figure in their group, a solid and dependable anchor of rea
son and veteran fighting ability. He was one of the few amongst them who was not too injured to fight at full capacity; but now no more—as he sadly realized. It was water under the bridge. Not to be dwelled upon. Dereas’s heavy heart strove madly to keep faith, and yet...he shivered guiltily at the thought that the mutant lizard-boy, who was likely already dead, had saved their skins...
It was a long later time, after many hopeless hairpin turns and dead ends, that Dereas started to think they had taken another wrong turn. The mountain king’s directions had proven inadequate. Though they never saw trace of Draba, his cackling, bordering on chittering, had drifted again out from the darkness. At least the quasi lizard-man was still alive. The company stood frozen like statues at an impasse, muscles clenched, shoring up their strength.
Fezoul flung himself to the cold floor, gibbering to his bestial gods. All were still unnerved by the death of Hafta and the reminder of how he had died and the atmosphere generated by Draba’s tumult was less than consoling. It sent chills up their spines.
Rusfaer was growing unhinged. Especially in light of the sheer wall of rock facing them. He had been growing prone to muttering to himself at random times, as Dereas noticed, and breaking out in chill sweats. Draba’s frightful chirping had crept under his skin. The echoes that drifted out of the darkness of a cross tunnel would have Rusfaer grinding his teeth with a fury that everyone within earshot could hear—and then, the snake’s slithering echo would rise and fall in rhythm with the banging of her skull against solid rock...It was ever a nightmare and all could feel the rage and promise of strangling coils of the snake slithering after them. Of them all, the strange cold sweat would bead the most profusely on Rusfaer’s brow. White-eyed glances he cast over his shoulders...his meaty fingers would hook on his hilt as if stricken with a malaise, prompting his unpredictable moods to turn volcanic and he would lash out at Fezoul, or Jhidik, if any break from routine or passing comment were not to his liking. Draba’s mischief had reached an apex when the eerie runt had shot out of nowhere, thrown dirt in his eyes and rammed Rusfaer sprawling in a rank pool. At that point Rusfaer had completely lost control.
He had run up the tunnel, cursing, roaring and smashing his blade against the rock, drawing sparks. “By Balael and the blood of accursed Kizoi, and hedonistic Zecrates, come out of your rat-hole, you little hobgoblin!” he had bellowed.
But the grinning prankster had shown no sign, nor was there any answering chitter or patter of feet. All had grown deadly silent then, accustomed to Draba’s eccentric appearances and disappearances, but less so Rusfaer’s random rages. Now Dereas winced.
For Draba had emerged again after they had backtracked to the next cross tunnel, crooning some child-like song in a lizardish tongue somewhere up that bleak, nighted passage.
“He is out to curse me!” grumbled the warrior. “I have seen it in his beady eyes!” A ghastly grimace twisted the New Wolves’ chief’s face. He flung oaths left and right, cursing and shrieking into the maddening darkness.
Dereas ran up and shook his brother like a rat. “Shut up! Get hold of your senses, you idiot.” His hissing warning echoed down the murksome tunnel. “These rants will get us killed. Remember Pygra roams, blind or not, and she will gobble us whole. Your little Draba was a New Wolf warrior, transmuted by evil magic, no more, no less. He’s no spook, or ghoul, or some figment of your imagination. From what hellish place the witch’s sorcery came, we know not—” the beastslayer’s words rustled darkly in the gloom, drifting in the air like restless bats.
Rusfaer held his chin in his hands, gripping his matted beard with a restless frenzy. He pulled fingers through his sweaty locks. “No, brother! He’s a changeling, some mischievous, cursed sprite. It’s a sign yet—a sign! He’s an instrument of the lower forces, the demons. Do you not see? Balael has forsaken me—he has relinquished us to the beasts.”
Dereas opened his mouth, but closed it again. He remembered his raw wounds in the wild ride through the gully of the Vhale on horseback which seemed so many aeons ago. How he cursed and cried out at Balael’s unresponsiveness. The withdrawal of his god was one of the worst feelings of his life—and the aftermath, the thrice-damned Eakors which had forced him on this insane adventure.
The beastslayer sank back on his haunches and Rusfaer turned his back on him, mumbling angry prayers to Balael and maledictions to Kizoi. The man’s wild eyes stared into the gloom with a desolation that approached mindlessness.
Perhaps he and his brother were cursed, thought Dereas. Either the mountain would be the death of them, or life on the run as cursed renegades would bring them to ruination...
It could have been hours, as easily as days that they wandered up that tunnel, delirious and mumbling imprecations, moribund and parch-throated. Their flight for survival and Pygra’s relentless pursuit entailed few variations. Up, up, and always up—as Fezoul had madly murmured. They felt their ears pop with the pressure of the height they had ascended, and their aching feet plodded on and their breath ran short. Dereas could swear his ears felt dulled to sounds by the increase in altitude and the dizziness that rode the wings of hunger, fatigue and privation.
All the while, the group never knew what surprises waited around Vharad’s next crumbling corner—Pygra had taught them that, as had the saturnine Draba. One never knew what the fiendish rascal had in wait for them, leaping out at them like some snouted gnome, cavorting like a lunatic dervish. That, or Pygra rearing out with her leering gaping jaws. The snake would spring upon them again, that was for sure, Dereas thought sourly, striking like a cobra, worming her way like a coiled mist through tunnels she should not be able to navigate. Those suffocating loops of hers would get them at some time.
The tactic of losing themselves up narrow passageways was fast losing its effectiveness. The snake was starting to anticipate those crude manoeuvres. More and more she despised Draba’s feints and dodges, judging from her hisses and thrusts, as much as she did their harum-scarum evasions. Sooner or later their luck would run out and safe corridors would make themselves scarce.
The snake Pygra herself was becoming short of patience with Draba scurrying up or down tunnels into those little niches of his, places she could not follow. The serpent went to greater lengths to catch his miserable hide. His lizard-born, razor-sharp eyesight was an advantage she lacked, and this galled her...stone blind as she was now. Her old yellow eye was almost fused shut, certainly blind, but she could smell—fiercely at that, and her tongue, though shortened from a spear’s slash, provided a sense of spatial perception that none of her skulking prey possessed. Had Draba been a bit more cognizant of her strengths, perhaps he would not have made such an egregious error leaping out so overzealously one time in his blithe, jaunty horseplay. She, the primordial snake, was a creature of the darkness that could hunt indefinitely. No tunnel was her master, or too distant for her to pick up the spoor of fresh game. No living creature was too cunning to elude her grisly traps...
At some moment in time close up the tunnel, Rusfaer had leapt out, sword bared, prepared to face down yet another familiar patter of feet.
He gripped his sword and planted feet firmly.
Then Draba came springing out, wild-eyed.
But Pygra was on the hunt, a slithering shadow a stone’s throw away.
The serpent whipped out her loathsome head and trunk, materializing from behind a crumbling mass of sandsone adjoining the foot of a cross tunnel.
Rusfaer let out a yell. He felt the colour drain from his face. Scrabbling back in mortal fright, he fell back into his brother, who in turn jostled Jhidik. Draba was caught in open peril under the weight of that awful shadow, flat-footed with nowhere to run. Rusfaer instinctively slashed out with his sword, whirling blade, unwittingly cleaving thin air, barring the lizard’s access with his gleaming sword, and the sickening crunch of coils caught little Draba broadside as he tried to leap to safety.
Dereas would never forget that incredulous look of shock on Draba’s thin lizard
face. It was a last glimpse of expressionless horror, an innocent air of blind astonishment. The snake caught him in its fetid teeth and dragged the diminutive form away. Draba was gone in a heartbeat. The snake poised imperturbably, swallowing—a morsel so small as if Draba had been a bread bite to a man. Her wedge-shaped head swayed on a glistening trunk. Her dead eye loomed with chilling, blood-curdling scrutiny in the dark.
The beastslayer swallowed, closed his eyes with a sadness and fright and took a sharp breath.
“Still think you’re cursed?” he breathed hollowly, glowering at Rusfaer who licked his lips and stared blankly at the swaying menace in front of them, as they pulled each other away from that place of reeking death.
They shambled on all fours up the shadow-cursed tunnel, darting into a cross-tunnel. Fezoul gibbered madly; Jhidik clawed and limped his way at their heels. Pygra came after them, a horrible slithering mass in the murk. They could hear her rustling somewhere in those frightful folds of darkness, lashing her coils against stone walls in feverish delight, sounds which drove them to sheer madness. They would have died long minutes ago had it not been for Draba’s last prank—or for the inordinate number of near unnavigable sharp turns that kept her sizeable bulk at bay.
The snake pinched her tubular bulk with ripping strength through narrow ways, hissing impatiently around harrowing bends. She was not able to slither along fast enough to follow her scrabbling prey, to their fortune, as relentless as she was in her pursuit. They slipped and squeezed past a hole that could barely fit a man; they fled into a wider tunnel. Behind they could hear the pounding, quaking echoes of the snake against unyielding rock.
Through loops and dips in the tunnel the stragglers came out, panting and wheezing on a dim promontory that joined the bleak ledge, a familiar perch, with expressions sombre. They stood blinking on the upper reaches overlooking the great chasm that they called Tutraken that they had quit long ago, but at a higher point than where they had last left it. They had arced a huge distance around its brim, the rim of the inner mountain. All for the sake of a few more morsels in Pygra’s maw, Dereas thought miserably. Now they emerged, hollow and ghost-eyed. They followed the ledge with sombre resignation on its upward climb, fevered ravings spilling off Fezoul’s lips. The sheer drop down those unscalable cliffs was heart-numbing, enough to drive any one mad. Not a man amongst them could ward off the thought that when it was his turn to face Pygra’s gullet, clad in ghastly loathing of fear and nightmare, he would die horribly.
