The Lord Of Lightning (Book 3) (23 page)

"Find me," the Archer repeated, "for if all is lost, my dearest wish is to die near you."

The elf was overcome and could not speak.

Their parting kiss was long and passionate. They held their embrace as if they both wished to press the very soul of the other into their bodies. Then they parted.

The Archer rode hard to the east. And, the elf, nestling her human infant, rode hard to the west.

Chapter Eleven

Beneath the Depths

Fayollis, the man who had been shouting at Stralain and Stomikother in a vain attempt to join with Deifol Hroth awoke to find dirty claws holding him upright. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he discovered that he, and the fifty or more men who were with him, were in a cavern deep beneath the earth. And, every human stood trapped between two, tall, monstrous creatures that stood stock still.

The horrible things looked as though they were human once, except their features were stretched and decaying. Their heads were elongated and squared. Their teeth long and yellowed. Their arms and legs gangly and sinewy. They stood several heads taller than any living human in the darkened depths. The monster's eyes were all empty, black pits of voided sorrow.

The creatures resembled the ghaunts some spoke of in terrified whispers, humans that had been transformed by the Dark Lord's arcane arts.

"You desire to serve me?" A deep, honey sweet voice echoed throughout the black shadows of the cathedral of stone.

"If that is you, Deifol Hroth," Fayollis said with agitation, trying to sound brave, "we wish to be among those who will prevail-"

"Hush!" The voice of piercing evil commanded. "Learn obedience and the surrender of your souls."

"I- I don't-" Fayollis stuttered in fear.

Beneath the layers of dense chalk of the Syrenf Plains, the cavern was carved by the centuries from rippling water that flowed through banded brown stone, with ebony stalactites that hung down like spears dripping inky blood.

The smell in the cavern was moldy and wet. The sound of water dripping echoed all throughout the blinding darkness. The cavern was cold, cold as a graveyard on a midwinter's day.

The ghaunts all stepped back from the living humans and pressed their vile decaying bodies against the walls of the cavern as though they were trying to avoid some impending catastrophe from overhead.

The men with Fayollis pressed together, muttering with fear. Fayollis could hear some begin to weep. Fayollis looked back into the cavern to get a better sense of the hundreds, if not thousands of ghaunts that waited like corpses buried standing up on their feet. The cavern, with the ghaunts completely still, resembled a burial catacomb.

Fayollis could see a shimmer of energy pulsing from the back of the cave, from out of the black. It looked as if ghostly water was moving forward in a ceiling to floor wave. He could feel every hair on his body stand on edge from the approaching, pulsing power. His skin and bones began to vibrate. He clenched his teeth in anticipation and fear, but his teeth clattered anyway from the intensity of the energy. He heard screaming from the men in the back as the wave of energy hit them.

Looking to the back, Fayollis could see men being bodily lifted and stretched, their flesh browning and putrefying. Fayollis fell to his knees and curled into a ball as the men all around him screamed in terror and pain. From his fetal position, Fayollis could see the feet of the men all about him, levitating off the cavern floor, violently shaking.

Then, the energy dissipated. Fayollis looked up. He was unchanged, but all around him stood dead-eyed ghaunts, faces now corpse-like, bodies stretched. He was the only human left in the cavern.

As he heard the rattle of large, iron spears being passed to the new recruits Fayollis begin to cry in fear.

A failing prayer was only half uttered, as the monstrous beings that were once human jammed their spears into the  untransformed man. Fayollis' screams echoed through the dismal, black cavern as he was butchered by the ghaunts.

Yulenth reigned his horse to a halt for only a moment. The early morning sun was cold and harsh. Yulenth and his horse both breathed clouds of vapor in the chilly air.

"Farewell, Halldora, Queen of Man," Yulenth sadly said. "I wish you the best with your task."

"Fare you well, Yulenth of Glafemen," Halldora returned. "May the gods smile upon your designs, and win us the day."

"I fear where I am now to go, no god would smile," Yulenth said with worried grin. Then, the gray haired man spurred his horse on, and he rode into the abominable mists that covered the citadel of Deifol Hroth.

Yulenth rode his skittish horse down a path he knew to be safe from the grotesque, transformed garonds lurking in the miasma.

But as luck would have it, a garond, hunched over and squat like a crab, with fifty wiggling insect legs protruding from all over its body, sat waiting, broken free from its chains. Yulenth pulled on the reins, and his horse kicked its front legs high in fear. The magic-twisted garond grabbed the horse with both its massive claws. Yulenth leapt from the horse's back as the disgusting, mutated garond burrowed its grinding maw into the bloody flesh of the horse.

Yulenth hurried away, knowing the hungry monster would concentrate on his poor horse, and might attract other freed, deformed garonds.

Following a memorized path through the blinding, white mist, Yulenth came to a stone arch entrance leading into the citadel. The opening in the black wall should have had a normal garond guard as a sentinel. Yulenth looked around for a moment to see if the guard was nearby. Yulenth didn't want to be clubbed by a surprised guard.

With no sentinel in attendance, Yulenth cautiously entered the fortress of the Lord of All Evil Magic.

The stone corridor inside the citadel was dark and quiet. Yulenth pulled out his hand torch and lit it with flint and steel. It wouldn't burn long, he needed to quickly find a larger torch.

As Yulenth carefully stepped down the corridor, he saw a garond club lying on the stone flagstones.

At the next intersection, one path led down to the forbidden room with the creature, Lah'ugh'gloth.

Perhaps the vile demon had eaten another garond sentry, Yulenth thought. Yulenth wanted to have another look at the creature anyway, so he crept down the flights of gray stone steps leading down to the chamber of the thing that had no solid form.

At the last intersection that led to the door with the mystic sigils and runes carved into the thick oak, Yulenth heard a door open from the other direction off to the right.

Lord Desprege emerged from the dark with a grin that unnerved Yulenth. He had seen that look before, on Lord Stavolebe's face after he had made the final step into the total blackness of evil. Behind Desprege, Yulenth could see through the open door, steps carved out of living stone leading even further down into the earth. A noxious smell floated up out of the opened door.

"Yulenth!" Desprege cried. "I have just seen the most amazing thing."

"Is our Dark Master behind you?"

"Yes," Desprege answered. "He'll be up from the cavern in a moment, once he's finished with his new ghaunts."

Yulenth had one more experiment to try. Now had to be the time. He might never get another chance.

"There he is," Yulenth lied, pointing back at the empty door.

Lord Desprege turned to look, and Yulenth hit the short, fat, bald man as hard as he could on the back of his head. Desprege crumpled to the flagstones, unconscious.

Yulenth held very still. He centered and squared his thoughts. He allowed his mind to only imagine a small circle of white and nothing else.

Yulenth heard the sound of feet ascending the stone steps. He knew it was Deifol Hroth, but fought to keep his mind completely blank.

With his vision unfocused, and his eyes staring straight ahead, Yulenth could see the Evil One stop at the doorway. He seemed puzzled. Then, the Dark Lord of All Evil Magic held out his hands like a blind man, feeling along the stone wall as he entered the corridor.

Just before Deifol Hroth's foot touched Lord Desprege's prone body, Yulenth leapt forward and let go of his blank mental state. Deifol Hroth actually jerked back as though startled by Yulenth's sudden appearance.

"My lord," Yulenth said.

Deifol Hroth blinked as though his vision had just returned.

"Lord Desprege seems to have fallen and hurt himself," Yulenth lied as he bent down to try to rouse Desprege.

"How long have you been here?" Deifol Hroth asked in a slow and dangerous voice.

"I just arrived, lord," Yulenth carefully said, shaking Desprege, who began to revive.

"Where have you been?" The Lord of Lightning hissed as though he was seeing exactly where Yulenth had been and with whom.

"I was gathering more information for you, lord," Yulenth smiled, as he helped Desprege to his unsteady feet.

"I now know all I need to know," Deifol Hroth said with a flat, deadly voice. The Lord of Lightning quickly smiled, then let the smile drop. "Come with me."

The Dark One led Yulenth and Desprege to the oak door with the arcane symbols, barring the chamber to the unspeakable horror of Lah'ugh'gloth.

Deifol Hroth raised his hand and the door unlocked by itself and swung open.

"Enter," Deifol Hroth commanded.

Desprege stupidly marched right into the darkened room. Yulenth hesitated.

"My lord," Yulenth began. But, Deifol Hroth grabbed Yulenth by his tunic, and threw him into the room a though he weighed no more than a child.

Yulenth's hand torch sputtered to the flagstones of the room. Desprege immediately rushed to pick up the still smoldering light. He gently blew on the hand torch to keep it alive.

The sound of the oak door locking clanked through out the stone chamber.

Desprege huddled next to Yulenth as they both looked up, watching the mass undulating across the ceiling.

"Oh, you have returned for more conversation," a voice dribbled from the ceiling. "How very, very delightful."

"I do not think the Lord of Lightning has locked us in here to discuss pleasantries," Yulenth growled, looking about for some way to escape. 

"No?" Lah'ugh'gloth slimed, as the shimmering, transparent mass of its body shuddered across the ceiling to hang directly over Yulenth and Desprege. "Perhaps he has locked you in here for me to consume? He does that, you know. I find it rather distasteful. Oh, my. I made a rather humorous remark, unintentionally." Then Lah'ugh'gloth's gelatinous mass quivered with girlish tittering.

"You mean to eat us?" Desprege blubbered.

"Well, I do get hungry," Lah'ugh'gloth frowned with several disembodied mouths. "But I try to be courteous to those I find entertaining. Like you, Yulenth of Glafemen. I am most curious. How have you come along with your crisis of faith?"

"I have no crisis of faith," Yulenth said as he slowly drew his sword, "because I have the certainty of reason.

"No," Lah'ugh'gloth chuckled, "you have no crisis, because you have no faith to begin with."

"I believe in what I can prove," Yulenth said in a low voice, "and what I can explain."

"How do you explain me?" Lah'ugh'gloth said, sounding very pleased with himself. "But of course you can't. You can't explain or prove anything of magic. And yet it exists. Just because a thing happens, that you can't explain or replicate, it does not mean the thing has not happened."

"Then what is magic?" Yulenth said to humor the demon as he and Desprege carefully shuffled away from being directly under the mass of its gelatinous body.

"That is simple," Lah'ugh'gloth's mass shuddered with a giggle. "Magic is that which you desire made real by the  strength of your will."

"Explain," Yulenth said as he reached the oak door and carefully tried the locked handle.

"When you effectively use magic, you bend what 'is' to 'what you want'," Lah'ugh'gloth said simply, like a child.

"That is no explanation," Yulenth said as he desperately scanned the stone room for any other window, door, or escape.

"Hmm," the quivering mass said. "Perhaps it would be better to say magic is 'making what you envision manifest'."

"That is like saying, the sun is the sun because it is bright and rises in the morning," Yulenth said as he pushed Desprege away and motioned for him to move to the other side of the chamber in the hopes the mass would spread thin.

"You must explain how magic works for me to believe in it," Yulenth said as he held his sputtering hand torch high to peer in every corner. "What are the mechanisms? What catalysts? What are the essential principles? How do they function? No one can explain these things to me in a clear and reasonable manner."

"Magic works because it works," Lah'ugh'gloth said plainly.

"That's nonsense," Yulenth said as he inspected the oak door for any weakness. "That's like the fool who does something again and again, expecting results, even if he fails the first time."

"You must see to understand," Lah'ugh'gloth said, and, without any warning, a portion of its mass suddenly dropped onto Lord Desprege.

Desprege twisted and raised his hands as the sticky gel of Lah'ugh'gloth's body enveloped him. Desprege's mouth worked as though he was screaming, but no sound could be heard through the shuddering, transparent, glutinous substance of the demon's body encasing him.

Desprege looked like a child, helplessly, slowly flailing his arms. His eyes were wide with shock. He slowly shook his head in disbelief. His mouth was wide with a soundless scream. Then, his body jerked with a violent spasm, and then went limp. Life left Desprege's eyes, leaving a vacant stare. Desprege floated motionless. He looked as though he had drowned while suspended in the transparent mass clinging to the ceiling.