Dark Crusade (24 page)

Something else was in his skull... Something that fed...

The polar bear coughed and relaxed its fangs, spraying blood from its black-tongued muzzle--blood that was not Kane's. It sagged against him suddenly, dragging the man down beneath its gigantic bulk. The blood-slick daggerhilt tore away from Kane's grasp. Ripping forepaws still hugged him in a lethal embrace, but now their strength seemed less irresistible.

Kane desperately writhed from under the toppling bear, sliding toward its haunches is it sprawled forward against him. The mortally wounded polar bear pitched slackly toward the edge, hung for a long moment struggled feebly against overbalance, then slid like an avalanche over the ice-ledge and into the silent mists that waited far below.

Kane stumbled forward.

He was in a cavern, damp and smelling of carrion. Gelatinous fungi leaked wan, phosphorescent light onto the dripping stalactites. The floor was treacherous with slime and foetid pools of uncertain depth. Cold water drenched his bare flesh, as he sloshed along the passage. The broken chains on his bloody wrists clanked dismally.

He barely remembered that crimson instant of intolerable rage when the hopeless note of her disappearing screams had driven him mad, and the rusted chains that shackled him to the stone had snapped like rotted cord.

For worm-twisted miles he had followed the mocking echoes of her cries, bleak despair smothering the fires of his wrath. Those who had left him here--had they purposefully let her come to him to attempt hopeless rescue?

A pale figure sprawled in the pool just ahead. Kane plunged toward it recklessly, knowing at once the familiar lithe figure and ash-blonde hair. He called her name.

Vacant eyes stared up at him from a slime-crushed face. But the consummate horror was that she still lived...

Recognition seemed to light in her stark eyes as he knelt beside her mutilated form. His fingers pressed her lacerated neck, and there was only horror on her slack features.

Its attack was silent--dropping from the gloom above where it had climbed on its socketed limbs. Feral instinct cut through Kane's grief, and he sprang away at the last instant. The great hump of rubbery flesh grazed his naked skin as he twisted, but its murderous leap had missed him.

Stagnant water sprayed, and the devil-leech recoiled from its leap--its springy form unshaken by the drop. It reared upright like a man--like a child's mud status of a man. Stubby legs and arms ended in sucker-tipped knots of appendages like outsize maggots, and its underbelly was slimily undulant as a slug's underside. Above its thick shoulders its neckless head hunched forward like a cobra's hood. Malevolent intelligence gleamed in its squid eyes, set far back of its outthrust socketed maw.

The devil-leech sprang for him, its ungainly bulk uncoiling suddenly from its fall as if driven by steel springs. Kane's footing failed on the fungus-smeared stone, as he tried to fend off its attack. In an overwhelming rush of cold, blubbery muscle, the devil-leech was upon him.

Kane grunted and struggled for a grip on the rubbery bulk. His fingers slithered uselessly on the slimy flesh, fighting the clutch of the demon's suckered paws. Its relentless mass squeezed against his squirming flesh, crushing him to a jelly-like carpet of fungi. Kane thrashed about with desperate strength, trying to tear away. He succeeded only in wriggling deeper into a stagnant pool; foul water sprayed over his gasping face, choking him.

Toothed and suckered like a giant lamprey's mouth, the devil-leech's maw sought his throat. Kane's fingers tore futilely as the cobra-hood head hunched downward. The foot-wide circular mouth with its rasp-toothed writhing tongues bore down, down...

His hands slipped, and the devil-leech's stubby arms suddenly pinned him down. The lamprey-maw darted for him. Kane writhed. The suctioning mouth fastened on his bare chest.

A thousand dull knives rasped into his flesh, as the circular mouth shredded the flesh of his chest. Scarlet welled for an instant, and then the hideous suction was tearing at his soul. Kane screamed.

Feeding feeding something else is feeding...

The mindless rage that had earlier snapped iron surged through him again. Bellowing in fury, Kane recoiled with all his enormous strength. His arms tore free. His frantic fingers ripped the feeding mouth from his chest. Blood spread from the circle of macerated flesh. A circle like those that blotched her white, still flesh.

Kane flung up his knees and sent the devil-leech floundering back from him, He sprang to his feet--howling a one-noted roar of hate. Naked, bare-handed, he leapt upon the creature--this demon that had bloated on uncounted sacrifices in its foetid lair. His powerful hands gripped fast on either side of the devil's maw. The file-edged tongues gashed his fingers to the bone; the rubbery lips writhed to clamp shut. Kane set his grip and pulled, throwing his huge shoulders into the effort.

Boneless flesh stretched to the utmost. The devil-leech tried to wriggle away from the madman. Splits cracked into strained flesh, widened--then with a gathering wrench tore open. Black blood gushed forth as if from a putrid wound, covering his arms.

Kane laughed, somehow keeping his death-grip on the leathery rasp-toothed jaws. He pulled all the harder, tearing the boneless flesh apart as a man might part a coconut hull. He stood in a pool of gore now, as the devil-leech's efforts to escape grew ever weaker. Arteries--if the demon had blood of its own--must have parted. An ocean of foulness welled up from its ruined throat as Kane's mad laughter echoed through the cavern...

But he was walking through the cavern again. No, it was a corridor--a dank passageway of coarse stone blocks. The passage was unlighted; the darkness close and foul with the stench of unwashed bodies. Kane's hands seemed dragged down; his gait was a clanking hobble. Massive chains shackled him.

Kane tried to halt, and the iron collar at his neck snapped his head forward. There were soldiers ahead of him, leading him by his chains. He had not seen them at once in the thick gloom. Trying to think. Kane let them jerk him forward along the passageway. Except for a scrap of rag, he was naked--his body scored with half-closed wounds. Pain and fatigue made his legs all but too weak to bear his weight.

Bolts clashed; hinges groaned. An iron-bound door was thrust open. Torchlight spilled into the passage. Kane blinked stupidly, blinded by the sudden light as his captors hauled him within.

The familiar, hated profile of Jarvo greeted him from within. The stocky general was seated in a low-backed chair beside a glowing brazier. A swordhilt protruded from the smouldering coals. His one good eye was alight with triumph, and his youthful face--the side not immobilized by scar was twisted into a smile. Not wholly cloaked by shadow, the chamber's gleaming instruments of torture waited behind him.

Jarvo grunted in satisfaction. "So you're conscious again, Kane--or have you only feigned delirium these past hours?"

"Hours?" Kane heard his voice ask. His thoughts, struggled for clarity. How was he here? Delirium...?

"So you'll pretend not to know?" Jarvo considered him thoughtfully. "Perhaps you don't. As a ploy, it's pointless. Yes, hours--more than a full day since the final battle.

Since my men and I broke through into that old tower where you'd sought to hide. You were lying there senseless, half dead from your wounds. Had you thought to make a last stand there, Kane? Then you'll regret you didn't use your last strength to fall on your sword. My surgeons staunched your wounds, nursed life back into you with their elixirs."

"Why?"

Jarvo's scarred face sneered wrathfully. He clawed at his seared profile. "Have you forgotten so soon, Kane? Did you think to escape with so easy a death? Orted Ak-Ceddi slipped from my grasp, but our people will at least see justice meted to you! You, Kane--you, his general who forged the sword by which the demon-cult of Sataki terrorized our lands!"

His voice, which had started to rise, now fell, its tone deceptively calm. "When I was chosen to lead the Combine's armies, I swore I'd pull the Prophet's fortress down on the bodies of his crazed priesthood, that I'd hang a follower of Sataki from every tree in Shapeli, and that Orted and his henchmen would die in agony before the eyes of my army. Well, Ceddi lies in ruin, the carrion crows are feasting the forest--and though Orted has eluded me, his general is my prisoner!"

Jarvo came to his feet, his good eye staring at Kane's face. "In a few hours it will be dawn. At dawn you will be dragged into the central square. There before my victorious army your limbs will be broken on the wheel, your skin will be flayed from your flesh, and, after a time, you will be burned at the stake. My torturers are artists; they assure me that with stimulant drugs and careful work you may live until nightfall."

Jarvo's hand blurred toward the smouldering brazier, came away with the sword--its blade white-hot from the coals. His voice cracked with hate. "And here's something to think on through the night!"

Kane tried to fling his head aside. Chains held him. Glowing steel slashed across Kane's face, cauterizing as it sheared through smoking flesh. Agony forced a hiss through his clenched teeth. The stench of his burning flesh choked him. Kane sagged backward, one half of his face a charred and bleeding horror.

"I return your favor," Jarvo growled, "and leave you one eye to see. Take him back to his cell."

Half-blinded, sick with pain, Kane scarcely was aware as his captors dragged him to his cell, flung him inside and locked the ponderous door. Weighed down with chains, he sprawled on the filthy stones of the pitch-dark cell. Agony lanced his skull. Jarvo's quick slash had torn away his ear, laid open his face to bare bone, split open one eye like a burst egg.

In a few hours they would come for him. He would die a hideous lingering death--humiliated before his enemies. They would gloat on his suffering, laugh at the screams of agony even Kane's iron will would not be able to lock in. And there was no hope of escape. Shackled, half-dead from his wounds, helpless in the grasp of his victorious enemies, not a man left alive who would lift a hand to help him.

This was the end. There would be no escape. A life that had outlasted centuries would end in agony and shame. Dismally. Hopelessly.

Feeding... something is feeding...

Kane clutched at his skull. Even through the pain of his mutilated face he could sense the icy tendrils pierce his brain, sucking energy from the agony of his tortured soul.

What was it... What had he done... He should not have fallen prisoner to Jarvo. There had been a hope of escape--desperate escape. It was so hard to think. Pain and despair dulled his mind. What had happened... A battle, Jarvo had said...

Kane remembered the battle. The chaos of blood, steel and flame as Jarvo's army stormed Ceddi and ended Orted's Dark Crusade in a wild night of violence and destruction. With fury Kane remembered the Prophet's treachery, his insane refusal to accept a truce after Katie's abortive coup d'étàt that had given the Combine its chance to rout the once invincible Sword of Sataki.

Kane remembered the last stand of his personal guard, trapped in the dying fortress between Orted's fanatical troops and Jarvo's advancing army. As the last of his men fell, Kane had hewn his way to a moment's respite. And then? Kane remembered the black despair of that moment, when, reeling from exhaustion and a dozen wounds, he had realized he was cut off. There had been the old tower... Even in the desperate melee of battle, men had been loath to approach the chill stones of this ancient redoubt; those who guarded it now fled their posts before Jarvo's advance. Kane had fought his way to the tower, bolted the ancient door in the face of his pursuers.

Why... He had done so knowing the door would hold them only short minutes--that he would be cornered. Why had he chosen the tower to make his final stand? Kane struggled to think, to remember. He had sought the ancient tower in some last desperate hope. Why? Why... the tower...

The Tower of Yslsl--No! The Lair of Yslsl!

Yslsl!

Wizard of a lost age--or demon? Only the vaguest of legends remained. His black stone tower had stood here even before the first priests of Sataki had crept into Shapeli, so it was said. Or was it true, as some held, that Sataki and Yslsl were both brother demons in the pantheon of some forgotten elder race? But the cult of Sataki still lived--although for centuries it had all but perished--and to Yslsl there remained only tenuous myths. And his tower. Or, as the legends said, his two towers...

When Ceddi had been built from this benighted forestland, its first inhabitants had included the ancient tower within its log palisades. Though cold and menacing, its stones stood solid--and the city's founders had had more immediate dangers to face than foreboding legends. Generations later the tower yet stood--solid, cold and ill-famed as in the earliest days. Ceddi now had grander fortifications, and the old redoubt had been virtually abandoned.

There were two towers, so the legends held. One here, the other half a world away. And between the two towers dwelt Yslsl--the demon-wizard whose interdimensional web was linked to this world through these two foci of energy. Perhaps his web touched other worlds as well...

One might enter the Lair of Yslsl, enter and cross through to where another strand of the web was anchored. There was a ritual that would open the portal, a spell known to eons-dead priests and to students of such lore. One might journey through this interdimensional corridor if one knew the spell. But to do so one must confront Yslsl...

Kane, whose knowledge of the occult spanned centuries, knew the spell--and the danger. But with his enemies breaking through the tower door, there had been no other chance.

And Kane remembered. Remembered chanting out the spell with breath in frothing gasps. The smash of the battering ram splintering the iron-bound door. The chill of his slashed flesh pressed to the black sunburst of stone set into the wall at the head of the spiral steps... The falling into blackness...

What had happened...

Jarvo said they had found him stretched senseless on the stones. Had his last desperate hope been only a fool's gamble with an ancient legend? Or was he even now enmeshed in the Lair of Yslsl--tortured by the illusions plucked from his mind by the vampiric demon?