Death's Angels

Chapter Thirty-Five

The mine was even gloomier than Rik remembered. He felt like he was being watched from all around. There was a pressure in the air that had nothing to do with depth beneath the ground. He felt the weight of the mountains and the weight of something else, alien and inimical, pressing down on him.

They were a long way below the surface now. Asea led them quickly, quietly and efficiently, sending the ripjacks snuffling along first one path and then another, waiting for their return at junctions, before ordering them to range ahead once more. Her two servants accompanied her always, and seemed as much at home in the darkness as she. He wondered exactly how human they were and what their presence here portended.

They had gone off the path their original venture had followed, and moved deeper beneath the earth, winding further down with every step while the ceiling became lower and the oppressiveness of it all increased.

The mine was much larger than he had originally realised. In their previous trip they had seen but the smallest part of it. There seemed to be endless galleries and tunnels. Something had worked down here for centuries to make them so big. Exactly how old were they? These mountains had been inhabited for a long time and not just by men. He remembered the map among the documents they had sold. It seemed that it had not lied.

He heard soldiers breathing sharply and moving uneasily. There was not enough room in here to swing a bayonet or fire a shot. If the demon they had fought before was to come on them now, they would be sitting ducks unless the sorceress and her henchmen could protect them. Like most of the men he had slung his rifle over his back and went with bayonet in hand. At least he had his pistol, although he was not sure whether it would be wise to use it in this confined space. Ricochets could prove deadly.

If they continued much further they might find themselves on the roads of some subterranean hell. Just as the thought struck him, he noticed that they stopped. A low mutter rippled down the line.

Up ahead they had found light and something far more sinister.

Zarahel sensed the intruders. He felt puny human spirits and the presence of others far more powerful. Excellent, he thought, directing some of his servitors to action through the psychic link they shared. Their souls would provide fine fodder for a reborn god.

Rik could not believe his eyes. The tunnel had ended, passed through an opening and emerged into something far different. If he had not known better he would have sworn they were in a city, one buried deep beneath the earth and built by nothing human at all.

All around them were walls of smoothed stone, caked and mortared and overlaid by something slick as varnish, shiny as the carapace of some monstrous beetle. Reluctantly he touched it with his fingers. It felt faintly sticky. Patterns of phosphorescence covered it. He felt sure that they were alien runes that contained their own cryptic meaning.

The tunnels were long and circular as if made by the bodies of some great worms and then left smooth by the slimy secretions of strange moist bodies hardening on them. He intuited that he was having a premonition of the truth brought to him by some sorcerous sense other than one of the five normal ones.

“What the hell is this?” the Barbarian asked.

“I have not the slightest idea.” Rik said. Like the rest of them he moved forward to get closer to the Lady Asea. He strained his ears, desperate to hear what she might say, to get some explanation of their uncanny surroundings. She was speaking to Sardec but her words were pitched in such a way that he suspected that she intended for them to be heard by all. They were not reassuring.

“…lair or a city, a hidden fortress of the elder race.”

“It’s astonishing,” said Sardec. “So perfectly preserved. It looks like it was just abandoned.”

“Perhaps it is not. Perhaps it is just re-inhabited or being prepared for it.”

The ripjacks milled around, yipping and hissing and frothing madly. They seemed on the edge of going crazy, and Rik could understand why. Strange scents filled the air, strong and musky. If he could catch them, how much stronger must they seem to the tracking beasts.

“It’s like the inside of a termite hive,” said Sergeant Hef.

“A whole mountain made into a termite hive,” muttered Leon.

“Let’s not imagine the size of the termites.”

“Always looking on the bright side, eh, Rik?” said Leon. Despite his joking words, he was unable to keep the fear from his voice.

Rik was thinking about the thing he had fought in the mine and trying unsuccessfully not to imagine a city of them. What must this place have been like when it was occupied and filled with those creatures, accepting sacrifices from the people who lived on the surface above, devouring flesh and souls and working the Shadow alone knew what unholy magic?

There were undercurrents of stark fear in every man’s voice. The wrong thing said now might set them all running back up into the mine in terror. All of them knew they were in the presence of something larger and more frightening than they had ever imagined facing. They were ready to flee or to fight at the slightest provocation.

Rik looked around once more. The tunnels ran off in every direction, some going lower, some higher. Others emerged from the ceiling or descended into the floor like pits. These were like streets designed for creatures not bound by gravity, he thought, or who could, like spiders, crawl up and down the face of walls.

They had emerged on the outer limit of some vast web of tunnels. From here they could either follow the outer ring or descend deeper towards the centre. In the middle, he thought, they would find the spider that had spun the great structure. It was a thought he felt best to keep to himself.

Asea spoke once more to the ripjacks. With ever greater reluctance the savage beasts snuffled for a scent and then led them deeper and deeper into the maze.

“Ready your weapons, men,” said Sardec. “I want every rifle loaded. If something jumps us, they are in for a nasty surprise.”

Almost immediately he regretted giving the order. It made him sound like a nervous fool. Of course, the men had already loaded their muskets. A glance around told him that no one seemed to have noticed his slip.

Sardec pushed on through the corridors, the Lady Asea beside him. The ripjacks moved just in advance of them, reluctantly, profoundly frightened. The Lieutenant did not blame them. He felt the oppressiveness of their surroundings, although apparently not as strongly as the Princess of the First. Perhaps Moonshade did indeed insulate him from the sorcerous miasma she appeared to be ensnared in. Perhaps he was just less sensitive than she.

The men were reluctant to move. He could sense it in their talk and in their tone. He pushed on, trusting them to keep up. They were like a herd, he thought, hanging together now for protection. None of them wanted to be left behind. All of them wanted to be close to the sorceress, as if this gave them a better chance of survival. They were probably right about that.

The long circular corridors seemed more organic than designed and laid out with a strange symmetry that was not the product of a Terrarch or even a human sensibility. Now and then odd teardrop-shaped blisters or pods marked the walls, but they looked half collapsed. Inside a few were faint phosphorescent shapes. He felt sure that these were old, and somehow non-functional. There did seem to be more of them the further they progressed into the demon god’s lair.

Occasionally what looked like a long, living cloud of luminous gas snaked through the corridors. They never came closer, nor did they appear dangerous. Once Asea sent the ripjacks towards one but it retreated into the distance with a speed that was surprising, and every indication of intelligence. Asea recalled the hunting pack before it could go too far.

“What are we looking for?” Sardec asked the sorceress.

“You will know when you see it.”

The answer was not a great help, he thought, but then perhaps she did not know herself. Perhaps she would not understand the cause of this great disturbance until she was within sight of it.

“Is there not some divination you could perform that would help?”

“There are several, but I feel it best to conserve my strength for the coming conflict.”

There was no arguing with that.

With a thought, Zarahel directed the reborn sacrifices through the tunnels of the lair. They were armed with the old weapons, ready to fight in the old ways. He let them know they were not to kill their foes if they could help it. There was a better use their souls and their juices could be put to. He gave his attention back to the summoning. The way was fully open now. More and more power flowed into him. He sent it coursing down the pattern to the sacs on the walls. New life went with it. The Spider God continued to emerge.

Rik looked around frantically when he heard the scream. A horde of tribesmen and women poured out of side-corridors. It took him a moment to realise that there was something profoundly wrong with them. They moved slowly. They were naked and their skins were grey. A strange greenish-red witch-light burned in their eyes.

All of them had what appeared to be massive jewelled pendants dangling from their necks. Many of them had other things attached to their bodies and those things were deeply disturbing to see. Some of them had massive crab-like claws, shiny and glittering like the carapaces of beetles attached to their arms. Armour of the same stuff covered some of their bodies. Their movements had an odd jerky inhuman quality that was almost insect-like. It was as if something that was inhuman wore their flesh.

Rik knew what had become of those people who had disappeared into the mine now.

That was all he had time to think about before lifting his rifle and snapping off a shot. Shooting into that tightly packed mass there was no way he could miss and he saw a man go down, knocked over by the force of the musket ball. Almost at once the man began to get up, pulling himself to his feet, despite having taken a wound that Rik would have sworn was fatal. There was no time to worry about that now. He reckoned they had time for one more shot before the fighting became up close and personal.

He rammed powder and bullet home and fired in the direction of the war-cries and half seen bodies he could see through gaps in the drifting powder smoke. Shouts and sounds of fighting from up front told him that they were attacked from that direction as well. This was no random encounter then but a carefully planned ambush.

“I hope you are ready to taste my steel, you bastards,” the Barbarian bellowed. Hastily Rik slammed his bayonet home just as a hill-man erupted from the smoke cloud in front of him. Rik smashed his bayonet into the man’s gut. It felt like he was sticking it into a wet practise dummy. Only this time instead of sawdust and straw what came out was fluid.

He withdrew the bayonet and struck again, taking the man through the throat. The man did not fall although he had already taken a number of wounds. His guts hung out from where Rik had hit him, his arm hung limply where a bullet had pierced it and still he came on. An awful stench of excrement and something else filled the air. The greenish-red light glittered in the man’s eyes as he reached out for Rik with his one good arm. Rik could see that had a claw on it.

No, not a claw, he realised as he tried to step back and away. The thing was like the head of an enormous insect grafted onto the man’s hand. Its mandibles opened and revealed glittering spider eyes and a leech’s sucker mouth within. He ducked as the mandibles clicked together above his head and aimed another blow at his opponent.

His horror intensified as he realised that it was not some amulet the undead creatures were wearing but a living entity, some unholy hybrid of spider and beetle that clutched their chest. What he had taken for the chains of the amulet were limbs buried deep into the body of the man.

He struck directly at the centre of the thing with his bayonet; his blow glanced off the carapace. He ducked away from another sweep of the thing’s claw and this time lashed out with the heavy wooden butt of his musket. It hit with a sickening crunch. Black fluid leaked from the broken carapace. He caught sight of what might have been a pulpy brain within. Another stroke brought his bayonet into the fleshy innards. The corpse man spasmed and let out an awful inhuman shriek before falling inert to the ground.

“Kill the insects on their chests!” he shouted, knowing how insane it sounded but unable to think of anything else to say.

He turned just in time to avoid the embrace of another man with one of those evil things grafted to his breast. He shuddered. He did not want that inhuman creature touching him. An image of the parasite becoming unhooked from its bearer and burying its limbs into his own flesh flickered through his mind. This time his bayonet took the thing full on and pierced it through. Again the human lips opened and an alien shriek emerged from them, and the corpse man reeled off into the gloom, thrashing perhaps with the dying agony of its rider.

Rik had no time to think about it. The Barbarian raced past, his heavy blade flashing as he cut into the hill-men’s lines. Rik followed along with Leon, Weasel and Toadface. They formed up back to back, an island in a sea of fleshly chaos as the hill-men pressed home their attack.

The sound of shots filled the air. The stench of blood and sweat and sulphur and smoke and excrement assaulted his nostrils. He smashed the butt of his rifle down on a man’s head, feeling bone give like matchwood. Scarlet blood stained his hands, some of it his own, from small cuts he did not know he had picked up.

He jabbed with his bayonet at a man racing at the Barbarian’s back. The hill-man fell without a cry. The Barbarian lopped off his head with a backward lash of his sword, but to Rik’s horror, the headless body kept moving.

“Kill the bastard things hanging on their chest!” he shouted once more and drove his bayonet forward and down through the crawling corpse’s back. He thought he felt its tip pierce something for the corpse began to lash its limbs. He twisted his weapon cruelly and the thing was still.

He could hear war-cries now, and part of his combat-deranged mind tried to make sense of them.

“Die you fuckers!”

“Death or glory.”

“The Spiders! The Spiders.”

“Help! They cannot die! They cannot die!”

“Steady, lads! Steady!” The last was in the distinctive tones of Sergeant Hef. To his horror he realised that all the voices belonged to Foragers. Only occasionally did he hear the inhuman shriek that was the death cry of one of the corpse riders.

Screams of pain mingled with shouts of rage. The roar of ripjacks cut through the thunder of musket fire. Two brilliant flashes blazed across his retina. A stink of ozone and burning flesh assailed his nostrils. What the hell was that, he wondered, then realised that it was Asea’s lightning lash.

As quickly as it had started it was over. Some of the Foragers were in flight, retreating like an outgoing tide, leaving uncovered the flotsam and jetsam of battle: maimed bodies, wounded men, severed limbs, pools of blood, piles of broken flesh encased in torn cloth. All the corpse-men were dead. Here and there a spider-like thing scuttled very slowly away on long unsteady stick like limbs. Men bayoneted them or used them for pistol practise.

And Foragers were looking at each other with the wide-eyed fear-filled gaze of men surprised to find that they were still alive after passing through that maelstrom of violence.

Zarahel felt his servants die. The intruders were tougher than he had thought. No matter though. He had more servants. And nothing could stand against Uran Ultar reborn.