Rise of the Death Dealer (33 page)

THE HELMET

T
he border marker lay facedown in the dirt. A rectangle of stone of
unremarkable color or size, its backside told Gath of Baal nothing.

He dismounted, turned it over using the toe of his boot. He could not read
the words, but the crudely chiseled image of mountains and overhanging clouds
told him he had reached the Land of Smoking Skies.

Five days had passed since he had left Noga Swamp, and each had been spent
finding a new trail through diverted rivers, leveled mountains and upturned
valleys and meadows. Now, just beyond the marker, he faced a tongue of hard lava
nearly twenty feet in width. It receded, rising higher and higher, toward a low
conelike hill, the remnant of a volcano. A meager spire of smoke rose out it,
like a flag of surrender. The remains of larger volcanoes filled the surrounding
area beyond it, their tops cut off as if by a giant knife. They rose off of low
bald hills blackened by fire and radiating flows of hard lava. There was no sign
of life on the ground or in the air, and the perpetual black clouds for which
the Land of Smoking Skies was named had vanished.

Gath remounted his black stallion and rode up onto the tongue of lava.

There was no sign of the many staircases which had been carved out of the
rocky cliffs. They were either crushed or buried, and the shadowed mouths of the
mountains’ many caves had vanished, either swallowed by volcanic explosions or
drowned by spewing lava. The ground itself had been rearranged, like a quilt
kicked by sleeping feet. There was no indication of which volcano had held the
underground chambers of the Queen of Serpents with its secret entrance to the
living altar of her lord, the Master of Darkness.

He halted at the crest of a rise, and his eyes thinned.

The skeletons of men rose out of the lava flows, some buried to their knees,
others to their skulls. More bodies were draped among the blackened branches of
burnt-out oaks and pine trees, their bones picked clean by flying predators.
There was no armor on the skeletons, and no weapons lying about: the booty, no
doubt, of two-footed predators.

He turned one way, then the other, and saw a distant ridge of black lava.
Beyond it, in the far distance, there was a patch of green forest that had
somehow escaped both lava and fire. He looked back at the dead volcanoes, and his
fingers drummed the head of his axe. A moment passed. He unbuckled the horned
helmet from his belt and held it up with both hands.

Its living steel was warm against his calloused fingers, and the horns seemed
to pulse and reach for him, daring him to defy its addictive power.

Snarling, he lifted the helmet over his head, as if to put it on as casually
as he buckled his belt. But his blood and bones rebelled. The muscles in his
forearms knotted and, with their veins bulging under sun-darkened flesh,
resisted, instinctively afraid. They seemed to know that once the helmet covered
his head there was every chance he could become its prisoner again, and could
not remove it without the help of Robin Lakehair’s magic.

His face glistened hotly in the shade cast by the headpiece, then his pride
welled up defiantly, and slowly his arms forced the helmet down until its rim
descended over his forehead. A primitive pleasure shone behind his reckless
eyes, then they vanished behind the metal, and the helmet was in place.

His harsh breathing was noisy behind the mouth hole. The whites of his eyes
glittered briefly behind the eye slits, then a fiery red glow replaced them.

The mark of the Death Dealer.

FORKED TONGUES

G
ath drew his axe and prodded the stallion into a trot. His helmeted head
moving from side to side. Alert. Expecting trouble. Wanting it.

Veins corded and throbbed along his forearms, and steam drifted from the
sleeves of his chain mail as his blood, growing hotter, coursed through him. His
senses sharpened and expanded, sending vibrations into his scalp and hair, then
into the metallic flesh of the helmet and through its horns into pointed tips.

He prodded his horse into a gallop and moved deep into the enveloping
landscape, recklessly riding through narrow guts and gullies designed by nature
for ambush. But he felt nothing save the chill of the air flowing past him, and
heard nothing but wind and cawing vultures.

He was deep in the domain of the Lord of Death, crossing over earth and rock
in which the heart of darkness was buried. Here sin, corruption and murder were
the coin of existence. Here the power of evil rivaled earthquake and tornado.
But he saw only a mysterious foreboding void.

He turned off the tongue of lava, galloped up the side of a huge crater and
reined up at the crest of the cone. Rubble filled its center: the opposite side
had collapsed inward and sealed the volcano. Here there was not even a thin spire of smoke to proclaim its former majesty.

He rode down into the crater, turning and twisting the stallion between
massive boulders, churning up clouds of fine dust. Finding nothing but earth and
lava, and sensing no danger, he galloped back to the crest of the crater and
again reined up. The helmet throbbed against his head, hungering for battle, and
frustration spit flames from the eye slits. But he sat still in his saddle,
defying the headpiece’s demands, and slowly the flames abated, the red glow
died.

He spent the morning slowly and carefully searching the other craters, but
found no cave entrances, no golden doors, no staircase cut out of lava, only the
charred skeletons of lizards, pythons, adders and men with and without tails.
Returning to the largest crater, he again searched the rubble filling the cone,
and again found nothing. He remounted the crest and stood in his stirrups
surveying the distant landscape.

Beyond the dead volcanoes to the north and west, mountains rose in steep
cliffs to jagged peaks half hidden by clouds. To the east and south, the
direction in which the molten lava and its trailing cloud of dust had traveled,
the hills were strewn with rocks and beds of dust, bisected and decorated by
puddles and rivers of hard lava.

The entrance to the underworld was sealed. Hidden.

He sank back into the saddle, raging with frustration. Suddenly the red glow
reappeared behind the eyes of the helmet, then black smoke spewed out, and he
growled demonically. The stallion reared, whinnying, and Gath yanked on the
reins, holding the stallion’s head erect, his body quaking. The helmet’s demon
fire drained into his blood and groin, and the headpiece turned his head, its
flaming eyes scanning the horizon to find a thin spire of smoke rising behind
the distant ridge of black lava. He drove his spurs into the stallion, and it
leapt forward, charged down the slope.

Gasping with blood lust, sweat draining down his arm to ride in glittering
spider trails over the blade of his axe, Gath rode over hills, across tongues of
lava and through a maze of towering boulders thrown about haphazardly by
volcanic explosions. Folds of black lava undulated beyond the boulders, forming
the ridge beyond which the smoke spire rose. A narrow rocky defile zigzagged
through its left side. Gath plunged into the defile with the animal turning and
twisting, then erupted into a clearing surrounded by rock walls thirty feet
high, and reined up.

A campfire, surrounded by stones laid out in a ritualistic triangle, occupied
the center of the clearing. Beside it, skeletons were stacked and strewn in a
narrow stream of water flowing through the clearing. Some still carried chunks
of meat and flesh, and the water was dark red. In the corners, armor and weapons
pillaged from the dead made heaps against the rock walls. Three narrow, twisting
gullies opened onto the clearing. They were filled with deep shade and crouched
figures. More lurked in the clefts of the overhanging ridges, barely discernible
against the black rock.

Gath, with a low rumble of satisfaction escaping the helmet’s mouth hole,
walked the stallion into the sunlight filling the middle of the clearing, and
the helmet’s horns pulsed with life, curving down in cruel challenge.

The shadowed creatures cringed and hissed with pink-red tongues protruding.
They were forked.

Gath slowly turned the stallion in a tight circle, affording each of the
creatures a chance to attack his back.

They hesitated, then lurched cautiously into the sunlight at the edges of the
defiles and clefts. They wore ragged tatters of hunter-green tunics, the uniform
of the Queen of Serpents’ bodyguards, and belts hung with daggers and swords.
But they ignored their weapons, and held their hands in front of them like
claws, drawing back lips to expose fangs and teeth. Patches of scales clung to
fuming sores in arms, jaws and thighs. Fingers and toes had fallen off. Noses
had shrunken to hard black scales, ears had shriveled to bloody holes, and they
were bald.

Gath reined the stallion to a halt and drew back warily as the creatures’
fumes swirled about him. He gagged on the stench, and the creatures, some of
them resorting to their bellies for propulsion, launched themselves at him.

The first attacker led with his mouth wide open and quickly discovered his
mistake. Gath greeted him with his axe, and when the snakeman hit the ground,
the upper half of his mouth was lying ten feet away from the lower half.

The axe buried itself in the meat of two more attackers, then five bodies hit
Gath. They drove him out of his saddle, bore him to the ground with hissing
squeals and buried him under snapping, swarming bodies.

Gath rolled across the ground crashing through the pile of skeletons,
splashing in the blood-red water, ripping the bodies away. They came apart like
half-baked dough, and greenish wet fumes and blood spattered helmet and chain
mail. Fangs bit into his forearm, but broke off before doing damage. When he
fought his way back to his feet, he no longer had his axe, but held a muscular
arm by the wrist. He had pulled it out of a shoulder as easily as if it were a
cherry on a cake. He hammered his assailants with the arm until they writhed on
the ground like dying snakes, and in the process reduced the arm to a two-inch
stump.

He threw it aside impatiently and moved for the creatures slithering on their
bellies. His eyes held the hunger of a starved man.

He kicked at a head, removing it from its shoulders, and stepped on another.
It exploded like a melon and he slipped on the pulp, crashed into a boulder
headfirst. The rock, being made of harder stuff than the decaying demon spawn,
left him in a dazed lump on the ground. The creatures slithered around to feed
on him, and the stallion moved in among them, rearing up and stomping. The
creatures coiled and hissed under the descending hooves, then began to jerk and
fume in the throes of death.

The stallion backed away from the carnage, and Gath rose slowly. He moved
onto the heap of skeletons, retrieved his axe from the bony rubble and stood
leaning on it. The blade glistened with bloody streaks. Behind him, a red-orange
glow filled the distant sky, tinting his black armor and matching the glow of
his eyes. The same color tinted the flowing water. It was the only movement, a
river of death.

The axe came back into Gath’s hands, as two more figures emerged from one of
the gullies. They also wore hunter-green and had forked tongues, but stood erect
and held sword and spear in hand.

The horned helmet lowered its horns, growling in anticipation, and the
creatures backed up a step, moving away from each other to attack from different
angles. One hesitated, digging a small leaden vial from a belt pouch, and the
other lunged for it. His partner lifted his sword in a short swing and cut off his friend’s hand.
Howling, the creature dropped to the ground with green blood spewing from the
stump of his wrist.

Gath moved for the surviving snakeman, and he stuffed the vial back in its
pouch, sank into a crouch with his sword playing in front of him. The helmet’s
eye slits replied with spitting fire, but Gath stopped in place. His body heaved
as he once more brought the helmet under control, and the fire died in his eyes.
He deliberately dropped his axe, then leaned in, feeding the snakeman’s sword
his helmet. The creature slashed, but the blade glanced off harmlessly. Suddenly
Gath stepped inside the swing of the sword and, carefully measuring the force of
his punch, hit the snakeman flush on the side of his head.

The creature went reeling back, leaving his sword behind, met a boulder with
his face and fell back on the ground like a drop cloth.

Gath picked up his axe, moved to the snakeman and straddled him. When the
stunned creature came to, he found the cutting edge of the axe poised on his
Adam’s apple and the menacing face of the horned helmet looking down at him. He
held perfectly still, not daring to swallow.

“What has happened here?” Gath demanded.

An inarticulate hiss was the reply.

Gath leaned slightly on the axe, drawing a trickle of blood. The snakeman
flinched with pain, and terror swam through his eyes as he blurted an answer. It
was in a language Gath had never heard before.

“The entrance to the underworld?” Gath snarled.

The creature replied with a long, rapidly spoken and seemingly lucid flow of
words, as if he understood Gath perfectly. But again he used the foreign language.

Gath lifted his axe angrily to pulp the creature’s head, and the man fainted
with a whimpering hiss.

Gath inspected the snakeman carefully, but found nothing that told him what
he wished to know. He hesitated thoughtfully, then, without untying the jar with
the holes drilled in it that dangled from his belt, lifted it, feeling its
warmth, and gave it a shake. The captive in the tiny prison moved about
vigorously, causing the jar to move on Gath’s palm. Satisfied that it still
lived, he lowered the jar and looked over the battlefield without satisfaction.
The helmet, its hunger unfulfilled, still churned and boiled for satisfaction,
and his pride still cried out for a worthy challenge. There had been no glory or
honor in this day’s work, only bloody labor.

Gath dragged the unconscious snakeman to his feet and threw him across the
clearing beside the stallion. Then, tying him securely, he tossed him over the
saddle facedown and walked the horse through a gully and out of the clearing.

In a nearby area was a flat spread of lava with a large irregular bowl-like
depression in the middle. It was about fifty feet across and easily twenty feet
deep at its lowest point. He dropped the reins and descended the steep incline
of the bowl. About ten feet short of the lowest point, he set his axe on the
ground, squatted and untied the earthen jar from his belt. He lifted it to his
ear, listening, then held it in front and away from him. With the jar resting in
one hand, he took hold of the cork and hesitated, did nothing for a long moment.

The helmet was hot and heavy against his head, sinking low and weaving back
and forth as if trying to throw him down. He fought it back into place, and
flames erupted angrily. He sat still, forcing them to abate, then firmed his
grip on the cork, took a deep breath and, in one fluid movement, ripped the cork
out and rolled the jar down the slope toward the bottom of the bowl.