Come Endless Darkness (33 page)

As the second of the apelike dumalduns appeared from the vortex and bounded forth to do battle. Chert finished his work and stood free. One muscular arm scooped up a long length of chain while the barbarian grabbed Brool's leather-wrapped haft. Thus armed, Chert straddled the still-comatose form of Greenleaf and waited for the monster's assault. The dumaldun was there almost instantly.

The monster that charged toward the hillman was gorillalike, while the one Gellor had repulsed was a baboonlike thing. Others now appearing resembled orangutans, grizzled old chimpanzees, gibbons, mandrills, and other sorts of hideous monkeys. Each dumaldun was huge and strong, with long fangs and poisonous nails.

Stupid, lusting for blood, and maniacal by any standards, these denizens of the sphere of vile purple were indeed the perfect tool to accomplish the demonurgist's aim. Although his might had summoned far more than a dozen, that number would have been quite sufficient to dispose of Gellor, Chert, and the unconscious druid. With Gord's help they might have a chance of defeating the creatures, but that meant Gravestone would be left unmolested, free to work still more evil with his spells and magic.

The distorted visage of the gorilla dumaldun came open in a howling challenge, splitting wide to reveal a mouth big enough to encompass a man's entire skull, teeth long and sharp enough to crush bone, tusks of length so great as to meet where the teeth splintered a fang-pierced cranium.

The monster was indeed planning just that, but the hillman's battleaxe struck first. Brool sent its angry buzz all around as its deadly curve came upward at an angle. Barely grazing the dumaldun's paunch, it nevertheless left a foot long cut that was only a nail's breadth short of disemboweling. Then it clipped the lower quarter of the yawning mandible and sheared it oil. The dumaldun rushed on still, grabbed Chert, and sank its remaining lower tusk and upper fangs into the hillman's shoulder. Despite his dweomered leather and magical mail, those terrible teeth penetrated flesh.

The baboon-thing fighting the bard was likewise at close quarters. Recovering from the pain of its initial wounds, the dumaldun crouched and ran into the fray again, coming on all fours as would a dog. Then the bestial thing leapt. Dagger and sword met that attack, but the dumaldun came on heedless of the steel thrust into its throat, the long blade of Gellor's sword shining with gory wetness where it protruded from beneath its shoulder blade. The baboon-thing bowled the waiting man over and tore with nails and fangs at the frail human body. Gellor's helmet was knocked off, and his head struck the floor. A thousand stars sprang into the troubador's vision, then all was dark.

At that same moment. Chert loosed his hold on his axe and used his big hands to seize the jaws of the dumaldun. With a titanic effort that made the barbarian's muscles bunch and his veins to seem like snakes writhing across those rugged mounds of power. Chert pried the massive jaws open. Teeth were forced from flesh, then apart farther still. There was a loud crack, and the monster's Jaw dangled limply, held in place by rags of its filthy hide.

"Son of a diseased dungheap!" Chert bawled as he grabbed the monstrous dumaldun, lifted it over his head, and hurled it into the faces of the next two demoniacal things as they came at him. The corpse sent the pair back and down, but the effort was too much for the barbarian. Head spinning, muscles uncontrolled. Chert toppled backward at the mercy of whatever beast came upon him next.

Gravestone had seen Gord's action, noted the sudden cessation of his evil gateway to Tarterus, and for the tenth time cursed mentally the young champion who opposed him. There was no time for the luxury of a true and proper curse, though. Besides, the priest-wizard thought, the efficacy of such against one so filled with supernatural powers would be questionable at best. What was needed to best the little thief were strong spells and malign forces. Gravestone still had a considerable arsenal of both. Another weapon must be brought into play now, instantly.

"Hellsblades!" the demonurgist shouted triumphantly. That dark calling would not only keep his foe at bay, it would pursue him and at best embroil Gord in combat with the howling, capering dumalduns.

The champion of the Balance heard the exclamation as it sprang from the priest-wizard's lips, saw the red hot metal of the hells-spawned glaives as they came into being and began to twist and spin. Nine long knives, glowing tongues of terrible metal forged on the floor of the furnaces of the hells. They rotated with blades in varying planes so as to describe a moving sphere, a ball of grisly death for any creature caught by them. Nine feet across, nine feet high, nine deep. A devilshine called up to slash and chop a globe of red destruction from razor-edged, searing-hot falchions of diabolic making.

"You grant them to me?" Gord called to the vaunting Gravestone.

"Oh, yes, yes! Dear 'champion,' they are yours — a freely bestowed gift," the demonurgist called back, wondering why he had spoken so even as he articulated his response. There was a feeling of unease in his heart, but he shrugged it off instantly. He had not erred; he could not.

But he had. Gord knew this the moment he saw the nature of the dweomer Gravestone had brought into being before him. He knew right away what to say and do. "It is a generous present, and I freely accept!" Gord shouted the response as if responding in a ritual. "Blackheartseeker and I now take your gift!" With that the young champion thrust forth his dead-black sword, sending its length toward the center, the heart of the Hellsblades' form. The demonurgist had only a heartbeat to wonder what madness had overcome his adversary. He was throwing himself into the centrifuge of his doom, and the blur-quick blades would devour sword and champion alike in the blink of an eye, spewing both out as steely slivers and minced flesh as instantly.

"Die, dirty little..." The shout of final triumph died to a murmuring standstill as the demonurgist saw what happened next. As Gord's sword pierced the sphere, the whirling slowed. Lightless sword touched red-hot glaive, and the hell-forged metal darkened, flowed, and then became a part of the ebon blade. One after another were affected this way, until all nine had melded with the black brand.

Although the horrified gaze of the priest-wizard saw no change in the sword itself, Gravestone understood. "Aid me, Infestix," he wailed as Gord brought the dark blade down and a hell-red trail glowed In the air where the long edge passed.

"Demon-hand and devilshine. Gravestone," Gord called as the demonurgist shrank back. "Let the greatest filth from Hades' cesspool come bubbling up to heed your bleating and whimpering for help. He'll come too late! My sword needs yet one more component to complete its energy — the heart of the nether-pits' force. You!"

Gravestone turned and ran. The ravening dumalduns would screen him from the terrible blade, from the champion who bore it. Not long, but long enough for him to effect his escape.

Then the demonurgist saw the full effect of the use of the Talisman of Balance. Four of the ape-beasts were tearing at their dead mate where it lay atop the stunned troubador. Two were engaged in a cannibal feast upon the carcass of the dumaldun slain by Chert, as the remaining quartet of the horrible denizens of Tarterus alternately tore into the motionless druid and the felled barbarian, trying to decide which was better feasting. All of them were unaware of what was about to transpire, but Gravestone saw and knew too well.

"No help, no help." he wailed, clawing desperately in his dark robes for an instrument therein, a thing of power to rescue him.

A shape of pure light, a form of deep blue in which meteors of gold shot and played, stood near the scene. It was the ultimate guardian of the upper spheres, a solar. Gravestone needed but a single glance to know what it was and flee shrieking from it. Gord, however, was uncertain. Despite the rout of his foe and his desire to catch and slay the demonurgist, the young champion felt compelled to observe what the being was doing. Its work was fell indeed.

The glowing form of lapis hue sent forth jagged bolts from its hands. These crackling, ragged-edged arcs did not flash forth, then disappear into nothing but a burning after-image as would lightning. Each played forth with angry snapping to a distance of five paces — just about the height of the solar itself. Then, as if extensions of that bright being's arms, the arcing bands of energy stretched forth, their tips forking pincerlike, and each seized a dumaldun.

The sound of the beasts as they died was a terrible music to Gord's ears. The translucent being from the upper spheres, however, seemed totally unaffected by the hideous yammerings and bellows of the dumalduns as they melted into stinking jelly under the crackling force. Again the pincered bolts reached out, and again another pair of the evil monsters were slowly vaporized into fetid gas and jellylike slag that puddled and bubbled on the floor. These sounds also attracted the notice of the other beasts from the netherspheres.

Leaving their quarreling and feasting, the half-dozen remaining dumalduns sent up ear-splitting howls of anger and hatred as they espied the towering solar. Though small by comparison, the beasts of Tarterus were undaunted. Eight-foot mandrill and nine-foot gibbon snarled and sprang. A monstrous orangutan parody, as wide as its seven-foot height, bounded and gibbered as it charged. The others were no less fearsome in aspect; yet the being from the higher planes stood unperplexed.

Twin rays of molten gold sprang from where the solar's eyes would be, had the tall quasi-god had such. The scintillating beams struck the massive orangutanlike dumaldun, and the beast was transfixed. It took but an instant. The light died, the dumaldun stumbled and crashed down. Where the rays had touched the thing, there was no longer any substance; the orangutan had no chest or heart left. Still the survivors came on. Giant-sized tusks from a demoniac chimpanzee slashed and ripped at the lapis form of the solar. A dumaldun with the long and spindly appendages of a parody spiker monkey used its teeth and venomous claws to inflict its worst upon the being of glowing blue as the monkey-thing perched atop the gigantic head and shoulders of its foe. The five monstrous beasts swarmed upon the solar, and for a split-second Gord couldn't see it or speculate on the damage being done to the godling by the ferocious beasts from the foul sphere of Tarterus.

The solar spoke a bell-loud word, and the spidery dumaldun fell from its place atop the being, its iron bristles aflame, its bodily fluids boiling into steam. It exploded into stinking fragments when it struck the floor of Gravestone's space in no-place. The bolts of energy had vanished, but the solar used its own broad hands to seize another pair of the four remaining dumalduns. Each was held by the scruff of the neck.

The herculean arms came together then, and the beasts were smashed as if they were cymbals. The sound was by no means melodic or even ringing. Instead there was a disgusting thud, a wet squishing accompanied by snapping and breaking sounds and a spray of crimson and gray. Two limp forms flew up and over the massive being's shoulders. They didn't move after bouncing from their impact on the hard flags behind. Darker places of midnight hue showed plainly on the solar's form, mute testimony to the terrible weapons that the dumaldun employed. No mere fang and claw would so wound a being of this sort. The denizens of vile Tarterus used other malign energies as well, to inflict such hurts.

Without regard for such, and with singleness of purpose, the glowing solar drew a silvery rod from where a man's girdle would be. It was small-looking in the beings vast grip, but the instrument was potent nonetheless. Down it came, crystalline light flashed from it as it impacted upon a gibbonlike fiend, and the dumaldun thus struck howled and retreated, with weird, mercurial incandescence lighting its whole form. The sole remaining attacker left off its ferocious assault at that and tried to flee. The right arm of the solar struck again, and the result duplicated his first smiting. Both dumalduns glowed and yowled and capered. This time it was in agony and fear, not as wild lusting for blood and death. Because it was a creature of the higher spheres, the solar dealt quickly with the two. A quick snap of the wrist, a repetition, and the rod took each beast again, giving them a cleaner death than such fiends ever deserved.

Thank you. One of Weal!" Gord spoke out of true gratitude.

"Stay back!" The solar bellowed to the man who had taken a step toward it. "I read no malice in your heart, but you have no pure aura, either. Keep your distance, whatever you may be, and keep that weapon you hold away, too!"

"My friends and I serve Balance, fight the evil of Tharizdun. This brand is made potent by the very strength of Evil. Fear me or it not!"

"Fear? No solar ever fears, creature of convictionless spawning. It is the stench of the blade, your lack of righteousness, which repels me. Common foe or not, I will have no association with you!" The being of lapis light then moved as if readying to depart.

Gord was taken aback by the attitude the minion of Weal displayed. It felt no fellow-feeling, showed no common cause, disdained any proximity to him. No wonder that the vile ones who labored for Tharizdun's ascendancy were virtually unchecked by the might of the higher planes. Such beings as this would never accept others who were not of identical ethos and action.

"Have pity, Bright One," he called to the solar despite his welling indignation. There lie three heroes, brave men and true, felled in the fight against those who oppose you and all Weal, too. Show mercy and aid them!"

The solar paused. Tour heart is filled with repulsiveness, your head with sin, your hand with nether-force. Yet you dare to speak to me of benisons?" Yet even as the being spoke, it hesitated. "Very well. I see the need for some justice in the matter. You serve those both hot and cold, good and evil, the fence-striders and self-lovers. Choose one of the three, and I shall restore him to vitality. That, and the whereabouts of your demon-consorting adversary, will fully even the score between us."

"Even? Score? I speak of combating the very essence of all that is wicked, of driving that one's servants to their demise, of locking evil away forever!"