Banished Sons Of Poseidon

by Andrew J. Peters

  The shell flipped over on its side, and an inferno of light flared out to the cavern. Dam clenched his eyes shut from the shock of it. He struggled to narrow his beam of silence around the stone. Luckily, the shock of light surprised the three serpents as well. They recoiled from it, and that gave Dam time to act.

  Grasping the stone with silence, he opened his eyes in a squint so he could find it. If a trace of the Great Atlas’ blood bonded him to the stone, its only manifestation was an ability to adjust quickly to the stone’s remarkable brilliance.

  Just as Dam perceived its form, another sight beneath the shell halted him. He saw a miniature monster with three serpent heads clinging to the Oomphalos and writhing with silent squeals. The hatchling was a tiny replica of queen Ouroborus. They must have been keeping it cocooned with the stone so it would grow to be the dread beast that she was.

  Dam reached for the stone and shook the gory little menace from it. But in the time he had been suspended by the discovery of the hatchling, he had lost hold of the silent shroud he had spread over the Oomphalos and the magic that had kept him cloaked. The hideous baby shrieked at him. One serpent locked in on him, then another, and then the third.

  Dam shoved the Oomphalos in the pocket of his apron. In a heartbeat, any of the three creatures would lunge and capture him. They shriveled back their snouts, their knife-sized fangs dripping with deadly venom. Dam used the only weapon he had. He called up a mighty sound memory in his head, and pitched its roiling, sparking energy at the ceiling of the lair. It burst like a barrel of niterbats thrown from a catapult.

  That sent the serpents flinching to the ground. Dam hurled a second and a third blast at the ceiling for good measure. He sheathed the stone and ran for the lip of the pit, circumnavigating the ricochet of vibrations he had stirred up. It wouldn’t take long for the serpents to figure out that the explosive attack on their den had been a trick. Dam had to make it to the burrow that led out of the mountainside.

  A legion of fanged demons skirred up the sides of the pit.

  At the entrance to the burrow, Dam turned back, captured as many echoes as he could in his mind’s hand, and whirled them into a cyclone of deafening chaos. Some of the serpents bounded down the walls of the pit. Others clung on and fought through the confusion. Dam raced into the burrow. That had been the best trick he possessed. Now he had to focus on speed. Serpents would be on his heels in no time.

  Chapter Three

  Dam made it to the outlet to the mountains and stumbled down the steep escarpment. He reached out mentally for the ring of his xiphos. Its tinny signal led him to the rocky bunker where he had left his weapon, and he holstered his sword and scabbard. The whistling pass through the mountains was a short distance away. Could he make it through and across the great distance to the city before the snakes tracked him down?

  A frenzy of lumbering vibrations erupted from the mountain socket above him. Many dozens of serpents were skating through that tunnel and fighting over one another to catch up with Dam.

  A rivulet of sweat ran down the side of his face. His powers would be practically useless now. He could put all his energy into creating phantasms of sound to distract the snakes or put it all into outpacing them, but he couldn’t do both of those things at once, and neither strategy held much hope against the legion of fanged demons closing in on him.

  Somewhere in the scalloped ridges of the sightless valley beyond him, he knew of a possibility for expediting his flight. Dam threw scraping vibrations out to the hills. By the grace of the gods, an answer came back to him, and spiny legs galloped through the darkness. Above him, loose pebbles sprayed down the escarpment, and serpent snouts shot out of the mountain socket.

  The fire scorpion bounded up from the valley. Dam clambered on its back, grasped a reasonably secure hold, and bore down psychically to send it fleeing into the mountain pass for its life.

  Like riding a bucking bull, the scorpion’s momentum threw him back. Dam clung on desperately. Serpent bodies drummed to the ground behind him.

  Dam had no idea how a fire scorpion’s speed measured up to the serpents. He had seen the creatures darting on their bellies, and they were longer than his scorpion at a full stretch. His steed careened through the ravine at a breakneck pace, surely as aware of the peril as Dam himself. The serpents plowed after them like a rumbling tide carving through the pass.

  The serpents accelerated behind Dam. The skirring of their scaled bodies was practically in reaching distance, and then Dam heard a rush of noise from the sides of the ravine. A fanged snout lunged out from the shadows at the level of his carriage. Some of the serpents had sorted out a higher trail. Dam cringed away from one of them and swung back from the snapping jaws of another on the opposite side.

  If the snakes overtook his scorpion, he would find himself dodging strikes from all directions. Dam hung on to the rim of armor above the scorpion’s gob, spread out flat over its back, and called up his trick of melding soundlessly into matter.

  A snout bucked into the scorpion, throwing one side of its legs into the air while Dam clung on to its armor for dear life. His steed raced forward and found its balance again. It lurched away from a strike on the other side.

  Dam wasn’t going to let himself or his steed get ripped apart by the serpents. He needed to use his powers to buffet them back, and he only knew one sound that could scare off a giant snake stampede. Dam drew it out of his head and imagined it thickening and growing into an orb as powerful as a hundred barrels of packed niterbats. He scoured the ravine with his mind to feed his phantom of sound every vapor of noise he could find. It had to be a perfect mimic to trick the snakes. Focusing fiercely, Dam imagined ripping the orb open to unleash its destruction.

  The severing of that ghostly creation was so loud, the entire ravine seemed to shudder. Phantom rocks rained down from the height of its banks. A thunderous knocking rose up from the floor, and then he heard an ear-piercing crack as though the bed of stone was cleaving apart.

  The scorpion scurried from one side of the ravine to the other until Dam got hold of a rhythm of vibrations to keep it focused on a straight path to safety. The rumble of the serpents’ chase fell off in the wake of the angry tremor Dam had created. His trick had worked. Hopefully, it had sent the snakes racing back to the other side of the mountains. When its vibrations wore down, he would be able to tell for sure.

  At least the trick had bought him some time. Dam climbed up to a better seat on the scorpion. He didn’t waste a moment to gloat over his cleverness. He had a long way to go back to the city.

  *

  Dam rode on to the far end of the mountain pass and descended to the bank of the lake. A drink of water would have been a divine ecstasy, but Dam decided to ride on. He had to make the journey home in a fraction of the time it had taken his expedition if he was to stay ahead of the snakes. It had been a long hike around the lake, and he still had the grotto, the Fire Canyon, and the dead lava fields to traverse.

  He galloped along the shore of the vast, black lake. Dam kept attuned to sounds of pursuit from the mountains, but he heard nothing troubling for a long stretch. The mountains droned with a deep, ancient resonance, and gusts of wind shrieked over its peaks. Dam felt the Oomphalos in his pocket. It was a miracle that it had stayed secure through all the jostling in the mountain pass. Now he needed to bring it back to the city to heal his blind cousin and save the lives of the freed prisoners.

  Far away, he noted a clap on the surface of the lake. Dam’s ears homed in on that spot. Serpentine bodies splashed into the water from the shoals of the mountains. They zigzagged a vigorous tread to overtake Dam on the opposite bank. After Dam had scared them away with the illusion that the mountain fault had opened up, they must have found an alternative route through the range. No doubt, they were locked in on the vibrations of the Oomphalos, and they would fight to the death to retrieve it.

  Dam urged his scorpion to a faster clip. The tinkling current of the grotto was near. Judging by
the movement of the swimming snakes, he could make it to that passage before the horde reached the bank. It would be a terror of a race after that.

  They scaled the ridge of the grotto and flew through its shallow waters. The scorpion sensed the danger again and needed no command to put as much distance as possible between itself and the snakes. They kept well ahead through the cavern and upward to the cleft tunnel that would lead to the Fire Canyon. Dam listened to the serpents beaching from the lake and trundling forward in pursuit.

  When they arrived at the high bank of the Fire Canyon, the pursuing scourge was just yards behind them. The scorpion quickly sorted out a descent and a route from island to island across the scorching, incandescent flow of lava. Luckily, the creature had no aversion to heat or flame. It made fire from its own belly to power its limbs. Meanwhile, Dam sweated through the crossing, making himself small in the center of the scorpion’s back, hoping to avoid the spatter of molten rock and the spray of steaming geysers.

  The serpents skirred to the bank above them and delayed a bit with their strategy for fording the flame-spitting canyon. Dam swept up the sounds from the canyon floor and hurled a scorching blare at the snakes to menace them. The monsters reared back from it, but they quickly took up a direction for their pursuit.

  When Dam reached the other side of the canyon, the snakes were halfway across. Now his scorpion had to make incredible speed across the dead lava field to the city. That would be even ground for the serpents. They would be able to torpedo across the rock floor and spread out to attack Dam from an array of vantages.

  Dam thought of another problem. He would be approaching the city from its tunnel entrance. If the Old Ones had sealed up the city as a precaution, the tunnel gates would be closed. A watchtower was on that side, but it was a great height above the tunnel, mounted on the mighty shelf of the city plateau. Dam could send a signal to the men on watch, but even from a distance, no one would be able to make it down and draw open the gates for him before the snakes overtook him. The gates wouldn’t be able to open and close quick enough to stop the snakes from breaching the city.

  He would have to take a trail around the plateau to the canyon-side drawbridge over a broad trench of lava. He summoned his scorpion onward with a burst of speed. It would be a longer journey, giving the snakes more time to catch up with him. They had to travel like the racing wind.

  Up the broad slope to the dead lava fields, Dam homed in on the distant sounds of the city. Its geared lifts cranked and churned with water. Its smelt-works clanged and surged, and Dam could even hear the sizzle of gas-lit flames. Dam’s spirits soared. Those were the most joyous sounds he had heard in many nights. When he crested the slope, he feasted his eyes on the specks of light on the horizon that framed the magnificent, mounded city.

  Dam directed his scorpion toward the rocky bank along the walled city shelf. That pathway rose up to cliffs of mori-mori mines, and beyond they would find the canyon that yawned at the foot of the city.

  While the scorpion climbed the bank, Dam felt a rumble gaining up on them. A legion of snakes flooded across the lava field like a devouring wave. Dam goaded his scorpion to pick up its pace. For the first time, he noticed a strain in the creature’s movements. The heavens knew it had covered an epic expanse of ground and mostly at a breakneck clip. Smoky breaths chuffed from its undercarriage. Its fuel was nearly spent.

  Dam clenched down mentally with urgent vibrations and clopped his legs on the scorpion’s sides like spurring a stallion. A tide of serpents was closing in on them. The scorpion lumbered up to the cliffs and staggered forward with its armored cage of ribs heaving.

  Mori-mori flowed in the caverns of the cliffs where the scorpion could replenish itself, but they didn’t have a spare moment for that. Dam felt bad for the beast. He would see that it was rewarded with a gluttonous drink and a good rest for its labor, but it needed to find a final charge within itself. Otherwise, they would both be buried by a sea of serpent trunks and fangs.

  Dam’s thoughts formed words in the quivering language that the scorpion understood. The animal sucked breaths through its vented undercarriage like a smithy stoking a brazier. Flames surged, not as vigorously as Dam had sensed before, but its crawl strengthened to a trot and then a gallop. Mercifully, the rest of the way was downhill. They hurtled to the foot of the cliffs and pressed onward toward the ridge of the canyon and the narrow trail to the city drawbridge.

  The snakes avalanched down the cliffs to the canyon rim.

  From hundreds of paces away, Dam locked in on the fiery beacon of the drawbridge watchtower, locating the vibrating energy of two warriors. Inside the city’s encircling fortification, he could hear the dense current and chatter of its inhabitants. He could bullet his voice across the distance to the drawbridge guards and urge them to bring down its iron leaves, but the guards might be merely startled by that disembodied voice. He needed to warn the entire city about the encroaching army of snakes.

  He visualized the mighty conch shell that called the warriors to arms. Dam held it hovering above the city walls and imagined a giant breath blowing through the conch with the fury of a titan. The blare was massive. It rang through the city with a paralyzing force. In its wake, a rapid footfall of soldiers hurried to the city’s lookouts and archer towers.

  Dam brought the Oomphalos out from his pocket and raised it above his head like a star grappled from the heavens. That would make him startlingly clear to the guards. A boy who had wrested the Oomphalos, saddled on a giant, fire-breathing scorpion, racing toward the drawbridge with a horde of serpents rushing after him.

  The leaves of the drawbridge clamored down. The scorpion scurried to that passage, taking it with a leap while the platforms were still partially raised. The scorpion barreled through the narrow gap between the tall iron gates, knocking about both sides of the gateway.

  Inside the city quay, it skidded and careened to a halt. Dam was thrown from its back and onto the stone floor in a tumble. The Oomphalos flew out of his hand. Sparks of pain blew up in his vision, and his hip throbbed brutally from his landing, but he couldn’t begrudge the scorpion for bucking him loose. Through its Herculean effort, they had made it safely inside the city.

  Chapter Four

  As the blurry form of an underground warrior approached Dam to help him to his feet, he heard a terrible thud at the city gates. Cries hailed from the battlements of the city’s stone wall curtain. A flurry of whooshing bolts sprung from crossbows.

  Dam fought through his disorientation to take account of the situation. The serpents had been on Dam’s heels, and now they were ramming the doors. Meanwhile, the Oomphalos blasted a blinding aura, and the scorpion rounded the quay like a loosed bull. It was sending archer reinforcements ducking and scrambling for cover. That had to be dealt with first.

  Dam stood up and gathered calming vibrations for his steed. The scorpion bowed and answered with a gale of shearing complaints. It would hold for a little while. Dam went for the Oomphalos, which had been thrown a few yards away. Just as he picked it up and pocketed it, he was met by a familiar voice.

  “How do you control that thing?”

  It was Backlum. He was understandably bewildered by Dam’s reining of the fire scorpion. Dam grinned, though the pain from his fall made him wince. He was happy to be in contact with people again and happy to see that the warrior was unencumbered by his neck brace.

  “There’s a lot to explain,” Dam said.

  Backlum clopped Dam’s shoulder. “C’mon. We can pen it in a storehouse for now.”

  Dam cast a mental bridle on the scorpion and followed the warrior out of the quay and down a ramp to a district of vaults for the city’s ore and raw masonry. They penned the animal in a brickhouse and rolled the metal shutters behind it securely.

  Remembering his promise to the scorpion, Dam told Backlum, “It’ll need to eat.”

  “There will be a feast for all of us if we make it through this night.” The warrior took a peculiar ac
count of Dam. “You found magic in the backcountry.”

  Dam nodded, wincing from the pain in his rattled head again.

  “You took a hard fall. Can you help out with the front line?”

  “Sure.” The pain would wear off, and Dam wanted to do his part, although he wasn’t really sure how he could help.

  Backlum started back to the quay at a brisk pace. Dam jogged after him to keep up with the warrior’s long-legged stride. He wanted to ask about the other members of his expedition party, especially Hanhau. Had he made it back to the city?

  The sounds of battle drew Dam’s attention away from that matter. The yard-thick city gates shuddered and rang from the assault of the hard-snouted snakes. Above, some two dozen archers fired and reloaded their crossbows to send back the enemy below the wall.

  The battalion was scarcely enough to fight the snakes. Their ranks were sparse since many of the warriors had been injured from the explosion at the Oomphalos tower. Dam followed Backlum to a ladder leading up to the archer gallery.

  Before Dam could climb up behind Backlum, he was halted by a voice.

  “Dam.”

  It was Ysalane. Dam turned to the warrior queen. Her face glowed with a kind sheen.

  “You have done what no one thought was possible,” she said. “There aren’t enough words in the world to thank you.”

  Dam didn’t know what to say to that. It made him feel proud and humble at the same time. He noticed Ysalane glancing at his sagging pocket. Of course, she wanted the Oomphalos so it could be hidden and protected in a place where the New Ones wouldn’t get it if they managed to break through the city’s defenses. Or maybe, as Blix had said, the warrior queen had mastered some of its magic and could hold back the snakes.