The Viper's Fangs (Book 2) (34 page)

23

Sardach released Angus and turned quickly toward Tyrag. He
would have to go over the mountains to—

A hideous sound burst around him, and he felt a sudden,
intense pain as a small part of him was completely obliterated by it. He
convulsed, the tendril tightening uncontrollably around Typhus, squeezing him so
tightly he felt the ribs break beneath it. But he didn’t care. A part of him
had been destroyed, and he turned toward the source of the attack—but Angus was
already falling quickly out of sight. He
almost
pursued him, but
Argyle’s unrelenting command reasserted itself.

Bring Typhus back to me.

He screeched and turned furiously toward Tyrag. Revenge
could wait.

It would be a long flight, and Typhus was dangling limply from
his grip. He had been badly damaged, but he wasn’t dead yet. Argyle wanted him
alive, and he would have to keep him that way. He reached into Typhus and began
to infiltrate his organs. He could not heal him, but he could sustain him for a
long time.

24

Hobart hesitated at the edge of the crater and set the magic
light in the snow at its rim. There was a hand sticking up in its center, and
the fingers were bent at odd angles and frozen into place. He stepped gingerly
forward, the snowshoes slid a bit on the slope before he settled near the
bottom. He gritted his teeth and knelt down to touch the ice-cold hand, the
stiff, unyielding forearm. He blinked severely to squelch the tears and took a
long, deep breath before firmly gripping Giorge’s forearm. He pulled, gently,
steadily. Giorge was light, but the snow tried to keep him in its grasp. Hobart
bent forward, reached down further into the snow until he grasped Giorge’s
collar. He pulled again, and the snow reluctantly gave way.

Giorge’s arms and legs were strangely bent and unmoving; he
was frozen solid. Hobart didn’t care. He cradled Giorge in his arms as best he
could and slowly rocked back and forth. He wept. He didn’t know how long he
wept before the Ortis with him put his hand on his shoulder and said, his voice
soft, “Angus needs us now.”

Hobart had lost close comrades many times before, and he
knew what needed to be done. But somehow this was different—
Giorge
was
different—and he found it very difficult to accept his death and set aside the
emotions roiling through him. But he had to. Ortis was right. He could do
nothing more for Giorge; he was dead. But Angus wasn’t. He nodded, and said, “We’ll
bury him first. A cairn on that mountainside where the curse was taking him.
He’d appreciate that. It will be on the way.”

“All right,” Ortis agreed. “We will need to do it quickly.”

Hobart nodded and stood up with Giorge in his arms. He
repositioned the awkward, distorted, frozen corpse as best he could and backed
out of the crater. “Do you remember where we were supposed to go?”

Ortis nodded. “Around that mountain and up the slope on the
other side.”

Hobart nodded and started walking toward the mountain. It
was only a few hundred feet away.

“I’ll take the lift back up,” Ortis added. “I might be able
to see where Angus is when the sun rises.”

Hobart nodded and kept walking. It was a sluggish pace at
first, but once they were past the snow onto the rocky surface of the mountain,
it quickened to an almost reckless trot.

Ortis followed a few paces behind.

25

Angus wasted a precious moment cursing his ill-aimed shot,
and then twisted around to face the ground as it approached. It was still quite
far away, and he reached out for the magic around him to cast his Flying spell.

But it wasn’t there.

He reached for the magic within him
and couldn’t find it!

What was wrong?

He desperately tried to find the magic again—but nothing. He
couldn’t bring the magic into focus, couldn’t remember the spell.

The ground was approaching more quickly, now, and he would
strike it in less than three seconds. Where was the magic? He had concentrated
as he always had, but it wasn’t there. What—

He clamped down on his mind. This was no time for questions;
he needed to act. The ground was nearly upon him, and he had no magic. He
couldn’t fly. What else could he do?

He looked at the wand in his hand.

He had
some
magic, but what could he do with it?

He had just over a second left before he struck the
mountainside—

It was granite. If—

He rapidly made the activating movements for the wand and
did his best to gauge his distance from the mountain and to estimate his speed.
If he timed it right, if he had the right angle—

He curled into a ball and held out his arm to make the final
movement….

26

Hobart stopped at the base of the first broad step of a
stair leading up the steep slope of the mountainside. He set Giorge down on it,
and his twisted, frozen body settled into place with a muffled clink.

“We won’t need to build a cairn,” Ortis said, pointing upward.
“That’s Symptata’s crest.”

Hobart looked up the slope and saw that the stair branched
out in several directions above him. At the end of each branch was the sealed entrance
of what looked like a tomb dug into the side of the mountain. Above each
entrance was a sculpted three-headed snake, but these snakes had their heads
bent down and their mouths and eyes closed.

“The top one is open,” Ortis said, his voice barely audible.

Hobart shuddered as he saw the dark opening, so like a mouth
about to swallow them up. The snakes above it had their mouths and eyes wide open,
as if they were ready to strike. He gulped and said, his voice strangely soft
in his ears, “It’s for him, isn’t it?”

Ortis frowned. “I think so,” he said. “But why hasn’t it
taken him by now?”

“What do you mean?”

“If all the others are the tombs of the ones killed by the
curse, how would they have gotten there? There had to have been some of them who
tried to break the curse on their own, and when they died, no one could have
brought them here like we did with Giorge.”

“So?”

“Angus said something about this curse moving things from
place to place or plane to plane or some such, didn’t he? Well, why didn’t it
move Giorge when he died? It had to have moved at least some of the others when
they died.”

Magic,
Hobart thought, scowling.
Curses. What
sense did they make?
“It doesn’t matter,” he growled. “We’ll leave him up
there and say a prayer to Onus to torment him with riches and women. Giorge
would like that, wouldn’t he?” He bent down to pick up Giorge. Once he had him
fairly well balanced in his arms, he lifted his foot to the first step. But he
didn’t go any further and almost dropped Giorge. “They weren’t there before,”
he muttered, looking at Ortis. The Viper’s Fangs were at the edges of Giorge’s
mouth, drooping down until the tips curved under his chin.

Giorge’s body settled in his arms as the convoluted corpse
shifted, and he turned back to adjust the weight. Giorge’s eyelids fluttered
and he met the cold, lifeless, empty, blue, star-speckled stare of the Viper’s
Eyes. They had an inner white glow.

Hobart thrust Giorge corpse away from him and leapt
backward.

Giorge’s corpse struck the stair with a sharp, heavy thud,
and a moment later, it creaked and snapped as the limbs straightened themselves
out.

Hobart took three quick steps back and slowly drew his
broadsword. He almost slipped on the loose stone as he half-whispered, “By the
gods.”

Ortis moved in beside him, and they watched as Giorge’s
corpse slowly worked its way into a sitting position, stood up, and walked
haltingly up the stair.

“What do we do?” Ortis asked. “Follow or not?”

Hobart’s heart was beating like a captured sparrow’s wings,
and he was finding it difficult to breathe. His hands were shaking with fast little
quivers like the twang of a bowstring, and his right foot kept sliding on the
loose stone of the mountain’s slope. He took a step forward and quietly fell into
place behind Giorge as he thudded slowly up the stairs. Hobart’s fingers began
to ache from gripping his sword too tightly, and he forced himself to relax.

It was a slow ascent. Giorge’s corpse took each sliding,
frozen, ponderous step as if it would be his last, thumping it down but a few
inches in front of himself before slowly lifting the other foot. At each rise,
they stood for long, terrifying seconds while the knees crackled and bent.

“What are we going to do when we get there?” Ortis asked.

“I don’t know,” Hobart hissed through clenched teeth.
Zombies
aren’t real!
he thought fiercely, trying to deny what he was seeing before
him.

Another step….

When they finally reached the top, Giorge’s corpse didn’t
hesitate; it plodded slowly forward, into the entrance of the tomb. As soon as
the corpse crossed the threshold, a stone slid into place and blocked Hobart
and Ortis from entering.

Hobart stood still for a long moment, and then said, “That
decides that.”

“We could try to open it,” Ortis said.

Above the entrance, a faint green aura surrounded the
sculpted snake heads, and they eased forward, their eyes and mouths closing.

Then the stair shuddered and the mountainside began to
shake.

Hobart lost his footing and landed on the steep slope and
began sliding. He only slid a few feet, but when he looked back up, the tomb
was gone.

So were the others….

1

Typhus hunched over and tried to breathe through the pain of
his broken ribs, tried to ignore the sudden, sharp pain as Sardach dropped him
roughly to the stone floor of Argyle’s lair. He whimpered, curled up, and
wrapped his arms around his chest.

“Lift him up,” Argyle said.

Sardach reached down and lifted him painfully to his feet
and held him there.

Typhus focused on breathing.
Still the mind
, he
thought.
Still the body.
After about twenty seconds of the mantra, he
had enough control to ignore the pain and lift his eyes to look at Argyle.

Argyle was nibbling on the nail of his right index finger
while the fingers of his left hand tapped softly on the head of his hideous
dog. He called it Pug, mainly because it looked ugly, smelled ugly, and sounded
ugly when it decided to screech. Pug was a good pet—she had eaten intruders
invading his inner sanctum on more than one occasion—but she didn’t like to be
tapped on the head. Argyle knew this, but he also knew Pug would tolerate it
because it was Argyle doing the tapping. But it would irritate Pug and draw out
its natural inclination to rend flesh in its gruesome teeth. When Pug began to
slash her bony tail like an angry cat, Argyle smiled, his teeth gleaming in the
faint candlelight. All Argyle needed to do was tell her to kill, and Typhus
would be her next meal—and Sardach would gladly hold him in place while it
happened.

Argyle studied the fingernail he had been chewing on and said,
“You are supposed to be dead.” His voice was calm, almost dismissive, almost
uncaring. It was not a good sign. Typhus had heard that cold, dispassionate
tone enough to know that it always bespoke a barely restrained rage that could
easily erupt at any moment. When it did—as it
always
did—it could be
vicious and swift or slow and painful, but it always ended with its target’s death.

Argyle flicked his fingernail and slowly turned to Typhus.
“I trusted you,” he said. Then he smiled again. “Not really, of course; I don’t
trust anyone. But I did rely upon you more than I should have, and that was my
mistake. I should have known better.” He began to stroke Pug’s soft black fur,
and she began to calm down. That was a good sign; it would be a fast death.

Argyle’s brow furrowed as he looked down at Typhus with the
familiar dull brown eyes that reminded him of dirty potatoes. Typhus stared
back defiantly and said nothing. There was nothing that needed to be said. He
was at Argyle’s mercy, and he knew that Argyle had no mercy. Whatever happened
from this point on was out of his hands.

“Fanzool told me you were dead,” Argyle continued, his tone
light, almost playful. “Now he is dead. A pity that; he was an amusing fellow,
even though his divinations were frequently too ambiguous to be of use. You,
though,” Argyle said, resting his right hand on the skulls that served as his
armrest, “were of great use to me.” He began to tap a skull, the sound little
more than a muffled, hollow echo. His left hand began tapping on Pug’s head
again, creating an odd rhythm. Several seconds passed as Argyle stared at
Typhus, and then he said, his voice soft, “You took something from me. I want
it back.”

The coins!
Typhus thought with a kernel of hope.
He
wants them back!

But he didn’t have them anymore. Angus—

“I don’t have the coins,” Typhus rasped, forcing the words
out past his mangled ribcage.

Argyle waved his hand dismissively. “I am aware of that,” he
said. “Dirk returned most of them to me, and the last one is of little
consequence. It will find its way back to me eventually.” Then he paused and barked
a harsh, mirth-filled laugh. “You think this is about the coins? Do you think
they are so valuable that I would send so many of my minions after you
knowing
that you would kill them?” Argyle shook his head and laughed some more.

Typhus frowned and gulped. If it wasn’t the coins, it had to
be—

“If all you had taken were the coins,” Argyle mused, “I
would have let it pass. The cost of doing business with one such as yourself. A
bonus, perhaps. No, Typhus, I do not care about those coins.” His suddenly clasped
his hands in front of his chest as if he were about to plead with Typhus, and then
leaned forward close enough for Typhus to feel the heat from his breath.
“Where,” he asked, his tone uncomfortably pleasant, “is my key.”

The key? All he wants is the key?
Typhus began
laughing despite the pain it caused. He would have gladly given the key back to
Argyle, but he didn’t have it. It was in his tunic, and his tunic was in Angus’s
backpack. As he laughed, he felt his broken ribs rub against each other. The
sharp end of one of them slipped underneath another and jabbed into his lung.
He felt the sharpness of the puncture, felt the ticklish air seeping out around
it, and then felt it bite deeper, lodging into his heart….

As he collapsed, as his consciousness slipped away, he felt
the warm, unfriendly touch of Sardach entering his body….