Alium, page 32
At the end of the hall of feeding cells they passed through an archway into a room where at last Ogwold could stand up straight, but here they stopped at once. Inside were, presumably, their capturers, huddled around each other in a tight circle, all panting heavily and wetly snorting. They seemed completely dormant if not for their frenetic breathing. Ogwold quickly snatched the sphere out of the way and obscured its light, but Byron took his hand and opened the fingers slowly. The light returned, and the eyeless creatures were none the wiser.
Ogwold had heard stories about the insidious Krug, so were called the blind mutants said to live within the mountains themselves. His father had called them the true ogres of the world, hideous trolls that mashed entire Novare in their limitless jaws. But these creatures were not so large as they were strange, for there was little about their appearance that seemed necessary for survival. Ogwold knew that the Nogofod were large because they had always lifted heavy things, but for what reasons should these creatures have two heads; why should their skin be translucent, so that all their skeleton and foul black organs were palely seen; why should they have seemingly helpless extraneous arms jutting out from their shoulder blades hanging there, twitching every so often, and extra legs—extending from their buttocks—doing the same, and too long, lying impotent along the cave floor?
Really only a few of their features seemed to have a purpose. Each head was sunken with one horrible gaping toothless mouth, constantly smacking open and closed. These vacant sucking holes were their only facial features but for hideously long whiskers arranged like numberless antennae that bristled and flowed and twirled, now Ogwold realized, everywhere upon their bodies. The milky, transparent skin from scalp to toeless foot was covered in these fine, waving, grasping hairs which seemed constantly to reach for the rock floor, the ceiling, out into the darkness for something, anything to touch.
Byron took one noiseless step into the room, but the moment his boot touched the ground, all of the venturing hairs upon the otherwise motionless creatures rippled, furled as in decoding some new frequency, stood alarmingly straight, then feverishly snaked out along the floor like sniffing hounds, undulating and issuing horrible tittering noises as the frenzied panting from their gathering grew deeper and more guttural.
“We won’t get through,” breathed Ogwold, but even the sound of his voice seemed to simmer in new amplitude upon the long hairs of the creatures and they began to cheep and chatter amongst themselves.
“You’re the one with a weapon here,” said the mercenary, pushing Ogwold into the room. If his own deft step had aroused the entities, the clumsy staggering of the ogre’s huge feet must have been deafening. So tremendous was the impact of that sound that they all for an instant, each and every hair, seemed to freeze.
Yet even now against these wretched things fully grown and evil to behold, Ogwold could only think of the knight he had crushed in Occultash. He took a great, thumping step backwards, and the forest of hairs again began to throng as the pale creatures advanced in a manner wholly unnatural, wielding their crude wooden spears pointed with jagged rock, rasping and moaning through their yawning mouths which turned sickeningly upward as in some hellish silent crooning as they moved. But however hesitant was Ogwold in the face of these advancing monsters, his greener arm seemed as well attuned to the threat as it had been on that rainy night, and for it as much as Ogwold the training with Byron had quite soaked in.
Bulging and narrowing amorphous in the white glow, it rose as one instinctively shields the eyes from a bright light, and formed again that clean, green blade. Just in time was the edge rendered to parry the lunging spear of the nearest mutant, flinging it easily aside and returning to hover extended like a guardian spirit before its ward. With the jar of the deflection Ogwold too was knocked into a state of self-preservation, staring into the awful cavernous mouths of the creature before him. Suddenly shouting he leapt forward and kicked the creature directly in its opalescent chest. There was a deafening boom. The Krug spearman shot across the room, struck the wall, and slid to the ground, its horrible mouths smacking open and shut rapidly.
Ogwold staggered, stunned at the force he’d delivered. The other creatures scattered, warbling and cheeping heinously, their hirsute skin undulating madly; but with a great roll of hair they charged him all at once. He drew back and swung out with the green sickle as he had at Byron these past mornings, strong, but not too hard, controlled, calculated, in one great sweeping motion, averting his eyes at the last moment. There was a sickening splatting noise, almost delayed in its sounding, as when a razor passes over flesh and the laceration blossoms moments later. In that instant Ogwold felt death. He saw clearly the wolf of fire on the lonely hill in the endless night, and it howled. The three mutants were cloven at varying heights; the mangled sections of their seizing bodies thumped wetly to the dirty cave floor. Ogwold’s blade snaked so lithely back into the shape of an arm that it shed every last drop of the black blood it had touched in a dark mist lightly settling over the grisly scene.
“That was horrible,” he said, falling to his knees with a great boom.
“You saved us.” Byron placed one hand on the grieving ogre’s massive shoulder. “They will kill us Ogwold, if we do not fight back.”
“I understand.” Ogwold sighed deeply and held the arm which had dealt three deaths so swiftly. Byron did not rush him, and went to lean against the wall, listening intently for the skitter of any approaching foes, but there were none. In the airless dark they brooded in silence each on their own paths. At last the ogre stood and nodded.
*
They ran quickly through the room and into the next tunnel, the sphere whizzing along just ahead of them to light the way. They turned again and again, choosing tunnels at random or at least which seemed to move towards the surface, coming on empty caves, knowing nothing about the layout of the labyrinth, and realizing as they went that though they seemed vaguely to move upward, the depths of the place, the extent of it was beyond imagining.
They passed many tunnels too small for either of them, looking precisely like those malevolent holes from the dig site. It was through these tubes, like portals into some hive-dimension, that they realized the nature of the creatures’ awful extra limbs. Out from one such tiny passage burst three of the beasts one after the other before them, and Ogwold could see that just as they scrambled from the aperture their backward facing legs and arms had been running along the ceiling so that they bounded against two opposing surfaces. These three were gone in moments, tearing down the hall in the opposite direction. Neither Byron nor Ogwold had moved a muscle since they had first heard the awful scraping noises of their digitless extremities. When that febrile scrabbling had finally faded into the cylindrical darkness, they silently carried on.
One long tunnel opened into a marvellously tremendous cave too tall with blackness and thick with gloom to betray its proportions. The sphere swept out into the void of its mass, delineating its features as it went. Over the uneven floor and among the ancient and flowing formations of rock thronged a great host of the awful creatures, garbling and croaking at one another, huddled in those same circles breathing shallowly and quickly, their helpless backward facing arms and legs flailing and twitching in the dank air. Yet by far the majority were packed even more tightly together and hunched over a sequence of long stone tables, smacking and tittering and gibbering as they savagely fed on dark bloodied meat, slumped all over in no particular order before them.
The way they ate was snake-like, for having no teeth they did not chew, and leant back so that their food slid down through their gaping mouths and choking throats directly to their stomachs. All down the enormous stone slabs the pairs of heads reared back to gag upon their food in lumps or dove down to gum up some new shapeless chunk. All the creatures stood the whole while, as there were no seats; the tables were rather gigantic troughs of food, and however ravenously they went about their feeding, there was nothing easy or apparently enjoyable about this process.
Ogwold and Byron stood still in the stagnant air, watching from the entrance. There were perhaps thirty of the creatures here, but most horrifying was what they saw when the sphere spiralled up to shine upon the craggy funnel slope of the cavern roof. At first it appeared that there were several tremendous stalactites there, but then they saw that these were a different colour from the rock, and that some of them swung in that same sickening way as had the egg sac from their cell. They looked like cocoons hanging pendulous in the shine of the light, yet it was clear they were far too large, and their limbs were free to move, for the moment wrapped up in a great leathery membrane such as they’d not seen upon the other Krug.
A particularly oafish creature then lurched into the great dining hall, dwarfing the huddled whispering things, and when it passed through the crevice in the rock which served as its entrance, they saw fluttering from its twisted back a fourfold set of black, webbed wings like those of an enormous aborjay in texture, but more like a moth in appearance. The entity was similarly pale and translucent as the other wretches groveling before it on the floor, and it too had only gaping toothless maws within the pale blind flesh of each its twin heads. As well it was covered in the same disgusting tendrils that writhed for surfaces, snaked along the ground, snatched and clutched as the creature moved. But this entity did not have any extra limbs, compared with Ogwold and Byron at least, and stood only just shy of the full stature of a grown Novare man. It certainly wouldn’t fit inside the smaller tunnels.
Most interesting of all, though the thing was an astonishing sight as a whole, the beast dragged Ogdof’s unmistakable massive sword behind it into the room, sheathed in its simple leather scabbard. It was clear that the sword was too heavy for the creature; its back twisted horribly and its wings flapped with noiseless exertion as it quaked merely to unsheath the thing. Even when it did manage to hoist the weapon up into its grip, it was clear that it would never be able to properly swing it. Yet there was a great clamour of screeching and gibbering among the crowd, whose tendrils had presumably sized up the weapon when it was dragged in vibrating against the cavern floor, and they seemed to think otherwise, for they all forgot their food and fell prostrate on the ground in a great reverent silence.
“Ogwold. Get me that sword,” Byron whispered. Already throughout the room the tendrils of hair picked up the notes of his voice.
“You’re sure you can swing it?” A new seriousness had come over Ogwold, such that he wondered not about the possibility of waking the foul creatures hanging from the ceiling. He was focused, like Byron, upon escape, survival.
“Trust me, it’s perfect.”
For the second time that night, or was it day, neither of them knew, Ogwold hardened himself for combat. But this time, though the images of the slain Novare, of the bloody rain puddles, the gaping, dead faces, the slain Krug so simply bifurcated surfaced in his mind, he felt the strong grip of the plant in his shoulder, snug around his heart, which steeled, and some new animus awoke within him. It was a hard, a resolute spirit, as capable of wonderful tenderness as it could crush a boulder in its grasp, and now it stood not beside Ogwold but with him. They went into the fray together with one clear thought—it must be done.
He charged the creatures this time before they could prepare a defence. His plant arm flourished like liquid cast from the shorebreak of his shoulder, suddenly condensed down in a fine edge and hardened into a larger blade than before as he swung. The sphere went with him, humming in his ear, lighting up the pale monsters as they came. The first wave of creatures lost their torsos, and Byron could not help feeling a swell in his heart. The sick things were like imps next to the size of an ogre, and even were Ogwold unarmed, now that he was committed to their defeat, they could not stand a chance. As he fought, his arm-blade grew mightier, and began even to extend during his swings to reach more distant opponents. When seven of the creatures had fallen, the remainder of their feverish number retreated desperately into the shadows, some of them wriggling up into the black tube holes.
Only the winged leader with Ogdof’s old slab of a sword held its ground. It struggled to raise it blocking as Ogwold brought his verdant blade crashing down upon it, displacing the massive weapon from the creature’s hands which hardly supported its weight so that it sparked against the stone floor and thudded heavily away like a column of stone, incapable of bouncing, glued down by its impossible mass. With one swift backhanded slice the mutant’s twin heads plopped to the ground, the body knelt in a breath, and slumped over dead, black, oily blood spouting all around like a babbling underground brook.
Panting, hunched over on his knees, Ogwold squinted and pushed the sweat-sodden locks of hair out of his eyes. The deafening hiss and chatter of the creatures packed along the cave walls was like spurs of ice scraping through his veins. Byron appeared silently and leant almost ceremoniously to grip the hilt of Ogdof’s old sword where it lay on the ground, smoking in the river of sick. He drew it up with seeming ease, and with a blasting grunt hefted the whole immense length of it over his shoulder. For a moment it seemed that he would fall right through the cavern floor, but then he sighed as softly as one who is at last reunited with some lost lover. The weapon was far larger and heavier than the sword he had taken from Leostoph’s armoury, and a much finer thing in essence. It was, he thought, almost the same breadth and length as the sword he’d carried long ago. Ogwold stared at him in total bafflement, for to lift the thing even he required a greater degree of exertion.
Then they heard the rustling, and the soft plopping of wet feet onto the stone floor in all directions. The sphere ranged about and they saw that the winged creatures roosted above had come down to meet them. They were just like the bearer of Byron’s new blade, though somewhat slighter of build. Their mouths opened and rasped hoarsely as they approached in low positions, raising daggers and swords of jagged rock. Byron only grinned more broadly in the pale light.
From shoulder to toe with a titanic slash he obliterated the first Krug so fast that Ogwold could barely see the blade carrying through the air. Leaping forward he swung across the scene still thick with exploding blood and disembowelled three more. Inky innards spilled from ravaged torsos, and they toppled over noiselessly. The others shrieked and charged. Two brandished clubs of wood, the other a long sharp rock. Byron finishing his swing had used the momentum to lift the sword up and over behind him, and now he brought it crashing down atop the nearest monster, cleaving it clean in two. With the blade now shooting straight out before him, he changed his angle deftly and lunged suddenly forward, impaling both of the remaining creatures along the great long slab of metal. Raising the hilt of the weapon, he pushed them sliding off with his boot. The whole effort looked even easier for him than when parrying Ogwold’s attacks in the morning. The ogre could only wonder how many of the beasts it had taken to wound him so grievously when they were captured.
Ogwold was silent, breathing heavily as he listened to the feverish flight of the remaining creatures, forcing themselves through the black holes and escaping into the cave-hive. But he realized that these heavy breaths were not from enervation, for he was quite bursting with energy and felt that he could climb any mountain without rest. It was adrenalin perhaps, or maybe, he thought, the green arm drinks from a fight as well. He stared at it cautiously, as if it possessed a mind of its own. Though it seemed to carry with it a beautiful peace, it too contained a great violence. He was yet able to accept that such violence may have come from his own heart, but certainly he had felt a kind of calm in winning the battle.
“They were monsters,” Byron said, partly reading his mind. “They would have eaten us or worse. And now they’ll return with hundreds more.”
“But they were like us,” said Ogwold. “They weren’t just animals. And they liked my father’s sword.”
“What’s not to like?” Byron swung the sword powerfully, as he did every morning, and a dank blast of air struck Ogwold in the face. “I could cut a boulder in half with this thing. It would crush an armoured man’s bones with one swing. Your father must have been hunting Euphran.” He grunted, hefting it back onto his shoulder and exhaling deeply as he rose beneath its weight. “He is a greater smith than many I’ve known.”
He went near to the crevice through which the first larger creature had entered, and picked up, fitted the enormous weapon into the simple scabbard there. When the vast leather length was then strapped to his back, the point of the blade nearly touched the ground, extending just beyond Byron’s calves. Ogwold was struck by Byron’s strength, for he was not a particularly large man, and certainly he was of slighter build than the winged Krug which had barely wielded the thing a moment ago.
“It does look finer in your care. You use it so well. It’s yours, Byron. But my father is no smith; he bought the blade from a Knight of Lucetal long ago.”
Byron spat and the fluid which struck stone was mostly blood. “That is unfortunate. But even among the barbarians there are great minds and hands.” He looked coldly into Ogwold’s eyes, which misted as the ogre tried to imagine how the brilliant armour and kingly ships of Lucetal were somehow barbaric. “You’re going to have to get over this killing business if you want to travel with me. I attract death. It’s my calling, you could say. And these mountains are evidently teeming with fiends. Already devils like that infernal Teperchael lie in wait. Who knows what lurks higher up.”
“Right,” Ogwold said, saddened to think how easily he had embraced the notion of the archaeologist’s friendliness. He sat upon one of the bloody stone tables to take many much needed breaths. The mercenary slouched and pressed one hand over his shoulder, finally allowing himself to grimace from the pain of his injuries, which had not completely healed spending so little time under the influence of the plant, spitting up gobs of blood too long forced down.
