He howled with the crying torment of death. But still he stood.
The coldness abated, then the heat came surging back, like flames searing through his veins. His muscles corded, then bulged and stretched the confining chain mail until it was molded by his body. His bones swelled within his meat until his joints accommodated his weighty mass. He fed on the power of the helmet.
He looked down at himself uncertainly, then strode on through the foreboding landscape to the center of the swamp where the stone bridge spanned the two ponds. Sunlight trickled through the leafy roof. Reaching it, he stopped and bathed alone in its splendor as understanding and exhilaration surged through him. He was a massive horned demon of black metal and sinew graced by golden light, drinking air and holding the bridge with booted feet as if all the elements were personal possessions. The helmet had transformed him. He was death, and he had never felt so alive.
Thirty-eight
Gath looked up toward the sky, and fire glimmered behind the eye slits of his helmet with an insatiable and unnatural hunger.
High overhead among the branches of the tree cover there was movement, the angular jerking movement of Feldalda tree pythons. Their grey-green color and sharp angles made their long, thick bodies look like tree branches. Suddenly they defied their instinct to hide themselves, serpentined to a position directly over Gath, and deliberately threw themselves into the air. Their bodies flattened, catching the air, and they fell in a controlled dive toward him, with saliva flying from their open jaws.
Flames spit from the eyes of the horned helmet. Gath’s body sank into a cocked position, eager to feed.
Fear glittered in the eyes of several of the pythons, as if they suddenly had serious thoughts of turning back.
The axe soared skyward in a sweeping arc. The blade kicked back shafts of sunlight, then sliced through the first wave of pythons to send heads and lengths of body flying. One reptile, eluding the axe, hit the helmet, and its jawbone was driven back into its brain. The mass of swarming snakes, living and dead, fell over him, and he dropped on his back, losing his axe. Rolling over and over, he pounded the tangle of squirming muscle with fists, elbows and knees.
Jaws clamped down on a horn of his helmet, around his metal-clad knees, and over an elbow. Living lengths of thick muscle wrapped around his legs, neck, and arms. In one mass they wrestled, pulled and rolled toward the edge of the bridge.
Gath ripped an arm free, drew a dagger and began to saw. Blood spurted from severed necks and trunks, drenched his chain mail and blinded several snakes. A flailing head drove the dagger from his grip. His legs and chest were wrapped in snakes, being crushed. His only weapons were his fingers. He sank them into snake flesh. The bodies were too thick for the grasp of his hands to hold, but his fingers continued to squeeze relentlessly.
The cold nothingness of death again coursed through him. But this time it exhilarated him. A thundering, cavernous roar echoed out of the mouth hole of the helmet, and his fingers plunged into the meaty bodies, ripping away handfuls of flesh. The reptiles, writhing for escape, dragged Gath’s body and axe off the edge of the bridge, and he plunged heavily into the water below.
The helmet sizzled and brought the murky liquid around it to a bubbling boil as flames continued to spit from the eye slits. The surviving reptiles floundered off, churning up the muck to blind Gath. On his hands and knees, and with his lungs aching for air, he probed the muddy bed hunting for his axe.
Moments later, the spike of the horned helmet rose slowly out of the murky slime, followed by the steaming helmet. Gath, gasping, stood shoulder deep in a fetid, black and blood-red pool of mutilated lengths of snake. He waded onto a small island of mossy earth, and stood panting and dripping slime, axe in hand. An ominous, deathlike silence pervaded the swamp.
Suddenly he dropped into a slight crouch and turned slowly in place.
Something large and dark loomed toward him out of the light at the center of the lake. It emerged teeth first. The elephant-sized alligator. Green slime dripped from its rotting jaws. They were parted, showing jagged, sharp stumps, dark with yellow and black holes. The alligator belched, and a pale green mist issued from its mouth.
The Death Dealer staggered back gagging and blinking at the alligator’s foul, stinging breath, then glanced about. He had an audience now. A crowd of fair-sized alligators, no more than twenty or thirty feet long, floated on the water not far off. Snakes were gathered in the treetops, dangling recklessly to get a clear view. Cape bulls, wart hogs, lizards and swarms of white ants covered the banks along the raised road and the bridge overhead.
Gath looked back at his latest threat.
Reaching the island, it shuffled forward to do what it, the Lord of the Swamp, had done for centuries: destroy any competitor that invaded its world.
The ancient predator spread its mouth until its upper jaw blotted out the sun, leaving Gath in shadows to contemplate the thick ropes of slime that stretched between the upper and lower teeth. Then he bolted forward, and leapt in between a gap in the lower teeth. He advanced on the two tonguelike slabs of pink muscle blocking the throat, his axe slaughtering the living red meat underfoot. The alligator gagged violently, throwing Gath backwards into a puddle of stinging digestive fluids.
Then the alligator remembered to close its mouth.
The Barbarian, crouched in the bowl of the jaw, watched the upper jaw descend and snap shut. The roof of the reptile’s throat was only a few feet away. With all his strength he thrust up to drive his axe blade through the pulpy roof at the back of the mouth and into the brain.
The monster sucked in its breath, and Gath was pulled, tumbling, toward the throat. He spun, bringing the axe handle around in front of him, and it stuck in the sides of the throat like a fence rail, brought him to a stop.
Gath, heaving for breath and with body stinging, looked around. The flames from the helmet cast eerie orange light on the dark living cavity dripping saliva. The whole structure shuddered. Slowly the cavity began to roll over, then flopped upside down, dropping Gath on his back against the roof of the mouth. Saliva puddled around him, then water began to flow between the predator’s teeth and fill the bowl as the alligator began to sink.
Once more Gath felt death’s cold bite.
Thirty-nine
The giant alligator, after thousands of years of service to the Lord of Death, was dead. It floated belly-up at the eastern edge of the Noga Swamp. Its massive head was moored in mud. It had obviously been used as a raft.
Beside the body were footprints through the mud, and into a stand of tall reeds, some parted and crushed by booted feet.
Rage distorted Cobra’s face under the glittering, silver magnificence of her skullcap. She swore bitterly, curses that her attendants noted as substantially more colorful than usual. They stood warily beside her on the road, fearing to comment on the disaster before them. Beyond the group, within the thousand shadows of the swamp, small reptilian eyes glittered and bodies trembled.
Cobra shuddered and hugged herself, muttering, “He will wish he had died here in the swamp. I promise it.”
She stepped off the road and followed the footprints toward the reeds. “You will wait here until I return.”
They bowed low in reply.
The footprints marked a path through the reeds and around the skulls marking Trail’s End, then vanished on hard earth. Instinctively she reached for her Glyder Snake, then remembered her pocket was empty and scowled. Down the trail she found shrubs and brush recently crushed by some bulky creature. Beyond them was a new trail of crushed undergrowth. Whoever made it had no fear of being tracked. She followed it anyway.