The Lod Saga (Lost Civilizations: 6) Page 7

  Lod panted as sweat dripped from him. Kulik grinned evilly.

  “Submit to me,” the thing in Kulik said. “And maybe I shall let you live.”

  Lod snarled. He shook his head, flinging sweat from his eyes. He had to do something now, or it would be too late.

  The thing in Kulik swung another swishing blow. Lod lunged. The half-Nephilim reversed the swing, bringing the axe back. Lod hacked at Kulik’s ankle, at the leathery tough boot. The extended swing lacked enough power to cut deeply into the boot and the foot inside. But because of the half-Nephilim’s reversal with his axe, he was off-balance.

  Lod slammed onto the ground as the axe clipped his shoulder.

  Kulik bellowed, unable to halt his stagger toward the mineshaft.

  Lod looked up in time to see Kulik twist around to stare at him. The eyes held blackest evil and raging fury. Then the half-Nephilim plunged into the hellish silver mines.

  -13-

  Three days from the mines, Lod wearily trudged through desolate wasteland. Half the water-skins draped upon his person were shriveled shells. The others sloshed with hot water. The sun burned like a malignant eye, determined to bake him to death.

  From the mines, Lod had traveled south into the yellow grasslands. He’d jogged most of the time and had begrudged himself the few hours of sleep that exhaustion had forced upon him. Rocks abounded here and cracked earth. Purposefully, Lod had avoided all trails and had headed into the bleakest regions where no man walked.

  The Rephaim hunted him.

  Lod shaded his eyes against the sun’s glare. Through the heat’s haze, he spied a dot. It had appeared in the last hour.

  Lod’s sunburned face shifted into a fierce grin. It caused his cracked lips to ooze blood. There was nothing here, not even vultures. He shrugged off several used water-skins and laid them upon the burning ground. He sat cross-legged on them. He closed his eyes and let his chin drop onto his chest. He rested. His body screamed for it.

  Lod opened his bloodshot eyes and raised his chin. He drew the dulled scimitar and a sharpening stone. Uncorking a water-skin, he let precious drops drip onto the whetstone. With slow, sure strokes, with a familiar rasp, he filed out the nicks and returned the blade to its razor keenness.

  Kulik’s last words had told him how to defeat the Rephaim, the thing that couldn’t die.

  Lod drank from a skin. He ate tough strips of donkey meat. Then he waited.

  The dot grew. It advanced through the shimmering haze. In time, the giant cave hyena with its spiked collar trotted into view. The beast’s crushing jaws hung open. The black tongue lolled from its mouth. It was an obscene creature. It had low hindquarters and a powerful upper body and neck. It was huge, a thing of nightmare, and the spirit of the Rephaim possessed it.

  Lod rose to his feet. He held the scimitar loosely beside his right leg. He held a two-foot dagger in his left hand.

  When the cave hyena reached thirty feet from him, it stopped. It sat on its haunches. Its ugly head cocked to one side and it panted. Saliva dripped from the long tongue. The beastly eyes held evil intelligence and fury.

  “Man most foul,” the hyena whined. The words seemed tortured coming from the beast’s throat. Its vocal cords, tongue and mouth were alien to human speech.

  At such blasphemy, Lod’s hackles rose.

  “I will only cripple you,” the hyena whined. “I will sample your flesh and lap up your blood. Then I will devise spells and break your will. I will possess you as I do this beast.”

  With his left wrist, Lod wiped sweat from his eyebrows. He took a deep breath. Then he stepped toward the Rephaim-possessed creature.

  The hyena licked its chops and yipped wildly. It stood.

  As he advanced, Lod crouched, turned sideways and kept his gaze on the spiked collar.

  “Come to me, man of flesh,” the hyena whined. “Learn the unreasonableness of resistance.”

  Lod’s eyes shined with zealous rage. The muscles in his forearms hardened. “I am against you, declares Elohim. I will lift your skirt over your face. I will show men your nakedness and the kingdoms your shame. I will—”

  The hyena howled. Its claws kicked up particles of sun-baked dust as it scrambled to attack.

  Lod held his scimitar across his torso, with the flat of his blade aimed at the hyena. He twisted the blade. Blinding sunlight reflected off it and into the beast’s eyes. The hyena snarled in bafflement as it charged blindly. Lod lunged to one side as the beast passed. He sliced his scimitar with brutal speed. Razor-sharp steel cut spotted skin, muscles, tendons and cracked bone. The hyena whirled and its jaws snapped on air. After his swing, Lod had skipped out of range. Blood dripped from the hyena’s now useless right foreleg.

  The hyena shuffled away.

  Lod bared his teeth.

  “For that,” the hyena whined, “I will pluck out your eyes, tear out your tongue and break your arms and legs. You will become a harlot who services old hags.”

  “I will shatter your teeth,” Lod intoned.

  The huge beast snarled as its lips drew back to reveal savage fangs. In a disjointed gait, the hyena limped quickly toward Lod.

  Lod’s eyes burned with fanatical fires. He remembered the mines of Tartarus. He recalled the horrors the Rephaim had unleashed on men. Lod roared with fury and charged straight at the Rephaim-possessed hyena. He judged the disjointed gait, the sudden lunge the hyena used each time with its single foreleg. The beast was huge and those fangs—

  The spiked collar protected the beast’s neck and made it harder to maneuver toward its side. Lod charged and timed the one-legged gait. He rammed his scimitar straight into the slavering jaws. He recklessly plunged his arm after it into the beast’s mouth. Pushed by brutal strength and the speed of both the man and beast, the scimitar punched through flesh and brain and exploded out of the skull. Lod’s brawny forearm and the gagging sword made it impossible for the beast to do more than lacerate flesh.

  Lod hacked with his knife and pried at the grinding teeth then jerked his arm free. He backpedaled, he panted and he snarled at the choking beast. It sank down as its blood watered the soil. Its eyes, they watched Lod. Life still flickered in them. The hyena tried to speak, but that was impossible now.

  Soon, the giant cave hyena died.

  “Elohim,” Lod shouted, “protect me from the spirit of the Rephaim!”

  It attacked him spiritually. It assaulted his soul and fought for entrance. But Lod was a fortress unassailable.

  During the attacks, Lod gathered his water-skins and began to trudge south. He felt the Rephaim all around him. This was a haunted place now. He hoped no one came into this desolate region to give the spirit flesh. Kulik had given him the way to win. The half-Nephilim had said, ‘He can reach out only so far.’

  Lod hoped this desolation was greater than the Rephaim’s reach.

  He grinned then. He had escaped Moloch. The so-called god of Uruk had thought to keep him a slave, first in the stadium and later in the mines. He was supposed to have died in the mines. Now he was free, free of Moloch and his vile sons and grandsons.

  It was a hard-won freedom, a precious freedom. Free…

  Lod he drank from a skin and continued his trek out of the haunted wasteland, a free man to choose as he wished.

  Manus Farstrider

  After the mines of Tartarus Lod seeks a place without First Born, Nephilim or Rephaim spirits. He treks far south and eventually becomes a sell-sword for a chariot noble in the Pishon River Valley. In time, a First Born with Jogli chariot nomads invades the valley from the Ammon Gulf. A terrible battle is fought near a salt marsh, west of the city of Ramoth. Lod survives, but the chariot lords die hideously.

  Lod works his way to the mountains. He is still quite young. And although other refugees in the mountains distrust him, Lod stops to help. It is a harsh existence. Stubbornly, Lod uses his strength like an ox, for once building instead of killing.

  Prologue

  “Bind him tightly,” the
necromancer whispered. “I do not want him bucking and heaving, ruining everything.”

  As he waited, the lean necromancer rubbed the hilt of his skinning knife. He had spidery-thin fingers, the nails were polished black and the skin bleached unnaturally white like old bones. The pommel of his knife was of jade, intricately carved to show a screaming head with a protruding tongue.

  Not that tonight’s sacrifice would be allowed to scream. That was a pity. The necromancer was uneasy in this gloomy forest of the foothills. For days, he had ridden his mule alongside the Nephilim and his cutthroats. He wished he were back in Shiva, deep in the cellars with his chained captives and eunuch-acolytes. It would be soothing to listen to a helpless victim scream for mercy or blubber about the treasures he would bestow on anyone who released him from his tortures.

  A night breeze rustled the leaves of nearby birch trees. The necromancer shivered, pulling his shawl tighter around his narrow shoulders.

  He would have liked to warm himself by the campfires. But the Nephilim’s cutthroats crouched around those. He might have endured their sweaty stench and their coarse swearing. But it made his flesh crawl to sit near unshackled, ill-restrained henchmen who cast him such vicious glances.

  The flames crackled, throwing up sparks. It illuminated the motley ruffians, sixty in number. They were fierce, wild-looking men—slavers, man-stealers. Most were from far-off Poseidonis, men of middle height, with lean muscles and dark hair. Some were back-alley killers from the isle of Iribos. Those tattooed themselves with binding symbols to the god of Shiva. They were all rough, merciless and hardened to their task. Most wore leathern sandals and coarse tunics. A few were bowmen. Others bore nets, ropes, long dirks and short swords. Their main defense consisted of a round, bull-hide shield, usually with a spike in the center.

  The necromancer turned away from them, away from the many campfires. He concentrated on the captive. The naked Arverni tribesman struggled fiercely against his bonds, but he was held fast. The five slavers knew their trade. The tribesman’s arms and legs were painfully stretched so he was spread-eagled on an altar of heaped together rocks. A wadded cloth had been shoved into his mouth and a gag prevented him from spitting it out.

  “Leave,” whispered the necromancer.

  The leader of the five slavers shot him a venomous glance. That one wore a row of spikes jutting out of his lower lip.

  In the darkness, the Nephilim approached, his boots scuffing rocks.

  The five slavers hurried away from the altar and back to the campfires.

  The Nephilim was a giant, twice the height of any of his men. He had godly features and wore bronze links for armor. Beside him was a young man in a red tunic, bearing several heavy javelins and an outsized, bronze shield.

  “You must find Bosk,” the Nephilim rumbled in a deep voice.

  The necromancer shivered. He kept his gaze averted from the giant, as was appropriate when in the presence of one of the blood.

  “Great One,” he whispered. “Does it matter if the captive dies?”

  The Arverni on the crude altar twisted his tangled-haired head. His eyes pleaded.

  “Find Bosk,” the Nephilim rumbled. “That’s all that matters.”

  The naked Arverni tribesman tried to arch his back. His muscles strained against the many bonds. Yet he hardly moved. The slavers had secured the wretch as well as the necromancer’s eunuchs in the cellars could have done.

  With a hiss of bronze on leather, the necromancer drew his skinning knife. It was long and single-edged, a flat instrument, more akin to a razor. Firelight glimmered off the polished bronze blade, making it seem reddish, bloody. He approached the crude altar as the doomed tribesman tracked his every move. He always loved this part, the supremacy he felt over the victim. He made sure to display the skinning knife prominently. They always watched the knife in such terror.

  The necromancer removed his shawl. It was a costly garment and he didn’t want to stain it with blood. He had a shaven scalp, narrow features and charcoal was rubbed around each of his eyes to height his eeriness. The cool, night wind on his head made him yearn for the shawl.

  He closed his eyes, banishing his discomfort. When he opened his eyes, he whispered, “Tonight, you give me your soul.”

  The tribesman strained, his muscles looking like cords. Sweat glistened and his eyes bulged.

  With a steadying hand, the necromancer touched the tribesman’s clammy skin. The skin almost rippled in response, and the Arverni stained even harder to twist away. Carefully, the necromancer made his first cut…

  With blood-splatters on his robe and with bloody dots on his face, the necromancer backed away later. Blood oozed from thirteen precise slashes on the shivering Arverni. The necromancer wiped the skinning knife against the meaty part of his left hand. Then he hurried to a bamboo cage covered with a black cloth. With a whisper of sound, he drew off the cloth. Within were countless bats crawling over each other. They were furry, and had sharp ears so it seemed they were horns. Many stared at him with eerily luminousness eyes. He unlatched the small door, reached in and took out the first bat. He held it near his bloody hand. A tiny, oh-so-red tongue darted out, licking his palm.

  The necromancer shivered with delight. He loved the sensation. The bats had raspy tongues like young kittens.

  In beastmaster’s cant, the necromancer crooned to the bat. The creature lifted its lips, revealing needle-like fangs. The necromancer pitched the bat into the air. It flapped its furry wings, squeaked and landed on the squirming, bleeding tribesman.

  One-by-one, the necromancer repeated the performance. Soon, a carpet of the furry bats crawled over the tribesmen. They licked his blood, feasting. Their saliva kept the blood flowing, kept it from turning sluggish and forming scabs.

  The necromancer raised his thin arms so his sleeves fell down to his elbows. Evil tattoos swirled on his pale forearms, marking him as a necromancer of the sixth rank. He began to chant in a forbidden language. The blood of the sacrifice, the tribesman’s life-spark, powered the occult words.

  Somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howled forlornly.

  As he continued to chant, the necromancer drew his knife. Trancelike, he approached the seething mass of crawling, licking bats. He swept aside several and plunged the dagger into the tribesman’s chest. It was a perfect thrust, between two selected ribs and into the primitive’s heart.

  The Arverni’s bulging eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. Mystically, the bats lifted their ugly, bloody snouts and screeched in a hellish chorus, voicing his death-cry for him.

  “Go!” the necromancer shouted in a strangely, high-pitched voice. “Find Bosk! Then return and tell me where he hides!”

  The bats launched off the dying Arverni. They winged into the night. In seconds, the squeaks and trills were gone. And the tribesman no longer squirmed. He no longer implored with his eyes, but stared glassily at unseen vistas.

  The necromancer sagged against the altar and panted, spent, his shaven scalp slick with sweat. Now was the hard part, the waiting for results.

  ***

  Dawn was less than an hour away by the time the last bat returned. Like all the others, the furry creature flapped to the necromancer, landed on his shoulder and crawled to his sunken cheek. There, the bat nuzzled the necromancer and wrapped his furry wings around the man’s head.

  The tiny beast imparted images that it had sensed throughout the night.

  Finally, the necromancer peeled the creature from himself and deposited it in the bamboo cage.

  With his gaze downcast, the necromancer approached the Nephilim. All the campfires had died. The majority of the ruffians snored, wrapped in their cloaks. A few were hidden in the forest, on guard.

  “Where is Bosk?” the Nephilim rumbled.

  The necromancer knew those of the blood hated failure. This Nephilim more than most ill-rewarded those who gave him displeasure. The Arverni tribesman on the altar had been such a one who had failed in his task of finding Bo
sk.

  “Great One,” the necromancer whispered.

  “Did you find Bosk?”

  “…I have found a village, Great One.”

  “What do I care about that?” the Nephilim asked angrily.

  “Not an Arverni village, Great One. Pishon Valley refugees huddle there. Surely, it holds many prized beauties.”

  “Show me Bosk.”

  “Our god desires more slaves, Great One,” the necromancer whispered. Fear gnawed at him. He played a dangerous game.

  The Nephilim stared at him, saying nothing.

  “Great One,” the necromancer whispered. “Might Bosk have contacted these villagers?”

  The Nephilim, Manus Farstrider, grunted. There was a leathery sound, perhaps of him stroking his chin.

  “How far is this village?” Manus asked.

  “High in the mountains, Great One. Maybe two days trek.”

  Time passed painfully as the necromancer waited. Finally, Manus spoke gruffly:

  “Pack your implements and ready your mule. We leave at dawn.”

  The necromancer wanted to groan in complaint. He was tired from the spell. His bats needed peace and quiet, not the jostling of the trail. Instead, he bobbed his narrow head. And he consoled himself with the idea of choosing several of the prettiest captives-to-come. Those would march into his cellar in Shiva and there scream for him most shrilly. He rubbed his spidery fingers in anticipation and hurried to his hobbled mule.

  -1-

  Dressed in a chariot-runner’s kilt and sandals, Lod dug around a large pine-tree stump. He was in a field of pine stumps that gently sloped to the south.

  Around the shorn field towered tall pines and evergreens of the alpine forest. In the near distance, hidden by the giant trees, were the thuds of village men chopping down more trees. They were clearing the pines in the hope of planting barley or oats before the growing season passed. They had fled the Pishon River Valley, fled the invasion of the god of Shiva. The felled trees formed the palisade around their meager village and supplied the logs for their cabins.