Bloodstone (34 page)

This then was the hideous battle that raged into the timber--the soldiers yielding ground grudgingly, driven back nonetheless. The relentless onslaught of the shadow creatures slithered over a new litter of bodies, corpses distinguishable from those slain earlier by their mangled aspect. And although dawn was yet hours distant, the night was broken by the eerie, evil luminescence of the shadow hordes.

Teres caught a glimpse of Dribeck in the emerald radiance; the Selonari lord was fighting gamely in the face of blackest defeat. Wanting suddenly to stand beside him, she cut her way through the tireless van of Bloodstone's spectral creatures.

A blade slashed toward her, a clumsy stroke so unexpected she barely did parry. Her astonishment vanished quickly at the new threat as she engaged her opponent's bronze alloy sword, a Rillyti weapon wielded now by a hand that weeks ago was human. Thinking ruefully of the shield she had earlier discarded for long dagger--the shield had been useless against bare-handed assailants--Teres lunged to attack. Her foe parried clumsily; evidently its guiding intelligence was too limited for the intricacies of swordplay. Instinctively she thrust her swordtip through its chest--and almost lost an ear, when the lamia's awkward slash followed what should have been a mortal wound. Teres cursed her momentary lapse--battle fatigue was dulling her thoughts--and lopped off the extended sword arm. As she methodically disabled the creature, she noted that elsewhere along the line of combat were the phantom shapes taking up fallen Rillyti weapons. Those of steel they left untouched. She grimaced. Even with their clumsy swordplay, the creatures would be deadly opponents, invulnerable as they were to all but wounds that severed completely.

Dribeck went down. A crawling arm, sundered at the shoulder, had clamped webbed fingers upon his ankle. He swore, slashing wildly at the dragging weight, as a man-shaped phantom hurtled upon him. Hindered by the tenacious grasp, Dribeck lost his balance and fell, the shadow creature struggling atop him, hands locked about the man's throat. Dribeck's steel sliced through the glowing arms, and his sudden lunge knocked the unsupported creature away from him. He struggled to his feet, but the strangling hands still closed about his long neck. Fighting for breath, he hacked the forearms off at the wrists-to no effect. In panic Dribeck dropped his blade, clutched the spectral hands in his own, sought to tear them from their choking grip. The rubbery flesh-substance was slippery under his sweaty fingers.

Dribeck's tongue was starting to protrude when Teres reached him. Those who remained of his personal guard were too hard-pressed to note their lord's distress. Despairing of breaking the stranglehold, she set her dagger point between thumb and forefinger and sawed through the tough flesh. Unable to appose, the disjointed segments fell free, and she flung them off into the darkness.

Weak but still conscious, Dribeck staggered to his feet, while Teres beat down the assault of another shadow slave. He retrieved his sword and, supported by Teres, withdrew from the battle to recover his strength.

"My thanks, Teres!" he gasped, massaging his bruised throat. "But I think you may have saved a life that will never see the dawn! The men fight well, but fatigue now tortures us all. One by one, we fall to the ceaseless onslaught of this demon horde-nor do we rise again with the unnatural vitality that our deathless enemy draws upon."

"Will you call retreat?" she suggested. "We can still escape."

Lord Dribeck shook his head wearily. "A useless escape. Kane's power has already exceeded my most pessimistic calculations. Another hour, another day... who can say! Kane boasted that Bloodstone's power would become limitless! It's likely that this battle will be the last chance mankind will ever know to escape the shadow of Bloodstone. While a handful of us survive, I dare not throw away that slim chance of victory!

"We've pushed Kane hard, gained ground on him. We nullified his deadliest weapon, handed his Rillyti army a bloody defeat--and we're taking toll of this phantom horde. I can't count how many men we've lost, but I'm still hoping we can outlast these murderous shadows somehow. Butcher them all to wriggling fragments, and maybe we can walk over the glowing scum to find Arellarti without further guards.

"And there's still Gerwein," he added. The priestesses' knoll thrust like a bastion along the faltering Selonari lines, but the advancing shadow creatures had not overrun it. About the camp of Shenan's daughters, Dribeck had concentrated the bulk of his troops, for he judged that their sorcery might well hold the only chance for victory. Beleaguered as never before, the cordon battled valiantly to withstand the merciless assault. Dribeck could discern Gerwein's tall figure, leading the frantic priestesses through some unguessable incantations. Still white forms, stretched upon the ground, attested to the altar's black hunger. Gerwein, then, had not accepted defeat.

"I have my breath again," declared Dribeck, squaring his lean shoulders. "It's pointless to seek to maintain our battle line any further, and I don't want the Temple's hill to be cut off. Come on, we'll retract our line to the knoll and make a stand against its base."

Teres did not listen. Her eyes were wide with insupportable horror.

Following her gaze, Dribeck mirrored her fear. The dismembered segments of energy-substance no longer writhed in blind disunion. From the wriggling wake of the shadow slaves' onslaught, impossible monstrosities were taking shape. Disjointed limbs crawled against mangled trunks, pressed together--and were one. Haphazardly at first seemed this terrible union to occur, but now there was demented purpose to the gruesome reanastomoses.

A one-armed torso lurched erect on mismatched legs, clasped against its stub of forearm another arm, severed above elbow, and with this dubiously jointed limb snatched up a rolling head and joined it to its nuchal stump. So it went throughout the battlefield, strewn with this ghastly debris. Little attempt was made to match the component segments, so that inconceivable travesties of coherent life took shape. Human heads and limbs clung to batrachian trunks, and the reverse. Dread-winged conglomerations flopped across the ground, unable to take flight. An apish creature shambled with octopoid tentacles upon its shoulders; a human shape bore spider arms. Many of the depraved recombinations were incapable of erect ambulation, having blindly conjoined with limbs of too great disparity--or fused arms to knees, thighs to shoulders. These thrashed about, powerless to break this outré reconjunction, or oblivious to the unnatural mismating.

Other abominations shambled across the forest field that were an even greater outrage to natural order. A hemisected man shape, cloven from shoulder through crotch by a mighty blow, wriggled forward in centipede fashion, an impossible disarray of limbs jutting from its sectioned plane. Most terrible of all were the octopoid creatures, reconjoined in a blasphemous, crawling chaos of tentacles, claws, human and amphibian limbs, human heads protruding like cancerous growths from their rubbery flesh. Scarcely less monstrous were the horrid reshapings of the spider creatures. Nor were the snapping heads affixed to disjointed arms good to look upon as they scrambled crab-like over the corpses.

Taking new and frightful shape as they crept onward, these fiery monstrosities of unthinkable configuration inexorably advanced to reinforce the teeming shadow army, whose onslaught threatened to overwhelm the line of warriors with each passing moment.

Lord Dribeck tore his sickened gaze from the crawling horde of madness. "To the priestesses' encampment, then!" he ordered in a shaken voice. "Where I fear we must make our final stand."

Pulling back the men, together they slashed their way toward the knoll. The task seemed all but insurmountable. The hard-pressing ranks of the shadow creatures bore down upon them like engulfing quicksand, clung tenaciously, smothered them with crushing numbers. Even as the Selonari line contracted, they left a trail of mangled bodies embedded in the avalanche of emerald horror.

They had hacked through half the distance to the embattled prominence when final disaster caught them. A sudden surge of the more monstrous shadow slaves overran their withdrawal, smashed through the ranks of battle-worn soldiers. Their line had broken; now the knoll was cut off. Bloodstone's shimmering minions thrust past the breach and streamed through to encircle the fragmented human army.

"We must reach the Temple's knoll!" yelled Dribeck. "Try to cut through to the others!" Desperation added new strength to fatigued limbs, and the rallying warriors closed the rift somewhat. But their endurance was cracking under the unrelenting strain, nor was there a man among them not scratched and gouged by the phantoms' talons, or carrying the deeper wounds of bronze blades. The column contracted, buttressed against the monsters' rush, but now the spectral shapes enclosed the human ranks, ravaged through the rearguard where the wounded had been taken.

They would not see the dawn, Teres realized, and though she had often thought to die in battle, there was no heroism in being torn apart by these mindless shadow creatures. Recklessly now she fought, too exhausted to curse, but with a feral snarl on her bleeding lips. Ah, for Gwellines--his hooves would wreak havoc amidst these glowing carrion! But the stallion was tethered with the other mounts, deemed useless in this night combat. Wistfully she hoped the horse would be spared; he was about the last vestige of her once settled existence.

Teres went down under clutching arms. Dribeck's sword sliced through her assailant's shoulders, then a misshapen human/bufanoid hybrid leaped upon his turned back. Doggedly he struggled under its weight--the creature's mismatched components made its attack clumsy, albeit vicious. Cutting away the choking fingers, Teres lurched toward him, but staggered as a legless torso trapped her foot in its webbed fist. She turned upon the dismembered trunk, hacking down as it sought to climb her legs. Dribeck had dropped to his knees, now beset by another misshaped foe as well, his sword arm pinned by its grasp. A tentacle lashed out at Teres as she struggled with the crawling hands that ensnared her legs. Her last-instant slash cut through the serpentine coil as it struck for her throat, but a sudden blow from a jointed spider claw stripped the sword from her deadened grip.

She lunged for the fallen blade, stumbled from the dragging anchor that clutched her ankles, and threw herself headlong to seize the blade. Frantically she chopped at the loathsome claws that held her; they would not let her rise. The tentacled monster loomed over her, reached once more for her throat. Teres sliced upward, her last strength failing, and recognized in unbelieving horror that atop the grotesque, multi-limbed arachnoid carapace reposed the head of Lutwion.

Then there was moonlight.

She thought her reeling senses had shattered with madness in that fearful moment. Impossibly, the moon had suddenly turned full. Pale luminance streamed down from its cold, ashen sphere, cast shadows upon the sickened earth.

But it. was not the moon that coursed through natural skies--she realized that with wonder. Its luminescence was far too intense. The white brilliance hurt her eyes, struck her upturned face with palpable force. She could sense the unearthly chill of the moonbeam's touch, cold that seemed to leech the warmth from her sweat-soaked skin.

And the globe that shone down upon them was not the dead surface of the moon that mankind knew. There were subtle shapes writhing upon its pale eye. In sudden fear, Teres looked away.

The attack, the relentless advance of the shadow creatures, halted. Their mindless faces seemed to contort with terror as they looked upon this unnatural effulgence.

Teres saw that their emerald flesh-substance was blackening, beginning to slough away in leprous scabs that dwindled while they fluttered to the ground.

The shadow army broke and fled--running, crawling, scurrying, as best they could--retreated from the incredulous humans, fled for the causeway. Although the distance was not great, they would not cross it.

Like vengeful lances the too-brilliant moonbeams stabbed down upon the routed horde. Their unnatural flesh withered and seared under the cold rays, as if they were worms writhing beneath an intolerable heat. First to go were the wriggling fragments, like blackened slugs as they contorted in agony, crumbled apart and melted into the earth. The larger segments lasted longer, but got no farther. Nor did the creatures who fled on staggering limbs fare much better. Under the pitiless luminescence their charred limbs faltered, and collapsed as the burning decay eroded their substance. As they bucked and rolled across the forest, their death struggles carried them only a little way before dissolution overtook them. A few blindly sought the shadow of the trees, but to no avail; the moonlight seemed to search the fugitives out in defiance of natural law. Some of the monstrous conglomerates of alien and human shadow substance almost reached the foot of the causeway. There the last of them fell, formless blobs of searing, shriveling flesh that gave up their stolen life force in silent agony-collapsed into crumbling mounds of char, melted to a dark stain upon the earth, which slowly faded away into the nothingness from which the shadow slaves were spawned.

Dawn was touching the horizon as the alien moon slowly dimmed. Stunned and bleeding, the remnants of Dribeck's army looked in disbelief for their vanished enemy. And if victory belongs to the survivors, then few were the victors of this nightmare battle.

Gerwein's face had aged ten years during that night.

At dawn the battle-worn survivors had tended their wounded as well as might be, then collapsed upon the forest earth in utter exhaustion. As strength returned, they had searched the field of combat, still too fatigued to bury the uncounted dead. Of the shadow creatures no trace remained, but the earth was heavy with the corpses of men and Rillyti. From this battle there would be raised a row of cairns great as the stony peaks of Serpent's Tail.

The shambles of the encampment was restored to a semblance of order, but far fewer were the tents now spread beneath the rattling victory banner. A watch was posted, strategy discussed tentatively--though with the morning sun above them, the men cared only to draw grateful breath and lick their wounds.