Bloodstone (7 page)

Angrily Kane cuffed the soldier away and returned to his searching. Once the rotting land had swallowed the ring, he could never reclaim it.

Alarmed, confused, Banlid jerked away from his leader. His racing thoughts reached a muddled decision that Kane had been struck on the head perhaps...clearly completely mad!

A wounded Rillyti, blood oozing from a deep stab in its chest, broke upon them. If its wound was mortal--as from its position it must be--the creature seemed not greatly disadvantaged. Croaking dismally, it spied the prone human, and its sword swung up. Banlid wasted no further breath on his heedless leader and met the amphibian's attack. Few of the men other than Kane had won out in single combat with a Rillyti--ganging up on the swamp giants being the only effective strategy--and Banlid was close to exhaustion. Still, his antagonist was badly wounded, and as the mercenary feverishly defended himself, he sensed an insidious attenuation of the creature's assault. For all this it was a tight duel--the Rillyti lost all regard for pain or injury as it felt its strength drain from its wounds. In one final furious effort, it beat aside Banlid's tentative counterattack and leaped to grapple with him. Shakily the mercenary sidestepped its lunge, delivered a deep slash to its side, and finally hacked the Rillyti to pieces as it fell on its face, still trying to crawl forward.

Gasping for breath, he looked about for another of the monsters. None rose to attack him. Groggily he contemplated his leader, dull disbelief set in his flushed face. The madman would have let the Rillyti split him in two, had not Banlid interceded.

Kane had crawled out at full length on the pool's edge, his hips balanced there--trunk, shoulders, face buried in the tepid muck. He raised his face for air, expression still distracted; then ducked his head and frantically churned the bottom slime with his bands. Stoically Banlid waited for matters to reach a head. A sudden splash, and Banlid thought Kane had dived in completely. Rather it was his excited thrashing, as he wriggled back onto the bank. He raised a mad countenance to the other. Slime and mud coated his face and hair, mingled with still flowing blood; a few swollen leeches dangled from the edges of his beard. Insanity burned in his cold blue eyes. His lips were twisted in a smile of triumph.

"All right... I found it," he announced in a low voice that held a harsh undernote. Carefully he wiped the ring on his filthy leathers, then slipped it once more over the middle finger of his left hand. Calmly he brushed his face clean with one hand and retrieved his sword.

Face impassive, he stared at Banlid, as if challenging the other to comment upon his bizarre behavior. "Well, let's see how many are left," he remarked.

Banlid nodded, deciding it was wise to ignore the scene he had just witnessed. Kane seemed his usual self--Shenan knew how sane that might be!--and the stress of battle did evoke strange reactions. The bloodstone ring drew his attention, and he wondered at the gem's eerie, sullen gleam. Was it some trick of the light, or did the stone appear to shed a more vivid luster than before?

The ancient causeway was torn apart by the violent struggle that had raged upon the swamp-rotted spine of red stone. Mutilated corpses of men and Rillyti lay strewn in grotesque heaps or floated in the brackish pools. Some of the Rillyti still twitched upon the sodden loam, like gigged frogs left to wither in the late afternoon sun. The bufanoid guardians were slain--reportedly one had fled into the swamp--but the toll of Kane's mercenaries was a grim one. Eight others had survived the attack, all relatively unscathed, for it, had been the kind of battle in which a disabling wound meant swift death. The earlier victim of the spider's fangs lay forgotten where he had fallen, a Rillyti spear standing from his ribs; Kane wondered whether the arachnid's venom had proved fatal before the coup de grâce.

"If we turn back now, maybe we can make the--"

"No one turns back!" Kane interrupted Banlid. "We're almost in sight of Arellarti now, and we'll carry out my original plan! I knew we'd probably have to fight our way through Kranor-Rill--you men were told of our chances when I selected you. Our losses were worse maybe than I'd figured, but we've driven through their guards. I'll see that each of you receives a bonus when we return."

"Kane, we've only killed a few! Shenan knows how many hundreds of these monsters are lurking in this damned swamp!" Banlid protested. "We don't stand a prayer to see another dawn, if we press on deeper!"

"Want to try blundering back through the swamp after nightfall? Then pray the Rillyti overtake you swiftly--they'll grant you a cleaner death than Kranor-Rill has waiting! Sure, we've only seen a few of the Rillyti... they're scattered all through the swampland. But we've likely beaten the only organized force they'll have in our vicinity--those who stood guard over the causeway. It'll take a while for these toads to band together in sufficient strength to overwhelm us, and before then we'll be headed back to Selonari. And at Arellarti there should be room to use our bows. The ruins will give us walls at our backs--a redoubt we can defend with archery should the Rillyti get brave again. And unless the legends lie, we may uncover weapons that will give us the strength to destroy an army!"

Banlid recognized that further remonstrance was futile, probably dangerous. Grimly he acknowledged that Kane's logic was apparently sound, although the red-haired captain offered only the most sketchy plans for escaping from Arellarti, once they reached the place. The expedition held ominous promise of being a one-way trip, and with this unpleasant foreboding Banlid again regretted the role Lord Dribeck had forced him into.

The day grew a mile older, and the ground displayed no inclination to rise. Kranor-Rill yet surrounded them--the swamp seemingly endless, an omnipresence of poisoned life and malignant decay that became relentless rather than monotonous. But the sounds of the swamp had altered. The cacophony of animal sounds persisted, albeit at somewhat muted level, but new sounds now underlay. A bass croaking-distant, but seeming to gather from ever more hidden throats as they progressed. Unseen splashes, startling in their rush, that could only mark passage of creatures of considerable bulk, though no large animals had been sighted for some time. Sounds of dubious portent, where a greater imaginative effort was demanded to supply optimistic interpretation than one bleaker. Despite Kane's confident manner--reckless, a better descriptive--an atmosphere of clinging fear settled over his men.

A far-reaching shadow made twilight of the swampland and alerted them before the close horizon grudgingly yielded view. Already the causeway was rising above the morass, its glassy stones less obliterated now, and the terrain began to drop away as they approached the dull red walls that loomed above the rotting land. An island jutted from the sea of decay, and only their instinctive awe of its alien architecture held them back from storming its yawning portal--as exhausted swimmers strive toward an unknown beach, no thought for what dangers might lie beyond the surf.

Arellarti!

Dwarfed by the paired obelisks from which the massive gates had swung-now the broken pillars were festooned with vine, the gate blasted into blackened and curiously fused fragments of pitted bronze alloy--they paused to marvel at this swamp-guarded city of lost legend. Eagerly Kane clambered up the tangled lianas and gained the wall, nearly breaking his neck as a creeper tore free of the parapet. Heedless of his exposed position, he stood braced against the skyline, hands cupped to shield the setting sun that peered back at him from the opposite wall.

Arellarti was a city of stark and wondrous geometry. Its formulation lay severely circular, with diameter stretching somewhat over three miles to the far wall, so Kane estimated. Walls of the mottled red igneous stone formed a rim a hundred feet high to enclose the city. Cracked and aslant in places, the walls had miraculously escaped the, centuries, although one quarter-mile section made a gap, where evidently the swamp had gnawed beneath the island. Beyond the gate, sunken stonework could be dimly glimpsed extending into the morass, possibly wharves for the long-vanished sea. Within the walls Kane could discern the outline of streets congested with debris and entwining vegetation, a perfect network of radial spokes and concentric circles whose precise engineering called to mind the deadly symmetry of a spider's web. So far as he could distinguish, the flawless geometry was extended even to the buildings that studded the concavo-convex city blocks, although distance and the general condition of extreme disrepair made this uncertain. Nonetheless, there seemed to exist an obsessive insistence that the bizarrely stylized architecture of one edifice be mirrored to the last alien angle by another counterbalancing structure. Briefly Kane noted that certain areas of smashed and toppled buildings appeared to lie in a punched-out pattern of destruction.

But his awareness of further details of the ruins was overawed by his attention to the monolithic structure that totally dominated Arellarti. A grin of triumph bared his teeth, and his bark of laughter caused wonder among his men below. Though an unknown few had ever crossed Kranor-Rill to spy upon these ruins, Alorri-Zrokros's description had been true. There at the center of Arellarti it towered like a vast hub--or like a bloated spider at the intersection of its wide-flung web, thought Kane, recalling his earlier image--colossal domed edifice over a quarter-mile across, whose smooth walls rose above the city to an apex of nearly a thousand feet. The city's seven radial streets converged on an open courtyard that surrounded the dome like a halo, and of an entrance there was no sign, the structure displaying the mathematically pure geometry that characterized all of Arellarti. Unless obscured by vines or effaced by time, any adornment seemed altogether absent from the dome itself, although the other examples of Krelran architecture showed bizarre patterns of geometric design etched into their stonework. Fissures and dark gaps that flawed the dome's soaring walls could be clearly seen at this distance, and the genius of alien engineering must have been marvelous indeed for the cyclopean structure to have resisted the crushing weight of centuries. In common with all else in Arellarti, the dome was constructed of red-mottled stone of evident igneous origin. As the late sunlight caught the city, Arellarti's precise symmetry--its glassy stones of burnt sienna, its measured streets choked with green lianas--suddenly reminded Kane of a brilliant jeweled mosaic.

Grunting chop of sword against vine sounded close at hand. Less reckless than Kane, Banlid and the rest had pushed their way along the wall to the debris-choked stairway that ascended the parapet. Cursing as they methodically hacked through the obstructive maze of creepers, they wearily shuffled over steps which were spaced to a height uncomfortable for human gait. Near the top, their efforts dislodged a nest of hornets, and the stairway disrupted into a mad dance of frenzied swatting and swearing as the gold-and-green insects swarmed over them.

"Shenan's tits, Kane! We should have taken the ape's way up like you did!" complained Banlid, several angry welts puffing through the dirt on his bushy-bearded face. With a breathless cheer of self-congratulation, the men finally gained the rampart. Throwing themselves against the uncrenellated parapet, they gazed upon the ancient city through sweat-blurred eyes.

Abruptly one of the mercenaries wavered uncertainly. "I can't seem to breathe!" he murmured hoarsely, fear spreading across his pale features. His comrades looked at him in amazement, then in alarm, as he slumped to the stones in a stupor, sweaty hands weakly pawing at convulsive throat, his breath a strident wheeze. The sound grew higher pitched, became ragged, then ceased, as his head rolled back and his limbs twitched aimlessly.

"Ommen have mercy--the hornets stung us all! We're all dead men!" moaned a Wollendan mercenary, as panic claimed the watchers.

"No, you're not! Stop your damned yelling before you shake the wall down!" ordered Kane. "Those hornets haven't poisoned the lot of you, or you'd all be flopping off the wall with him! I've seen this before--some freak of their blood makes a few people react like this to any harmless sting! Now get back and let me see to him--there's an off chance I can save him still!"

Pushing them away, Kane knelt beside the stricken soldier and whipped the dirk from his boot. Swiftly he felt along the spasm-knotted throat below the Adam's apple, sliced through surface tissue, and made a careful incision into the exposed cartilage of the windpipe. "That's putting him out of his misery," commented someone. "Only you missed the big veins."

Kane gestured impatiently. "I cut open his windpipe so he can suck air. See... his chest is trying to pump air, but his throat's clamped shut with poisoned humors. If I was able to bypass the constriction, he can keep breathing until his breath blows off the poisoned humors, and the airways will reopen. I've seen this work a few times when a man was strangling from something within."

His men looked on dubiously, still uncertain that the hornets had not doomed them all. Although comatose, the victim's chest heaved more regularly now, and breath could be heard rushing through the wound in an eerie, bubbling rasp.

Kane watched the object of his handiwork with the inspired interest of experimentation. "Couple of you bring up some of that cane we've been chopping through all day," he ordered. "I think I can get a hollow tube down his windpipe an inch or two maybe. Ought to hold back the constriction and keep the hole open."

Two of the men disappeared down the stairway. The rest remained grouped around the victim, watching with interest. A few bets began to be offered as to his chances.

Howls of death and booming croaks rose like gobbling thunder from below and shattered their absorption with their unconscious fellow. Crawling from the cover of the swamp- a horde of Rillyti erupted onto the causeway. Their number may have been a hundred or a thousand--the computation was pointless in view of the handful who stood against them. Rising from the morass wherein they had stealthily gathered force, they swept onto the high ground like an obscene tidal wave of misshapen flesh and gleaming bronze. Their rush was irresistible. Even as those on the wall turned in horror, the second soldier was shredded under a dozen blades; his companion had utterly disappeared. In an instant the bufanoid army had bounded across the intervening space to storm the walls atop which the interlopers made a hopeless stand.