John Fultz - Seven Kings

She climbed past floor after floor of arched entries and locked chambers. At last she found the great iron door at the top of the winding stair. It stood wide open, and a bloody glow flickered into the stairwell, staining the black basalt to crimson.

There, in the doorway, limned in scarlet torchlight, stood a tall and thin figure. A long robe hung about the gaunt frame, glittering like a shroud of dark jewels. Here was the man-sized version of the great stone effigy that towered over the plaza. A spiked crown of onyx and rubies sat upon his brow.

In the lean face a pair of eyes gleamed like specks of tarnished gold touched by moonlight. They peered down the stairs at her, and she stood once more in her true form, one hand against the cold wall to support herself. The yellow eyes burned.

She had no voice. She wanted to become an eagle again, to fly from this place. She should never have come here.

“Sister,” spoke the voice, “I had almost forgotten your great beauty.” It flowed into her ears like honey, sweet and laced with clear venom.

She studied those cruel wolf-eyes. It could not be him. This… thing… was too different. Too inhuman. Too beautiful and deadly.

“Fangodrel?” she whispered.

The shadowy King shook his head.

“Gammir,” he corrected her. “I’ve always been Gammir.”

A wide grin showed white fangs.

She turned and leaped down the stairs, body melting, feathers sprouting, heart pounding. But it was too late.

Spreading leathery pinions, he struck like a great jungle bat, a sable wind wrapping her in darkness.

A strange aroma raised him from the brink of oblivion. It was not unpleasant. No more offensive than the sweat of workhorses he had known in the cornfields. For a moment, right before opening his eyes, he imagined himself lying in such a field surrounded by green stalks. Yet his back lay against hard, uneven stone, not the soft and rich earth of the plantations. His eyes fluttered open stubbornly. He stared at the rough granite ceiling awash with firelight and shadows.

That he lay somewhere deep beneath the ground was immediately apparent. Although he had never seen a cave or cavern, he had been told such hollows in the earth existed. Where were the Deathlands, the fruiting meadows, and the wide-open sky of Eternity? Where were Matay and his unborn son? Some fiery underground had claimed him instead of the blessed afterlife promised to slaves by their own desperate faith.

He groaned at the discovery, twitching his anguished muscles. Invisible flames seared his chest, left leg, and side. He recalled the bite of the poison arrows. The demon visages of his pursuers. The pale beasts that had spilled the blood of the Onyx Guards across the jungle. Lastly, he remembered their claws upon his skin.

He forced himself to sit upright. Gritting his teeth and peering through a curtain of pain, he examined the place that was not Death. A hole in the earth’s bowels no bigger than a slave’s hut. A single round exit with only flickering darkness beyond. A tiny fire of twigs and moss gleaming near the wall of the threshold. Carmine furs and animal skins hung from the crude walls, along with implements of wood made for cooking and tools of stone wrapped in sturdy vine. Shuffling toward him from the far recesses of the cave, a hunched figure entered the fireglow. One of the pale beasts, long of arm and leg, fantastically clawed, with curling horns instead of eyes, and a horribly wide mouth full of fangs. There was no sign of the great tongue that lay coiled inside that maw. The creature’s gaping nostrils sniffed at him, pink and flaring. Instinct ignited, and he tensed, ready to leap away from the beast.

The cave swirled about him and he fell hard upon a mat of woven reeds. The arrows had been removed from his body, yet his wounds were still fresh. And they were deep. The venom sang its painful melody in the current of his blood. He could not sit up again, let alone stand. He lay at the mercy of the quiet creature. His eyes swelled, dripping salty excretions onto the cave floor, and his reopened wounds seeped.

The squatting beast loomed over him. The stockyard smell of its flesh had awakened him. It filled the entire cave… a tang of loamy musk. In the firelight its smooth white skin took on a golden sheen. Unlike the others he had seen, a pair of pendulous breasts hung from its chest. The pink nipples reminded him of Matay’s body, and his stomach churned. He might have retched then, but there was nothing in his stomach to expel. The creature placed a single hand upon his heaving chest. Its touch was gentle, the palm of the hand soft as a human woman’s. Its other hand went to his forehead, where a second tender caress calmed his spasms.

As he fell again into lonesome darkness, the beast opened her mouth and sang.

Matay waited for him beyond the living world.

Perhaps now he would die and join her.

Yet he failed to see Matay, not even in his poisoned dreams. He wandered lost in the crimson jungle, swam through pits of ruby-eyed cobras, swam dark waters that clutched and drowned him. He ran from the laughing heads of demons that hung from the branches of dead trees. There was no rest in his sleep. He fought to survive the poison, and something deep inside him decided to win that fight.

He opened his eyes again, no way of telling how much later, and stared once more at the glimmering cave roof. The female beastling squatted near him already, spooning a hot broth into his mouth. It ran down his cheeks and her long pointed tongue extended to lick it from his face. The flavor was a mix of root vegetables and mushrooms. His odd caregiver cradled his head in one massive hand as the other spooned the broth from a broad steaming bowl. Why could he not die? Despite this grim thought, he lapped hungrily at the soup. His wounds were cleaned, wrapped in mud and ruddy leaves… a poultice resembling the earth medicine of his own folk. He did not resist the feeding; his belly ached with hunger. He sipped from the big wooden spoon, and the she-beast cooed, then trilled a weird melody. Somehow he knew these were the sounds of approval.

He recognized now another figure, one of the male creatures, crouching in the cave. It sat near the entrance, as if watching the feeding with its eyeless head. Its nostrils twitched and its round skull nodded. He marveled at its ivory horns, thick as the hafts of spears and coiled into points at either side of its jutting chin. It placed a handful of brown moss on the fire without turning its head, and the flames danced brighter.

Whatever they were, they wanted him alive. He did not have time to wonder why, as sleep claimed him again. His belly groaned contentedly, and the she-beast laid his head back upon the reed mat. Again she sang a strange lullaby as he faded.

Several more times he awoke to such a feeding. Helpless, he had no choice but to submit to the she-beast’s nurturing. After a while the blackness of his wounds faded, and the venom worked its way through his system. The she-beast had taken his urine often in a hollow gourd, and when necessary she helped him void his bowels into a stone bowl. These she emptied immediately somewhere beyond the cave.

She kept the cave immaculate, despite its dirt floor and chaos of hanging tools and hides. Finally he found himself able to sit up. He accepted from the cave dweller an unknown fruit shaped like an egg but covered in fuzzy amber flesh that faded to pink at the tips. She licked her lips with a viperish tongue and raised a second fruit to her own maw. He followed her lead, biting into the fruit. It was sweet, delicious, and substantial. It tasted like sunlight, whose warmth he had almost forgotten in this deep place. He devoured it, examining his wounds one by one.