by Chris Turner
The black-jade crow with bald crown hung upside down, with twined talons suspended from a familiar, ghastly gibbet. The hangman’s brace was held aloft in the arms of a tall, thin-winged man, sombre and imposing, straddling the entrance gate carved into the cliff face. Whatever sinister symbolism the inverted poises held was lost on him.
He pushed aside thoughts of the anthropomorphic horrors and struggled up the dangling vines of cords, likewise did Rusfaer, who heaved his figure erect, rolling onto the outstretched bird’s claws holding the ropeway. With instinctive skill, he wrapped his thick thighs round a projecting buttress, laid himself flat on his belly, and with a warrior’s strength, lowered his arm to help his brother up, grunting a wordless note of encouragement. For an instant, Dereas and Rusfaer were natural allies, arm clasped in arm with something of camaraderie, and the beastslayer glimpsed a penitent cloud fall over his brother’s bronzed, harsh face.
Fezoul, clinging to Dereas’s leg, trembled dizzily as he flopped over the side, panting like a sheep, clucking like a frightened hen. Dereas afforded him a croaking grunt. He patted him on the shoulder while he hauled Jhidik up, his face darkened with grief, for the Pirean’s face was a grimace of agony, wincing with the effort it took him to stand on his throbbing leg and lean on his friend’s shoulder. No broken bones at least and Dereas studied the ring of grim, sweat-stained faces around him. Not without solemn reflection and a fierce sense of appreciation. These men had survived beyond the hope of survival.
In silent awe, the company watched the snake slither its way down the opposite ledge. With a sinister flick of her supple tail, she disappeared into the bends of darkness.
A shudder raced up all their spines, for they saw she moved with an uncanny stealth and a confidence, despite her lack of sight and her fresh wounds.
Dereas felt a sick horror in his stomach. Part of him still refused to believe the snake had actually tracked them this far. How could she have? Was she from another world? They were truly lost in this dim world of forgotten time. What horrors had these people known? Certainly they must have had many, denizens of an age that one could hardly imagine. Was the winged man haunting the chasm part of an extinct race, the last of its kind? To be snuffed out by Pygra at last?
Dereas could not help but feel a shiver of emptiness raise the hairs on his neck and a sense of futility for humankind’s primitive idolatry. The beings who worshipped the winged creature, had been inspired enough to carve an effigy of similar, dismal grandeur, consumed as they were with a fiendish fascination with death, cruelty and darkness. The power of terror that the beasts had over them was as palpable as the sepulchral air around them. Such a power permitted these beasts to rule over their lost race in a cesspool of evolution, within caverns of nightmare over the aeons. Did they derive a warped sense of identity from the subservience?
Dereas struggled with the concept. What was there to gain from worshipping these horrors? The idolatry and tragic falseness of it all brought such a queasiness to his gut that he felt the urge to retch.
Draba was dead; so was Hafta, no less Amexi.
Why all the futile, senseless deaths? To what end did those senseless sacrifices serve?
He staggered back limply into the bat-haunted gloom that stretched back into the cliff, braving the lower tunnel that yawned past the gate between the winged man’s legs. It was a tunnel choked with shadows and sinister wafts of chill and chiselled from the oldest rock of Vharad. The tunnel wound up like a witch’s loom, ceiling rising twice as high as a man, perfectly bare. Sometimes a rank pool filled with black water would block their passage as they groped their way along. They would have to skirt it, wincing with puckered mouths and grimacing frowns, for fear of disturbing whatever eerie thing might dwell there.
A trickle of blue-green water streamed down the tunnel and offered some dim luminescence, but little to combat the near blackness. Bestial faces, carved from the primal rock, crowded the flanks of the tunnel and leered out at them like phantoms out of time: snouts of ibexes, horns of bulls, the hairy ears of bats, the ribbed wings of condors, and the demoniac, leering, pug faces of apes, boars, crocodiles. The greenish pall distorted reality and painted the leering faces and the tusks and horns in otherworldly clouds of godless lunacy. Dereas could not help but feel ghosts of shivers crawl down his back. It was a complete menacing menagerie of every possible kind: animal, demon, incubus—ever to walk Darfala. They were tiered in endless synchrony, end on end.
By no means were these human, nor were there remotely human characteristics amongst them—almost a deliberate omission, as if to discount the very existence of humans in this world, the ultimate degradation of humankind...
The exception were the skulls that lined the rank floors on either side of the idol-cursed tunnel. Such skulls numbered in the hundreds, sitting meekly subservient to the towering gods above.
The eye sockets of the skulls faced outwards toward the centre of the tunnel, eyes pools of darkness, as if peering inward to the dead souls of the men within. Some were corroded with age, bleached or blackened beyond recognition. Back-sloping brows and jutting forejaws were pitted with age and of such primitive construction as to indicate that they were the kith of long-lost proto-man. The symmetry of the arrangement suggested order and precision, the workings of a possibly philosophical and ordered race, though fatalistically and primevally backward in their bestial demon-worship.
Dereas’s speculations rang in his skull. Why was this odd tunnel different from all the rest? Was it one that marked the rite of passage to beasthood? To manhood?
The beastslayer’s mind rose and fell to strange, disquieting conjectures: he imagined scores of acolytes or would-be warriors traversing the tragic corridor, after doubling back across the ropeway, inundated in heady incense, smoke and aromatic herbs. Perhaps a sentenced or doomed man might make a horror-filled journey to the agonized spirit of the hanged man that was poised gruesomely on the other side of the chasm.
The beastslayer’s head swam. He thrust all the possibilities aside, for such speculation bred madness and it was Saeth’s work. His nerves quivered. The crashing impact of the ropeway had left his head dizzy and the resulting vertigo still cavorted amongst his senses, leaving random stars prickling before his eyes.
A thunderous rumble suddenly echoed back down the winding way they had come. The companions crouched tensely alert. Lizards? Pygra’s mischief and her shuddering aftereffects? Dereas felt the rock shake under his feet again. Then a rattling and slithering of nightmarish proportions receding behind him. A chill crawed up his spine. He ran cold fingers through his tousled hair, now helmless since the lizard realm. The disturbance passed. He knew as the others did, that they faced beasts whose wrath exceeded every threshold of imagination.
He and Jhidik forged onward up the hallowed tunnel in a hollow trance, Rusfaer and Fezoul following. Their chests heaved to gusty breaths; their eyes roved in their sockets, searching for some side tunnel, some crevice or cranny that would admit no snake and would get them as far as the end of Vharad.
But there unfolded only the endless dimness of the passage, with its leering, bestial faces and endless rows of macabre skulls lining the way.
“Black Balael!” fell Dereas’s urgent hiss upon the gloomy passage. “Is there no end to these idols? Look—rows of them! And no side tunnels. Balael have mercy! Must we claw our way out of this ghoul’s tomb with our bare fingernails?”
Rusfaer grunted, “Balael aside, batslayer. We will break our nails scratching at doom’s door either way.” His blade traced mock circles in the air.
“’Tis a dead end.” Jhidik muttered at last. His roving eyes, keener than the rest, had scanned deep into the darkness, and blinked now in resentment, as if seeing only dead empty air and failure. “All this—effort, for naught. It must certainly be Pygra on our tail.”
“What else would it be?”
“You heard!” Fezoul moaned. “He said ’tis a dead end. We are all doomed! There is no way ou
t!”
“Shut your mouth, you worthless rabbit turd,” growled Rusfaer.
And true to Jhidik’s prediction, they all stumbled upon a sheer rock face. They halted, panting before the impasse. The rough wall hosted a ghastly stone snake’s head mounted in its centre with wolfish ears perked on its scaled crown. A steady stream of water seeped from the open mouth to slap on the smooth stone below, trickling at their feet like a marsh’s ooze. It was like some parody out of an accursed ghoul’s temple. Dereas mused: not unlike Pygra this stone beast was, minus the ears, perhaps an imaginative artists’s embellishment to endorse the monster’s insatiable appetite.
Lesser deities were arrayed around the snake at respectful distances—two raptors, a jackal, and three hideous crab faces with pindrops for eyes and stalks stemming from their scalloped crowns.
Dereas felt his knees buckle. Rusfaer surged forward and struck blade at the ophidean face in sheer blood-fury. He sent blue sparks skidding off metal and stone, smiting left and right at snout and ears, notching his blade.
Dereas pulled him away, sour mutters on his breath, “Save your steel and strength, you fool.”
The sounds of distant muffled rustling issued behind them. All eyes turned restlessly and Rusfaer stopped his hewing and blinked in uneasy wrath.
Fezoul murmured in a hypnotic monotone, “’Twas said that the Old One Snake guards the treasures of the ‘Soul’. From its mouth flowed the Waters of Eternity—upon which the salvation of the Chosen depends.” He narrowed his eyes on the devilish snake head with a studied intensity which gave the others no comfort. “Only the most penitent can reach the place to seize the boon and become victorious over the body and bodily death!”
“Enough of your maundering!” snarled Jhidik. “Your priestly homilies are for the dogs. We face bare rock, nothing more. Tis no soulful treasure here—” and in a fury of frustration, he jammed his sword up into the snake’s mouth.
The dwarf’s eyes bulged in warning. “No, ’tis true—Mymar, our elder, was adamant, he told us that—”
“I’ll jam good steel into Mymar’s gullet. Cease!” The Pirean’s lips boiled froth and he jammed his three foot blade further into the beasts’s mouth which ran with blueish water.
There was a metallic clink as something caught on the Pirean’s blade. Jhidik slid it back after only a short penetration before it jammed again.
He pulled the weapon free with force and frowned, sheathing his sword. In a blind rage, he plunged his hand up into the bubbling orifice.
His intent was perhaps impulsive. Dereas guessed he hoped to grab at the bauble or whatever ancient object caught in its stony throat. But the Pirean found his fingers only arching around a slight bend in the throat before he winced. He retracted his hand, as if a stinging pressure had smitten it. “Kizoi’s fiends!” he cried, gasping.
There was a sudden whir of activity behind the rock face. Then, the startled company jumped back. The slabs parted in two, splitting the idol down the middle where a near invisible crack had run down the centre. It widened, swinging inwards with freakish synchrony to reveal a secret chamber and a gloomy tunnel that wound up the back.
Many musty odours poured forth and they gaped in awe at the black yawning passage that greeted them, one that had not likely seen the gaze of human eyes for aeons.
Dereas saw a small rough ramp of stone that directed the trickle of water from a higher point, now retracted. Water sprayed full out on the smooth flags, sending sloshing echoes around the chamber. Their eyes traced furtive circles around the periphery.
Jhidik shook out his wrist and looked closely at his right hand. A cross-marked bite blossomed in a red angry welt, not unlike that of a serpent’s. His face twisted in agony, conjuring up all the superstitious fears of the past. Jhidik tried to shake out his hand with an unconcerned laugh.
“The mark of the snake!” shrieked Fezoul, veering close to study Jhidik’s wound. “’Tis a curse!”
“Would you shut it!” Rusfaer lumbered forward to shoo him out of the way, but the dwarf scrambled back.
Dereas’s dark eyes scanned uneasily about the chamber. If this tunnel were a rite of passage, then only the most worthy—or desperate acolyte or warrior, would have the impulsive foresight to thrust a hand in the snake’s mouth, as had Jhidik.
Dereas took tentative steps into the cloying blackness; skulls glared up at him in owlish vacancy, a double row of twisted shapes, where in the previous tunnel there was only one.
He stared in dislike at the massive intricate stone hinges that controlled the sliding portal and found that the barring flanks of stone had completely disappeared, merging into the surrounding chamber’s stone, as if it had never been. If any of them squinted narrowly, they could discern the vague outlines of primitive gears or pulleys floating somewhere in the cobwebbed murk near the ceiling. “Balael—“” Dereas’s whispered hiss faded to a murmur in an eerie echo. He wondered at the minds that had created such fiendish contraptions.
Search as they might, they discovered no catch, lever or serpent head that would slam the door closed once again.
Rusfaer finally blew out a curse and motioned them up the tunnel. “’Tis a fool’s errand to search for logic in this evil place. Let us be away!”
The beastslayer grunted in agreement. The others grumblingly acceded. With determined strides they sought the innermost tunnel. And yet, as Dereas straggled back, he struggled to thrust the incident from his mind, for ever was the fact that they could not close the door a detail that gnawed at the back of his skull, for he had an uneasy feeling that some terrible consequence would come of it.
With a fateful curse he joined the others and they lurched up the chamber in grim huddles. The passage became a tunnel of girth wider than the last, oddly bearing smoother walls and more intricate carvings—of bestial countenances and dead things and forgotten glyphs, yet draped heavily with the weight of ancient sorrow.
Rusfaer strode along with long strides. There was a noticeable spring in his step, as if some vague belief had washed over him with the discovery of the hidden tunnel that the snake had no chance of pursuing and crossing the chasm. Dereas wondered too if there was any way the slimy horror could negotiate the tons of rock and hundreds of tunnels, many of them twisted and small, that might connect to this dim, out-of-way place.
Dereas searched the mountain king’s face for any clue as to what chances they had of exiting the mountain, but found no encouraging sign. Nor of escaping the snake. Only a reflection of sheer hopelessness, and ahead a mounting grade.
Dereas made a wry face. What a dour fellow, this mountain king...But then again, who wouldn’t be after all the carnage they had witnessed? The beastslayer refused, however, to believe in any god of fatality. Balael was not of that nature. They were lost, true, and he forced himself to believe there must be a way out of this tomblike prison. He slammed a fist into his sweaty palm, muttering to himself, as if he were not with other men who mumbled similar thoughts as dark as his own.
Rusfaer chuckled in sinister mirth. “Of course there is, brother. It’s called faith. Look at what it did for those primitive monkeys who worshipped blindly their outworn gods.”
Dereas could not tell if his brother was jesting or dropping a lurid hint to the quandary that faced them. They had crossed that barrier of transparency where men’s lives are threatened to a degree that no matter what the shared animosities were, they would band together in the interests of survival.
Jhidik waved a dismissive hand, refusing to dignify Rusfaer’s cynical remarks and dark humour.
Flights of crooked stairs carried them higher and higher, worn smooth with the pad of a thousand thousand feet. The passage was distinctly older here and more primitive than any of Vharad’s ghoulishness thus far. Each step they took with the rigour of pilgrims, until their ears were finally popping with the altitude and their lungs bursting with the effort of climbing so high.
Dereas mentally counted the skulls they had passed. Th
ousands? Perhaps these all were the proto-humans, or perhaps monkeys or apes that Pygra, or some other similar creature, had devoured in its bloodthirsty reign, excreting out the skulls when the beast was done. The ghastly thought brought a clammy sweat to his body.
They reached a place where four men could walk abreast. On either wall, panes of unpolished glass rose smooth to the touch and held back a depthless cube of water. Strange fish swam behind those panes, Dereas saw to his marvel—some with square fins, others with bellies like blowfish. Others had no eyes or teeth and looked more like mutated eels or snakes than fish. Their twin tubular bodies were intertwined. Water leaked around the edges of the walls. It was a curious aquarium, crafted of crystalline glass, where it imperfectly joined the stone and dribbled into the Vitrin stream at their feet—thus watering the throats of the skulls that crouched there like forgotten apes from a haunted past.
The weary men grabbed handfulls of arizoi that grew between the cracks of the glass and rock, and past these sights they moved chewing the leaves with shivering disfavour. Their brains were too full of past horrors to quail much at this time. Fezoul jumped back when a loathsome fish-like shape darted toward the glass as if to peer forth and inspect him, which it did with sightless eyes. Others gave the tank wide berth, reminded of the restless reptiles that echoed faintly behind them and the deep low reverberations that shook the rock under the mountain. The glass shivered and threatened to crack under dull thuds. Whether the lizard king’s monsters caused such disturbance or whether it was the aftermath of Pygra’s uncanny violence on the walls, was anyone’s guess.
As to what strange sustenance the aquatic mutants fed on, none knew, or considered, except Dereas, who guessed that the waters behind the glass stretched to underground streams teeming with newts and other forms of fish food.
Up the trail they climbed.
A sudden fresh booming came to their ears. Dereas jerked around in white-eyed alertness.
It could have been the dim resonance of pounding deep in the stone tunnels below.
