Rise of the Death Dealer (31 page)

THE INVADER

T
he sound of a horse and a jangle of armor came from the stand of fir and
hemlock trees crowding the eastern edge of the murky slime. Then a single male
rider, moving at a controlled and steady pace, appeared between the trees. Robed
in shadows. Wearing darkness as naturally as the midnight sky.

A shaft of sunlight slashed through the needle cover and splashed across the
mane of a thick-muscled black stallion, glittered on the blade of a huge axe
riding a saddle scabbard and washed over the black chain mail covering the
rider’s body. A slight tug on the reins, and the stallion stopped facing a
narrow trail of raised bald dirt crossing Noga Swamp, the sunlight a bar of gold
across the man’s sun-dark, handsome face.

Unruly, almost neck length black hair framed ruddy flesh stretched tautly
across bold cheekbones and the bridge of his blunt nose. His lips were wide and
flat, creased with a scar that ran to his square chin, and his eyes hid in deep
clefts under a shallow forehead, casting black shadows. Enigmatic. Hard. The
face of nature’s child, as calm and steady as the sheltering pine and brother to
the storm.

Wine bottles, dried meats and bread filled his saddlebags, and his belts
carried a sheathed dagger and sword, a coin pouch and a small earthen jar
drilled with air holes.

Two vultures landed silently on the limb of a naked, fire-blackened mangrove
tree, and craned their wrinkled necks low, watching the stranger. Their crops
were stuffed, and their feathered bellies ballooned over the branch. Good
workers, as well fed as graveyard worms.

Smelling the scent coming from the jar, they suddenly cawed loudly.

The stallion reared slightly, snorting and stomping, and a scrap of dappled
sunlight illuminated an object hanging at the side of the rider’s hip: a helmet
of black metal, with a spiked crest and horns that curled down and back toward
the masked face.

Cawing madly, the vultures spread their wings, lifting heavily into the air,
and winged their way up in hasty retreat through a passage between the skeletal
limbs of the mangroves.

The man who owned the horned helmet was no stranger. He had invaded the
forbidden lands before.

Reaching a safer perch at the heights of a tall fir, the two vultures again
settled side by side, and looked down at the lone rider. Greedy hunger was
bright behind their eyes, not because they hoped to feed on the large man, but
because they were certain they would dine heartily on the carnage that would
mark his trail.

The rider, Gath of Baal, gave the birds a routine glance, and held the
stallion steady just short of the raised road. The caution in his eyes could
have cut steel.

The swamp’s foliage and waters were totally devoid of their customary
serpentine shadows and ominous clicking and hissing. There was no movement and
no sound except for the faint songs of the wind in the tree canopy, the cricket
and the blue bottle fly. Nature had used the swamp for a battlefield, and
slaughtered the land as well as its inhabitants. The swamp was now one eighth
the size it had been when he had first crossed it, a shallow muddy pond.

To the sides of the road, where the water touched the edge of the forest, it
was murky green and deep. But in the main body, it became shallow and slimy,
then turned to dark wet mud. Beyond that, the bottom was hard dry mud which had
cracked and pulled apart around the burnt and blackened bodies of the mangrove
trees.

On the opposite side of the swamp, tongues of hard lava now curled and
twisted down out of the heights of Panga Pass, then spread out in widening fans
across the dry swamp bottom and dipped their tips into the murky waters. There
steam rose above the edges of the pond. The recently molten rock was still warm.

The skeletons of oversized lizards, crocodiles and snakes were draped on the
black limbs of the trees and protruded from the dry mud bed. Bits of charred
skin danced on their burnt bones.

The land, once a sunless world of shadows roofed by leaves, had been ravaged
by rivers of molten lava which boiled away the greater portion of the swamp and
set fire to the trees and undergrowth to leave a grey, lifeless land exposed to
sun, wind and eye. But other, more unnatural forces, had also been at war. Many
of the dead creatures were headless and lay in submissive coils and crouches, as
if they had surrendered to execution.

Gath leaned forward, and the stallion started down the road into the spilling
sunlight, using center trail in a manner that said no other had the right. Both
man and animal were stained with trail dust, and moved with that easy grace only
granted to those travelers accustomed to roads fashioned from mysteries and
destruction. But their eyes were wary, hunting the strange, haunted devastation.

Up ahead, lava obliterated the trail through Panga Pass which the Barbarian
had formerly taken. Now he would have to scout out a new trail, a task which
would be difficult and time consuming. But this did not bother him. Instead it
brought a dark smile to his face.

The Land of Smoking Skies lay somewhere to the west beyond the pass, and it
was not simply one more mysterious, uncharted world so common to that distant
time. It was a world ruled by the Master of Darkness and his armies of demon
spawn, and for Gath, a world of compelling memories of unleashed evil which
tugged at his soul, transforming his dark smile into one of flashing
anticipation.

The demons of the Lord of Death had hunted him long enough. Now he was the
hunter.

Gath was certain that the mysterious place he now longed to dominate, the
place where he belonged, was up ahead at the mouth of the underworld. There he
would stand guard and destroy the demons of the Master of Darkness as they came
forth from the bowels of the earth. There he would find the satisfaction and
fulfillment the helmet now demanded. To find it, he had to leave behind all he
knew. His home in the rain forest called The Shades, and the only two people he
had ever called friend, the lovely Robin Lakehair and the
bukko
Brown
John. But he had no choice. The horned helmet’s magic penetrated his blood and
bones. It was rooted in them, and produced a hunger he could not resist.

Now the helmet was the only friend he had, and he was resolved to dominate
its magic, make it the only one he needed.

His hand dropped to the headpiece and stroked its living steel. It made him
the master of wherever he chose to stand, the equal of earthquake, thundercloud
and lightning. With it mounted on his head, he would prevail against whoever he
faced, and do it in the manner he had sworn he would long, long ago when he was
a boy. By himself.

THE NYMPH QUEEN

F
ar to the west of Noga Swamp, past the Land of Smoking Skies, across the
great Barrier Mountains and beyond the vast sea of sand dunes called the
Emptiness, lay a small ocean bordered by black-shadowed forests and shrouded in
dense fog. It lay still, silent, then the sound of a horn echoed out of the
gloom. Faint. Mysterious. Like the wailing moan of all that had died in the last
year.

This was the Inland Sea, a slowly, steadily growing body of water which would
one day be called the Mediterranean.

Only the sun and moon can remember what it looked like then, less than
one-tenth the size it is now and confined to its southwestern extremity, only
the meager beginning of what it would become.

In those barbaric days, the sea was landlocked. It was fed by falls cascading
over a landbridge which linked the continents which would one day be called
Spain and Africa. The source of the falls was the Endless Sea, the Atlantic, to the west. Fed by the melting ice capping the
northern continents, the Endless Sea was imperceptibly rising, cutting through
the landbridge. In the far distant future it would push through and tear it down
to link the two oceans with a passage called the Straits of Hercules, and bury
the mountains and deserts and Great Forest Basin under its watery weight. But
now it slowly spilled its icy waters into the tropical warm waters of the Inland
Sea, content to send up billowing clouds of steam which hung over the western
shore.

There the massive rock which would be called Gibraltar crouched like an
animal with its paws extended to the south and its haunches bunched to the
north. At that end, sheer cliffs of shale and limestone rose to the heights,
supporting a castle constructed of black stone. Pyram, the lair of the Nymph
Queen, the high priestess of Black Veshta, whose magic manufactured the demon
spawn for the Master of Darkness.

The low piercing cry came from a horn mounted in the castle’s east tower. It
was a command.

The sound flooded over the blunt, thick ramparts and towers, swirled down
through passageways and courtyards. Shutters banged against it. Doors were
bolted, and behind them the inhabitants whimpered and covered their ears. But a
few children ran through the ruins and perched on fallen walls overlooking the
water, thrilled at the prospect of getting a glimpse of their legendary queen.

The horn announced the ritual feeding of the great Lord of Destruction who
ruled the Inland Sea, and only the queen could feed him. When she did, the
children would gaze down on her nymphet beauty and see why for the last months
the horn had forbidden them to look at her. But soldiers quickly found them,
drove them back into their homes and then hid themselves.

The horn continued to cry out, then abruptly stopped, and Pyram stood still
and silent.

At the base of the cliffs was a large crescent-shaped cave. The blackened
pylons of a pier extended from its shadows, thrusting up out of the turbulent
waves like giant rotting teeth, their roots washed with clinging greenish-white
foam. A moment passed, then a blood-red barge emerged, rode over the waves and
pulled away from the end of the pier. It headed for the tip of a blunt rock
protruding from the water about a half mile off shore. The sacred feeding area.

The barge’s hull was a long narrow oval constructed of papyrus reeds. The bow
and stern ends turned up, and were molded and painted in the shape of erect
phalli. There were no masts or sails. Six oarsmen stood in stirrups on the stern
deck plunging leaf-shaped oars into the surf with trained precision. They
followed the beat of a pace drummer who sat under a thatched awning on the aft
quarter. A weathered waterman stood behind him holding the tiller steady. Each
had been deliberately made deaf and mute so they could not hear their queen’s
sacred voice, or speak of her sacred beauty.

At the prow, three elderly priests stood reverently, hands clasped in prayer.
They were bald and bare-chested, their loose white skirts held in place by black
ropes. The eldest, the high priest of Black Veshta, had three red circles
painted on his shiny pate, and his foot rested on a brown-skinned girl who
sprawled chained, naked and whimpering on the deck. She was blindfolded.

Tiyy, the Nymph Queen of Pyram, stood on the command deck, shivering like a
leafy bush and smelling of Midnight Orchids. Her diminutive body was buried
within a massive bear-fur robe, the hood hiding her head. Only her eyes showed
within its shadows, large almonds under level eyebrows as thin as thread, and
outlined in black kohl as wide as a child’s finger. The upper lids were heavy
half-moons blushed with pale indigo. The orbs were a flawless, translucent
alabaster surrounding sky-blue irises, and the pupils were dilated, dark
compelling doorways into a mind as predatory and cunning as the trapdoor spider.

A short thin man stood respectfully to the side of her throne chair. His
black tunic was ragged and thick with trail dust. Where his flesh was exposed,
it was greyish and smooth, almost slick, and blistered. Schraak, a serpent
priest in the service of the Queen of Serpents. He had just arrived after an
arduous, hurried journey from the Land of Smoking Skies with a message from the
Master of Darkness, and the sweaty slime oozing from his worried cheeks said he
had not brought good news.

When the barge neared the tip of black rock, and was too far away from the
battlements for anyone spying there to see her features, Tiyy lowered her hood.

Her hair was dyed a bilious lemon-yellow and cut with flawless symmetry in
the shape of a shoulder-length pyramid. Florid pink rouge thickly covered her
cheeks, in an attempt to hide the wrinkles in her heart-shaped face, but without
success. It was a face which undoubtedly had once been beautiful, but which now
had no physical claim on the title Nymph. A withered sack of flesh and bone
laced with lightning.

As the barge slid alongside the rock, she raised a commanding hand. The pace
drummer stopped beating his drum. The oarsmen plunged their oars deep, holding
them steady, and the barge slowed, came to a stop.

Tiyy advanced to the front of the command deck, and her robe fell partway
open. Her face belonged to a woman in her eighties, but her throat was only
slightly slack, and her bare round shoulders were as plump and firm as a girl’s.

She removed a small leaden vial from her robes and thumbed it impatiently. It
was thick and heavy, with a lead stopper tied to its narrow throat, and
contained the magical black wine, Nagraa, which sustained the powers and forms
of the Lord of Death’s demon spawn.

The high priest joined her on the command deck, bowing low, and she handed
him the vial without ceremony, saying, “Hurry! Hurry!”

The high priest scurried back to the prow, and his two assistants lifted the
chained girl off the deck. She screamed and thrashed blindly, but they took
little notice and forced her squirming body down on the deck, just short of the
rail. One priest squeezed hard at the base of her gums, forcing her mouth open,
while the high priest, holding the vial well away from his face, removed its
lead stopper. A beam of black light shot forth from the mouth of the vial,
accompanied by an almost human wail, and the blindfolded girl shrieked and
thrashed, turning her head away. The priest forced her back into position, again
pressuring her mouth open, and the high priest emptied the vial’s fuming
contents into it.

She gagged and kicked, screaming fitfully as the priests unchained her. Then
the high priest plucked her off the deck as if she weighed no more than a cup of
soup, and held her above his head. She screamed again, then passed out. He shook
her until she regained consciousness, then heaved her out over the railing.

Her arms and legs windmilled helplessly against the air, and she hit the
water, sending up a crowd of white watery spears, then sank from sight.

Tiyy, now standing at the side of the command deck, watched the water as
Schraak moved up beside her. His eyes were white with shocked excitement, but
the Nymph Queen showed no reaction.

The girl surfaced, thrashing and screaming. Her blindfold had been torn away,
and she looked about with white startled eyes, then began to swim for the barge.
One of the priests picked up a long blunt pole hanging on the deck railing and
routinely drove her away from the barge. She screamed and grabbed hold of the
pole. He shook her off easily and prodded her further off. She tried to swim for
the rock, panicked after three strokes and began to thrash and scream
mindlessly, churning the black-green waters to a white froth.

Tiyy watched intently. The blue of her eyes suddenly vivid behind their thick
black lids. There was color in her smile.

Without turning to him, she said, “It begins well, Schraak. The girl has
spirit. That is sure to bring him.”