Prisoner of the Horned Helmet (16 page)

CHICKEN BROTH

I
t was night when Cobra’s eyes blinked open. Above her, in the golden torchlit ceiling of her bedroom, she could see the strangely elongated reflection of her supine body cushioned by down pillows with soft fur covers. She explored her nose and lips with cold fingertips, found blood, and looked at it. Her eyes were startled, cold, as if her brain had turned to ice.

She pushed herself onto an elbow, and glanced around. A silver tray stood on a nightstand beside her bed. On it was a silver pitcher and cup, and a silver bowl steaming with chicken broth. Behind the stand her alchemist, Schraak, and his two assistants, kneeled in patient attendance. Beyond them the head of the giant snake was upended. Its tangled and twisted body nearly filled the room. Smoke still filtered out of the interior stairway.

The room trembled and Cobra sat up, startled. Across the room, past a curve of the snake’s motionless body, silver columns were down. She pushed herself off the bed, and stumbled beyond the toppled columns to a large hole dug into the wall of the tunnel beyond. Guards, stripped to scaly waists, were digging. She turned to her alchemist.

Schraak rose and said gently, “We are preparing a fitting burial for your beloved sentry… in the holy fire pits.”

Cobra glared at them fiercely. “Madness! Cut him apart, and take him down in pieces. There is no time for tunnels.” She dismissed the subject with a wave of her hand, and demanded, “How long have I been unconscious?”

Schraak cowered. “This is the second night you’ve slept. You were nearly buried in the tunnel under fallen rock, so we thought it wise to let you rest.”

She pressed her finger against her brow. “Tell them to stop digging immediately and remove this sickening stench.”

Schraak motioned to his assistants, and they, bowing, hurried off.

She turned to Schraak. “Where are you holding the Barbarian?”

Schraak shifted uneasily. “He… he’s escaped.”

“What?” Involuntarily her body changed color and texture. The scales turned crystalline, and snowy white cracks appeared in them as if she were turning to ice.

Schraak stammered inarticulately, then blurted, “Everyone ran. We… we thought the mountain was going to explode.”

“Fool!” she hissed. “Have you never heard the anger of our god before. Are you incapable of thought? He stole the helmet.”

Schraak gasped.

She snarled, started pacing with a cold stiffness, and from deep in the mountain came a roar. She shuddered. “It is no wonder he still rages.” She turned hard on Schraak. “What time is it?”

“Morning comes within an hour, perhaps two.”

A cruel line lifted a corner of her mouth; it stayed in her cheek as she spoke. “He won’t dare travel at night. That means he won’t reach Noga Swamp until tomorrow morning.” The line pushed a malevolent smile into one cheek, and with rising excitement she whispered, “Alert the swamp. Before daylight every servant who dwells there must know the Dark One has stolen the Master’s helmet and must be stopped. And tell them, when they catch him, he is to be eaten alive… finger by finger.”

“But there’s only one, two hours at most. We’ll never…”

“Send water snakes by the underground river,” she said with authority. “We will follow the same way and arrive in time to watch the ants feed on his rotting scraps.”

Schraak bowed, and hurried down into the interior staircase.

Cobra watched him, then turned to see his assistants reappear with five guards. Holding axes in their sweating hands, they contemplated the body of the monster like butchers faced with quartering a steer with their fingernails.

Cobra hissed contemptuously, “Start with the head.”

They bowed and started to hack at the neck. Cobra watched the blood spurt until it had painted the guards red, then reached for her still-warm chicken broth. She lifted the silver bowl to her dry lips and drank. Her nostrils flinched at the smell and taste of the potion. When she could see the silver of the bottom of the bowl, the rose tint had returned to her translucent cheeks.

NOGA SWAMP

G
ath sat under an overhanging rock in Panga Pass blinking at the first light of day brushing the distant night sky. Behind the slits of the horned helmet, his eyes were weblike red trails. The searing, stinging lids hammered each other. But he did not dare sleep.

The helmet had produced an incredible heat, as if his brains and blood were on fire. He was soaked with sweat and parched. Earlier in the night, he had thought the heat would fry his flesh and bones and kill him, and he had frantically and blindly tried to untangle its cowl from the chain mail, but failed. Then the heat abated somewhat and a strange unnatural sensation had coursed through him, as if the heat had somehow melded his head into the helmet. He could feel the cool night air on its metal, and at the tips of the horns. They had become part of his flesh, and they brought other sensations. He could sense danger about him as if it were a palpable substance. All night he had felt it: cannibal ants crawling under the earth he sat on, and predators hiding behind the tall grass swaying nearby.

The helmet was serving him like an infallible sentry, but it was also playing a deadly game with him. His eyes fluttered tiredly, then closed and stayed closed. His head dropped sideways and the weight of the helmet, just as it had been doing all night, got the better of his neck and tried to throw him to the ground. With a grunt, Gath came awake and yanked his head upright. He gasped with exhaustion, then forced the helmet to behave like a normal helmet and remain balanced on his head.

He looked around warily as his body heaved with heavy breathing and steam drifted through the links of his chain mail. His eyes fluttered and closed again. This time the helmet enlisted a numb elbow as an ally, and dropped him to the ground. His helmet hit a rock, and clanged with mind-splitting vibrations. Metal ate into his jaw and scalp. The pain screamed into the core of his brain, leaving him paralyzed. He lay like dead meat on a plate until a sharp and different pain arrived unannounced, and his eyes snapped open.

Gath was eye to eye with three inches of feisty dragon-lizard. It was perched on his sprawled hand, and breakfasting on his thumb.

The thumb tolerated this only a moment, then punched the lizard aside. The reptile tumbled over three times, leapt up and charged again. The thumb was ready. It had taken hold of a neighborly fingertip and drawn it back like a tiny catapult. It snapped, clubbed the reptile in the side of its blue jaw, and drove it several feet through the air to land in an unconscious lump beside his boot.

Gath picked up the lizard, tore off the head, legs and tail, and shoved the body through the mouth hole of the helmet into his mouth. Chewing and swallowing ravenously, he dragged himself to his knees. The horned helmet suddenly lifted, and his eyes stared at the underside of the overhanging rock. The sense of danger was so palpable it could have grown hair. His muscles rippled and swelled in response, as if instructed by the helmet. His body exploded off the ground, and drove the helmet into the lip of the rock shattering it. He stepped back quickly. The crumbling pieces fell to the ground in a cloud of dirt carrying a flailing, six-foot python. Its mouth stretched wide displaying a parade of toothy executioners. Gath closed it with his boot, flattening it to a bony pulp.

He picked up his axe, strode out and a din of noises greeted him. He could see grass and brush moving, and feel deadly adversaries lurking in the shadows and behind rocks. He trotted down the trail, ready for their attack, wanting it, but they did not appear.

He reached Noga Swamp, in good time. Home waited beyond its wet, murky body, but the local residents had other destinations in mind. Every branch, root and vine was alive with deadly creatures, all hungry to fill their bellies with his meat, and whirlpools of murky water beckoned with the same dread invitation.

He turned along the dirt road with a determined trot, then picked up the pace and began to run. Up ahead, as far as the floating bridge, the entire surface of the road undulated with swarming lizards and snakes. He charged onto the living carpet, his boots crunching and churning. Viper, adder and lizard cracked their teeth on his chain mail as he dodged and leapt past, but others buried fangs in calf and shin.

He made it to the bridge and pulled up gasping with horror. A dozen tiny snakes clung to metal and flesh, pumping venom into them. He ground his teeth, picking and slapping them off, then gave up and waited for the venom to do its work.

The pain came, and he staggered back, blinded. The heat was swept from his body by an icy wave of terror, then death’s cold bite tore into him. It did not allow him a flashing moment to review his life, but propelled him headlong into an endless void of emptiness and loneliness. He was nothing. But he still stood on his feet, and still held his axe.

He howled with the crying torment of death. But still he stood.

The coldness abated, then the heat came surging back, like flames searing through his veins. His muscles corded, then bulged and stretched the confining chain mail until it was molded by his body. His bones swelled within his meat until his joints accommodated his weighty mass. He fed on the power of the helmet.

He looked down at himself uncertainly, then strode on through the foreboding landscape to the center of the swamp where the stone bridge spanned the two ponds. Sunlight trickled through the leafy roof. Reaching it, he stopped and bathed alone in its splendor as understanding and exhilaration surged through him. He was a massive horned demon of black metal and sinew graced by golden light, drinking air and holding the bridge with booted feet as if all the elements were personal possessions. The helmet had transformed him. He was death, and he had never felt so alive.

COBRA’S EXECUTIONERS

G
ath looked up toward the sky, and fire glimmered behind the eye slits of his helmet with an insatiable and unnatural hunger.

High overhead among the branches of the tree cover there was movement, the angular jerking movement of Feldalda tree pythons. Their grey-green color and sharp angles made their long, thick bodies look like tree branches. Suddenly they defied their instinct to hide themselves, serpentined to a position directly over Gath, and deliberately threw themselves into the air. Their bodies flattened, catching the air, and they fell in a controlled dive toward him, with saliva flying from their open jaws.

Flames spit from the eyes of the horned helmet. Gath’s body sank into a cocked position, eager to feed.

Fear glittered in the eyes of several of the pythons, as if they suddenly had serious thoughts of turning back.

The axe soared skyward in a sweeping arc. The blade kicked back shafts of sunlight, then sliced through the first wave of pythons to send heads and lengths of body flying. One reptile, eluding the axe, hit the helmet, and its jawbone was driven back into its brain. The mass of swarming snakes, living and dead, fell over him, and he dropped on his back, losing his axe. Rolling over and over, he pounded the tangle of squirming muscle with fists, elbows and knees.

Jaws clamped down on a horn of his helmet, around his metal-clad knees, and over an elbow. Living lengths of thick muscle wrapped around his legs, neck, and arms. In one mass they wrestled, pulled and rolled toward the edge of the bridge.

Gath ripped an arm free, drew a dagger and began to saw. Blood spurted from severed necks and trunks, drenched his chain mail and blinded several snakes. A flailing head drove the dagger from his grip. His legs and chest were wrapped in snakes, being crushed. His only weapons were his fingers. He sank them into snake flesh. The bodies were too thick for the grasp of his hands to hold, but his fingers continued to squeeze relentlessly.

The cold nothingness of death again coursed through him. But this time it exhilarated him. A thundering, cavernous roar echoed out of the mouth hole of the helmet, and his fingers plunged into the meaty bodies, ripping away handfuls of flesh. The reptiles, writhing for escape, dragged Gath’s body and axe off the edge of the bridge, and he plunged heavily into the water below.

The helmet sizzled and brought the murky liquid around it to a bubbling boil as flames continued to spit from the eye slits. The surviving reptiles floundered off, churning up the muck to blind Gath. On his hands and knees, and with his lungs aching for air, he probed the muddy bed hunting for his axe.

Moments later, the spike of the horned helmet rose slowly out of the murky slime, followed by the steaming helmet. Gath, gasping, stood shoulder deep in a fetid, black and blood-red pool of mutilated lengths of snake. He waded onto a small island of mossy earth, and stood panting and dripping slime, axe in hand. An ominous, deathlike silence pervaded the swamp.

Suddenly he dropped into a slight crouch and turned slowly in place.

Something large and dark loomed toward him out of the light at the center of the lake. It emerged teeth first. The elephant-sized alligator. Green slime dripped from its rotting jaws. They were parted, showing jagged, sharp stumps, dark with yellow and black holes. The alligator belched, and a pale green mist issued from its mouth.

The Death Dealer staggered back gagging and blinking at the alligator’s foul, stinging breath, then glanced about. He had an audience now. A crowd of fair-sized alligators, no more than twenty or thirty feet long, floated on the water not far off. Snakes were gathered in the treetops, dangling recklessly to get a clear view. Cape bulls, wart hogs, lizards and swarms of white ants covered the banks along the raised road and the bridge overhead.

Gath looked back at his latest threat.

Reaching the island, it shuffled forward to do what it, the Lord of the Swamp, had done for centuries: destroy any competitor that invaded its world.

The ancient predator spread its mouth until its upper jaw blotted out the sun, leaving Gath in shadows to contemplate the thick ropes of slime that stretched between the upper and lower teeth. Then he bolted forward, and leapt in between a gap in the lower teeth. He advanced on the two tonguelike slabs of pink muscle blocking the throat, his axe slaughtering the living red meat underfoot. The alligator gagged violently, throwing Gath backwards into a puddle of stinging digestive fluids.

Then the alligator remembered to close its mouth.

The Barbarian, crouched in the bowl of the jaw, watched the upper jaw descend and snap shut. The roof of the reptile’s throat was only a few feet away. With all his strength he thrust up to drive his axe blade through the pulpy roof at the back of the mouth and into the brain.

The monster sucked in its breath, and Gath was pulled, tumbling, toward the throat. He spun, bringing the axe handle around in front of him, and it stuck in the sides of the throat like a fence rail, brought him to a stop.

Gath, heaving for breath and with body stinging, looked around. The flames from the helmet cast eerie orange light on the dark living cavity dripping saliva. The whole structure shuddered. Slowly the cavity began to roll over, then flopped upside down, dropping Gath on his back against the roof of the mouth. Saliva puddled around him, then water began to flow between the predator’s teeth and fill the bowl as the alligator began to sink.

Once more Gath felt death’s cold bite.