Into The Dark Flame (Book 4) (27 page)

   'Don't touch the weapon!' warned Fhurn. 'You can do nothing.'

   It seemed to Leth that the javelin's shaft was growing shorter. With horror he saw that it was actually burrowing into Dembarl's writhing body as though with a life and will of its own. The Abyss warrior convulsed and kicked, dreadful sounds escaping his lips. Abruptly a great gout of steam burst through the flesh of his cheek, and he jerked and lay still.

   'Swordbearer!'

   Leth turned to see Rasgul at the corner of the wall. He had taken the two unused javelins from the Acolyte corpses and now signalled for Leth to move to the opposite corner. Leth did so, peered around. There was no one to be seen either way. A wide, low-ceilinged chamber opened before them, supported by two rows of thick, unadorned rectangular columns. Numerous openings of curious shape could be seen leading off to either side.

   'You are in charge now, Swordbearer,' whispered Rasgul, his burned amber eyes flickering mistrustfully across the chamber. 'The passages may lead anywhere or nowhere.'

   Leth glanced behind,
then spoke to Fhurn and Huuri, both of whom had shortbows slung across their backs. 'You two wait. Bring up the rear, and be alert for attack from behind. The rest, fan out but stay close together and move with me across the chamber.'

   The party began to move slowly through the chamber, slipping from column to column, pausing to look around,
peering into the openings as they passed them. They reached the further end of the chamber without incident, and faced a blank stone wall formed of massive ashlar blocks. Leth heard a faint hiss behind him. He wheeled about. A compartment had opened in the facing wall of one of the columns. Within it a bulbous, bloated thing hovered, resembling a massive, deformed red-purple ball, all loose, hideous fleshy growths, waving tentacles and a wide, bubbling froggy maw.

   'Cacos
a!' shouted Rasgul as the thing floated forward from its compartment. At the same time three more of the creatures emerged from similar compartments in neighbouring columns.

   The
maw of the first cacosa, cavernous enough to almost engulf a man in one go, opened. Leth saw something begin to form inside it. A brown liquid globule flew out at him. He managed to throw himself to the side, out of its path, and heard it splash wetly against the wall behind him. As the sopened its maw to spit again Leth darted out of its way around the nearest column. There were yells and screams coming from off to one side. Peering around the column Leth saw one of his companions - he could not tell who - smothered in the brown eructation of another of the cacosas. The stuff had formed an elastic mass around its victim, and seemed to be thickening by the moment. The man - whoever it was - struggled desperately to free himself, his movements painfully slow and laboured as he strove against the stretchy, hardening stuff. As he did so the cacosa glided forward, froggy maw wide, and plucked him from the ground.

   Leth was not close enough to intervene. He saw Count Harg throw himself at the monster, sword flashing,
then Leth grew aware of the first cacosa sliding slowly around the column, seeking him out. Before it could turn he rushed it, slashing hard with his scimitar. The blade bit deep. The cacosa convulsed in the air, emitting a terrible roar, and wheeled on Leth as he struck again. He dived low, avoiding its plunging maw. His blows, while aggravating the cacosa, seemed to be having no mortal effect. He glimpsed Rasgul rush out, brandishing one of the blazing javelins he had taken from the two dead Acolytes. He thrust it deep into the cacosa's bloated corpus. The cacosa bellowed and shot upwards, smashing into the ceiling, spinning. Its form began to distort and diminish, gobbets of steaming flesh flying in all directions as the javelin burrowed deep.

   As the dying creature fell to the ground Leth rushed to aid Harg. The
cacosa he was attacking was roaring and twisting, trying to defend itself against Harg whilst attempting to fully swallow its victim, whose legs protruded from its maw. Leth hacked hard at its flesh. It turned and drew back. Again the swordblows seemed to do little more than enrage it. But with the warrior in its jaws it was unable to spit at its two assailants. It pulled away, but two others were coming forward. A mass of brown spittle flew at Juson, missing him by inches. The remaining Abyss warrior - Leth thought it was Huuri - attacked the cacosa from behind. Leth was aware of Rasgul between the columns, hurling his last remaining javelin, which plunged into the side of one of the cacosas, sending it shrieking and shivering to the floor.

   But now Leth was aware of other enemies coming from the passages to either side of the large chamber. Vaguely human, featureless things, powerfully muscled, with pewter grey scaly skin, brandishing radiant, beaked axes and combat pincers. They came forward stealthily, weaving between the two remaining
cacosas.

   Rasgul cried out a warning.
'Goles! Move back!'

   One of the goles rushed at Leth, thrusting at his head with the bill-head of its axe with one hand, the other, with the spiked pincers, snapping at his groin. Leth dodged both blows, swung with his scimitar and struck the gole in the shoulder. The blade went deep, but the gole showed no reaction, and as Leth pulled back he saw to his shock that he had left no wound.

   'Draw the Orbsword, Swordbearer!' called Rasgul, who was retreating and fending off the blows of another gole. 'It’s your only hope!'

   Without hesitation, leaping back to avoid the gole's attack, Leth dropped his scimitar and drew free the Orbsword. It glowed bright, though much of its radiance was lost in the blood-toned air. But there came a gasp from the goles, and even the
cacosas seemed hesitant for a moment.

   Leth seized the opportunity and lunged at the nearest gole. The Orbsword passed effortlessly through its chest. The gole's mouth sagged
open, it issued a long sigh, and fell.

   But there were as many as ten goles advancing upon them now, maybe more, as well as the two
cacosas. Recovering from the shock of the sight of the Orbsword they pressed forward again relentlessly. Beyond them Leth glimpsed several Acolytes running forward from the tunnel along which he had come, grasping pairs of deadly blazing javelins. With the others of his party he drew back, but the situation was hopeless. There was nowhere to retreat to. His was the only effective weapon, but even with the Orbsword he could not hope to fight off so many assailants.

   A
cacosa yawned and ejaculated its wet brown mass. Leth glimpsed Harg hurl himself to one side, narrowly avoiding the sticky mass, which glued itself to the edge of the closest column. Rasgul was being hard-pressed by two goles. Leth slid across, lowering his body, and swung the Orbsword into the nearest gole's flank. The creature spun with sudden shock, then fell silently. At that moment Leth saw, beyond the gole, something glittering within one of the column compartments from which the cacosas had emerged. Ducking another mass of flying spittle, Leth lunged for the compartment. On its side wall was a small silver knob. Without time for thought Leth reached in and grasped it, pressed, pulled, twisted . . .  Something gave. He heard a low grinding sound behind him. Harg called out.

   Leth turned. In the rear wall of the chamber a door had opened. Beyond it nothing could be seen bar a flickering redness, predominantly darker than that which filled he chamber he now occupied. There was no time for consideration. Harg and the remaining Abyss warrior were already fighting their way back towards the new opening.

   'Through there!' Leth yelled. Now the others of his party saw the opening. Desperately hacking, they fought their way back. One by one they slipped through. Leth came last, the enemy creatures crowding him, yet holding back slightly, wary now of the glowing sword he wielded. From behind them he saw an Acolyte draw back an arm and hurl a javelin. The thing wuzzed angrily past his ear into the opening behind him. Leth prayed it had struck none of his companions. A gole came at him suddenly, axe swinging, pincers snapping. Leth avoided the blows. Something grasped him from behind and dragged him back. Rasgul stood inside the opening, grasping a metal bar set into the wall. As Leth came inside the Abyss warrior pushed hard on the bar and the door slid shut upon the chamber, leaving the cacosas, goles and Acolytes on the other side.

ii

   They were in a spacious area bounded by walls both of hewn stone and natural deep red rock. Numerous tunnel entrances were revealed in the rock faces, leading off in various directions. The acrid smell that Leth had
detected earlier was more forceful here. It scoured the back of his nose and was mingled with a faintly sulphurous stench and a moist, sour-sweet odour of decay.

   From somewhere unseen, away to their left, issued a blood-curdling sound: a dreadful, dirgeful bellowing. It came semi-rhythmically, finding its way through the tunnels, an inhuman issue that ranged across the scale from a profoundly menacing, enraged
basso
rumble to a ruthless, tormented lowing which mounted remorselessly, reaching a blood-chilling alto shriek before breaking off, pausing, then resuming again. Leth felt his teeth on edge, his gut knotting, the muscles of his spine involuntarily clenching.

   Rasgul bent to pick up the fallen Acolyte javelin,
then straightened, glancing grim-visaged towards the direction of the maddening sound.

   'She knows,' he said chillingly to Leth. 'The Great Sow has sensed the Orbsword. She knows you are here.'

   Count Harg, re-loading his repeating crossbow, wryly observed, 'Ah well, she tells us in which direction she lies, at least. We should not run down too many wrong tunnels.'

   'And we should waste no time,' said Rasgul. 'She’ll be more anxious now than ever to release her obnoxious force upon the world.'

   They struck out into one of the nearer tunnels, whose black maw promised to take them at least some distance towards the source of the dreadful stridence. They were five in number now: Leth, Rasgul, Harg, Juson and Huuri. A small, tight but motley band made up of murdering thugs and merciless warriors, none of whom knew their own hearts or minds, and led by a desperate young warrior-king who had been summoned as a god to rid a world of a nebulous evil of which he knew nothing.

   With Leth and Rasgul leading they crept forward into the obscuring shadows. The area they were leaving seemed deserted, but each of them was aware that anything might lurk there, within the tunnels or anywhere close by, and Huuri took it upon himself to bring up the rear, alert at all times for sudden attack from that direction.

   The tunnel, though it twisted like a worm, proved to be no longer than fifty paces, and they emerged from it into a colossal subterranean cavern. The floor was predominantly level and paved with huge slabs of red-black cut stone, but the cavern itself was a natural formation. From its furthest side, beyond fields of stalagmites, tall twisting igneous pinnacles and wildly formed ledges and outthrusts of rock, the chthonic light blazed more intensely than ever before. A raging cascade tumbled down the far wall, its sound muted by the din of the monster somewhere even further below. Spuming jets of spray glinted pinkly, splaying out, foaming and falling, and great clouds of rubescent vapour rose, draping much of the cavern in a fine patina formed of millions of tiny glimmering beads of moisture. Weird capering shadows were thrown across the lofty ceiling, the towering walls and floor. And within those shadows, within that obscuring light, Leth thought he saw movement, as if the rock walls and the cavern floor itself had come alive.

   He blinked, peered hard, and realized he had been partly mistaken. The cavern had not come alive, but it was a host, a domain of some kind of life. Creatures were advancing, crawling and slithering down the wet rock walls, coming towards him and his companions, coming in their scores, perhaps their hundreds across the steaming cavern floor. Their approach seemed calculated and deliberate, as if they had no need for haste. And from beyond them, in a yawning gulf unseeable at the back of the cavern, out of which the weird light emanated, Ascaria's dreadful lowing, bellowing, wailing issued without surcease, causing the clamouring air to tremble.

   'Prepare yourself, Swordbearer,' cautioned Rasgul, and his voice carried such a strange emotion that Leth turned to look at him.

   'What are they?'

   'It is not what they are that you must concern yourself with. It is what they are not.'

   He knelt, unslinging his bow. The others had done the same, levelling bolts and arrows at the oncoming horde.

   'We can’t kill them all!' declared Leth.

   Rasgul glanced aside at him. 'No, we can’t.'

   Leth craned his neck, straining to make out more clearly the obscure host that moved toward him. The nearest were perhaps forty paces away. And with a horror greater than anything he had experienced so far, Leth gasped, seeing suddenly what it was that he faced.

   'No!'

   'They are not what you think, Swordbearer.'

   'I cannot!'

   'They are transformed. They are lost. They are Ascaria's newest defenders. And they are coming to kill us.'

   Leth gaped, twisting his head from side to side, something inside him crying out in mute outrage.
For he was looking at children. Some were in rags, some in half armour. All carried hand-weapons of some form or other. They came on at a chill, remorseless pace.