Rise of the Death Dealer (58 page)

SURRENDER

G
ath did not recognize the girl crumpled under him. His mind was on fire.
Hammering his skull. Clouded. Then his mind began to come down off the top of
the mountainous body and merge with it. Size, proportion, place came into focus,
and he became aware of the billowing white light, the familiar faces watching
him, and finally recognized the small naked girl. White light swirled about her,
cradling her, and glowed within her, but there was no mistaking her. Robin
Lakehair.

Abject shame shook him, then he heard the Nymph Queen shout, “Kill her, you
ape!” He turned hard, snarling.

Tiyy screamed and backed up the staircase, her features shocked almost past
recognition.

Gath started for her, and the room shook, staggering him. He stopped short,
and Jakar and Brown John rose uncertainly, bringing Cobra with them. She was
slumped and gasping, her hands clutching the ugly steel bolt protruding above
her breast. Suddenly wind howled and sucked at them, and the white light swirled
in its grasp, emptying itself from the cave and rushing back toward the huge
jewel.

Gath kneeled beside Robin, shielding her from the wind and rushing light, and
lifting her gently. She glowed from toes to hair, and her breath came in short
gasps, her eyes closed and lips parted. Their color was back. His fingers
touched her lips gently and her body became rigid in response. Then her eyes
opened. They were stark with fear, then they smiled falteringly, and she went
soft in his arms. Tears welled from her eyes, and when she spoke it was a soft
cry.

“Gath.”

His body shuddered, stunned. It was only one word, but her tone said that
within that single word was the entire tale of a man, and it was his tale.

Gath helped Robin to her feet, and Jakar covered her with his cloak, handing
her a length of her torn tunic to belt it with. As she did this, Gath turned to
Brown John and Cobra. She was pale and gasping, sagging against the
bukko
and crying with joy.

The room shook again, and they turned toward the pillar of light.

The wind had stopped. The jewel was no longer sucking the white light in. It
was now centered in the crystalline body, becoming denser and denser, until the
crystal turned opaque white. Its glow filled the chamber. Then its opacity
faded, leaving a flawless, transparent pillar. Encased within was the perfectly
preserved body of an ancient priestess.

Her pose was regal, yet kind, and she was muscular, with dark olive skin
burnished by the sun. Her black hair was in wild disarray, uncut in the style of
savages. Her only garments were girdle, halter and necklace, and they were made
of sparkling diamonds.

“The jewels!” gasped Cobra and Brown John.

Gath, Brown John, Cobra and Jakar stared, mystified. The priestess was short
and sturdy, her bones blunt and primitive, unlike anyone they knew. Yet her
features were strangely familiar. They glanced from Robin to the ancient
priestess and realized the savage priestess looked like Robin. They were almost
identical.

Robin realized it too, and staggered into Jakar’s arms, dumbfounded.

A wailing shriek came from behind them, and they turned to see Tiyy howl,
“No! No!” and spread her arms to send forth dark vapors and destroy them. But
there was fear behind her eyes, and she faltered and sank back, lowering her
arms, as if confronting an enemy more powerful than herself.

“White Veshta!” Brown John whispered, and they looked once more at Robin.

“Yes,” Cobra said weakly. “White Veshta incarnate.”

The translucent pillar suddenly cracked open, and fumes came forth from the
body of the preserved goddess. Instantly she began to decay. Flesh peeled, bones
dissolved, and her limbs went up in smoke until all that remained were her
jewels. The pillar itself dissolved into a mist. The jewels fell to the pedestal
amid a flurry of white dust and tumbled to Robin’s feet.

“Take them,” Cobra gasped. Robin looked at her, and she pointed weakly at the
jewels. “Pick them up! Hurry! Hurry!”

Robin hesitated, then gathered the jewels in her arms and rose, holding them
against her chest. They instantly came alive in her grasp, writhing, glowing,
and sparkling with shafts of white light. Where they touched her flesh, they
began to merge with it, sinking into her, and she trembled with awe and wonder.

When they vanished within her, the glow behind the eye slits of the horned
helmet cooled and faded, revealing the shadowed eyes of Gath of Baal. They
stared at Robin.

Again her nut-brown face with its cheeks of budding roses was a theater of
soft illusions, and her lips tiny mountains of color, the tissue of dreams. But
this time the dreams were rooting inside him, finding sustenance in his blood
and bone and muscle, and giving him a strength he had not had before.

His hands took hold of the rim of the helmet and lifted it slightly. The
helmet flinched at his touch, twisting away, and the eye slits flamed again.
Gath’s body convulsed in pain, and the helmet howled and roared, but he held on,
righting himself. He shuddered, then the glow behind the eye slits died once
more, and the headpiece surrendered.

Gath lifted the helmet off and stood facing his friends.

His thick black hair was again singed and smoking, and his cheekbones,
forehead and jawline were burnt raw and rimmed with ash. It made it difficult
for him to smile.

Robin raced into his arms and held him, sobbing, “Gath! Oh, Gath, it’s true.”
She looked up into his burnished face. “You’re free.”

The room shook again and there was a rending crack as dust fell from the
ceiling. They all looked up and saw that the stone roof had cracked at the
center and was slowly sinking, promising to bury them.

HOME

T
he horned helmet in his hand, Gath led them to the door and saw crossbow
bolts streaking toward them. He stopped short, deflecting a bolt with the
helmet, and shoved the others aside, out of range behind the wall framing the
door.

Tiyy stood halfway up the staircase behind her worm soldiers. They were
hurriedly reloading their crossbows as she screamed at them, “Hurry! Hurry! Cut
them down.”

A worm soldier rose up to fire, and Gath threw his helmet. It caught the
soldier in the shoulder, crushing his boneless meat, ricocheted off the wall,
spitting sparks and flames to blind another soldier, and hit a third, ripping
out his throat with its horns.

Tiyy backed up three steps, staring in horror as the bloody headpiece fell at
her feet and rolled off the staircase. She gulped a breath and screamed again at
her stunned men, “Keep firing.”

The worm soldiers let go a volley, and bolts screamed through the air,
clanging against the obsidian wall, burying themselves in the wooden doorframe.

Frustrated, the Nymph Queen shouted, “Attack! Attack!”

A half dozen worm soldiers surged toward the open door, hissing wetly, with
the steel blades protruding from their wrists weaving in front of them.

Gath stepped out from behind the cell wall into the opening. He now held
Brown John’s sword in front of him, and Jakar stood behind his shoulder firing
his crossbow.

The first worm soldier took the bolt in his face, and it tore through his
skull-less head. Still he charged mindlessly, blindly swinging his bladed arms.

Gath’s sword took off one arm at the elbow, and still he came, charging past
Gath as his arm fell to the floor. It was still alive, like an earthworm torn in
two.

Ignoring it, Gath strode into the black room swinging the flat of the blade,
crushing instead of stabbing, and his sword ate heartily of the spongy bodies,
killing them.

There was a sharp crack within the chamber. Gath glanced back over a shoulder
and saw his friends crowding up behind him, their eyes wide with a new terror.

Part of the chamber’s black stone ceiling had collapsed into the cell.
Streams of dirt and rock were spilling out of the hole, and loud tearing sounds
came from the ceiling where cracks were moving in jerks and jags through it.

“We’ll be buried!” the
bukko
shouted. “We’ve got to get out of the
tunnel! It leads to a tide pool!”

He pointed at the barred door on the opposite side of the cave. Schraak stood
behind it with his arm reaching through the bars, trying to grasp the homed
helmet which lay on the floor just out of reach. To the sides of the gate, the
huge, hooded carnivore worms were writhing out of their holes.

Gath, raising the sword like a spear, threw it.

The blade took one of the huge worms in the head, and it recoiled, began to
writhe and whip its head about trying to dislodge the unwanted pain.

Gath glanced up at Tiyy. She stood near the top of the staircase surrounded
by worm soldiers. Gath’s eyes glittered dangerously, and he picked up two large
stones, one in each hand. He ducked a crossbow bolt, then flung the rock,
crushing a huge worm’s head.

He used five more rocks, crushing the worms or trapping them in their holes,
then threw a handful of small rocks at the crossbowmen on the staircase. The
speed of the rocks was such that they drilled the spongy bodies and came out the
opposite side. Panicking, the worm soldiers raced past Tiyy, vanished through
the arched door at the top of the staircase.

Gath retrieved the helmet and stood in the middle of the cave, lowering it
over his head. Before it touched his neck, flames and black smoke roared from
the eye slits.

Tiyy turned to flee and the cave shook, threw her down. She rolled over the
side of the staircase onto the floor of the cave.

Gath moved for her, but hesitated as the cave again shook.

Shrieks of breaking, tearing stone came from the dungeon cell, and Brown
John, Cobra, Robin and Jakar surged out amid swirling clouds of dust. Behind
them falling rocks and dirt were filling the cell.

Tiyy jumped up, nimbly darted halfway back up the staircase, and cracks
opened in the wall siding it. The arched doorway at the top of the stairs had
collapsed, and dirt and rubble were spilling down the stairs toward her. She
jumped back to the floor and hesitated.

Gath could sense her only ten feet away, but his back was to her, and he was
occupied, driving the last of the huge worms into its hole with the flames of
the helmet.

The nymph raced to the barred door blocking the passage to the tide pool and
shouted, “Open it! Open it!”

Schraak stood in the shadows behind the barred door, trembling and shaking
his head.

“Open it!” the nymph screamed.

The small man backed up a step, still shaking his head, and turned, plunged
into the passage out of sight. Tiyy brought her fingers to her lips and whistled
shrilly, twice.

A horrid scream came from within the passage, then Schraak reappeared beyond
the bars. He was not walking, but was being propelled backward by some huge
darkness filling the passage. He screamed again and again and came into the
flickering light. He was clinging to the moist spongy head of a monstrous worm
five times the size of the others. Its body was so thick it was scraping off
chunks of rock from the sides of the passage. The legendary Anababis, the
ancient carnivore worm of the primordial underworld and the guardian of Pyram’s
dungeons. Black Veshta’s favorite pet.

Tiyy slid to the side of the barred door, and Schraak was driven against it.
He screamed and flailed, then came through the bars in large wet chunks of wormy
flesh and fell into the cave in seven pieces.

Robin screamed, and hid her face against Jakar’s chest. The young nobleman
held her, but could not hold the color in his face.

The worm kept on driving and the barred door burst free, clanging on the
floor of the cave. Then the creature stopped with its massive featureless head
beside its master, and Tiyy stroked it lovingly. In response, the worm spread
its wrinkled face wide, opening its mouth until its gums touched both floor and
ceiling of the passageway.

Tiyy jumped nimbly over the lower teeth, landing barefoot in a splash of
slime. She glanced around ropes of saliva hanging from the roof of the
creature’s mouth at Robin as she lifted her head.

“We’ll meet again,” Tiyy said matter-of-factly, then plunged into the
pinkish-grey throat and vanished in its shadows, the splat of her running feet
echoing behind her.

INDIGESTION

T
he giant worm dropped its mouth closed, dislodging enough saliva to fill a
washtub, and plugged the tunnel.

Gath looked around the cave.

Rubble was spilling in from the dungeon cell and deep cracks in the wall
behind the staircase, and dust swirled, filling the black cave. Robin, Jakar and
Brown John coughed and choked as it gagged them, settling thickly on hair,
eyelids and shoulders. Cobra was now unconscious in the
bukko
’s arms,
and bleeding on his chest.

Brown John answered the question in Gath’s eyes before he could ask it. “It’s
the only way out.” He nodded at the giant worm. “You’ve got to get us past that
creature.”

Gath nodded, glanced at Robin’s hope-filled eyes as they watched him, and
rushed into the dust swirling out the cell.

Working almost blindly, he found the timber door and kicked it down. He
ripped and twisted at a timber, and it came away from the debris wearing a large
rusted hinge. Holding it in both massive hands, he advanced out of dust and
stood face-to-face with the worm. Black smoke spewed from the helmet’s eye slits
and the red glow reappeared within it.

The worm’s wrinkled face jerked and opened slightly, spreading webs of slime
across thick blunt teeth.

Gath lowered his head, and flames erupted from the eye slits. They seared the
worm’s face, and its spongy grey flesh puckered like the skin of a fig, the wet
slime sizzling and steaming. Instinctively the creature writhed backward,
cramming its shapeless head inside the tunnel, and spread its jaws. Saliva as
thick as rope was strung between its teeth.

Gath swung the heavy timber, hammering the teeth with the rusted hinge, and
three broke off, making an opening as wide as a door. He swung again, and the
worm spit out a gob of saliva large enough to bathe in. The congealed liquid
slurped around Gath’s legs, and he slipped, plunging forward out of control into
the mouth, and it closed with a wet slap.

Inside the worm’s mouth, Gath rolled forward, slipping toward the digestive
tract and barely hearing Robin’s faint scream outside. Still holding the timber,
he wrestled it sideways, jamming it against the sides of the worm’s throat, and
came to a sudden stop. Gathering his balance, he found he was knee-deep in
guck, barely able to move his legs. He spewed flames around the interior of the
worm’s mouth, and the instinctive creature writhed and again opened its mouth,
trying to eject him with its convulsing body.

Gath held his ground, took hold of the timber and ripped it free. Then he
thrust it up, this time jamming it vertically between the mushy jaws. He kicked
at the base of it until the timber was firmly stuck in place with the creature’s
jaws spread wide, and looked outside at Brown John.

“Come on! Hurry!” The three words were one harsh yell.

Brown John and the others hesitated, unable to accept for a moment the nature
of the passageway offered to them. Then the
bukko
shouted, “Let’s go,”
and stepped through the gap in the worm’s teeth, carrying Cobra. Robin and Jakar
followed.

Gath proceeded into the digestive tract of the worm, spewing flames around
its gummy interior, and it flinched and convulsed, opening the passage wider.
The others followed rapidly, scrambling and dodging in an effort to avoid the
sting of digestive fluids, and choking on their putrid gases.

Every time the walls of the worm’s interior convulsed against Robin, a
glittering diamond would appear on her flesh emitting beams of white light which
burnt and repelled the offending flesh.

Near the middle of the worm, the tract began to narrow, and Gath had to
crouch low, pushing and shoving, as well as burning away protruding glands and
growths. Suddenly the helmet sensed a threat up ahead, and he charged forward,
shouldering the meat aside.

Just short of the end of the tract, the savage nymph goddess was on her hands
and knees hacking an opening in the side of the worm with her knife. Flashes of
guttering torchlight were slipping through the cut she had already made, and
splashing across her slick body.

Gath’s legs churned forward, the horns of his helmet chewing up the narrowing
sides of the tract, his knees banging it aside.

Tiyy glanced over a shoulder, her large, sloped eyes bright with reckless
daring, then dove into the cut up to her hips and came to a stop. Stuck. She
wiggled and squirmed violently, and began to slip through.

Gath dove for a kicking ankle, and it vanished through the cut. Growling, he
jumped up, holding the roof of the tract away with his back, and pulling apart
the sides of the small hole Tiyy had made. He turned the eye slits on the sides
of the hole, and flame erupted, burning the hole wider and wider and weakening
the surrounding flesh. Then he ripped the hole wide enough to serve as a second
mouth, and held it open.

When the others reached him, Jakar took Gath’s place, and the Barbarian dove
through the hole, leading the way. The hole opened on the vertical staircase,
and he dashed down it with the others following.

As they descended, the rumblings within the surrounding rock walls grew loud
and threatening, and the stairs shuddered under them, shaking loose clouds of
rock and dust. Reaching the bottom of the vertical shaft, Gath plunged through
the short side passage into a main cross tunnel. It was still lit by torches,
and there were sounds of running feet from the interior opening.

“To the right,” the
bukko
shouted.

Gath did not need to be told. He was already headed that way, following the
helmet’s instincts.

He burst out of the tunnel onto the ledge siding the tide pool, and saw Tiyy
perched on the edge. She was naked now except for the sheathed dagger on her
forearm, and glistened with slime and blood. She dove like a flying arrow out
over the swirling pool, arched at the center and plunged down into the frothing
ocean water.

Gath dove in after her, touched bottom and saw her slicing through the
greenish waters into the dark sinister hole in the white floor. He swam for the
hole, and black light shot up out of it. It spread quickly, filling the pool
with an inky darkness, and his hands groped blindly before taking hold of the
edge of the hole. He could see nothing. The black light had subdued the helmet’s
powers: its glow had gone out, and it could no longer sense anything. His mind
and body heaved with frustration, but it was Gath of Baal’s frustration, not the
helmet’s. He bunched his legs under him and thrust himself toward the surface.

Erupting from the center of the tide pool, he gasped for air and saw Jakar
standing knee-deep in sea water at the tunnel leading to the ocean. He was
waving and shouting for Gath to come that way, but the sounds of the swirling
water and roar of the surf echoing through the tunnel covered his words. Gath
swam for the tunnel, and Jakar vanished into it.

Reaching the tunnel, Gath climbed into it, and a wave tried to drive him
back. He stood with his legs set apart and body low, and the weight of the wave
battered thighs and chest. Then its force was spent, and the incoming water
lowered, allowing him to wade through it.

He found the others waiting on a wooden dock twenty feet down the tunnel,
where it widened into a huge cavern that reached through the base of the
mountain for a hundred feet then opened onto the Inland Sea. There a dark fog
lay just above the white-capped blue-black water. The sounds of frightened gulls
were shrill, and the crashing waves were loud as they spilled into the cave.
Rocks broke away from the rim of the mouth and crashed into the churning sea.
The cave itself shook and rumbled, and dust swirled from the roof, clouding the
air.

Through the haze, Gath could see that the dock ran the length of the cave to
its mouth, where it joined a pier which reached out another three hundred feet
into the dark sea waters. A blood-red barge bobbed up and down just inside the
mouth. A dozen bat soldiers were loading it hurriedly, while others were untying
it from the dock. Twenty feet this side of the barge, more bat soldiers lay half
buried under a rubble of rock. It had spilled out of the mouth of a tunnel
opening off of the dock, and dust and more rubble were now joining it.

Gath turned to the
bukko
and hesitated. The old man still held Cobra.
She was barely breathing now. Her face was chalky against his blood-stained
tunic. Gath looked into Brown John’s eyes. There was no humor or reckless plots
behind them now, only pain and panic.

“The nymph got away,” Gath said, because there was nothing else to say, and
charged down the dock toward the barge. After two strides the helmet was roaring
and spewing flames.

When the bat soldiers saw him coming, there was no doubt in their minds that
the flaming demon spawn, their sacred queen’s newest Lord of Destruction, wanted
the barge exclusively for himself. So they jumped into the water and swam for
the Inland Sea. Those who were not certain that the only thing he wanted was the
barge did so very swiftly.

When Brown John and the others boarded the barge, Gath manned both the port
and starboard oars as Jakar took the rudder, and the craft pulled away slowly
from the dock. The
bukko
huddled with Cobra on the raised command deck at
the center of the ship, and Robin searched hurriedly through the baskets of
provisions and stores of arms and armor loaded by the bat soldiers, hunting for
a knife and firepot so she could remove the crossbow bolts from Cobra’s flesh and close her wounds.

A flurry of small rocks and spilling dirt fell on the barge as it passed
under the rim of the cave mouth, then the lumbering craft floated clear, and the
massive, hunched rock supporting Pyram growled in complaint at their departure.

Gath took no notice, his huge body bending and pulling on the oars. Cording.
Glistening.

The barge plowed into the incoming surf, riding over wave after wave, then
broke free and headed out to sea under the concealing roof of fog.