by B. V. Larson
Therian’s victims fled, but he was a wolf among trapped fowl. He killed each with greater speed than the last. He leapt from place to place, traveling half the Great Hall’s width in a stride. He fell upon them, and whether they fought him or not, their throats ran crimson, their bellies opened, and their guts slid out upon the floor. Some met their fate upon their knees, pleading. Others went down fighting and growling like animals.
Within a few minutes, none survived save Therian, Vosh and Gruum. The only other source of activity was Duke Strad, who still heaved and strained stoically beneath the massive oak table.
“So,” said Vosh. “We meet again, King of my homeland.”
Vosh had gorged himself upon most of the retainers in the room, and his gluttony had swollen the lich’s form. His skull brushed the hanging candles in the Great Hall. Every bone had thickened and swollen. The vermillion robe he traditionally wore had become nothing more than a tattered cape that fluttered over the curving ribs, each of which was now as thick as the haft of an axe.
“You speak truth, Vosh,” Therian said. “I am your King. As is my right, I would offer you peace.”
Vosh looked about and discovered there were no more souls to harvest. He took a step toward them, then another. After three great strides, he stood in the center of the chamber.
Gruum looked on fearfully. As terrifying as Vosh was, Therian was nearly as fearsome. Such was the strangeness of his master’s voice—such was its potency, that Gruum did not dare to gaze upon the Hyborean’s countenance.
Vosh’s great jawbone sagged open. The lich’s rang in their minds. “You fear! You see me in my bloated state, full of fresh, wriggling souls and you fear Vosh!”
Gruum wondered at the change the lich had undergone. His manner was very different. Rather than being calm and philosophical, he had become bestial in speech and attitude. Gruum recalled the lich had likened the consumption of souls to that of drinking wine. Perhaps he had become drunk with the souls he had consumed.
Therian shook his head. “Sadly, I see you do not understand. What I offer you is the everlasting peace of the grave. I will aid you on your journey. You shall pass on as you should have so long ago.”
“You are a cockroach,” Vosh said, taking two more strides forward. Therian stood his ground. His twin swords gleamed.
Therian turned to Gruum. He pointed. “Stand just there and await the outcome of this fight.”
Gruum’s eyes widened. “But, milord…”
“Have faith, man.”
“Yes milord.”
Gruum walked toward the spot Therian had directed, his feet leaden with fear.
Vosh’s huge skull swiveled to follow Gruum as he passed by. “I marvel to gaze upon a man so low he services a cockroach,” he said.
Gruum sneered up at the monster, although he feared Vosh. He expected the lich to reach down and pluck his limbs from his torso, but Vosh let him pass. Gruum stood upon the flagstones. Next to him, he knew, lay the pouch he had tossed. The contents had gone missing, but surely the thing would come back to rest in its pouch, as it had done before. He did not watch for the sliding pool of shadow upon the floor. He did not want to see it stalking him, for if he did, he knew his bravery would fail him and he would run from it.
Vosh struck the first blow. His great fist, now bigger than a man’s head, came down from the smoky ceiling and crashed onto stone. Therian had stepped aside. Masonry cracked and fired splinters in all directions, such was the force of the lich’s strike.
Seeker flashed out to cut into the bones of the great forearm. With a sound like that of a woodsman’s axe chunking into a sapling, the sword bit into bone, but did not sever it.
Vosh’s other hand swept by and caught Therian a backhanded blow. The King went flying, but sprang back up, unharmed. He stalked forward, his blades ringing as they slashed and thrust.
Gruum could stand it no longer. He looked for the stalking shadow. The pouch was there, but—it was fatter than before. As his eyes stared, incapable of blinking or shifting away, he saw the pouch rise and fall, shifting about as if something within settled itself into a comfortable place.
Gruum reached down slowly, offering the shadow the flesh of his hand. He knew if the madness took him he would be able to fight Vosh, but he could not hope to be more than a distraction. He wondered a thousand things in his mind at once as his hand went nearer the pouch’s mouth. Would he see the steppes again? Would he know the love of a warm woman? Would it hurt when the thing in the pouch suborned his mind?
A crashing sound made him turn his head. One of the great oak tables had been smashed down, broken in two by Vosh’s elephantine fist of bone. A score of wooden shards fired around the room like arrow shafts.
Gruum ducked, and looked back down upon the pouch. The shadow had indeed crept forth. Just an inch. It sought his flesh, he felt certain. It had sensed his warmth and slid out a finger-thick tendril of itself into the open again. The surface was oily—so deep a shade of black as to be slightly reflective.
Gruum recoiled, snatching his hand back. He wiped his fingers again and again on his tunic. The thing in the pouch had never touched him, but his hand felt as if it were soiled. He realized he could not force himself to reach out to the creature any more than he could force himself to plunge his fingers into a viper’s mouth.
Something made a scraping, screeching sound behind him, then stilled again. It was the Duke, he knew, still squirming relentlessly beneath his oaken table. The sound filled Gruum with a thought. He acted upon it without further contemplation. He snatched up the pouch and flung it beneath the heaving oak table. He flung it right into the Duke’s straining face.
“Bastard!” grunted the Duke, rolling his dead eyes to see him.
Gruum took no notice. He found one of the guardsmen who lay like an empty sack of soft leather upon the floor. He took up a pike from the flopping fingers and ran back to the Duke. Plunging the butt of the pike under the table, he began to lever it up, heaving and straining as greatly as he could.
Therian dodged beneath Vosh now, slashing futilely at the knees. A dozen scores showed upon the other’s thick bones. But try as he might it seemed the bones were as hard as stone and would not break. The lich, for its part, lunged and clacked its hands together, unable to catch the lighting-quick sorcerer.
Gruum roared and heaved with greater energy. Duke Strad, sensing his purpose, went into a frenzy of scrambling activity. The odor of Strad’s burnt flesh, clothing and bone filled Gruum’s nostrils with a sickening stench.
Something touched Gruum’s foot then. Something hot, that burned like the venom of an insect bite. The burning sensation ran up his leg and touched his mind.
After a moment of cold realization, Gruum went mad.
-17-
Gruum’s mind was not his own. Within it, another dwelt, one that gibbered with insanity. His body was controlled by a malevolence the likes of which he had never known. Gruum and Duke Strad, their limbs powered by madness, rolled away the oak table together. Strad lurched to his knees, but no further, as the table still pinioned one foot.
Gruum—or what had been Gruum, grinned and reversed the poleaxe in his hand. He chopped away the Duke’s limb with three hard strokes. Strad was able to get to his feet then and begin a lumbering charge. He limped badly due to the missing foot.
Gruum followed him and when the Duke grappled with the back of Vosh’s legs, Gruum hacked at the Duke’s back, grinning all the while. He chopped and slashed and thrust with gleeful abandon. He sang at the top of his lungs while he worked, but never afterward could recall a single word of the song.
The Duke paid him no heed. His fingers—dead, unfeeling and driven with the strength of insanity, clung to Vosh’s tall legs.
Therian took full advantage of the lich’s imbalance. He managed to drive the towering skeleton to one knee, then prone.
Vosh drove his elbow back into the Duke’s head, crushing in one side. The cooked contents of Strad’s skull
oozed out upon the stones. The Duke did not release his grip, however. His one remaining eyeball rolled in its socket and the last of his blackened teeth stayed clenched.
Gruum likewise did not give up on his mission. He scraped the last tatters of flesh from the Duke’s scapula.
Taking up Seeker with both hands, Therian spoke painful words. He struck again and again. Soon, one of the huge bone fists had been hacked off. The second grabbed him, but he hacked that one away as well.
“You have damaged me!” Vosh said.
“I will chop you to pieces,” Therian replied, smiling broadly.
“I cannot be slain.”
“I will separate every bone in your form,” Therian said. He set to work on the left elbow, ignoring the thumping it gave him. Mammoth bones cracked and split.
Gruum, for his part, slashed at the Duke’s exposed back, still ignoring Vosh and Therian. He set about cracking the vertebrae one at a time like walnuts.
“My bones will grow back together,” Vosh said, “after you have died of old age.”
“I will place them each in a different dimension,” Therian replied. “Time will stop and the Dragons will fight their final battle ere you are whole again.”
“Stop! I would offer you an arrangement.”
“Why wait another year and another day to finish matters between us? You serve Yserth, I serve Anduin. Never can there be peace between us.”
“I know that which you seek. I know where it lies.”
Therian hesitated. “You dare speak of my Queen? Have a care, for you are in my power now.”
“Stop your depredations, and I will give her to you—and the child.”
Therian placed his boot upon the great neck of linked bone. He leaned close to what had been a face seven hundred years before.
“Speak, and your torment will end.”
Vosh told Therian where his bride had lain for many long months.
#
When Gruum was brought back to his senses, he found himself in the gray light of day. They were still within the walls of the hunting lodge, but behind the Great Hall. They were in a quiet spot circled with highborn graves. Gruum climbed to his feet.
“How is it I still live, milord?” he asked. His voice was scratchy, as if he had spent the night screaming. Perhaps, he thought, he had done just that.
“There are few enchantments two sorcerers can’t break when they wish to.”
“Vosh helped you?”
“Not willingly, but yes. He has moved on from this place now.”
“Where are we?”
“At my wife’s crypt.”
Gruum looked around, blinking in alarm. He saw only one grave that might qualify as a crypt. It was built of hand-carved stones and crusted with ice. The iron grille that covered the entrance had been torn open. Blackness and a faint odor of decay met them as Gruum followed Therian toward the opening.
“What’s inside, milord?” Gruum asked.
“Steps.”
“And where do they lead?”
“Downward, to a chamber.”
Smelling earth, frost and death, Gruum hesitated on the threshold of the tomb. He thought then to ask if either of them were still mad. “What of the Duke?” he asked instead.
“Strad would not cease to be, so I buried him—in several places.”
Gruum’s eyes traveled the tiny graveyard. There were indeed fresh spots dug down into the frozen ground. He wondered if Strad’s parts still twitched down there, where they had been buried. The idea made his stomach roll uneasily. When he looked back toward Therian, he found the other had vanished into the crypt.
“Come man,” Therian called. “I need your help. At the very least, its warmer down here.”
Gruum followed Therian downward into the earth. There were indeed steps within. They were very steep, and went winding down in a spiral. The ceiling was so close overhead he had to duck down to pass within.
They found Therian’s Queen on a slab of marble in a chamber beneath the earth. She appeared to be sleeping. She wore a blue dress that had once been velvet and finely made. But now, the hem was soiled and ripped. The neck and bodice were stained with splatterings Gruum suspected might be old blood.
“Is she dead, milord?” Gruum asked.
“Oh yes,” said Therian. “I—I think this is as good a place as any to leave her.”
“I don’t want to leave mother,” said a very small voice behind them.
Gruum startled to hear the words. He whirled, one hand on the hilt of his saber. He tensed, but did not draw. He saw now the source of the words. There was a small child in a nightdress standing in a dark corner of the crypt.
“Who is this then?” Gruum asked.
“This is Nadja, my daughter.”
Gruum tried not to stare, but he failed. “She speaks? She can be no more than—”
“Time runs differently in some places, Gruum,” Therian said.
“You mean, they’ve been with—”
“I believe so,” Therian said, interrupting.
The little girl looked at them very seriously. “I do not want to leave mother,” she repeated.
“I am your father, Nadja. Your mother must rest here. I will speak no more about it.”
Nadja’s face was expressionless. Gruum was reminded of a glass doll. He noticed, examining her face further, that there were dark stains around her mouth. He almost shuddered, but controlled himself. What had the child supped upon down here in this cold, lightless tomb?
“Nadja,” Therian said as lightly as he was able. “Go upstairs now. I will join you. We will ride a horse together. After that, I will take you for a journey on a ship.”
“A ship?”
“Yes. Now head upstairs.”
The girl looked at them doubtfully. Gruum thought she was perhaps three years old. He could see she liked the idea of a horse ride and a voyage aboard a ship. She ran up the stairs. When she had gone, Therian turned to Gruum.
“Why have you brought me down here, sire?” Gruum asked in a whisper.
“I would ask you to aid me now, loyal Gruum,” said Therian.
“What would you have me do?”
“Wait until I take Nadja beyond the gates. Go upstairs and find the shaft of a spear. Or perhaps the leg of one of those stools the Duke was so fond of beating me with. Snap it so it splinters. Then bring it here—and do what must be done.”
Gruum stared at his master. Then his eyes crept to the Lady Sloan. She slept there so peacefully. She did not appear to have died, but she must have. He knew she was no longer the young thing full of life that she had once been. She was a monster now, beautiful or not.
“I will do as you ask, milord,” he heard himself saying.
Therian nodded, clasped his hand briefly, and mounted the steps.
Gruum was left staring at his hand. Never could he recall the King having made such a gesture before. Thinking of that helped get him through the vile task.
Gruum chose the oaken stool, splitting one of the stout legs with his sword. Oak, as he knew, was the strongest and split more easily than other types of hardwood. Making a hard, sharp point from the leg was a simple matter.
At the end, when he drove the point home, she opened her eyes and saw him.
“Gruum?” she asked. “Why are you here?”
“I don’t truly know,” he whispered to her. “I’m sorry, milady.” Then he struck the stake again, and her eyes closed for good.
Gruum stepped back, panting. He wiped away a tear with the back of his hand. He eyed the wound where the stake had sunk in deeply. No blood issued there. She was as dry as a tomb inside.
Many long days of travel followed as the three made their way back to Corium. With each passing hour, the early winter grew more bitterly cold. By the time they’d reached Therian’s home isle, the sun was only a distant memory.
End of Hyborean Dragons, Book #3
BONUS Excerpt:
The Swords of Corium
(
Hyborean Dragons #4)
by
B. V. Larson
-1-
Gruum and Therian returned to Corium with Nadja in the spring. It had been an arduous journey. Gruum reflected that an unfortunate number of people had died to get them back to the silver towers of Therian’s palace—some innocent and some not. They had lost the Innsmouth in Kem, the ship having been confiscated by unfriendly locals. Chased overland northward for a hundred leagues, they’d come to another pirate’s den named Port Thaup. There they were able to secure passage out onto the open sea. After a few deadly detours, they’d managed to reach the island kingdom of Hyborea. The final leg of the trip involved hiking across the ice shelf that now surrounded the island completely in the winter months. Arriving at last at the gates of Corium, Gruum was surprised to see little fanfare. None of the citizenry seemed glad to witness their grim King’s return.
Gruum eyed the wretches that huddled inside the great walls of Corium as they passed through the portal. They were thin, even for Hyboreans. Their pale skins were ice-blue and they looked even colder than they usually did. Snow covered everything and everyone, as ubiquitous as sand coating a desert. Snow had to be shoveled over the walls and melted with unnatural fires every morning just so people could walk the streets unhindered.
“What are you thinking, Gruum?” Nadja asked him. She sat upon their sole surviving pony. Her pale fingers were wrapped into the pony’s blond mane.
Gruum startled. He led the pony by the bridle, and it puffed at him as he turned around to see the girl’s face. Gruum opened his mouth, but did not answer her immediately. He had been staring at the people as they passed through the lower districts, thinking how hopeless they looked. Not even the sight of their long lost King walking by lifted their dismal spirits. Therian walked ahead, talking to his guardsmen of events missed during the last year. The King appeared to be distracted and out of earshot, but Gruum knew better than to tell the girl his true thoughts.
