Bazil Broketail (54 page)

“Welcome mighty warriors to Tummuz Orgmeen! You have surprised us all with your courage and skill. I am empowered by the Doom itself to offer each and any of you the opportunity to serve in the ranks of the army of Tummuz Orgmeen. All you have to do is step forward now.”

No man moved.

“Come, do not throw your lives away. You are brave men, and you will be afforded respect and honor in our great army.”

Burly Cowstrap spat loudly.

Still no man moved.

The man on the horse sighed.

“Well, if you are that stupid then indeed you will die shortly.” He seemed to brighten. “But not yet. There are other events to come. While you watch them you can rethink your stubborn refusal to serve our great master. Go to the dugout and look on what happens here and think upon it!”

When the men stayed put, the horseman waved his right arm in a signal, and from out of the mid-section doors appeared a squad of imps with crossbows.

“If you do not obey, you will be shot down where you stand.”

Kesepton waited a long second or two and then turned and walked towards the dugout. The men followed him, still clutching their hard-won steel and dragging the wounded.

The dugout was empty now; the doors were shut tight. They were to be allowed to keep the swords and knives they’d won, but they had little likelihood of escape from this place or any chance to use them in such a bid.

“What’s the point of fighting further? Why don’t we just make them shoot us?” said Yortch from where he lay.

“You heard the Broketail,” said Duxe. “The Lady lives. There’s still a chance we might get out of this alive.”

“Bah, you’re mad! Nothing but some nonsense from an addled reptile. And what if the damned woman is still alive? She’s hardly been a success up to this point. Face it man, we’re dead meat.”

Duxe chuckled morbidly.

“You are, Subadar, that’s for sure. But we aren’t, not yet.”

Yortch stared at him. “Damned Marneris, you’re all bewitched.”

The men turned away from Yortch, even the troopers. There was more activity on the broad arena floor. Handlers, mostly large-bodied men, but with a few imps among them, were at work around the pens holding the dragons.

The gate to Nesessitas’s pen was opened.

With a roar she charged out. Men and imps scattered and ran for their lives to the mid-section doors.

The arena was left to Nesessitas. She turned her attention to the locks and chains on Bazil’s pen, but before she could get far with them the great double doors opened again at the far end and a squad of trolls marched out.

“By the egg of my mother!” growled Nesessitas. “Here they come.”

She stepped out to meet them, unarmed, heaving her shoulders, lashing her long tail.

At the head of the squad of trolls was the largest troll Bazil had ever seen. It had red skin, mottled with black lumps like warts or barnacles.

The Valkyrie rode past while the golden youth used his megaphone to describe the upcoming bout.

The troll was Puxdool, champion of Tummuz Orgmeen. The combat would be with swords and shields. Puxdool drew his sword, a gleaming blade of six feet or more.

Two other trolls stepped forward. One heaved a heavy shield towards the green dragon, the other tossed a troll sword, the same size as Puxdool’s, into the air. It landed point first and sank a foot into the sand in front of Nesessitas. She wasted no time in seizing it and pulling it free, then she picked up the shield.

The shield was a loose fit on her forelimb, and the sword was too small and ridiculously light, but all at once the green dragon felt halfway whole again. She flicked the sword back and forth in the air a few times.

The crowd was applauding, rising to its feet and chanting homage to the master of this dreadful place.

Nesessitas looked up to where the crowd’s gaze was fixed. Under the dark cowl of the top of the tower she saw a gleam of polished rock; the Doom was there, watching.

Then, to a crash of cymbals and the booming of heavy drums, Puxdool advanced and combat began.

After crawling for an hour or more through a series of narrow spaces no more than a foot high Lessis, Relkin and Lagdalen finally emerged into a room of sorts.

The dim light from the blue stone showed a place half-filled with rubble and discarded furniture.

The rats had worn several trails through the dust and rubble but all converged at the bottom panel of the door, made of rough-hewn wood. The bottom panel had been chewed through, however, to provide a hole big enough for a rat but not a cat.

They tried the door; it was locked. Lessis muttered a quick lock-breaking spell, and within a minute the lock took on a blue glow. With a heavy click the rusted mechanism turned and they were through the open doorway.

From the square flagstone floor and the brick and plaster walls Relkin knew they were inside the keep. But from the dust, which was deep and marked only by rat and mouse trails, he knew this area was unused and had been so for ages.

The rats had left them by now, except for a small group of the fiercest bucks who now crowded around Relkin at the door.

He shivered. It was hard to overcome the natural dislike of ratkind, but even more than that there were the memories of the screams from behind them as they crawled through those narrow holes and the enemy had tried to pursue them. It was all too easy to imagine these little horrors slicing into one’s face in the dark while one was constricted and unable to defend oneself.

Lessis was peering over his shoulders, Lagdalen behind her. When she spoke he was startled by the nearness of her voice.

“This is an abandoned corridor somewhere in the deep vault.”

“No one but the rats have been here in a long time,” he replied.

“Good. And our pursuers are far behind us now.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Lagdalen.

“Well, my dear,” Lessis flashed them a fierce little smile, “we are going to raise hell. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Justus?”

“No, we shall require an augmentation of our forces. So first we must find our way to the slave pens. You have seen them, I believe.”

Lagdalen remembered the horror of the place.

“Yes, we did. What can we do there, with only the three of us?”

Lessis laughed. “We are more than three, my dear.” She gestured to the fifty or so buck rats that were perched all around them on the furniture and piles of rubble.

Lagdalen felt a shiver of distaste.

“Are they coming with us?”

“I have the feeling that they wouldn’t agree to stay behind. They’re very determined.”

Lagdalen recalled the shrieks in the tunnels behind them, too, and shuddered.

Lessis was examining the passage. The plaster ceiling had come down for long stretches, but although the place was half filled with rubble in places there was dim light coming from one direction. In the other there were many doors, all shut.

“This way,” she said, pointing to the light.

As they went they discussed the tunnels that Relkin and Lagdalen had fled through earlier. Relkin noticed that the buck rats were keeping pace with them, a small swarm of brown bodies that shadowed them at a few steps distance.

They reached the source of the light, an opening in the ceiling of the tunnel leading to an air shaft. Far above them was a tiny circle of blue sky. Lessis paused to estimate the distance and form an idea of where they might be. She was close to certain that they were within the vault, somewhere beneath the central keep.

Lessis of Valmes had spent many hours exploring these sinister tunnels; she was no stranger to the ways of Tummuz Orgmeen. Soon she found what she was looking for, a stairwell that connected the various secret levels of the vault. There were lights high above and the distant sounds of movements, but on their level all was dark and silent.

They went down, and the stairs here were strewn with rubbish, including a human skeleton, still clad in a few rags of a black uniform.

Eventually the stair ended and they were on the bottom level of the vault. Lessis led them on, the rats still faithfully following through a dank tunnel covered with slime weed. The tunnel ended with a small stair that circled up to a heavy wooden door studded with metal.

This door was bolted and locked from the other side, and moreover kept in good repair. Lessis was certain now she was right about their location. With a finger to her lips to quiet her companions, she leaned her head against the door and listened carefully.

After a while she was sure there was little activity on the far side, and she set to creating the spells that would open the lock and slip the bolts.

It took time, but within a few minutes the bolts were glowing softly and the door was in her control. The bolts slid open slowly and the door gave way to her touch.

They found themselves in a public passage very near to the breeding pen, the central zone of hell in Tummuz Orgmeen where the Doom’s armies were produced.

They crept forward and were soon rewarded with a view through a guarded gate of the vast slave pens. A pair of guards, in the black uniform of Tummuz Orgmeen, were stationed at the only gateway.

In and out of this dismal entrance there passed occasional small groups, mostly of women in the black robes of the Doom’s breeding service who brought food and water in and pulled carts laden with corpses out. Other women, in the white robes of the crèche system, emerged with infant imps, wrapped in swaddling and destined for the crèche wards.

There was no time to waste and no way around this gate. Lessis whispered for them to be ready to help her if necessary, and they moved quickly down to the gate.

The guards, Relkin noticed, were women—tall, brutal-looking women with hard faces, for no men were allowed in this place. They carried spears and swords and looked as if they knew how to use them. He looked behind and saw that their rat escort had remained behind in the tunnel.

The rest would be up to him and Lagdalen, he realized.

One guard was watching a trio of women in the black robes as they dealt with a woman in one of the pens who had gone mad and was biting her flesh and those of the women chained up close to her.

The black-robed servants of the Doom struck the mad woman over the head with a heavy hammer. Then they cut her free from her chains, hauled the corpse out and dumped it into their cart.

The guard watching this chuckled to herself at some grisly private joke. The other guard looked up with instant suspicion as Lessis stepped close.

“Surgeon’s party,” said Lessis, who knew that such groups of trainees did visit the pens on occasion.

The guard pursed her thick lips and snarled to her companion, “Is there a surgeon’s party on the board?”

The other guard glanced to the slate that hung beside her station, but before she could say anything Lessis had slipped her dirk out from inside her shift and stabbed the first guard in the throat with a speed that caused Relkin’s eyes to go wide.

Lessis had absorbed much from the death of the old cat.

Lagdalen meanwhile attempted a similar act, but the second guard heard something and turned and ducked just in time. The next moment a heavy gauntleted fist had knocked Lagdalen off her feet and the big spear was coming down to bear on her.

Relkin darted in, caught the spear with one hand and stabbed with the other. His dirk went deep into the guard’s hand. She grunted in pain, let go of the spear and punched him in the face. He flew backwards and slammed into the slate board and almost knocked it off its pegs.

Then Lessis had reached the guard and her knife was in the big woman’s heart; she eased the body down to the stone-flagged floor.

Relkin looked up. The black-robed women with the death cart had seen nothing; they were pushing their evil conveyance up an alley between two great rows of stone slave pens and they did not look back.

Some faces in the pens were turned towards them, however; startled eyes and hasty whispers were going around.

Lessis leaned back into the corridor and whistled; in a few moments the rats were streaming along the floor and into the great chamber. Lessis whistled again and pointed, and the rats set off into the great place in small parties of ten and twenty.

“Take up their weapons,” bade Lessis. “You must hold this place for a little while, let no one enter.”

Relkin and Lagdalen took the heavy spears and swords and stood in the gateway. Lessis disappeared inside.

Relkin looked back over his shoulder at a sudden cacophony of shrieks. The black-robed women scattered here and there in the place were suddenly jumping and running for their lives. Quite quickly they were herded into a small group in a far corner of the vast room where they cowered. The lady’s rats had done their part to perfection.

Now the chains began to rend asunder as Lessis moved from pen to pen, seeking the most vigorous of the younger women who were chained there. The power ran from her in gouts of blue fire as she broke the chains and set them free.

These women sprang up with shouts of joy and a crowd of them swelled around Lessis, trying to touch her, weeping in gratitude. Others came to join Lagdalen and Relkin—in their eyes burned a rage so deep and mortal that Relkin was afraid. He gave them the spear and the sword, keeping his dirk for his own use.

Now they had seven guards at the gate.

A pair of women in the white uniforms of the imp crèche suddenly appeared at the gate. Their mouths dropped open in shock and amazement when they looked inside the pens.

“What goes on here?” said the first, and then the freed women stepped forward and struck them down. The bodies were pulled aside.

“They deserve nothing but death for what they do,” snapped one when Lagdalen cleared her throat.

Lagdalen said nothing in the face of the fury in the woman’s eyes. The women in black robes were similarly dispatched by other freed slaves.

Soon Lessis had freed a hundred or more, choosing the youngest and the fittest, those who had spent the least time in this chamber of hell.

She explained to them what they were about to do, and she told them that although the odds were high and that many of them would surely die it was their best opportunity to have revenge on the monster that had done this to them.