Sorcery in Shad Page 22

  Tarra’s gaze took in the arena in its entirety: it must be forty-five to fifty paces across wall to wall, like a mighty pit itself within walls rising up maybe twelve to fifteen feet. Set in these walls, iron-barred archways led to nether vaults; above them an amphitheatre or stadium, with tiers of stone-hewed seats, going up and up, divided at intervals by aisles permitting access.

  Odd, but I think I’ve seen all this before! Tarra told himself where he looked grimly down over the heads of the Yhemnis massed in front of him. Last time it was in Klühn: Gorgos and his Temple of Secret Gods. And now it’s here. Ah, but last time it worked out in my favour, while on this occasion …?

  He let dumbfounded, horrified eyes scan the area, whose walls above the archways were adorned with jutting, red-and yellow-flaring flambeaux. In places there were still patches of yellow sand, but mainly the sand was red and slimed. Evidence of a great slaughter lay everywhere: torn bodies, and bodies without limbs, and other remains which weren’t human at all. As for the remaining combatants: a tight knot of figures was fighting even now. Fighting? In the centre of the arena, a mighty melee!

  There were Northmen in it, just two of them left – and it did Tarra’s Hrossak heart a power of good to see a trio of steppemen there, too, one of them being Narqui Ghenz, with whom he was somewhat familiar – and also a hulking, tow-headed youth who could only be the last survivor (along with Loomar and Jezza) of all the slaves Black Yoppaloth had shipped here. Six of them left, only six, of the hundred and odd they’d once numbered; and the bulk of them strewn in bits and pieces all around the arena. Gods, what a battle it must have been!

  As for the cause of the mayhem: no need to look far for that – or those!

  Back to back and side by side, Northmen, Hrossaks and bull-shouldered youth stood; their weapons were huge claws and mandible pieces torn from dead opponents; more of these hybrid monstrosities – things from Yoppaloth’s subterranean vats and breeding dungeons – ringed them all about. And of the latter…they were things out of a madman’s worst nightmares!

  They had human parts, some of them, human legs and thighs and occasionally heads, but for the most part they were entirely alien. Squat, lobsterish, red-eyed and slavering and huge! Or spiderlike, with many human arms. And one was slender and shaped like a mantis, half as tall again as a man, with chitin-plated hooks at the ends of its forelegs; but its head was a man’s, with tusks like a wild pig curving from its chomping mouth!

  Nor were these hybrids the worst, for there were others which may or may not have been men entirely, but which were in any case quite dead – but active nevertheless! And these were all the proof Tarra needed to show that indeed Yoppaloth’s masters had taught him something of necromancy, for they’d obviously been called up from the grave! And a full dozen of these monsters and corpses encircling the knot of survivors, while as many again stood back, only waiting to take their turn should one of their blasphemous brothers fall in the fray.

  Even as Tarra watched, the mantis-creature fastened its hooked hands about the neck of one of the coarse-maned Northmen and yanked him bodily from the tight central knot. He was lifted up, hurled down in the gory sand well apart from the others. Badly wounded and clasping his torn neck, he lay there for a moment, then stumbled to his feet; and Tarra fully expected that the mantis-thing or some other monster would pounce upon him and make an end of it. But that wasn’t the way these games were played. No, for the beast things of the arena merely singled out and weakened the prey, whose doom was to be sealed in an entirely different manner.

  Black Yoppaloth cried, ‘Hold!’ And the howling of the Yhemni mob in the amphitheatre seats and aisles faded to silence in a moment. His voice was not the voice Tarra had known; like the man himself, it was bloated now; its keen edge had gone, leaving it dull and booming, more like the croak of some vast, obscene and blear-eyed frog. And now he came, down the dais steps and striding almost drunkenly toward his victim, the crippled Northman, so that Tarra would not have known this were him if not for his height, his robes, and the crimson-lacquered crest of his head.

  And in his hand… the Suhm-yi Sword of Power – Tarra’s sword – against an unarmed, half-dead Northman! The Hrossak gulped back his rage, for rage was no good here – but he saved it for later. How could he ever have imagined there was anything of nobility in this monster? Yoppaloth’s personal magick? So the wizard Teh Atht had avowed; but now, to Tarra Khash, the bestiality of his creature seemed obvious. And as for Tarra’s sharing this power: it was the last thing he wanted. He’d be a man and live a life, not a lie! As for this ‘show’ in the arena: why, there wasn’t even a contest in it, and it had never been intended that there should be!

  All activity in the arena of death had ceased; the encircled group of human combatants could only look on, like the now breathless, bloodthirsty spectators themselves. Tarra wondered if they’d be so bloodthirsty if they knew their own lives hung in the balance this night. He guessed not, but hated them all the same. And so Yoppaloth strode to the doomed man, came up to him and showed him the scimitar’s keen, curved blade. ‘To make the end of it easier for both of us!’ And he laughed with that monstrous voice of his.

  Before the other could think or even move, Yoppaloth struck upwards with the sword, twice, slicing into the tendons under the barbarian’s arms and in his armpits. And now he was truly crippled. He cried out his agony, crumpled into a seated position on the slimy sand. Tarra gaped, astonished both by Yoppaloth’s cruelty, and by the sheer speed he’d displayed, which far surpassed anything the Hrossak had hitherto witnessed. Aye, and Yoppaloth’s accuracy, too, which had been better than hairbreadth.

  And the Hrossak was still gaping when the fiend tossed down his sword to the sand, leaned forward and grasped the barbarian’s head between his powerful hands. In the next moment, then Tarra understood the bloated appearance of the necromancer, for now Yoppaloth began to draw off what was left of his victim’s living strength!

  This must be how it had been for the Yhemnis taken in Yoppaloth’s black-tasselled tent. The Northman seemed to age visibly; his skin turned to leather in the time it takes to tell; he shrivelled down into himself, becoming an old, old man. Nor was his torment finished, for as his limbs began a spastic twitching and his flopping trunk toppled from Yoppaloth’s grasp – even as he commenced his journey into death – so something stirred into life in that terrible arena.

  A green shimmer had sprung up about a certain massive stone idol, one of the many dozens whose carved figures paraded in a grotesque circle around the arena. It was the image of Yibb-Tstll the Soul-Stealer, whose stony surface suddenly took on a molten emerald appearance. Tarra already knew something of Yibb-Tstll – mainly what Yoppaloth had told him, that the demon god took souls and was one of the Old Ones – but now he fixed his eyes more firmly on the idol and observed for himself. This was the first time he’d seen an actual likeness of that Dark Deity; but as his eyes widened, so he learned why Yoppaloth had warned him that to know Yibb-Tstll was a most dubious privilege.

  The statue was all of nine feet tall; of more or less manlike proportions, it had a head of sorts – a polished black node atop unevenly sloping stone shoulders – with a pair of eyes which were frozen in odd-seeming positions. One was more or less naturally placed, if a little high, but the other was down where the corner of a mouth might be found in a more normal piece of sculpture.

  The sloping shoulders were cloaked, as was the body beneath; but the cloak, carved of the same basaltic stone as the god, was open in front to reveal many polished black breasts. This seemed an anomaly in itself, since the figure was supposedly male! Beneath the petrified folds of the cloak and half obscured, a cluster of night-gaunts clung tightly, almost lovingly, to the barely glimpsed body of the god. In sum, the idol was a nightmare – and much more so when suddenly it came to life!

  That was Tarra’s first thought, that Yibb-Tstll lived and moved in the arena of death, but then he saw he was mistaken. In fact what he saw was
only a simulacrum or spirit of the Dark Deity himself, a ‘ghost’, which now flowed out from the stone and separated itself from it, and completely detached moved like a green-glowing wraith toward Yoppaloth and the stricken, dying Northman.

  As it went, so the thing took on something of solidity, until with the exception of its colour it was the twin of the statue which housed it – but one which left no tracks in the gore-spattered sand! Then, with its cloak billowing in a sickly slow-motion, it closed with Yoppaloth and their mutual victim and paused while the necromancer drew back. The spectators, crowded in the amphitheatre, had been silent, awed up to this point; now they roared their applause:

  Yes! Let it be now! Take his soul and send him to hell, damned forever!

  Greenly illumined, the monster-god stood over the Northman’s shrivelled, twitching form. The god’s feet, or whatever propelled him, were hidden beneath his billowing cloak; his eyes, glowing like balefires, were full of a hideous mobility; they slid over the surface of his head and face with a swift and apparently aimless motion, like the meandering of slugs but vastly accelerated. Then—

  The demon-god reached out from beneath his billowing cloak three grey- and blackly mottled things which might be arms, each terminating in a nest of seven grey worms which must serve as fingers. Two of these arms grasped the pitiful husk of the Northman and drew him upright like an empty sack; the third loathsome member spread itself wide, like some weird, seven-armed squid, and the tips of its digits entered eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth! Then they slid home to fill those orifices entirely, and the barbarian’s face and head were enveloped in the slime-filmed web of that awful ‘hand’.

  Yibb-Tstll took nothing physical (there was little left to take), but what he did take made all of the preceding torture merely a prelude. He took the very soul! The Northman’s shell collapsed entirely, and as the Dark Deity withdrew his slimed ‘fingers’ from his head, so there sounded a shriek whose origin could only be hell – the hell of the barbarian’s knowing that he’d be tormented for all eternity!

  In the next moment the horror of the vacillating eyes let what it held upright collapse, withdrew its ropy arms back inside the cloak, flowed back to its idol sanctuary and melted into the stone. The green glow remained, flickering over the basalt like liquid cancer …

  And the ‘games’ recommenced.

  Again the defenders, only five of them now, found themselves under attack from their inhuman, hybrid, and corpse adversaries; and almost at once the young Hrossak Narqui Ghenz was taken. ‘No!’ Tarra cried out, as a spiderlike monstrosity dragged Narqui screaming from the knot of survivors. Tarra’s cry was lost in the renewed uproar of the crowd, and when he would start forward down the steps of an aisle he found his way blocked by their milling black bodies where they scrambled to seek better viewing positions. Ignoring him as he fought his way through their crush, they had eyes only for the scene in the arena.

  The spider-thing had pierced Narqui’s body with poisoned fangs; he stood, swaying, one hand to his bleeding wounds, mouth open half in shock, half paralysed by venom. And Yoppaloth bearing down on him, carrying a weapon as before. But this time he’d left the scimitar with the gem-studded hilt behind atop the onyx dais; the weapon he held was similar to a pike, but it was not a pike; Tarra Khash knew exactly what it was.

  Reaching the low balcony wall which ringed the deep arena and contained the first tier of stone seats, Tarra was in time to witness Yoppaloth’s thrust. Again he cried out: ‘No!’ But too late. The slender head of that dreadful weapon drove home in Narqui’s side. This time, however, Tarra’s cry had been heard loud and clear, for the spectators had once more fallen silent. It was heard by all who watched, and also by Black Yoppaloth himself. All eyes turned to Tarra Khash. But his own fierce gaze burned only on the face of Yoppaloth.

  Narqui Ghenz had fallen to his knees, his hands grasping the shaft of Yoppaloth’s weapon where it pierced him. He turned his eyes pleadingly on his tormentor, but Yoppaloth was gazing up at Tarra Khash. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’ve come. And didn’t I warn you to stay away, Hrossak?’

  As his words echoed in that unholy place, so swords shrilled as they flickered from scabbards, and a moment later guards came plunging from the rear of the amphitheatre, hurling Yhemni citizens aside where they blocked the aisles. The first of these overeager bullies reached Tarra, found himself kneed in the groin as the steppeman ducked under his arc of steel. A second later and Tarra had wrested the sword from him, used its hilt to club him unconscious. Child’s play – but other guards were closing with him.

  ‘Stop!’ Yoppaloth commanded. And to Tarra: ‘Very well, Hrossak, since we both know why you’re here – come, join us in the arena!’

  Their eyes locked and Tarra knew he stared at a man bereft, a man bought and paid for in madness by the Old Ones! And yet he held the lunatic’s gaze, until the necromancer found it a mighty effort of will to break the spell. And Tarra thought, perhaps there’s magick in me after all!

  But then Yoppaloth threw back his crimson-crested head and laughed, and he shouted: ‘Come on, what are you waiting for? What’s another steppeman more or less?’ And with that he twisted the metal hand grip of his terrible pike.

  Tarra heard Narqui’s shriek of unbearable agony and it was like a fire that burned him. Something snapped in his head and bled fury like acid into his brain. Yoppaloth laughed again and turned his back on the Hrossak where he reeled in horror and outrage on the high balcony; he withdrew his weapon from Narqui’s body, grasped the mangled man’s head and commenced to draw off his remaining strength; and Yibb-Tstll, too, once more came flowing from his idol to claim his tribute of a soul.

  Up above the arena, someone tried to take Tarra’s sword away from him. Almost without thinking, he butted the man in the face, jumped up onto the wall; and taking the sword in his teeth, he leaped down to the sandy floor. He landed, rolled, came upright with the sword in his hand. It was high time a Hrossak showed what he could do!

  Meanwhile …

  Amyr Arn had found and carefully released the catches which held the iron grille in place across the arched entrance to the arena; now, seeing Tarra leap down amongst the beast-creatures, he put his shoulder to the bars and shoved. The gate crashed down in the sand, and before the dust could settle Amyr had bounded into view.

  The arena and amphitheatre were well lit by many dozens of flambeaux, but the light they cast, while ample, was ruddy and yellow, reflecting like molten gold from the silver sheen of Amyr’s Suhm-yi skin. Naked except for a loin-cloth, he might well have been one of Yoppaloth’s creatures, but the undisputed Lord of Shad and Shadarabar knew that he was not.

  ‘What?’ cried Yoppaloth where he’d returned to his dais. ‘And is Shad full of trespassers this night? Well, we’ll not worry how this one got here; no, for it’s a fact he’ll not be leaving!’

  Tarra had started after Yoppaloth, but a wall of hybrids and corpses had turned him aside, driving him toward the four original combatants. Not that he went unprotesting: a spider-thing with a man’s face perished on the point of his sword, likewise a pair of corpses where he left them headless, twice-dead on the sand; but the rest of them were too many for him, and finally he joined the bloodied, weary knot of survivors. By then, too, he’d spotted Amyr Arn, and at first had been unable to accept the evidence of his own eyes. Then Amyr (a mentalist, and familiar with the Hrossak’s mind) had sent:

  Ask about it later, bronze one, if there’s to be a later. Right now we’ve a fight on our hands! And he came weaving his way through the arena’s many monstrosities, to join the beleaguered group in the centre.

  Tarra had time only to give Amyr Loomar Nindiss’ knife before the surrounding hybrids and tomb-spawn closed their ranks again. And then all was mayhem.

  In the fighting, Tarra saw that Yibb-Tstll had taken Narqui’s soul. He vowed revenge. He’d not rest until Yoppaloth and the monster-god who was his mentor and tormentor were stopped, or until he himself was dead – which at t
he moment looked like being his fate anyway. No way the six of them could hold out against odds such as these. Then:

  ‘Wait!’ cried Yoppaloth, and again the arena fell quiet as the vat-things drew back a little. From his dais, Yoppaloth called out: ‘The time draws nigh – my time, the world’s time, the Hour of the Coming – and still the contest draws on. Events have been delayed. Ah, but I know a way to speed things up! Hrossak, do you remember how your pure heart quailed at the waterhole, when the Northmen would have taken my brides and used them? I couldn’t allow it, you’ll recall – for they weren’t “my” brides at all but Yibb’s! Innocents, virgins in mind and body: such souls are the tenderest tidbits to one such as Yibb-Tstll.’

  He turned his bloated face up to the amphitheatre’s crush. ‘Guards, now bring on the girls – and we’ll witness how a heroic Hrossak reacts to that!’

  At least Jezza’s away, Tarra thought, though what good it would do her or her brother in the long run he couldn’t say. But he saw the terrible logic of Yoppaloth’s twisted mind: no way Tarra and his handful could hope to protect a bevy of helpless girls in this pit of monsters; all of their time was consumed in simply keeping themselves alive! On the other hand, Yoppaloth knew Tarra, and knew he’d be obliged to try.

  The girls were quickly brought on stage, led from their ‘harem’ quarters down into the bowels of the ziggurat and then deeper still, finally jostled into the arena through one of the barred, floor-level hatchways, and the grille fastened in place again behind them.

  In the interim another Hrossak had been taken, nipped off at the knees by a lobsterish nightmare and dragged away screaming for Yibb and Yoppaloth’s delight; and in that same interval of time the twirl of morbid green light rising into the arena from the throat of the polished glass pit had contracted and drawn down its whirling mushroom head through the chimney, so that the brightness of the twister had acquired something of density, spinning there like a great green top or inverted cone of near-solid matter.