Robin sprawled on the bottom of the flask exhausted from pain and terror. Dang-Ling, exhausted from effort and frustration, sprawled on the stone floor beneath her. He sighed, then appealed to the worried faces of Baak, Hatta and Dazi, “This is terrible. Have we no other potions? Am I to believe she’s just another pretty girl?”
Fifty-five
The vast area between the fort at The Narrows and the city of Bahaara was filled with mountainous sand dunes which moved constantly across the body of the desert. Otherwise it was an empty void as still as death, except for a cluster of upturned rock, clinging to which was the rubble of a village destroyed long before the coming of the Kitzakks. The village had been the desert marketplace for nefarious and dangerous magic totems carved from the rocks. It had been such a successfully offensive market to the ancient rulers of the desert that they had had it destroyed. Since that time its history had long been forgotten except for a few storytellers. All that the Kitzakks and other travelers of the road now knew was that it had been called Chela Kong. The reason underlying the success of the original residents had been forgotten by everyone, but the earth remembered.
The upturned rock was unlike any other in the desert, an eruption from deep in the bowels of the earth. These stones had helped form the surface of the earth before the nature of what was animal, insect, reptile, fish and fowl had been determined, before the nature of what was right and wrong had been considered. Undetected vapors were emitted by the rocks, and they had a peculiar quality. They revealed and magnified the mystical power within the tiniest and weakest totems so that no sorcery could hide in their presence. Instead, it was revealed in all its potential might and terror. This phenomenon was most potent after the midnight hour, when the sands of the desert had cooled and cold winds swept unimpeded across the land to summon forth, not only the nocturnal creatures who dwelled in the body of the sand, but the vapors.
Now, as the midnight hour approached, forty nomad slave drivers sat around fires in the midst of the rubble, and drew forth their totems. Descendants of the ancient people who once ruled the sand, they had been privy to the mysterious legends since childhood and, without understanding why, knew that when they camped in Chela Kong the drugs of pleasure they enjoyed were somehow made stronger. As they waited, they stroked and kissed the vials holding them.
They wore desert dust, smears of their own filth, and loincloths over blue-grey flesh. The women had shaggy, filth-laden manes of hair twisted with snakes. All their bodies were distorted by overdoses of Cabalakk. Arms and earlobes were elongated. Here and there a bald head sported short horns, a tail swished, and arms carried webbed, lizardlike fins. The heavy users were dog faced.
Spears stood upright in the soil beside each man. They were long, painted indigo and charcoal, and their blades were serpentined leaf shapes with serrated edges, tridents and axe heads.
The slavers drank a thick dark liquid that bubbled in small brass pans over fires. When midnight arrived, each nomad mumbled a short prayer, emptied his or her vial into the pan and drank the hot fluid down in one gulp. The drug made their blue-grey flesh twitch. Hot spots of crimson gathered in their bony cheeks.
Two overfed Kitzakk slave merchants, owners of the company which employed the nomads as guides and chainmen, squatted over a small fire in the clearing. They wore expensively embroidered yellow tunics and heavy jewelry. Untouched wine and fresh fruit rested in brass pitchers and bowls at their feet. Every so often the pair glanced at the darkness filling the surrounding desert as if they expected it to rush over and hit them.
Behind the two merchants, better than twenty forest boys shivered in cages stacked on wagons. Their chained sisters and mothers did the same on the ground. At the edges of the torchlit clearing oxen grazed noisily.
The two merchants huddled together until their stomachs touched. Using the ancient Kitzakk dream language, they repeated what they had already told each other a dozen times. That the Kitzakk Army was surely somewhere between them and the Barbarian Army, and that the two riders they had seen far behind them on the trail were nothing more than mercenaries headed for Bahaara. Not the dreaded Death Dealer. Then they glanced at their nomad chainmen, their only protection, and saw again what they could not ignore. Their horns, fins, tails and dog faces had enlarged, and even though there was no sign or sound of an enemy, the savages were preparing for battle, as if their desert-trained senses had heard and seen what the merchants could not.
The moon slowly slipped down the side of the blue-black sky, then sank below the flat endless horizon. Silence and darkness took command of the night.
It began with a soft thunk somewhere along the rubble of the northern wall. The sound was followed by the sudden appearance of a flying rope of blood which glittered against the black sky as it caught the firelight, then disintegrated into red wet jewels before vanishing in the blackness.
The nomads jumped up, spears in hand, as the headless body of the guard at the north wall staggered into view and fell to the ground. Bodies crouched, the nomads nervously jabbed their spears in front of them as if they could draw blood from the body of the night.
Behind their wagons, the merchants found a shadow big enough to hide in, and glanced about trembling. The Barbarian boys rattled their cages, and the girls and women wrestled their chains, then gasped and became silent.
Out of the bowels of the night appeared a menacing living darkness, a warrior mounted on a black stallion. His horse picked its way through the rubble easily, as if it had always grazed on the short, hard growth of destruction. The rider carried an axe decorated with streaming blood that glittered in the slashing firelight. A masked and homed helmet crowned his wide shoulders. The eye slits, like windows to his nature, glowed red, as if his bones and brain were ablaze.
The Kitzakk merchants began to sweat and whimper. The Barbarian captives stared openmouthed. The shouting nomads converged behind their main fire with their spears protruding like the quills of a porcupine.
The intruder dismounted, and strode into the firelight seemingly oblivious to the obstructions blocking his path. He kicked over a low wall as if it were a pile of brush. His shoulder took out a section of still-standing doorway. He pushed a second wall aside with the flat of a hand, and it obligingly fell on its back, kicking up dust which swirled reverently around his tramping feet. He marched up a pile rubble, looked down at the nomads, and raised his axe with two hands over his head. His muscles bunched, and he charged, an avalanche of steel.
A stride short of the waiting spear tips, he planted his foot and, pivoting on it, swung his axe in a wide sweeping arc. The blade carved a half moon out of the spears. The power of the blow propelled his heavy body into the blunted poles. Wood splintered and snapped. Spear tips caught in the Barbarian’s chain mail; others gouged his legs and slashed his forearm. He did not appear to notice. His axe was back over his head, coming down fast. This time it fed itself on meat and bone. Slavers fell spouting blood from necks, chests and arms. Blue-grey bodies writhed in wet red fountains. The axe kept at its task as a howl of savage pleasure rang out from the horned helmet.