At first time passed by slowly, the days dragging on as each of them took turns carrying Grubble’s rotting body. After a two-day march, they found an area with soil soft enough to bury the warrior respectfully. No one spoke as they laid him to rest. Bipp topped the grave with a cairn of stones.
“He deserves a hero’s parade in Dudje,” Bipp said, choking on his words. “Not this pitiful grave far away from home.”
Logan placed a hand on the gnome’s shoulder to comfort him. “Aye, he was an amazing man who died a warrior’s death that surely the gods themselves could smile upon. We were better for knowing him.”
Corbin was not sure how much belief he held in the gods anymore, but he found his brother’s humility touching. Bowing their heads, they stood silent vigil for a few hours before forcing themselves to resume their march.
As they walked, Corbin filled them in on everything he had witnessed in death. At first Bipp doubted it had all actually happened, thinking perhaps it more likely some deep dream Corbin had been lost in on the brink of death. On the other hand, the gnome saw how readily Logan was to accept his younger brother’s word.
Either way, the decision was made for them. The way back to Dudje was lost, the bridge to Ul’kor destroyed, and the surface was supposedly close by, based on Corbin’s testament. They were determined now to find the man named Isaac who would help them free the people of New Fal.
Three more days dragged by in the wide lifeless tunnels.
“Bah, I think we’ve been sent on a wild goose chase by your ghost lady,” Bipp said, breaking the silence.
“We’re running out of rations too,” Logan said, shaking his head.
Bipp’s stomach growled loudly at the mention of food. They had run dangerously low on provisions and were forced to ration them.
“Could be a wild shot,” Corbin said, “but then what do you make of that?”
They had just reached the top of a sloping tunnel. Before them, the cramped area widened out into a taller cavern, at the end of which was a dead end of sorts. The companions all drew their weapons as they approached, carefully surveying their surroundings.
“There’s something you don’t see every day, eh?” Bipp wondered in awe, referring to a large, shiny column that reached from the ceiling to the floor.
“What do you think it is?” Logan asked his brother as they made their way closer to the strange pillar.
At its base, a doorway lay open in ruins, exploded from the outside in, crushing the small room behind it into a twisted, crumpled mess.
Corbin stuck his head through the opening to gaze up into a shaft of darkness. “Looks like some sort of manmade tunnel.” His words echoed up the metal tube.
“Aye, like an elevator but smaller,” Bipp reasoned, comparing it to the pulley system used to transport workers and ore in the gnome mines back home.
They clambered over the wreckage inside the shaft to search for footholds he said should be there. The iron rungs stretched all the way up, disappearing into the shadows above.
Corbin stopped his brother from climbing so he could tie a rope around each of their waists, connecting them in a lifeline.
“We have no idea how far up this thing is going to go. Best to play it safe,” he reasoned.
Logan had to be extra careful gripping the rusty metal rungs, lest he crush one with his mechanical grip. Up and up they went, climbing for what felt like eternity. Bipp’s shorter arms grew tired quicker than his companions’ did, so the men had to take turns carrying him on their backs.
Just when Logan’s muscles were burning beyond belief, aching for rest, he caught a glimpse of something to their right. “Look there,” he said. “I think it’s a door.” He pointed to a faint rectangular outline set in the shaft next to them.
Bipp nodded excitedly, scrambling up his back and stepping on his head to get back on the ladder. “If this is like the ‘vators back in the mines, we should find an…ah, yup, here it is!”
He worked a rusty door the size of his hand open. Inside it, he struggled to turn a metal valve. At first it did not want to budge, but then, with a sharp groaning, it slowly turned counterclockwise. The outline moved inward, revealing a double set of doors that shifted slowly to either side, opening a portal.
Light flooded the shaft from the chamber beyond, stinging their eyes, which had grown accustomed to the bleak darkness. One by one, the companions pulled themselves through the opening, until they all lay in pile, breathing heavily and rubbing sore muscles.
Logan began laughing, happy to be out of the never-ending tube. Looking around them, he could see the dim light was coming from a small recess in the wall. Standing up, he gauged the room they were in was not built of stone or wood. The walls’ material was alien to him, yet comforting in some primal way.
“Yuck, these floors are all sticky,” Bipp said, slapping the ground with his bare hand and pulling it away with a slight sucking sound.
Strands of thick webbing covered the ground in interlacing patterns. At the far end of the room lay piles of rounded clumps of the stuff. Corbin found that the sole doorway out was stuck in place and refused to budge.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this place,” Bipp said. “This room is giving me the willies.”
“Feel like sitting ducks in here,” Corbin agreed. “Let me boost you up to that opening so you can try and get this door open from the other side?” he asked Bipp, pointing above their heads to where a section of the ceiling had been torn away, revealing a crawl space over the doorframe.
The gnome climbed up onto his shoulders and, once inside, turned to give an encouraging thumbs up. “Okay, I won’t go too far, just enough to see where this leads. Be back in a jiffy, fellas.” With that, he scurried away on all fours.
“Corbin, come check these out,” Logan called over his shoulder, inspecting two large hanging sacs.
They were covered with more of the sticky strands. He pulled out a dagger and cut a long slit down one. A putrid odor of rotting fruit hit him in the face, leaving them both gagging hard to get the foul taste out of their mouths. Inside the sac was a grisly form. Some sort of oddly contorted humanoid that had been sucked dry of its fluids, leaving only a mummified husk of skin and bones.
“I think this was a person,” Logan said, looking at the humanoid’s strange clothing.
His heart jumped two feet from his chest when the sac’s twin shifted slightly. He hoped his little brother did not notice the reaction.
“Try that one, something is inside,” Logan said, brandishing his revolver and steadying it on the sac.
Corbin looked at him, gave a nod, and slit the sac wide open. This time a fresh body fell forward out of the sticky cocoon. Logan reflexively reached out to keep it from hitting the floor then sharply realized how disgusting it must be, flinging it away from himself.
They were both astonished to find it was a female human.
“How in the Hel did she get up here?” Logan said. “Where did she come from?”
The woman lay sprawled across the floor, eyes closed, her skin a pale, gray, sickly color and her long, raven-black hair strewn across the sticky strands of webbing.
Corbin tried to mouth a response, but he was unable to find adequate words to describe his thoughts, and before he could muster anything intelligible, they heard Bipp screaming.
Running over to the hole, Logan shouted for the gnome. Bipp answered by jumping out of the void, screaming and pointing over his shoulder while dashing to the far side of the room. The brothers did not need more information than that and quickly joined him with weapons ready.
Four sets of glowing yellow eyes appeared in the recess, hungrily staring at them, followed by long, furry arachnid legs reaching around the opening. A giant spider dropped to the floor in front of them as another joined it overhead. They were the size of large dogs, and Corbin’s skin crawled to behold them.
Logan shouldered his awestruck brother out of the way just in time to avoid
a hissing stream of green venom.
“I’m getting good at that,” Logan said to Bipp.
Another hairy beast skittered across the ceiling, its eight legs driving the predator with lightning speed. Logan let off two short shots, each bullet tearing off one of the monster’s legs, while his brother fended off the stalker to their front. The spider hissed in pain, dropping from the ceiling belly side up. Bipp ran in for the kill, slamming his hammer hard into the creature’s abdomen, but a thrashing leg caught him, throwing the gnome onto the remnants of a hanging sack, where he solidly stuck and frantically tried to wiggle free.
The spider was not dead yet, and it flipped back over with thick yellow blood oozing across the floor beneath it. A strand of webbing caught Logan’s pistol hand, yanking him forward, toward a set of hungry snapping fangs.
Bipp dropped from the sac, landing on top of the beast’s furry back as Logan struggled against its pull. Multiple eyes shifted to look at the gnome and the spider bucked, flinging him over Logan to land between Corbin and its sister. Logan could see his brother had the other beast in hand, four of its legs already dismembered. His captor pulled hard on the strand again, reeling him in closer to its dripping fangs while its back legs anchored it against the floor.
“Want a taste, do you?” Logan grunted, struggling to break free. “I’ll give you a taste—tell me what you think.”
Logan gripped the sticky strand with his metal hand, letting electricity course through it into the monster’s open mouth. The spider chittered a high-pitched noise that made his stomach feel sick. The sides of its body burst open from the inside, and the cooked beast fell limply to the floor.
Logan tried to break free from the webbing so he could help his brother, but there was no hope. Corbin circled the spider, rolling to the side each time it frantically spit venom at him. Logan could not help smiling at his brother’s skill, to have such a dangerous monster cornered like that. Corbin feinted right, the spider’s eyes and body following him, then shifted sharply to the left and stabbed the beast’s face with his voulge. The spider let out a death rattle and its legs convulsed before it too fell limp.
Bipp jumped up and down, celebrating, kicking the spider where it lay in front of the door, taunting the unmoving body.
“Corbin, I could use that blade of yours,” Logan said, gesturing to his hand stuck in the webbing.
“There goes your other gun. Guess you’re going to have to learn how to fight like a man now, huh?” Corbin teased, cutting the strands free.
Logan backhanded his brother hard, throwing him to the floor with the force of the surprise attack. Corbin was shocked to see his brother’s hand glowing hot white.
“Bipp, duck!” Logan screamed, as another spider slid down from the hole overhead on a strand of webbing, fangs dripping with venom.
The gnome hopped out of the way and a blast rang in their ears, hotly sizzling through the spider, which was slammed flat against the sealed door. When the beam subsided, there was nothing left of the sneaky predator but a gaping hole in the metal door surrounded by the burnt outline of spider legs.
“Blazing dogs above, you saved my skin!” Bipp exclaimed.
“That’s twice now you owe me,” Logan groaned from the floor, where he weakly sat on his knees. The depletion of energy was too much for him to handle after days without eating. He shot his brother an apologetic look for hitting him so hard, but Corbin shrugged it off and went back to cutting him free from the strands.
“Why didn’t you just blast your way free from this stuff?” Corbin asked.
It was Logan’s turn to shrug, “It takes too much out of me. I’m pretty sure the blast is powered by my own life force…or nutrients or something. I don’t know, I never got to ask Mr. Beauford.”
“Oooh, who is the lovely lass, then?” Bipp hooted, standing over the woman they had freed from the spider’s feeding sac.
Logan noticed her skin was not as gray anymore, color returning to her face. He rubbed his freed wrist as Corbin moved over to her, placing two fingers under her jaw and searching for a pulse.
“She is still alive, but barely. Who knows what those things were doing to her.”
“Looks like they were slowly feasting on her insides,” Logan said. “This other guy’s been sucked dry.”
“Um…fellas?” Bipp called from the blasted doorway. “You gotta see this.” He was staring through the hole into a blue glowing room.
They joined him on either side, gazing through the portal. An enormous chamber lay beyond. It was at least fifty times the size of the one they were in and stretched so far back it seemed to go on forever. All along the walls, row upon row of man-sized glass cylinders were stacked. Each one was full of a frozen, glowing blue liquid that housed a sleeping human hooked to some sort of breathing apparatus.
“What in the blue blazes?” Bipp stammered.
The brothers could only look at each other, then back at the woman behind them.
“Well, boys, looks like we found Isaac,” Logan said.
Corbin nodded in agreement. “Yeah, but which one is he?”
“Let’s wake the lass and find out, shall we?” Bipp asked.
The brothers stared into the vast chamber, down the rows of sleeping humans, knowing that what lay before them was the heart of the elder’s darkest secrets. Logan nodded toward the sleeping woman behind them, who might hold the key to saving Riverbell.
“Well,” he said, “here goes nothing,”
EPILOGUE
Baetylus watched through the eyes of the shaman Burgoth. It was disappointed to see the Walker brothers escape, but at least they would not be able to come back to New Fal and ruin everything the Crystal had spent generations putting into place.
Corbin Walker was a tricky one. It had vastly underestimated the power of that man’s mind and had a sneaking suspicion he had garnered help somewhere else.
It was a shame all these deaths were not closer, where the Crystal could feed off their dying souls. So much power to be harvested with such a massacre. And after the meddlesome boys had ruined its plans to have the skex swarm feast on the citizens of Fal. That had brought on a feeling that the Crystal had never felt before, something of annoyance. Baetylus did not like wasting its time, and it had taken several months of focus, constantly sending its will into the dimwitted insects, to muster them up and send in the wave of attacks. He lamented the missed opportunity for reaping that would have greatly boosted his strength.
“Ahhh…,” the Crystal sighed, leaving the distant ruins of Ul’kor behind and directing its attention back to the human city of Fal below.
Here its latest pawn lay in bed, tossing about in a feverish sleep. Baetylus cackled over Fafnir’s anguish as visions of a taunting Lady Cassandra plagued his dreams. The magistrate was running down an endless street while citizens threw rotten vegetables at him and screamed for his execution. Around a bend, Arch Councilor Zacharia pointed an accusatory finger at him and said, “Half-blood.”
How weak and fragile the human condition, yet how delightful for Baetylus to toy with.
Dipping inside the dream, the crystal appeared before the magistrate in the visage of an old man in white flowing robes. Baetylus sent a mental suggestion to the magistrate that everything was safe now, calming his churning mind. Fafnir gathered his dream self, looking around at the fading shadows of his tormentors, and understood that his Lord had come calling again. He was a little embarrassed by the realization that he had been caught having a nightmare, not wanting his god to see this moment of weakness.
“Fear not, my son. It is natural for mankind to dwell on baser fears,” Baetylus said.
“All-Father.” Fafnir bowed low. “To what do I owe this great honor, my Lord?”
“The dangerous Walker brothers are gone from this realm. They will no longer pose a threat to our people,” Baetylus said.
Fafnir felt a wave of relief to have the despicable problem dealt wit
h. He had feared Logan’s return and had worked out several scenarios to hide the truth of his involvement in Beauford’s assassination, but once Arch Councilor Zacharia opened up your mind, there was not much hiding of the truth. To know that Walker would never be able to return just secured his seat on the Council.
“I see your greed for personal glory has not lessened,” Baetylus coolly observed.
“My humble apologies, Lord. Everything I do is truly for the betterment of my people,” Fafnir groveled.
“Humph, I almost think you believe your righteous lies,” Baetylus said. “And what of the Ivarone girl? I do not see her anymore.”
“She has gone missing, my Lord,” Fafnir said, “though we are still trying to figure out how.” He quickly added, “We will catch her soon enough, however.”
“It would be wise that you do, and be sure to lay waste to Riverbell. I will damn their souls to the abyss for this betrayal.”
Fafnir could almost hear the hunger in his god’s voice, though he had no idea it was for the souls it would soon feast upon.
“I already have men traveling there to execute every last one of them as we speak, Great One,” Fafnir said.
Baetylus had gotten what it came for and switched the nightmare back on for Fafnir, turning up the intensity for fun through a minor mental suggestion. It had dwelled so long in this one’s mind that it was mere child’s play to influence the magistrate, who had already forgotten his conversation with the Crystal and was running terrified down the streets while his tormentors cut his bare blue skin with whips, yelling for the death of the half-blood Jotnar traitor.
Baetylus coiled inside its crystalline shell above the kingdom of New Fal, smugly savoring another day to come with its playthings. Soon it would gather enough power to walk among the weak-minded mortals below and claim its birthright. However, until then, at least it had the upcoming harvesting of souls from Riverbell to look forward to.
The idea of it made him cackle so loudly into the psychic aether that all the babies in Fal woke crying in the night.
FOLLOW THE ADVENTURES of the Walker Brothers and their companions, in book two of the series, Land of the Giants.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Without your input, this project would have been impossible. I appreciate all the time and energy each of you put into this. Special recognition for Jeni, who really went above and beyond.
Richard Skelany - Beware of falling asleep beside mushrooms, little Necroscope.
Serophin – No one runs backward through a window with more flair.
Denier Spade – When will you rage?
Robert Fox – Keep to the shadows, my friend.
Jeni Hamilton – I promise never to add S’s to my backward and toward again!
D. M. Almond is secretly a Muppet, waiting for Kermit to call him back to the big show. In the meantime, he spends his nights shackled to a keyboard, tapping away at the keys in some unyielding search for Acadia, a place he hopes you have enjoyed visiting. David does not take himself seriously and neither should you.
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