Prisoner of the Horned Helmet (23 page)

THE GLASS CAGE

T
he smokey stairway descended to the high priest’s workroom. They crossed it and passed through a door beside the workbench, closing it behind them.

The huge rectangular room they entered was a stonewalled underground laboratory. A world of retorts, flasks, beakers, waterbaths, condensers, phials, ladles, crucibles, and corked glass jars holding human and animal organs:

hearts, gonads, livers, penises and tongues. A maze of bottle green vessels were mounted on the tables and connected to each other with glass tubing rising to large colorless crystal tubes suspended from the ceiling by iron bars. Many leaked hissing fumes that dripped to form fuming puddles on the floor.

The crystal tubes wound their way toward a huge, perfectly transparent glass vessel barely visible beyond the clutter of apparatus, the culmination of some mad thaumaturgical scheme.

The neck of the mammoth flask was suspended by iron rings from the ceiling. Its ten-foot bowl dangled into a large circular hole in the stone floor. Baak climbed a ladder to a wooden deck built around its long cylindrical neck. Using a pulley attached to the ceiling, he lowered Robin headfirst down through the neck into the bowl.

Naked, her limp, nut-brown body descended slowly into the crystalline glass. It magnified her to almost three times her normal size, and lust glimmered in Dang-Ling’s watching eyes.

When Robin landed on the bottom of the bowl, Baak climbed down the neck and untied her, then climbed back out and pulled the rope up behind him.

Dang-Ling had moved down a stone staircase that circled around the flask and now peered at Robin’s enlarged body hunting for a mark, numeral, or tattoo of some kind. At the bottom of the hole, he peered up as Robin tumbled over languidly onto her back, then over again onto her stomach. She half opened an eyelid, saw Dang-Ling’s soft boiled eyes glistening wetly only inches from her own, and moaned, collapsed again.

Hours later, after Dang-Ling’s priestesses, two middle-aged women named Dazi and Hatta, had induced various vapors and fluids into the retort, Dang-Ling was sitting tiredly on the staircase staring down at his subject’s wet, steaming body. Earlier, when snarling red smoke had swirled over her thrashing screaming nudity with its stinging bite, he had expected to see fangs or scales appear. Then, when the amber vapors were induced into the bowl, he had prayed for yellow cat eyes and claws to materialize from her flesh. But Robin had remained essentially unchanged. Then white powders nearly smothered the girl, but no insect wings or antennae appeared. And the ritually prepared saltwater which was designed to expose any relation to sea demons had also brought no results.

Robin sprawled on the bottom of the flask exhausted from pain and terror. Dang-Ling, exhausted from effort and frustration, sprawled on the stone floor beneath her. He sighed, then appealed to the worried faces of Baak, Hatta and Dazi, “This is terrible. Have we no other potions? Am I to believe she’s just another pretty girl?”

CHELA KONG

T
he vast area between the fort at The Narrows and the city of Bahaara was filled with mountainous sand dunes which moved constantly across the body of the desert. Otherwise it was an empty void as still as death, except for a cluster of upturned rock, clinging to which was the rubble of a village destroyed long before the coming of the Kitzakks. The village had been the desert marketplace for nefarious and dangerous magic totems carved from the rocks. It had been such a successfully offensive market to the ancient rulers of the desert that they had had it destroyed. Since that time its history had long been forgotten except for a few storytellers. All that the Kitzakks and other travelers of the road now knew was that it had been called Chela Kong. The reason underlying the success of the original residents had been forgotten by everyone, but the earth remembered.

The upturned rock was unlike any other in the desert, an eruption from deep in the bowels of the earth. These stones had helped form the surface of the earth before the nature of what was animal, insect, reptile, fish and fowl had been determined, before the nature of what was right and wrong had been considered. Undetected vapors were emitted by the rocks, and they had a peculiar quality. They revealed and magnified the mystical power within the tiniest and weakest totems so that no sorcery could hide in their presence. Instead, it was revealed in all its potential might and terror. This phenomenon was most potent after the midnight hour, when the sands of the desert had cooled and cold winds swept unimpeded across the land to summon forth, not only the nocturnal creatures who dwelled in the body of the sand, but the vapors.

Now, as the midnight hour approached, forty
nomad
slave drivers sat around fires in the midst of the rubble, and drew forth their totems. Descendants of the ancient people who once ruled the sand, they had been privy to the mysterious legends since childhood and, without understanding why, knew that when they camped in Chela Kong the drugs of pleasure they enjoyed were somehow made stronger. As they waited, they stroked and kissed the vials holding them.

They wore desert dust, smears of their own filth, and loincloths over blue-grey flesh. The women had shaggy, filth-laden manes of hair twisted with snakes. All their bodies were distorted by overdoses of Cabalakk. Arms and earlobes were elongated. Here and there a bald head sported short horns, a tail swished, and arms carried webbed, lizardlike fins. The heavy users were dog faced.

Spears stood upright in the soil beside each man. They were long, painted indigo and charcoal, and their blades were serpentined leaf shapes with serrated edges, tridents and axe heads.

The slavers drank a thick dark liquid that bubbled in small brass pans over fires. When midnight arrived, each
nomad
mumbled a short prayer, emptied his or her vial into the pan and drank the hot fluid down in one gulp. The drug made their blue-grey flesh twitch. Hot spots of crimson gathered in their bony cheeks.

Two overfed Kitzakk slave merchants, owners of the company which employed the
nomads
as guides and chainmen, squatted over a small fire in the clearing. They wore expensively embroidered yellow tunics and heavy jewelry. Untouched wine and fresh fruit rested in brass pitchers and bowls at their feet. Every so often the pair glanced at the darkness filling the surrounding desert as if they expected it to rush over and hit them.

Behind the two merchants, better than twenty forest boys shivered in cages stacked on wagons. Their chained sisters and mothers did the same on the ground. At the edges of the torchlit clearing oxen grazed noisily.

The two merchants huddled together until their stomachs touched. Using the ancient Kitzakk dream language, they repeated what they had already told each other a dozen times. That the Kitzakk Army was surely somewhere between them and the Barbarian Army, and that the two riders they had seen far behind them on the trail were nothing more than mercenaries headed for Bahaara. Not the dreaded Death Dealer. Then they glanced at their nomad chainmen, their only protection, and saw again what they could not ignore. Their horns, fins, tails and dog faces had enlarged, and even though there was no sign or sound of an enemy, the savages were preparing for battle, as if their desert-trained senses had heard and seen what the merchants could not.

The moon slowly slipped down the side of the blue-black sky, then sank below the flat endless horizon. Silence and darkness took command of the night.

It began with a soft thunk somewhere along the rubble of the northern wall. The sound was followed by the sudden appearance of a flying rope of blood which glittered against the black sky as it caught the firelight, then disintegrated into red wet jewels before vanishing in the blackness.

The nomads jumped up, spears in hand, as the headless body of the guard at the north wall staggered into view and fell to the ground. Bodies crouched, the nomads nervously jabbed their spears in front of them as if they could draw blood from the body of the night.

Behind their wagons, the merchants found a shadow big enough to hide in, and glanced about trembling. The Barbarian boys rattled their cages, and the girls and women wrestled their chains, then gasped and became silent.

Out of the bowels of the night appeared a menacing living darkness, a warrior mounted on a black stallion. His horse picked its way through the rubble easily, as if it had always grazed on the short, hard growth of destruction. The rider carried an axe decorated with streaming blood that glittered in the slashing firelight. A masked and homed helmet crowned his wide shoulders. The eye slits, like windows to his nature, glowed red, as if his bones and brain were ablaze.

The Kitzakk merchants began to sweat and whimper. The Barbarian captives stared openmouthed. The shouting nomads converged behind their main fire with their spears protruding like the quills of a porcupine.

The intruder dismounted, and strode into the firelight seemingly oblivious to the obstructions blocking his path. He kicked over a low wall as if it were a pile of brush. His shoulder took out a section of still-standing doorway. He pushed a second wall aside with the flat of a hand, and it obligingly fell on its back, kicking up dust which swirled reverently around his tramping feet. He marched up a pile rubble, looked down at the nomads, and raised his axe with two hands over his head. His muscles bunched, and he charged, an avalanche of steel.

A stride short of the waiting spear tips, he planted his foot and, pivoting on it, swung his axe in a wide sweeping arc. The blade carved a half moon out of the spears. The power of the blow propelled his heavy body into the blunted poles. Wood splintered and snapped. Spear tips caught in the Barbarian’s chain mail; others gouged his legs and slashed his forearm. He did not appear to notice. His axe was back over his head, coming down fast. This time it fed itself on meat and bone. Slavers fell spouting blood from necks, chests and arms. Blue-grey bodies writhed in wet red fountains. The axe kept at its task as a howl of savage pleasure rang out from the horned helmet.

The Kitzakk merchants watched with spellbound terror, then covered their eyes as the horror took on a new dimension. The black-clad warrior was slowly rising on a growing mountain of the dead and dying. Terror gave way to panic, and the merchants fled.

They raced down a footpath and into the shadow-filled southern desert beyond. They stumbled blindly past Brown John as he was hurrying up the footpath. He stared at them uncertainly, then dashed along the rubble of a wall, reached a rise behind the cages and stopped short. His eyes widened with shock, and he sat down before he realized he had to.

Gath of Baal stood on a pile of dead bodies working his axe. The surviving nomads surrounded him. Splattered with blood, they mindlessly charged up the bodies of the fallen into the Barbarian’s slashing axe. Bodies and pieces of bodies tumbled in the air, tossed on fountains of blood, and still they charged. Gath was knee-deep in carnage, slipping on bloody chests and heads. Dying men clung to his legs, bit them, struggled with the last of their strength to pull him down into their mire of gore.

Brown John did not see Bone and Dirken arrive until they, and the group of volunteers they led, reached the clearing. The same thing that made them stop short made the old man relax enough to notice their arrival.

The battle was over, and Gath had disappeared. Nothing remained but bodies stacked as high and wide as a haystack. Shuddering feet protruded from it, and bleeding faces and twitching hands.

There was a slight movement at the top of the pile. A severed tail fell away, tumbled down indifferently to dangle for a moment against a sword, then rolled to the ground and twitched fitfully until it finished bleeding.

No one breathed.

Slowly the stacked gore parted at the top and horns arose, bringing large pieces of carnage with it. The black steel mask appeared with its eye slits flaming. Shaking off bodies, Gath of Baal climbed out of the pile, axe in hand. He ripped spears out of his chain mail, then staggered toward the Barbarian captives.

He searched through the chained women mindless of the fact that he was bleeding on their trembling faces. His blood mixed freely with their flowing tears and splattered against the hair of their bowed heads. Not finding whom he hunted, he growled with frustration, severed the women’s chains with his axe, then ripped the cages apart and moved into the night.

The boys fought clear of the wreckage of their cages and fled into the waiting arms of their mothers and sisters as the volunteers broke rank and hurried to them.

Brown John greeted his sons and they pointed with pride at the desert. To the north a line of flickering torches had appeared across the horizon. The Barbarian Army.

The old man smiled with rare pleasure, then saw a dark, horned silhouette moving up a wide path of rubble. Reaching the top, the figure stood against the night sky at the heights of Chela Kong staring south. Whiffs of vapor swirled about his legs. The vapors thickened until they enveloped his body, as if the rocks themselves were breathing. Brown John trembled with a sudden chill. It was not any man he had ever known, but a demon.

Brown John rubbed his arms until the chill was gone, then bravely marched himself toward Gath. When he reached the heights, he found the dark man slumping against a piece of wall. He did not look at Brown John or greet him. The helmet’s eye slits still glowed as they stared south.

Anguish and disgust rushed through the old man, but he made himself squat, then asked warily, “What’s happened to you?”

“I must see her,” Gath said. His voice was a distant, desperate rumble. “I must look on her face and touch her.”

A vague expression of recognition crept through Brown John’s wrinkles as he watched the red glow die behind the eye slits. He said, “I think I begin to understand, but not nearly enough to help. What is the nature of this magic that possesses you?”

The great metal headpiece dropped forward, and Gath caught it with his hands, held it with his elbows resting on his knees.

Brown John edged closer until his eyes could discern the dark figure, then sat down beside it. He reached to lay a comforting hand on Gath’s shoulder but hesitated. He suddenly felt unequal to the task confronting him, unable to draw forth the energy, skill and friendship the night demanded. His wrinkles fell slack, and he felt a thousand years old. It was a long moment before he spoke.

“My friend, we have two choices. Advance with the army and battle the Kitzakks until you are dead of exhaustion… or try to find her ourselves, secretly enter Bahaara and take our chances. Your helmet will be difficult to disguise, or perhaps it will not even permit such an adventure, but I believe it’s our best chance. What do you think?”

The shadow made no reply.

“I think we must face the fact that if you die, then she surely will.”

The shadowed figure shifted restlessly.

Brown John waited, then grunted mockingly at himself. “What an arrogant fool I’ve been. Two days ago, I asked you to confide in me because I thought that if I knew what the pieces of this puzzle were, I might fit them together. But I had no conception then of the magnitude of the players in this game. This whole affair has gone far past my poor powers of understanding, and if you are as aware of the presence of evil as I suspect you are, there is no way I could expect you to give me your trust. There is simply far too much darkness within me, even a man with only a particle of your powers could see it.”

Gath did not move or speak.

Brown John chuckled mockingly. “From the very first day at Lemontrail Crossing I have been conspiring to use you for my own dreams, to make certain my Grillards remained free to practice their frivolous magic. And what happens? I am usurped by a girl of my own choosing. A mere child who will not have the slightest idea of which necks to feed your axe, to say nothing of which nation to have you bring down. I am utterly defeated. And unable to help you… the one I would help the most. Yet I will tell you, Gath, whether you trust me or not, I would not trade places with any man. But, if you wish it, I will leave you alone now.”

It was a long time before the shadow replied. When it did, its voice came from the depths of a tortured soul. “Stay, old man, and listen.”