In The Shadow Of The Beast (36 page)

‘
What other horrors have
you committed in the name of your treachery?’ asked Veronique, her
breath catching in her throat as she realized that her brother had
indeed condemned The Regent to death.

‘
I have done what I must to
ensure that my designs are realized. You can assure yourself of
that,’ said The Baron with a self satisfied smirk upon his
face.

‘
The explosion of the
gunpowder store, was that one of your designs too!?’ Veronique was
seething now, despite the fear she held for her brother.

‘
All a very necessary part
of convincing out dear Regent that he must take up arms against the
Morays,’ cowed Mortaron.Veronique found herself suddenly very short
of breath. The depth of her own brother’s betrayal was
staggering.

The Baron stepped closer as he continued,
‘The Morays had plotted the destruction of the gunpowder stores for
some time. I saw an opportunity and merely allowed it to happen. A
simple matter of re-directing our intelligence and giving our spies
reasons to look in other places. A simple matter of leaving the
proverbial back door open, as it were.’

Veronique was aghast at this revelation,
‘Why have you done this?’ she breathed.

‘
Power. Control. All the
things your fool husband takes for granted, but doesn’t have the
stomach to wield effectively. Although, that is an issue very
shortly to be resolved,’ said The Baron, a cold relish running
through the timbre of his voice like a vein of glacial
ice.

‘
You won’t live to enjoy
the fruits of your labors,’ said Veronique. ‘Ill make sure that
word reaches The Regent. When he and Sigourd return they will
ensure that you receive ample enough punishment to fit your
crimes!’

The door to the chambers creaked loudly as
they were swung open suddenly. Veronique looked up to see who it
might be that had interrupted the siblings discourse. The Baron,
still smiling, did not himself turn, for he fully expected the
arrival of the person who at this moment now strode into the room
behind him.

Heavy boot falls echoed dully inside the
chamber as the nightmare knight Huron came to stand at his Barons’
shoulder. The knight was fresh from his travels. His armor scorched
and dented in places, his boots and cloak caked with mud and blood
and filth.

The Barons cruel gaze never left his sister
as he spoke again, ‘Ah yes, my nephew, the love sick puppy. I
expect to hear all about him presently.’ He inclined his head
toward Huron. ‘Tell us knight, what news have you of the heir to
the throne of Corrinth Vardis?’

Huron’s voice was a basso rumble as he
spoke, ‘I tracked the lord Sigourd as far as the Eastern Fringes to
a place where a band of settlers had made their home. The Baratiis
and I engaged and destroyed the encampment as ordered.’

Mortaron’s dark eyes glittered maliciously
as they played over Veronique, ‘...and the boy?’ he asked. Huron’s
flinty gaze flickered momentarily toward Veronique, some hesitation
stayed his hand.

‘
Speak damn you!’ roared
The Baron.

‘
There was a battle, a
fire...’ Huron swallowed hard, his eyes flickering once more in the
direction of the Lady Veronique.

‘
The Prince Regent is
dead,’ stated the knight flatly, in a way that implied he’d had to
force the words from his mouth, and had made an effort to strip
those words of any emotional inflection lest they give his true
feelings away.

Veronique’s mouth fell open, and for a long
moment she struggled to comprehend what she’d just heard. She
seemed to have trouble drawing breath before finally she fell to
the floor, clutching at her breast. When Veronique looked up again,
her eyes were red with tears and filled with hate.

‘
You murdered him!’ she
screamed at her brother. ‘You sent your butcher to find my son and
now he’s dead!’

The Baron did not speak immediately. He was
content for the moment to merely watch his sister impassively as
she wailed on the floor before him. His dark eyes regarding her
emotional breakdown with cold detachment.

In the eyes of the knight Huron, there was
something more like sorrow as he watched with mounting discomfort
the agonies of the woman he loved.

All around the dragon boat the raging waters
of the River Woe surged, tossing the small craft like flotsam. It
was all the trio within the shell of the boat could do to hang on
for dear life as they careened down the river at break-neck
speed.

At first Jonn Grumble had been relieved to
be rid of the darkness of the enclosed mountainside. He had
breathed deeply of the fresh air and smiled with relief at being
set free from the bowels of the Ash’harad. But all too quickly his
relief had turned to mortal dread as it began to dawn on him the
scope of their near suicidal undertaking.

They were soaked through and the boat itself
was half full of water as each time they crashed through another
surging current the waters would break fiercely upon the dragon.
The intensity of the experience had nevertheless inured them to the
bitter chill that worked itself upon their bones.

Jonn Grumble and Isolde clung as rigidly as
they might to the benches upon which they sat, while Sigourd
gripped the haft of the oar between knuckles as white as snow. He
wore an expression of intense concentration, and although the
others could not see it, Sigourd was hardly with them in that
boat.

He was at a crossroads between worlds, where
the physical and ethereal conjoin beyond the ken of mortal man.
Sigourd was hearing the voice of the All-mother, he could see the
notes of her sacred song being played out before him in the surging
of the river and the crashing crescendo of the raging waters. He
was navigating between those notes, searching for pockets of safety
amongst the brutal, destructive clamor of the great song.

The dragon boat had been on the river for
almost two hours since leaving the confines of the mountain, and
Sigourd’s own muscles sang with a blissful agony of their own as he
struggled with all his might against the pull of the single oar,
fighting desperately to keep the boat’s course true.

As they sped ever onwards down the great
river, there came a sound that dwarfed all others. It came to
Isolde and Jonn Grumble as a great thundering, crashing. As of an
avalanche that would not end. To Sigourd, it registered as a
discordant symphony that flared so brightly it appeared as if a
star had fallen out of the heavens. All three looked up to sight
what it was that had appeared so suddenly in their path. Sigourd
could not help but whisper a silent payer to the old gods when he
realized what peril it was they now faced.

‘
I’m hoping that what I’m
seeing up ahead is just a horrible trick of my imagination,’ said
Jonn Grumble, his mouth falling open as a new terror took hold of
his heart.

‘
You’re not imagining wild
man...’ said Isolde, the fear in her own voice barely audible above
the great booming that thundered around them, ‘...that is The
Hammer Of The Gods.’

The waterfalls marked the extent of the
mountain ranges, beyond them the River Woe passed on into the
flatlands of the known territories, running all the way to the
heart of Sigourd’s father’s realm.

When Sigourd and Jonn Grumble had first laid
eyes upon those falls from the safety of the distant mountain
passes some weeks previously, they had been inspiring enough to
take away the breath of the two adventurers. Now, as the dragon
boat raced into the heart of those same falls, Sigourd considered
the sight was epic enough to break a man’s spirit. Their sound was
akin to the sound of the eruption that shook the palace at Corrinth
Vardis, only magnified a hundredfold. The shockwaves of such a
titanic displacement of water sent a heavy mist coiling into the
sky a hundred feet high, and that same pressure was enough to
buffet and rattle the dragon boat and its contents even as it
sailed towards the epicenter of the Herculean spectacle from two
miles distant. The river surface leading up to the rim of the
waterfall was churned white as the Woe thrashed and roiled
unchecked. No mere mortal could ever hope to survive an encounter
with the raging essence of the All-mother.

‘
We should probably turn
aside. Or better yet pull ashore and take a bit of a stroll..’
shouted Jonn Grumble, his teeth chattering in time with the
vibrations of the boat, his eyes fixed upon the great plume of dark
mist looming before them.

‘
We cannot turn aside, the
river is too powerful!’ cried Isolde above the deafening sound of
their impending destruction. Jonn Grumble turned to Sigourd, his
voice flush with the desperate fear in his heart, ‘What’s the plan
then, lad? There is a bleedin’ plan isn’t there?!’

Sigourd was forced to fight harder than ever
to keep the boat on course, to keep it from straying into the path
of discordant notes that would see them smashed asunder. His brow
was knitted with concentration as he wrestled with the oar which
was slick with water and at several times threatened to snap apart
under the intense pressure of the currents.

Isolde was right, the river had grown so
powerful that they now had no chance of berthing the boat on the
banks of the river. They had little choice but to press on into the
falls.

And then it came to Sigourd, loud and clear
in his mind like the secret song of the All-mother;

‘
Through mist and spray
God’s anvil looms, the currents speed to certain doom. Hold your
line and set your eye, through danger’s veil you’re sure destined
to fly...’

The words of the boatman came to Sigourd
unbidden, but in the context of their immediate peril they fit a
madman’s logic . Sigourd realized that that riddle had been the
true parting gift of the mysterious boatman. Hidden in their
abstruse nature was the key to their salvation.

‘
We’re going through the
falls,’ cried Sigourd above the din. ‘Hold firm!’

‘
We’re what!?’ screeched
Jonn Grumble as Sigourd threw his entire weight behind the oar,
causing it to snap with a piercing rapport as the dragon boat
lurched suddenly, slipping between the discordant notes of the
river’s untamable currents.

Now they were locked into the destructive
symphony of the river and there was truly no turning aside. They
sped ever faster toward the falls, the boat shuddering and bucking
violently as they raced toward an inescapable doom.

The pall of mist loomed ever closer, like a
column of thick smoke, like a wall of water hundreds of feet across
and soaring dizzyingly into the sky. It blotted out entirely what
little light remained in the day, plunging the small craft and its
occupants into darkness as they passed beneath its vast shadow.
That column loomed over the little dragon boat like a Titan of old
myth, its fist raised high to smash the intrepid travelers from
existence. The mist was so thick it obscured from view almost
entirely the rim of the great falls. Sigourd and his companions
passed into that miasma totally blind to their surroundings.

All was noise. Noise so profound it took on
a density all its own. Here, at the very edge of the great falls,
surrounded on all sides by impenetrable gloom and assailed by
unimaginable levels of sound, the trio surrendered themselves to
the fates.

They clung fast to the sides of the dragon
boat, praying to their respective gods for deliverance. Sigourd
held firm to the intricately carved tail of the boat. The device
swept up and back behind his head in imitation of a what the
builder of the craft must have imagined such a thing to look like.
He stood pinned to that tail, his arms wrapped so tightly around it
he started to loose sensation in them. Which is why Sigourd
couldn’t be sure of himself when that tail seemed to squirm in his
grip.

It was such a quick thing, but still it was
enough to register on the young lord even distracted as he was by
terror. It felt to him as if the wooden tail pulsed once, like
thick muscles were flexing and rolling beneath the scaled, polished
skin of the boat. Surely a trick of his imagination.

‘
This is it!’ bellowed Jonn
Grumble, his voice barely audible over the thunder of the falls,
‘we’re going over...’ and he was right. Suddenly the rim of the
great falls was beneath the little boat, the violence of the
thrashing waters so unrelenting Sigourd felt as if the boat would
shake apart, even as the dragon headed prow of the boat crested
that roiling, churning abyssal fault, even as that dragon head
jutted out over the falls themselves, which dropped away into
forever. They teetered on the very precipice of annihilation, and
there would be no escape.

And then the unthinkable happened....

With a soul shredding shriek, like the sound
of a bird of prey taking wing to hunt, the dragon boat screamed its
defiance to the heavens. The sound itself came from that carved
wooden head sculpted into the prow of the vessel. It came from a
head that was stretching and swaying on a neck thick with corded,
living muscle. It came from a snarling, fanged maw that snapped
open and shut as if it were tasting life for the first time, its
eyes blinking in the face of the relentless spray kicked up by the
deluge.

The curved tail that Sigourd had clung to so
fiercely rippled once more before whipping free from its fixed
position at the aft of the boat, slashing this way and that,
thumping Sigourd into the belly of the boat where he fell heavily
between his companions, their eyes and mouths wide with disbelief.
The great carved wings that swept along each side of the craft
slammed open with a whip-crack, their gargantuan span unfurled in
the beat of a heart.