Demonworld (19 page)

Saints of the Sacred Oasis

Eragileak, the guardian demon of the valley, knelt among the bushes and watched his hated foe. In the clearing ahead, the great black-scaled lizard, Serpens Rex, was grinding against Bilatzailea, the succubus who had taken Saul’s seed only hours before. Even though built for this sort of work, she still found it difficult to accept the reptile’s obscenely powerful thrusting. Releasing the right balance of pheromones was also incredibly difficult, because her people had next to no knowledge of his genetic makeup. One wrong scent, one imbalanced secretion, could cause the horny monster to realize he was making love to a potential enemy and send him into a murderous rampage. Bilatzailea knew this was her greatest performance ever and treated it with great care; because Serpens Rex had an unreasonably voracious metabolism, an inability to handle extremes of temperature, and only marked his territory with mating signals once every decade, it would be no surprise to her if she found out that this “king of the reptiles” was the last of his kind.

But what a powerhouse! Blindness was right – his seed could provide unstoppable storm troopers for the great Ritual of Sacrifice that was to come…

Finally the great lizard stared into the distance, mouth open, and gave one last powerful thrust that threatened to drive her pelvis up into her spine. He gushed into her and produced a sound like a rooster deflating.

Bilatzailea was filled with joy. She had it… she had it! Now if she could only get away with her life intact!

It was Eragileak’s turn. He lifted a heavy stone and crept from his hiding place. It had sapped a lot of his strength to hide the light of his soul – the purple light that shone from his belly – but knowing that he would soon kill his greatest enemy gave him power. Carefully, carefully, he crept into the clearing.

Bilatzailea did not have to look to the side to know that her brother was near. Slowly she edged herself away from the black lizard. The monster’s enormous phallus slid out of her with a wrenching sound of violent suction that woke him from his post-coital paralysis. Bilatzailea froze – then the lizard sighed and collapsed on top of her. Hundreds of pounds of dead weight crushed her and thousands of sharp scales dug into her. She was trapped under the behemoth.

Eragileak lifted the heavy stone, then paused. Crushing the lizard’s head could potentially kill Bilatzailea, too. The seed she carried was far more important than his personal grudge. He studied the monster, unsure of what to do. The small of his back – perhaps crushing that would immobilize the beast long enough to find another opening. Eragileak shifted his weight, lifted the stone, then…

He heard a cry in his mind. An order to stop. Once again, Blindness, the lord of the oasis, jerked Eragileak’s leash.

He was told to
watch
.

Serpens Rex shook. His arms shuddered and his head lolled from side to side. His tongue leaped and shivered as if trying to flee a sinking vessel. The great lizard pushed away from Bilatzailea, then stood on weak legs. With lurching movements he approached Eragileak, then stood before him, arms at his sides. Eragileak dropped the heavy stone and was dumbfounded. The mighty Serpens Rex… now, a puppet!

Eragileak probed the channels and found his uncle Blindness. Far away in the world but right beside him in the landscape of their mental space, Eragileak saw Blindness as a dark mote ringed by a halo of dazzling brilliance. With a thousand sharp fingers he had probed the brain of the human he’d recently taken into himself. He had hundreds of brains packed into his sac – animals, ghouls, primitive humans – but none could match this new one. Most brains he consumed were shaped by fear, limited by environment, starved by poor diet, and crippled by a thousand bad habits necessitated by the wasteland. But not this brain. This brain did not know fear! Moments of anxiety, a few quick surprises, that was all. But true fear, the fear of living under brutal masters in an uncaring environment day after day, was alien to this brain. It knew only the hunger for more information and the joy of continually seeking out stimulating interactions, thus its potential was…

Amazing
, said the voice of Blindness from the ring of fire.

For hours he had dug, prodded, fed and starved, threatened and rewarded, and used all the old tricks he knew to open up minds and make them his own. And now, he had even been able to slip into the doorway that sexual release had opened in the simple mind of Serpens Rex.

Now
, said Blindness,
he is one of us
.

Eragileak approached the great lizard. He put his face against the monster’s. No response. He slapped him lightly across the face, waited, then slapped him again with enough force to send a man’s head spinning like a top on a neck full of shattered vertebrae. Serpens Rex staggered, then resumed his obedient pose.

Eragileak was torn. He still wanted to see his old enemy dead. He traced long, dirty nails lightly across the lizard’s face, delicately pried his mouth open, felt the warm tongue all the way to the back, then dug one of his claws into the thick meat. Eragileak’s claws were not sharp, but still he dug in, then tore a long line of broken flesh down the middle of the lizard’s tongue all the way to the very tip. Blood ran out in hot channels and pooled in at the base of the mouth, filling the cracks between yellow teeth.

Eragileak watched, fascinated, then nodded. He wanted Serpens Rex dead… but perhaps this was better.

Bilatzailea stood, groaning and hissing in pain. Her skin was imprinted in red fish scale patterns and she clutched at the opening to her primary incubation crevice, fearful that Serpens Rex had damaged the apparatus beyond repair. “I’m going back home now,” she said aloud. Eragileak was startled at the sound, then reasoned she must be limiting her open channels in order to spare him an awareness of her physical pain. “Those invaders… it’s up to you now.” She paused, then said, “Up to you and your new
friend!
” She lashed out with a sharp kick at the back of Rex’s knee, staggering him. Eragileak laid a hand atop the lizard’s head, then watched Bilatzailea disappear into the forest.

Eragileak felt Blindness tugging at his awareness. Once more the light about the dark mote flared as more of the new brain’s defensive layers were stripped and its potential was unleashed. Eragileak gazed in wonder, for the lord of the forest was summoning an army.

* * *

The mind of the lord passed over the forest, and the tribes were called.

First, the Tongue Eaters. They squatted in a moist, narrow canyon, their bodies little white mounds unmoving in the mist. Their leader woke in the night and gave a hollow cry. Then the angry males, plagued by throat infection and painful venereal leakage, also felt some god pass through them for one moment. They rose from their dark crevice and went into the night. As they marched they grunted the hollow tone that was theirs and theirs alone, a tone that no other tribe envied the use of, for this clan did not earn their name by eating the tongues of others, but by chewing off their own.

Now the Stone Skins. Tough and dull-witted even by ghoul standards, and prone to rashes that scabbed over like the flesh of the mountain on which they lived, this tribe felt the call and left off from the ritual torture they were inflicting on one of their own. Better prey had been promised them, soft prey free of callouses and unused to pain. The hunters left their clansmen, feet bound by vine, skin torn and bones chipped from thrown rocks, suspended from the cold stone of the mountain.

The Rot Gnawers felt the call. Pale and allergic to sunlight, these bulb-eyed ghouls coated their greasy skin in soot and dust and crawled in dark tunnels. They only ate what was already dead, and their favorite game was to hold down one member and drop maggots into his eyes and nose and laugh while the maggots slowly burrowed into meat and brain. Because they spent their lives in darkness, they ceased to use facial expression. As they flowed smoothly out of their dank tunnels, it seemed as if the blank-faced dead were rising to consume the world of the living. The blind god promised them a place of hiding far to the north, cold tunnels untouched by morning, and there they would find warm, fresh game.

The Chanters of Prayer were gathered around their sacrificial pit when the lord interrupted them. Their tribe was short and had spindly limbs and, since they could not compete with the other tribes in the hunt for food and mates, they had decided to rule in the secret realm where the gods dwelled. To this end they dug pits in the ground and caught the beasts that fell within, killed them, then the butchers would descend and divide the meat while the leaders fell on the ground and rapidly chanted the maddening gibberish that would trap the souls of the beasts. Their leaders often listened to the bones of the dead; just as the sounds of the sea could be heard in seashells, so too could the demands of the dead be heard from the other side through the cold bones. Now when the lord came to them and spoke in their minds, their leaders threw their bones and danced in fear, terrified that their own system of rule might have some basis in reality. After much confusion, they took up their knives and clubs and ran to the mountains in the north, where they would find their ultimate test, their greatest sacrifice.

The God Feeders also heard the call. Their tribe was greatly feared throughout the valley. For years they had abused the other tribes before the lord of the forest came to them. They were patient hunters with grim faces, and they often laid their excess kills at the entrance of the crystalline world where the lord dwelled. Many feared them, but few envied them: Because of their diet of raw meat, they left trails of writhing worms and maggots wherever they squatted. And they were quick, very quick, to turn on their own. Now the God Feeders saw visions of mountains, they saw caverns and a trap made of numbers, and they ran north on all fours to make the vision real.