James Silke - Prisoner of the Horned helmet

The 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?”

The 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.