“Yes, husband,” Thelia said. “It changed me—but for the better. I was a pretty fool before you filled me with fire. I can see that now. It fills me with shame to think of what a fool I was, what you must have thought of me.”

  “You might have been a fool,” Dan said, “but you were nice. I don’t know you now.”

  “Don’t know me? I’m your wife.”

  “Yes,” Dan said. “You’re my wife. One of my wives. You married into a harem that I control. I will always listen to you and do my best to protect and provide for you. Hopefully, I will come to know and love you, to trust and respect you. But make no mistake, you will never take over me or my harem, and you will never rule over my wives. Do you understand?”

  Thelia had slouched forward like a pouting waif. She blinked up at him, nodding. “I do, Master.” Her robe had fallen open to expose one spherical breast.

  The sight of it twisted his anger into something more. Maybe, if he’d been a nicer guy like old-world Dan, he would have deescalated their little talk, but the sight of Thelia’s perfect breast, his near certainty that she had meant to expose herself, and the submissive way she was blinking up at him possessed Dan with a different kind of fire.

  “You,” he said to the handmaids. “Remove the matriarch’s robe.”

  Thelia blushed, and her tiny mouth fell open in shock. But as the girls obeyed—without asking for Thelia’s confirmation, Dan was pleased to note—a timid smile came onto his red wife’s face.

  He let her stand there for several seconds, firelight dappling her naked perfection in rippling shadows. She looked at the ground, avoiding his gaze.

  “You are my wife,” Dan said again.

  “Yes, Master.”

  “And you want to please me?”

  She looked up then and nodded, her eyes huge and eager.

  She’s getting off on this, Dan realized. “And you understand that you are no better than my other wives?”

  Thelia nodded, biting her lip again. “I do.”

  “Are you prepared to serve me?”

  “I am.”

  “Good,” he said, darkness rising in him. He was so hard he felt like he might tear free of his jeans. “Down on your knees.”

  Thelia obeyed, lowering onto all fours. Her lovely breasts swayed back and forth. She licked her lips and looked up at him with lust in her eyes.

  This was not the feigned lust of her recent attempts at manipulation. This was real lust, the same lust he had seen so often in her eyes before he had filled her with fire.

  Similar lust now burned in the eyes of her handmaidens, he realized. They stared, mesmerized, wriggling with arousal.

  So the red elves of Fire Ridge are still in there somewhere, he thought. They just take a little coaxing.

  He crooked a finger at Thelia. “Come here then, wife. Crawl to me and do my bidding.”

  “Yes, Master,” Thelia said and crawled across the ground to kneel submissively between his legs.

  “Due to constant travel and seeing to the needs of my other wives, I have had little time with you in the bedroom. Are you talented with your mouth?” he asked, a rhetorical question if ever there was one.

  Before Thelia’s reawakening, the red elves had traded fire magic for the pleasure arts. Though Dan hadn’t had a chance to test the theory, what with all the hard work and travel of recent days, he suspected that Thelia could suck a twenty-sided die through a pixie stick without spilling a grain of sugar.

  “Oh yes, Master,” she said enthusiastically and licked her lips. “Please let me show you.”

  “Yes, by all means show me,” Dan said. “And I want your handmaidens to watch. I want you to show them how their matriarch uses her mouth to do her husband’s bidding.”

  “Yes, Master,” Thelia moaned, rocking eagerly back and forth, clearly turned on by the notion of his using her this way in front of her attendants. She reached up to his crotch and started to unzip his jeans.

  “No,” Dan said, stopping her hands. He encircled both of her slender wrists in one large hand. “I didn’t tell you to use your mouth on me. I told you to use it to do my bidding.”

  Thelia nodded. “Anything for you, Master.”

  “Good girl,” he said and caressed her pretty cheek with his free hand, brushing his fingertips over the black flames rising from her jawline.

  Then he reached over, placed a hand on Ula’s thigh, and spread the hobgoblin warrior woman’s legs wide open.

  Ula stiffened with surprise, then understood and grinned, showing him her tusks.

  “You must appease Ula,” Dan said, pulling Ula’s fur bikini aside to reveal the bright wedge of red pubic hair. “She is your sister-wife, and you must show her that you understand that she is your equal.”

  “Yes, Master,” Thelia said, her voice trembling with desire.

  Dan dragged the eager red elf between Ula’s legs. Releasing Thelia’s wrists, he grabbed a handful of her glossy black hair and twisted her head so that she was looking up into her sister-wife’s face.

  “Tell Ula you’re sorry,” Dan said.

  “I’m sorry,” Thelia said, and licked her lips.

  “Now show her that you mean it,” Dan said. “Show her with your mouth.”

  Thelia moaned, and a shiver of lust shuddered through the impossible curves of her perfect body. “Yes, Mas-umph!”

  Dan shoved Thelia’s face into Ula’s crotch, and the would-be queen of the red elves started lapping hungrily at the hobgoblin’s sex.

  13

  The Chamber of Horrors

  “Spears at the ready,” Holly ordered.

  The red elves fanned out in a skirmish line and started moving slowly back into the huge cave.

  Once they were past her, Holly let her guard down momentarily and gave her body a good shake, shedding water like a dog coming out of a river.

  She was soaked to the skin and almost numb with cold.

  If only I were numb, she thought, aching with cold.

  The rain had been pounding down all day. The higher they climbed into the mountains, the harder it fell. Then an icy wind whipped down from the jagged peaks that loomed over them like cruel gods, turning the rain into freezing rain and blowing it into them sideways.

  The caravan struggled through the freezing downpour until they arrived at the series of large caves Nadia’s scouts had discovered that morning.

  Now Holly wished that she’d grabbed Thelia before coming into this cave. She’d have the fire mage start a nice warm fire right now.

  Thelia had calmed down a little since Dan had put her in her place, but Holly still wondered what the red elves would be like when they reached Flame Valley.

  She wondered a lot of things about Flame Valley. What sort of red elves lived there now? Would Thelia’s reunion spark new life in the race, causing them to rise again? And if so, what would that rise look like?

  Would Thelia’s red elves be kinder than their ancestors? Or was Holly unwittingly helping to give rise to a second coming of the genocidal force that had nearly wiped her own people from the map forever?

  She wondered about the valley itself, the ancient fortress of Teel Elan, and of course the legendary Est eel Est or Root of Roots, the great delving tree around which her own ancestors had built their ill-fated home.

  We’ll see soon enough what Flame Valley holds, she thought, hit by another wave of nausea. And yes, for as much as she hated the thought of returning a fire mage to Teel Elan, she would make the trip.

  She had to.

  Raised in fire, the voice of her dead grandmother had said.

  Pushing these thoughts from her mind, she entered an adjacent chamber that smelled of death and shit, both scents faded with time.

  Calls echoed from the far reaches of the cave as soldiers cleared the deeper chambers. Hopefully, the rest of the caravan was finding the other caverns similarly unoccupied.

  The back of the chamber in which she stood was basically a shit heap. At a glance, she saw bones and patches of fur and what looked like a stone axe, all of these things mixed with the waste, part of it.

  Her eyes were drawn upward to the crude paintings that covered the cave wall. The illustrations were primitive. Stick figures copulated and gathered berries and hunted stick-figure deer.

  A large stick figure stood at the mouth of a cave—this cave, she realized, recognizing the distinct frown-shaped opening—bravely jabbing a spear at the only creature rendered with real detail, a huge bear with a massive mouth, enormous fangs, and claws like daggers. Red dots polka-dotted the bear’s torso. The stick figure caveman was doing his best to protect several women and two dozen children huddled in the cave behind him.

  This hadn’t been a tribe. It had been a family.

  She reached up and touched the smallest stick figures.

  Where are you, little children?

  Flakes of dried mud fluttered away at the brush of her fingertips.

  Then torchlight filled the cave, and she turned to see her husband entering the chamber. “You okay, babe?”

  “Yes,” she said, but in the torchlight, she saw the cave wall more clearly and realized that the rusty flakes were not mud after all.

  The entire painting, the whole wall, was covered in dried blood.

  Looking again at the smallest stick figures, she put a hand to her stomach.

  Don’t puke, she thought, and was shocked to feel hot tears welling up in her eyes. Silly girl. Why so sentimental suddenly?

  Dan’s arm settled across her shoulders. “Wow, I love what you’ve done with the place,” he said. “Great artwork.”

  “People lived here,” she said, wiping surreptitiously at her eyes so that Dan wouldn’t see. “A man, his wives, their children.”

  “No shit?” Dan said, leaning close to the painting. “Look at that. You’re right.” He laughed. “Guy had more wives than I do—and way more children.”

  “They were afraid of a bear,” Holly said, pointing to the monstrous illustration.

  Dan flecked away some of the dried blood, then swept his torch over the shit pile. “With good reason. Looks like the bear ate them. I think that’s a ribcage.”

  “Oh yeah?” Holly said, battling another wave of nausea. She pretended to study the painting rather than turning around. She did not want to see small bones poking from a mound of bear crap.

  “What do you know?” Dan said. “Karma’s a bitch. The bear might’ve eaten our artistic friends, but it looks like something else ate him.”

  Then Holly did turn.

  Dan was holding his torch directly over a huge bear skull half-buried in a pile of what she now saw to be very strange excrement. It looked almost like dirt, with not only bones but bits of rock and crystallized material mixed throughout.

  “It’s Biology 101, the food chain at work,” Dan said. “Cavemen eat those deer-type things they’re chasing on the wall there. Bear eats cavemen, and then…” He trailed off with a shrug. “That’s the question, right? What the Hades eats a giant bear?”

  People started shouting in an adjacent chamber.

  “Serpents!” someone shouted.

  “Kill them!” someone else yelled.

  Holly and Dan raced into that room to find three red elves jabbing spears at a writhing tangle of fifteen or twenty serpentine creatures, each of them five or six feet long and a foot in diameter.

  “Fucking snakes,” a red elf woman snarled and plunged her spear into one of the flailing creatures. Her fellow soldiers worked their spears, impaling the strange beasts, which moved awkwardly, flopping like newborns.

  Noticing the creature’s color—a purple darker than her own eyes—and the shape of their eyeless heads, which were like sheared-off spheres with flat faces dominated by circular lamprey mouths, Holly felt instantly colder than she had in the freezing rain.

  “Stop!” she shouted.

  The elves paused at the bloody work to stare at her with confusion.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said. “Those aren’t snakes. They’re baby—”

  The cavern floor burst to pieces in an explosion of rocky soil, and a toothy mouth ten feet across rose from the fracture and snapped down, slicing one of the red elf soldiers in half.

  The enraged purple worm raced up out of the broken ground with shocking speed. The cave shook, raining debris and knocking Holly from her feet.

  By the time Holly pulled herself off the shaking ground, the giant worm, all sixty feet of it, had entered the chamber. Its circular mouth was wide enough to swallow the war wagon. Its tail end tapered to a long stinger oozing poison.

  “Run!” she shouted, but the fierce red elves thrust their spears into the purple beast that had come to defend its hatchlings.

  The worm jerked its massive head, swept one of the elves from her feet, and smashed the woman against the wall like a hammer driving a nail. The shattered soldier dropped to the ground, leaving a new painting of bright crimson on the cave wall.

  "Get out of there!" Dan shouted to the remaining soldier, who had retreated onto a low ledge of stone jutting from the rear wall and stood now still as stone herself, a petrified statue. Dan's deep voice boomed, filling the cave and shaking the shocked elf from her paralysis. She leapt from the ledge and started to run toward them but disappeared behind a surging wall of purple flesh as the great worm cut off her escape.

  For a second, Holly thought the soldier had been eaten, but then she saw the elf scrambling back onto the ledge.

  The worm apparently sensed the elf, too, because its front end lifted off the ground and swung in that direction.

  "No!" Dan shouted and raced forward.

  Holly called after her husband, but it was no good. He wouldn't leave one of his soldiers to die. She watched in terror as he buried his sword into the worm's side.

  With shaking hands, Holly pulled her bow from her back and set to stringing it as quickly as she could.

  Temporarily forgetting the elf upon the ledge, the purple worm whipped around, snapping at Dan, who leapt away just in time and drew back with his sword, which was coated now in a glistening purple ichor.

  The worm scrunched back into itself like a coiling spring. Then the massive beast whipped around in a grinding sweep, looking to smash Dan with its entire body.

  Giving a barbaric bellow, Dan sprinted straight at the onrushing wall of purple. At the last second, just as the thing was about to flatten him, he leapt into the air. His timing was perfect. The giant worm flashed by underneath him. Dan landed on his feet and spun back around, teeth bared and sword at the ready.

  "Get away from that thing," Holly shouted, and began feathering the worm with arrows. There was no good target, no eyes or throat or groin, so instead of focusing on accuracy, she concentrated on speed, burying shaft after shaft into the purple flesh.

  Dan lunged in, hacked at the worm, and jumped back out.

  The monster shot forward, trying to bite Dan in half, but its great circular maw snapped shut on thin air.

  Shouting filled the cave behind her, and Holly felt a surge of hope when a volley of spears and arrows rushed past her and pounded into the purple worm.

  Yes! Their people had joined them. Perhaps now they could beat the thing or at least drive it back beneath the ground.

  Cursing madly, Dan rushed the beast again and buried his sword to the hilt in purple flesh. He barely had time to yank the blade free before the worm twisted back around, snapping at him.

  Dan laughed wildly, swept into the battle madness of his kind, and jumped backward away from the teeth—but not, Holly realized in a flash of terror, away from danger.

  "Look out!" she screamed as the worm's poisonous stinger whipped straight at her husband's back.

  At the last second, Dan dropped into a crouch, and the stinger missed, slashing the air where he had been standing. Then the barbed tail lifted up, arching over him like a great serpent.

  Dan scrambled to his feet.

  The tail whipped forward, driving its deadly tip straight at her husband's chest.

  Again, Dan leapt away, safely dodging the poisonous barb.

  But at the same instant, the gigantic purple worm launched its real attack.

  "No!" Holly shrieked as the great toothy mouth surged forward and swallowed her husband whole.

  14

  Fuuuuuuuuuck!

  Fuuuuuuuuuck! Dan thought, entombed in the hot, stinking tube that was the gut of the great worm.

  He wanted to scream the word, but he kept his mouth and his eyes shut tightly. He was covered in a thick, digestive mucus that burned like acid on his skin. He did not want that shit in his eyes or mouth.

  But damn, he wanted to shout curses. Not at the worm. At himself.

  He'd walked right into the attack. The worm had hit him with the old one-two, jabbing with its stinger and then cleaning Dan’s clock with the knockout punch, swallowing him whole.

  As if that wasn't bad enough, Dan had also dropped his sword as the thing’s mouth closed around him.

  So stupid!

  Not that he had much room to swing a sword in here. The sticky walls of flesh pressed in from all sides. They convulsed in muscular waves, sliding him deeper and deeper into the worm.

  He sputtered and thrashed and made the mistake of breathing. Noxious gas burned his nose and throat and lungs. It was all he could do not to puke.

  Help me, Crom, he prayed. Help me kill this unnatural beast.

  As if in answer to his prayers, a line of fire seared across his thigh. Wriggling his arm down his body, he latched onto the blade of his sword.

  It was a good thing that his foul-mouthed mentor, Wulfgar, no longer lived within the weapon, because the asshole would probably crack a joke and make Dan laugh in a mouthful of purple worm gut-snot.

  Thank Crom for small favors, he thought, moving his hand along the blade until he found the pommel, and for big favors, too.

  The walls lurched again, squelching him deeper into the monster’s gut. Yes, deeper… but toward what?

  He had dissected a large earthworm in high school biology, tacking it down and slicing it open with a scalpel like some kind of blooming psychopath, but he couldn't remember whether or not worms had actual stomachs.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26