Direchasm, p.12
Direchasm, page 12
The Night’s Herald nodded knowingly, scratching a gaunt rune into a fallen root with his athame.
Valreek rose in one swift motion, wrapping her heavily furred cloak tight around her thin frame, brushing her ash-blonde hair from her eyes and checking her dirk. She adjusted her hide pauldrons, and examined the two ungor skulls fastened to her cloak. Satisfied that all was in order, she moved to the others, glancing back at the Night’s Herald.
‘Today we find our vengeance.’
The bone augur gave a half-nod as Valreek moved to her lord.
Duke Crakmarrow was already on his feet, spinning his heavy bladed halberd around to warm up his whipcord muscles. The duke resembled a true Ghurite chieftain, clad in fearsome armour of resplendent bone and fur. A left pauldron was fashioned from the skull of a young karkadrak, and his cuirass was crafted from the beast’s ribcage, its claws and fangs jutting from the dense furs of his cloak like wicked barbs. Helmetless, the duke’s shaved head was wrapped by a leather headband, and dotted with amber ingots. His long, flowing silver beard was cinched into an ornate bone clasp. He regarded her with pale eyes, deep-set into a heavy brow.
‘Valreek,’ he said, his voice deep and stern, but somehow warm against the frigid mountain air. ‘Already on your feet and eager for the hunt. Always an early riser.’
‘I’d be a poor pathfinder if I was the last one awake,’ she returned dryly.
‘Indeed.’ The duke cracked a half-smile, prodding another of their sleeping companions with his iron-shod boot. ‘We cannot all be Gristlewel, sleeping well into the morn.’
The warrior spluttered, rolling over in his furs and groping out for his greatsword.
‘Wha–?! Are we… attack? Is it the beastmen…?’ Gristlewel trailed off as he saw the duke chuckling.
The others were already awake. Master Talon, bedecked in heavy furs decorated with avian skulls, tended to the duke’s harriers, the majestic hunting raptors that Crakmarrow kept ever near. Their black feathers were ruffled against the cold, and one of them squawked in hunger. In response, Valreek felt her stomach knot and twist. She gritted her teeth, ashamed to show weakness in front of her lord.
‘Filthy beastmen curs,’ the Royal Butcher snarled from atop the rock he was perched upon. He was busy sharpening his twin sickle-swords. His heavy cloak was draped over his portly form, and his jowled visage was curled into an expression of anguish. ‘Was it not enough of an insult to ravage the farmlands? Did they have to reave the royal granaries as well? The Eternal One knows what unseemly corruption they might have benighted their stolen provisions with. Even if we cull the wretches, still we might succumb to famine!’
‘We are not here merely to reclaim lost provisions,’ the duke reprimanded. ‘We are here to bring the foul ravagers to justice. To avenge our smallfolk, and to be the holy bringers of King Ghorphang’s righteous vengeance.’ He paused, looking out over the rest of the band.
The Royal Butcher bowed his head, ashamed. Gristlewel scrambled to his feet, scooping up his greatsword and adjusting the metal ringlets fashioned into his furs.
‘I just wish we were with the main host, hunting the herd, instead of this small group…’ the latter said.
The duke nodded in understanding. ‘Our quarry is powerful. The shaman’s dark-tongued whispers have unleashed untold devastation across our lands. Our hunt is just. For what victory is there in smiting the beastmen herd if their leader escapes unpunished? We may not share the glory of pitched battle against the inhuman savages, but the glory of the avenging hunt is ours. We are the Grymwatch. We are the king’s finest. And we shall act like it.’
The Night’s Herald added his words to the duke’s. ‘The interlopers have defied the duke, the king and the Eternal One, and must be returned unto the silence! We are the Grymwatch. We are Ghorphang’s judgment made manifest!’
On cue, the entire party repeated the words. Valreek felt a surge of pride as they left her lips, the hunger for vengeance burning within her breast.
Duke Crakmarrow glanced over each of them in turn, and then nodded. ‘Single file up the gully. Valreek, take the lead.’ He shouldered his halberd.
The ascent was slow, with the gully’s floor being a mess of razor sharp talus, scree and boulders that could easily crush a leg if shifted. Valreek would have urged the duke to continue the pursuit into the night were it not for the treacherous footing. It wasn’t long until she picked up the trail of the hated foe again: a few snapped branches and dislodged stones. She urged the others to pick up the pace.
Eventually, the gully disappeared into some manner of overhanging rock face ahead. The tunnel entrance, a maw of stalactites and stalagmites, gave Valreek pause. The darkness within was a yawning void, lit eerily by an oozing amber glow. A distant rumbling caught her attention, and she cocked her head to listen. It sounded like a distant rockfall – or perhaps, if the stories about the mountain were to be believed, the rumbling of a hungering gullet; the churning of the mountain’s innards.
Master Talon, trailing close behind, paused at her side, glancing at her. The harriers soared overhead, ready to resound their keening calls should danger approach from above the gully.
‘Do you hear the mountain?’ he asked, his voice bearing the thick accent of the Ekoursean mountain clans. His people had fought against Gryphon’s Watch once. But the threat of the encroaching beastmen and the famine that had swept through their mountains had forced the clansmen to put aside their differences and join Ghorphang’s demesne for the common good.
‘Rockfall,’ Valreek answered, putting as much certainty as she could into her voice.
‘I wouldn’t be so certain,’ Master Talon said, his voice low and ominous. ‘The tales told of this mountain speak of its hunger… As though it is alive…’
Scrabbling footfalls and shifting rocks told her the others were catching up.
The Night’s Herald was the first. He ran a long fingernail across the bones decorating one of his pauldrons. They chimed eerily.
‘The ancestor-heralds say the mountain beckons those of bestial blood to come into its hungering innards, to be devoured and digested for all eternity. They say this mountain is where all beasts come to die… Where Ghur and holy Shyish become one.’
‘I know the tales,’ Valreek muttered. ‘The beasts are drawn here out of primal impulse. They are at the mountain’s mercy. We are not.’
‘Indeed,’ the Night’s Herald rasped. ‘The Eternal One will not allow us to fail. Duke Crakmarrow is one of his anointed champions. Under his leadership, our hunt is just.’
She gave a half-nod. Valreek had hunted at Crakmarrow’s side for several seasons now – ever since the beastmen incursions began, forcing her and the tattered remnants of her clan out of the Splintermaw Forests and surrounding farmlands. Thus far, the duke had never failed. But even so, this was a different hunt. A hunt made upon the flanks of an accursed mountain, where the hunters were on the brink of starvation. She gazed into the dark maw ahead, determined. She would find vengeance, or die trying.
‘My hunters,’ Duke Crakmarrow said as he took up position alongside them, courage and stern resolve resounding in his deep voice. ‘Steel yourselves. We descend into the belly of the beast. This is where our true hunt begins.’
‘By the duke’s glory,’ the Night’s Herald proclaimed. ‘Our quarry shall find no refuge nor haven. This mountain shall be their grave!’
The duke gave a grim smile, raising his halberd towards the tunnel entrance. ‘Grymwatch, advance!’
Valreek gritted her teeth in anticipation, eagerly awaiting the moment when she could shed beastman blood again, and took her first step into the mountain’s abysmal depths.
As she pressed on into the mountain, the light began to fade, giving way to an oppressive, all-pervasive gloom. The sensation elicited a pang of primal dread within her, and she felt her chest constrict, the claws of brimming unease gnawing away at her resolve as the last rays of daylight ebbed. She paused, wondering if she would ever see the light of the sun again.
The others caught up to her, and she felt the duke’s heavy hand on her shoulder.
‘Courage, Valreek. Your kin will have their justice. And you will lead us to where it can be found.’
She nodded and continued, roaming ahead of the group in the gloom. Each step brought her farther away from the light and deeper into the mountain’s innards. Torches were lit by the Royal Butcher, but the darkness felt too oppressive for the firelight to truly illuminate. The shadowy recesses on the jagged tunnel walls were too deep, and the gouges on the floor, where the uneven stone split open around the stalagmites and pillars, looked far too eager to devour the unwarily placed foot. Above, the stalactites looked like the teeth of some immense, stony beast, ready to close down upon them at a moment’s notice.
And worse, the little natural light that did shine came from the most unsettling of sources. Motes of amber oozed from some of the cracks in the wall, like pus from the crusted scab of an infected wound. It dripped from the ceiling in places, forming eerie pools, semi-translucent and gleaming with nauseating light. Valreek did not dare touch it. There was something wholly unsettling about how the amber drew her gaze. It was as though it wanted her to look at it, wanted her to touch it. She wasn’t about to indulge it.
‘Nobody touch the amber,’ she said, turning to warn the others.
But the others weren’t behind her. The torch glow of the duke’s party had already disappeared behind a bend in the cavern. She frowned. She didn’t remember getting so far ahead of her companions. Unease clawing at her once more, she felt some relief as they rounded the bend. Their shadows seemed to lope behind them, eerily distorted by the shifting light.
‘Valreek,’ the duke called as they approached. ‘Still on the trail?’
‘Umm… yes,’ Valreek returned, quickly glancing around. She was still on the trail, though she scarcely remembered following it. Disturbingly, she realised she’d been following the amber. The glow was leading her on. But then, it had been leading the beastmen too. There was indeed sign of their passing. Their offal stink, and the faint stench of their unwashed, mangy fur putrefied the stale air. After a cursory glance, she saw stones kicked about by clumsy hooves, and felt the tingling sensation of corruption writhing across her skin. She didn’t know how she felt it, but the bray-shaman’s influence left an almost palpable trail of unwholesomeness for her to follow.
Valreek looked ahead, deeper into the gloom. While the amber glow was present in the distant tunnel, the source of the light never was. It was as though the darkness devoured it, and only by coming close to the light could one benefit from it.
Only by coming close…
There was a body in one of the amber pools. It looked like a foreigner, from one of the free cities; a man, hunched over, as though sleeping against the wall. His garb was the breastplate and slashed sleeves and leggings that many Freeguild militias had adopted as their military fashion. But his attire was decorated with feathers, all plastered over his form. He looked like an explorer.
‘Grim,’ Gristlewel muttered, following Valreek’s gaze. ‘Looks like the amber dripped on him as he slept?’
The man’s eyes were closed. If the amber had indeed fallen upon him in his sleep, then it hadn’t woken him. He looked so serene, as though he might still be sleeping, frozen forever in his gleaming grave.
‘I’d count on it,’ Valreek answered.
The Night’s Herald stepped up to her side. ‘The amber here is sick with yearning, poisoned by its own hunger. The ancestors whisper that it tugs against the winds of death. The silence of Shyish breathes here not.’
Valreek shivered and turned away from the corpse. The Night’s Herald was right. The amber light, and the darkness… it all felt sick. It felt ravenous. As ravenous as the twisting hunger churning in her own core. She gripped her abdomen, willing the pain to subside as she led the party deeper into the heart of the mountain.
Valreek didn’t know how long she spent ahead of the others. Master Talon periodically caught up to her as she followed her quarry’s trail through the labyrinthine warren. The tunnels shifted from ragged passages to natural caverns filled with galleries of stalagmites and stalactites, to strange, worked chambers carved by inhuman hands. The latter seemed unnaturally warped, twisting and folding in upon themselves. Pools of shimmering amber gleamed from the walls and ceilings as well as the floor, defying gravity. Valreek tried not to think about how such a thing was possible.
In some chambers, there were more signs of artificial construction; steps carved into stone, too large to be easily ascended by humans, and strange clusters of holes in the walls, like the corpse-alcoves of the catacombs beneath Gryphon’s Watch, though none bore any bodies. Half-melted stony growths, disturbingly resembling gaunt statues, reached from the walls, grasping out with spindly limbs.
Valreek gave everything a wide berth, choosing her path through the seemingly endless expanse of tunnels and caverns carefully, avoiding anything that looked even remotely unusual. She relayed her concerns to the others.
‘Any idea what these statues might be?’ the duke asked as they stopped to rest, giving the squawking raptor on his shoulder a comforting ruffle. The hunters had come to a conjunction of large tunnels where the statues were more clearly visible. Their forms were revoltingly insectile, fused into the crux between the walls and ceilings of the connecting tunnels as though they’d been waiting to ambush the travellers passing below. The hollow sockets in their misshapen skulls bled amber ooze, which pooled up beneath them. The statues were large, and they reached down with too many limbs, their forms appearing to emerge from the rocky formations as though erupting from some manner of oozing, stony membrane.
‘They don’t look like statues,’ the Night’s Herald rasped, looking up, his expression unreadable. ‘Perhaps they were once alive… petrified. Perhaps the mountain slowly consumes them…’
Valreek exchanged a nervous glance with the others, but any further speculation was cut short by a distant, braying call echoing up through the tunnels.
‘The quarry is near,’ Valreek hissed, following the sound to one of the passages. She crouched and listened. It resounded again, though the bizarre echoes made it impossible to tell from how far away it originated.
‘Valreek, Master Talon, move ahead,’ Duke Crakmarrow commanded. ‘Find our quarry and don’t let them slip away! We are right behind you!’ With a gesture, the raptor atop the duke’s shoulder took wing alongside its kin, loosed from Master Talon’s bone gauntlet.
Valreek broke into a run, focusing on her footing and the sound ahead, leaping from shattered rock to broken pillar, fluid and lithe. Master Talon kept pace while the harriers flapped ahead, their avian cries distorting in the twisting tunnels, amplified into ear-splitting shrieks.
They rounded several bends before they entered what resembled a shattered stone basilica, carved into the walls of a massive natural cavern. Several gloomy tunnels led out of the chamber in all directions, and panes of amber, like golden mirrors, decorated the walls, clearly still liquid but standing impossibly upright. Pillars, artificial in their smoothness, rose up from random points on the rubble-strewn floor, while arched ribbing, cracked and leaking more viscous amber, loomed overhead, obscured in the gloom. In several places, the floor of the basilica chamber sank away, forming into glassy amber pools, partially solidified. Some of the pools contained victims, frozen in their final moments.
Three beastmen stood near one such pool, and had been attempting to pull the husk of another explorer from it before the arrival of the harriers distracted them. Their furred, caprine legs and shortened horns marked them as ungors. Valreek knew there were more beastmen in the warband, but she could not see them. She did, however, see the rations carried by the beastmen. A leg of ham hung from the belt of one of the creatures, miraculously untouched, while stolen ration pouches, marked with Ghorphang’s bone seal adorned all three. She was practically salivating as she saw the harriers flapping around the confused ungors.
‘Now,’ Valreek hissed. One of the creatures carried a recurved bow, and was nocking an arrow.
Master Talon nodded, extending the blades fashioned into his bone gauntlets and breaking into a low run.
The bow-armed beastman loosed an arrow at one of the harriers, but the raptor deftly dodged. The other bird swooped in towards one of the spear-wielding ungors, flapping past its hasty thrust and landing on the creature’s face, squawking as its talons raked deep. The ungor howled and dropped its spear, batting the bird away and clutching at its mangled visage as Valreek and Master Talon closed the distance.
The archer had his back to Master Talon, and in a matter of seconds, both of the hunter’s wrist-blades were punched through the ungor’s lungs. It barely even managed a gurgle, slumping to one knee. Valreek charged directly towards the other spearman. It turned too slowly, allowing her to ghost past it and slash her dirk across its thigh, spattering blood across the stones. The beastman brayed in rage, sweeping out with the butt of his spear. Valreek’s momentum carried her past the ungor, and she vaulted over a fallen pillar, deftly dodging another pair of thrusts. The ungor followed, leaping up and thrusting down, braying in anger. But it put too much weight on its wounded leg, and stumbled forward. It fell from the pillar, allowing Valreek to lash out with a trio of merciless stabs, piercing its bicep, shoulder and collar. It gasped, dropping its spear and staggering back. Valreek closed in, repeatedly ramming her blade through its ribs.
Each thrust was a cathartic act of vengeance. A tithe of blood, pain and death exacted upon the degenerate monsters that had defiled Valreek’s home and people. She descended upon the ungor as it collapsed, thrusting again and again until her dirk and hand were completely drenched in gore. Blood was splattered all over her, and somehow in the frenzy the beastman’s throat had been torn out, likely by one of the harriers. It died moments later, and Valreek staggered back, horrified at the extent of the violence she’d wrought.
