Tales from the Spice Road

Chapter One

The distant sound of water dripping into a pool echoed plaintively through the dark, dank cavern, marking time like some liquid pendulum on a clock fashioned from apprehension made material. It was cold, and the air noisome with a mineral smell mingled with a noxious necrotic sweetness that makes bile rise in the gorge like a bloated fish, belly up in a weed-choked marsh. He dared not light a torch, nor waste his strength on any magical method to let his vision cut through the utter blackness until he was certain it was time to act. Moments crept by with agonizing lethargy as cold sweat began to trickle down his back. Somewhere in the darkness, One Ton sprawled, unconscious or dead. Zendas had seen him go down with a gash on his head spraying blood and maybe bits of bone just before the torch failed. He would have to do this alone.

Though he strained his hearing to the utmost, the young wizard could hear only the maddening drips, the source of which which he imagined first as his companion’s lifeblood steadily draining away, then as the overflowing slaver of the monstrosity’s unwholesome maw. Not moving a muscle, barely breathing, he felt his blood throbbing through veins and arteries in his neck and wrists and desperately hoped the sound of his adrenaline-shocked heart would not guide the unseen fiend to him.

It had all happened so quickly. One moment, he and One Ton were inspecting a pile of disarticulated bones, ribs snapped, skulls curiously halved like shells of soft-boiled eggs, the next, they beheld primal violence unleashed with savage mastery. One Ton had cradled a skull in his massive hand to inspect the huge tooth that lodged in the bone when Zendas thought he had heard a stealthy shuffle from the cavern’s tenebrous depths that stubbornly resisted the feeble light of his friend’s torch. One Ton had heard it, too, and spun, bringing the torch round to investigate. Then, abandoning its stealthiness, IT had sprung upon him from the murk, its loathsome bulk, wet with putrescent slime, covering the distance from the shadows to the source of light so fast it seemed more to appear next to the mercenary’s side than to properly move there. A glistening arm terminating in obscenely twisted and clawed fingers had lashed out with such force that One Ton’s head snapped back on his neck, a look of surprised incomprehension frozen on his face as his hulking corpus crashed ponderously to the cavern floor like an enormous oak felled by axes, the torch buried beneath. Before the light was extinguished, Zendas had caught a fleeting glimple of the abomination’s face, eyeless, fantastically wide mouth gaping wolfishly to reveal rows of teeth erupting from the jaws like wicked triangles of death. Just as the torch was snuffed out and the thing’s unnatural head turned toward him, Zendas, more by instinct than by conscious decision, cast a spell which teleported him instantly away from where he had stood to buy himself time to choke down his panic and horror and determine some course of action that might save his life and that of his companion who he hoped more than believed was still alive.

The spell had not sapped his strength too heavily, but the mage from Nataro knew that he had to use what remained carefully, for his continued existence depended upon it. Zendas’s mind raced, desperately flipping through remembered pages of books from the library in Odairo where he had spent three years as an apprentice, hoping for some bit of lore that might avail him in this dark hour. He heard his hunter moving with the deadly, unhurried purpose of a cat stalking a frightened rat, inching step by stealthy step closer to pouncing range. It could sense him in the darkness; it didn’t need light to hunt. But he did. And he didn’t have time to spare; he’d have to make one spell simultaneously provide illumination and protection while hopefully injuring the vile … thing. It moved with almost no sound, but the foetid odor surrounding it like an unholy aura betrayed its sly progress toward lethal proximity. Somehow, perhaps through a change in air pressure or some electrical sensitivity of the skin to the uncanny, he felt the creature was dangerously close. To wait longer might mean forfeiting any action at all, save dying.

Summoning up his remaining strength, Zendas focused his mind on visualizing an image of multhued lines of force woven together like some vast and complex spider web, seeking its inner order. With practiced effort, he forced aside the chaos and fused the lines into a multidimensional crystal. His hand shot out, fingers in an arcane shape amplifying the crystalline form which became a syllable hoarsely barked from his fear-parched mouth, and the glittering mental image sprang into reality as fresh sweat dripped, stinging his eyes and dampening his coarse woolen shirt.

And the silence and darkness which had reigned since the attack on One Ton was broken.

He perceived the light first. Painfully bright after the utter darkeness, flames burst into being in an arc before the wizard’s slight form, casting flickering light that housed long shadows which danced on the cavern walls like black devils in orgiastic frenzy. In the midst of the sudden conflagration, not more than a few feet distant, crouched the creature, its slimy skin already blistering from the heat of the blaze.

Then came sound, more painful than the brightness, the screams of the monster slapping back from the stone wall, echoing through the cave above the roar of the wall of fire, tearing at the wizard’s eardrums as though they were talons instead of sound. Its screech was high-pitched, almost like a little girl’s, but of far greater amplitude, giving outlet to its searing agony. The stench of burning rotten flesh filled the caves’s claustrophobic confines.

The creature leapt back, retreating out of the unexpected and unwelcome conflagration. Zendas could not read into its featurless face any insight into its next action. Would it retreat? Was it beaten? Or was it merely regathering itself for a second attack?

Seeing the fiend reach a clawed hand to the wall, the slight man knew it meant to wreak vengeance upon he who inflicted its pain. Seeing an opportunity in the chasm that split the cavern floor, a plan coalesced out of the panic of Zendas’s mind. Again he concentrated, this time his visualization was of countless lights, flying in a chaotic cloud like impossibly colored fireflies. These he quickly choreographed into an ordered dance, their hues harmonizing with their movements and scintillating signals. Again an uncanny syllable coupled with a deft movement of hands held out this time almost as if in supplication. More of his strength ebbed away with the strain of shaping the spell, but it was well-spent. The arcane working had warped space such that, despite how the deadly predator crawled toward him, it would find itself instead farther away. But this outrage against the fabric of the universe required payment; power was pulled from him to sustain the spell each moment it was maintained, sliding disconcertingly out of him like entrails drawn by an executioner.

Confounded, infuriated, the cthonian demon strove to close the gap between itself and its prey, its fangs dripping venomously. Its twisted, crablike hands and feet gripped the stone, letting it scurry across walls and ceiling like some great wingless bat. It screamed again with the timbre of torn sheet metal, the carrier signal for a ferocious menace. But each time it reached a sickeningly glistening arm to claw itself toward the wizard, it only edged sideways and backward, talons scraping and digging into the rock with the steely sound of daggers.

Soon it would be over the rift in the floor, but would it be soon enough? Zendas was already winded with the exertion required by his spell, and his still had one more to weave. He summoned up a new image in his mind’s eye, a multidimensional lattice of shifting waves of force forming pinnacles and valleys of potentiality. He put his effort into molding these to his will flattening those in a discrete area to a impossible smoothness, the seconds stretching out into what seemed like hours in the manaspace of his mind. His fingers traced a gesture, formed a symbol. With sweat streaming down his face, his tongue fashioned the syllable he needed but, as he gave it voice, he instead gasped with the effort, and the image instantly faded.

Nearly spent, sweat stinging his eyes, his muscles trembling with the strain of sustaining his earlier magic as it stretched out across time and space and requiring more of his energy to keep it from snapping, the wizard looked up at the creature, still clinging to the ceiling. Weakly, he visualized the lattice again, panting as he smoothed the purturbations of the field one by one to reveal a small zone of perfection. He let go of his one spell to give strength to the other and normalcy crashed back in, rebuking his intervention like a slap across the face.

The creature felt the change. It sensed that it could again make headway toward the puny human who had defied it, angered it, hurt it. A long, deadly hiss betraying its pleasure of savoring satisfaction soon to come crept out of its hideous jaws on breath rank with unnatural rot as it resumed its inverted, loathsome creeping past stalactites that mirrored its fangs.

Zendas extended the zone of perfection in his mind, flattening out each field of uncertainty, pushing the potentiality into position so that the lattice in that area was now paranormally smoother than the cosmos could possible allow. Again his he brought up his hand so that his fingers could weakly trace their gesture, form the required symbol. His vision dimming, his balance failing as he maintained the visualization, he uttered the syllable his tongue and throat nearly refused to form. The image, the gesture, and the syllable mingled in a synergy that expanded each component into a new and irresistible force. Reality shifted itself, acquiescing grudgingly to his magical demand as he put forth his waning power into this working.

The monstrosity crawling toward him felt this change, too, and frantically clawed at the stone. But they could not gain purchase; it was as if the rock was somehow transmuted into diamond polished smooth and greased, and the talons clicked against it in vain once, twice, and no more. With a loud scream of surprise, the unwholesome creature dropped from the ceiling like a slimy putrid fruit from a dying tree.

The thing’s vile body hit the stone floor at the edge of the chasm with a heavy, wet, hollow sound punctuated with the sickening snap of bones.

“Blast!” Zendas blurted, realizing he had mistimed his spell. The beast had not fallen wholly into the pit; instead, it clung with one arm to the floor adjacent, its loathsome head peering above the void. Looking past the flames still separating them, the sorcerer saw his adversary scrambling out of the pit. It had two arms out now, and was hauling itself up over the edge, snapping its slavering jaws in fury.

Zendas waited behind his screen of fire, and gripped his staff in the knowledge that he had too little strength left for any spells of consequence against such a foe. The staff, which he had carved out of a piece of rosewood as one of his first assignments as an apprentice, felt smooth and reassuringly cool in his hand. It was straight and round down its entire length, save for a crook at the top which he had put there as a stylized suggestion of his master’s familiar hat which swept forward slightly and then abruptly up, as was once the fashion in Odairo. Zendas thought of the old man, seeing his wrinkled brown face set with eyes deep with wisdom, sorrow, and affection. “Grant that I may not disgrace you, Jiru!” he said to the memory as the fiend advanced.

It sprang up, leaping like an abomination of some frog cruelly crossed with a great cat. Clearing the eldritch flames, it arced down, its claws extended like a deadly phalanx. Zendas pirouetted away from the dread clasp and swung his staff at the creature as it sped past to the floor beyond, but missed. With preternatural speed the creature was on its feet again, pressing the attack. Brandishing the rosewood staff in two hands, Zendas frantically swept aside the sweeping talons. The beast was crowding him, trying to push him into the flames which now lay behind him. The wizard brought his staff up to ward off an attack from one scimitar-nailed hand, but failed to protect himself from a vicious slash from the other, which ripped the flesh of his chest with three parallel lacerations, ugly, seeringly painful, but not deep.

Zendas smote the caven floor with the polished rod, and a loud crackle of arcane power sparked out at the creature with a flash of violet light. It staggered back, screaming in pain again, even as the wizard swayed from fatigue and went down on one knee. He had only enough stamina left for one more attack, and he hoped beyond hope he could execute it before the demonic predator could land its next blow. As the beast coiled itself like a spring that would release its energy in what would certainly be a final attack on its enfeebled prey, a huge form rushed past from through the flames, bellowing with rage as it bore down on the beast.

“One Ton!” gasped Zendas as he fought in vain against the leaden heaviness in his limbs and sank to the ground.

Grasping a heavy mace in both hands, the mercenary brought the weapon down with such savage power it knocked the creature back a yard. Before it could rise, the huge man planted his knee on its chest and grasped its sinewy neck with one hand while his other raised the weapon for another blow.

The creature, shrieking with fear as much with rage, ravaged One Ton’s arms and chest, cutting through leather and iron ringlets of mail and it fought to spit venom into his face. But the big man, eyes filled with indomitable and deadly purpose and brimming with blood streaming down from a horrid wound that would have killed a lesser man, hammered down with the mace once more. The screams were cut short by a sound like a melon being split open, and the beast quivered briefly, its brains dashed out in a revolting spray across the floor.

One Ton slowly got up, and held his head as he staggered over to the wizard’s side, blood soaking his torso, arms, and face. He lit a torch in the now fading flames, and extended a thick, muscular slab of a hand to the wizard.

“Come on, friend,” he said wearily. “Let’s get out of here!”

Copyright 2020 by Anthony Shostak. No part of this may be used for any purpose without permission.