In The Shadow Of The Beast (20 page)

The old man continued, ‘On a wretched night
a creature spawned in the Eastern Fringes, what you might call a
werewolf, broke into The Baron’s residence and found its way to the
chambers of the Lady. Who knew what designs the creature had, but
his attack was interrupted by the arrival of a serving girl, and a
guardsman of the house. The guardsman was Brodus Klay.’

The old man was staring off into the
darkness of the tunnels, his eyes unfocused, his manner almost
trance-like as he recalled to Sigourd the events of that long ago
night.

‘
Brodus Klay’s timely
arrival ensured that the beast was driven off. For his dutiful
service, he was stripped of his rank, and then summarily posted
here to these frozen wastes. Bidden by his liege lord to hunt
others like the beast he’d saved the lady from until the end of his
days.’

‘
Why?’ asked
Sigourd.

‘
It was Brodus Klay’s duty
to guard the chambers of the lady that cursed night. Somehow the
creature had slipped past him and made good its attempt to accost
the Lady Veronique.’

There was an undeniable note of bitterness
in the tone of the old man, and Sigourd was certain there was some
other element to the story that he was not being made privy
too.

‘
What happened to the
beast?’ Sigourd asked.

The old man looked up suddenly, fixing
Sigourd with a hard stare, ‘The creature was captured and
slain.’

Sigourd swallowed hard, the news of these
critical events that had transpired within his family before he was
even born was a hard fact to absorb. But he did his best to show no
outward sign of his troubled thoughts. Sigourd looked up, noting
that the old man seemed to be studying him, searching for some
hidden thing that he could only guess at.

‘
It’s as well that the
beast was slain,’ said Sigourd, ‘justice was done.’

The old man laughed hollowly, all sign of
his usual mirth totally absent. ‘It was The Baron’s justice to send
away a faithful subject who had saved the life of his sister. But
Brodus Klay has not been idle all these long years. He’s been
hunting those monsters ever since, and learning many secret
sorceries out here in these lonely mountains to aid him in his
struggle. He has unlocked the secrets of the ancients, and has been
able to scry into the past and the future. He has found the hidden
path, upon which few mortal men have dared to tread. He is a
thousand times more than once he was...’

Jonn Grumble emerged into
the starlit night and breathed deeply of the crisp mountain air. He
filled his lungs to bursting, so relieved was he to be out of those
wretched tunnels. Of course he’d been loathe to admit that he’d
been quietly losing his mind down there in the dark. The old man
had been right damn him, Jonn
could
feel the walls closing in, and the ceiling and the
floor pressing in on him too. He felt bad about leaving Sigourd
down there, but in all honesty he’d be of far more use up here
keeping an eye on things. Hopefully Sigourd would have a quick chat
with this Brodus Klay fella, who sounded to Jonn Grumble like a bit
of a bloody ponce anyway, and they could wrap up quick and move out
of these ruddy freezing mountains. Jonn Grumble could handle a
harsh winter, but the air up here was like daggers it was so
intensely frigid. It hurt just to breathe when the snow and the
wind was driving hard.

Fortunately, he’d emerged into a relatively
calm evening, and decided to avail himself of some of the juicy
little plums he’d stowed in his pack for a bit of a nibble when the
situation presented itself. Sitting down upon a large and
relatively flat boulder, wincing at the intense cold as it gripped
his backside, Jonn Grumble began to unfurl his knapsack.

It was there that he saw the nightingale,
lying dead at his feet. The bird lay amongst a scattering of the
innocent looking seeds that the old man had been feeding to it.

A feeling not unlike the razor sharp ice
winds that whipped about the peaks stirred deep within Jonn
Grumble’s gut, and without another thought he jumped up from that
boulder and once more made his way with all haste into the darkness
of the cave mouth. This time, his claustrophobia was not even a
whisper of a thought in his head as he disappeared into the
unknown.

CHAPTER 12

In the mouth of
madness...

The old man had fallen silent since his
discourse on the subject of Brodus Klay, and Sigourd had felt too
stunned by the revelation of his mother’s involvement to press him
further. So many questions raced through his head; what had been
the nature of the beast? Why had Sigourd never been made aware of
such turbulent happenings within his own household? Did his father
know of the incident? So many questions.

The pair made their descent further into the
heart of the mountain, and Sigourd became aware of small creatures,
picked out in the dim glow of the firelight, that raced along the
walls and underfoot. They were no more than four or five inches in
length, with many sets of undulating legs that carried them along
like a caterpillar might ambulate. Their pale, translucent
exoskeletons glowed infernally in the gloom, mandible parts at
their fore chittered at they raced past, footfalls fore the careful
footfalls of the two intruders into this strange subterranean
habitat.

Soon enough the tunnel opened out into a
large chamber, the rock walls of which climbed steeply up around
Sigourd on all sides as they glistened wetly before him. He peered
into the gloom so that he might make out any other details of the
space they now stood in. The sound of his boots on the rock echoed
hollowly off the walls. Sigourd estimated that the cavernous space
they now stood in must match in size the great throne room of his
father’s palace.

And then his eyes fixed on something
directly ahead of him. It had been there all along, waiting in the
near total darkness for his attention. A space in the rock wall
where the feeble illumination from the guttering torch was barely
able to penetrate, a fissure in the face of the cavern that must
have stood some thirty or forty meters high and at least several
across. That impenetrable black crevice loomed before Sigourd, and
the sudden knowledge of it filled him with a terrible foreboding.
He felt as if the abyssal fault was staring back into him as he
stared into it. The air around him suddenly felt very close.

‘
We go through,’ said the
old man matter of factly.

‘
Yes,’ replied Sigourd, ‘I
had a feeling you might say that.’

Without further delay the old man moved up
to the fissure, stopped before it so that he might stare into its
depths.

‘
What is it you see,
elder?’ asked Sigourd.

‘
I see a resolution,’
replied the old man, and promptly stepped into the fissure. In an
instant he had disappeared totally from sight. The old man had not
simply stepped through the fissure, he had stepped into the
suffocating darkness within and evaporated from sight in the blink
of an eye.

Sigourd stood there for many moments before
that yawning gap in the rock. What magic was this?

‘
Step through young master
Sigourd!’ came the old man’s voice suddenly, echoing around the
chamber as if he were everywhere at once.

Slowly, the echoing died away, and all that
was left to hear was the gentle fizz and crackle of the torch
clutched in Sigourd’s hand, his knuckles white around the haft.

It was no good to stand here idly while the
object of his journey into this mountain lay waiting on the other
side, Sigourd decided. Breathing deeply to steel his nerves, he
stepped into the giant fissure and...

Slip sliding down through the tunnel of
rock, Jonn staggered several times as his foot caught a spar of
granite or his toes kicked against a divot in the floor of the
tunnel. He made his way as quickly as he dared, knowing that every
second that ticked by was another second that brought Sigourd
closer to the danger Jonn Grumble now knew him to be in.

Dripping stalactites flashed by as he rushed
past them, splashing through puddles of viscous melt water, the
flickering light from his torch casting shadow upon the walls of
the tunnel that danced and jittered.

He wasn’t entirely sure that he was even
moving in the right direction. He had passed the point at which
he’d turned back many minutes ago, and had already come across two
or three tributary tunnels that split from the body of the main
passage.

He had paused at the first, peering into the
impenetrable dark of those smaller tunnels, straining to hear for
the voice of his friend or any other, but seeing nothing and
hearing only the hollow breath of the wind through this benighted
place. The next two tunnels Jonn Grumble had decided he would pass
by without pause, preferring to take a chance on the possibility
that the pair had continued along the primary tunnel as he hoped
they had.

On and on he ran, Jonn’s foot falls ringing
in his ears as the sound pinged off the walls that crowded in
malevolently around him.

The other side of the fissure was a vast
chamber of volcanic rock, the product of some gargantuan bubble of
molten lava that had swollen to impossible proportions. Swelling
within the heart of the mountain the bubble had solidified,
hardening into the natural cavern Sigourd now found himself
standing in.

The chamber was of such epic dimensions that
the waters of the river Woe had run in to collect in its base,
forming a lake hundreds of meters across and untold fathoms
deep.

That lake glowed with an unnatural sickly
pallor that recalled to Sigourd’s memory the image of the
chittering vermin that had skittered across the walls of the tunnel
that led them to this place.

As he stared into the depths of that body of
water, a peculiar feeling of discomfort began to grow within him.
It was the same feeling as when Sigourd had looked upon the strange
runes that hung above the entrance to the tunnel.

‘
This is a place of great
power,’ said the old man, his eyes fixed upon the waters as they
lapped gently at the rocks near his feet. There was something
unnerving about the elder’s manner Sigourd decided, some change
that had come over him since they’d entered the tunnel.

‘
There is where we shall
meet Brodus Klay,’ continued the old man, pointing to a spot near
the center of the great lake, where clouds like shadows seemed to
part slowly allowing Sigourd a glimpse of something that had
remained hidden up to now.

Sitting on a small atoll in the centre of
the lake, carved from the jet black glass of the molten rock, a
gargantuan human skull leered at Sigourd from across the sickly
waters. It had the air of some keep, or small fortification,
designed in a fashion that was intended to impress and unnerve.

‘
Brodus Klay lives there?’
asked Sigourd, his voice a low whisper in this quiet place. ‘How
are we supposed to cross over?’

The old man smiled ruefully, and bent down
to pick up a small chip of the molten rock near his feet. He
casually tossed the fragment into the waters, and Sigourd watched
as the ripples radiated outward, before slowly dissipating amongst
the murk.

He watched pensively for a few moments,
expecting something to happen, and when nothing did he turned to
the old man who stood quite calmly, his hand clutched around his
twisted wooden staff, staring out at the lake in a most genial
manner.

‘
I don’t understand--’
Sigourd began, when the sound of something slapping the water from
the shadows on the other side of the lake drew his attention. He
turned to see what had made the sound, and squinting into the
distance, began to see something emerge from the darkness of the
far side of the lake. At first Sigourd could not clearly make out
the thing that approached, for it appeared to be made of shadows,
thin tendrils of mist wreathing its form as it sailed closer and
closer. Gradually, the shape of a man coalesced before Sigourd’s
eyes. A man standing atop the back of some monstrous creature, a
dragon of ancient myth. Sigourd’s heart skipped a beat in his chest
as his eyes struggled to process what they were seeing. But no, not
a dragon at all, merely the affectation of one of those fearsome
creatures from the sagas. What the man stood upon was actually a
boat of quite fantastic design. Intricately caved, large enough to
accommodate three or four people at once, it possessed the curving
neck and snarling fanged maw of a dragon to the fore, and a barbed
tale of wicked appearance to the aft that curled up and over the
deck. To starboard and port, furled wings sat pinned snugly to the
sides of the craft. Twin rubies the size of small plums and set
into what were intended to be the eyes of the dragon boat,
glittered in the eerie light of the quiet waters.

For his part, the man standing inside that
strange craft was no less impressive, yet only more morbidly so.
Draped and coweled in a long cloak and deep hood that hid his face
under a veil of total shadow, the figure pulled morosely at a
single oar attached to the aft of the boat, which he must surely
use to navigate the waters of the lake. Like nearly everything else
Sigourd had seen since encountering the fissure in the rock wall,
that figure filled Sigourd with an instinctive disquiet.

‘
The boatman will ferry us
across the lake,’ announced the old man. As the dragon sailed into
the shallows, he began to wade out to meet the boat, clambering
clumsily aboard as Sigourd moved to render assistance before he too
climbed reluctantly into the craft.