I land flat on my back.
My ears ring with a dull droning whine that drowns out all other sound as I stare up at the cavern ceiling. Crystals gleam and wink in constellation clusters far above, spinning slowly as my vision reorients.
Pain. Lines of fire across my chest.
Gods damn it. I should have worn chainmail for this.
I drag in a ragged gasp of air and let it out in a rush. My body responds with a painful convulsion. Drawing another breath, I groan, roll to my side. The world tilts; my vision doubles. I shake my head, force my eyes to steady.
A slavering roar bursts through the thickness in my skull, followed swiftly by a familiar voice: “Vor! Brother, are you dead?”
“Not yet,” I growl, and spit out a mouthful of grit and blood.
“Then get your sorry arse back over here!”
I shake my head again and turn, zeroing in on the frantic action taking place some ten yards from where I lie. Sul stands with his back against a boulder, his spear up and angled across his chest. He grips the haft with both hands, pushing it into the slavering jaws of a woggha.
The cave devil writhes. Its curved claws slash at my brother’s head. Sul ducks and dodges, and the beast tears great gouges into the stone instead. Its hind feet scrabble for purchase as its powerful haunches lunge and lunge again. A black tongue wags, spattering saliva and green foam across Sul’s face and down the front of his shirt.
The spear haft groans. It’s going to break. When it does, the monster will rip my brother’s throat out.
My hand scrambles for my own spear. The haft is shattered into several pieces, but I find the blade, grasp it by the socket, and pull myself onto my knees.
Sul screams. I look up just in time to see him go down. For a moment, the terrible gray bulk of the woggha blocks him from view. I can still hear him screaming, which means he’s alive. “Sul!” I shout.
Then Hael is there. She lunges straight at the cave devil, wrapping her arms around its hideous muscular body, and topples it over with a single heave. It utters a shriek that sets all the crystals overhead singing a baleful echo. Hael rolls free of the beast and gets to her feet. It whirls on her, down on all fours, its awful eyeless head tilted, its long tongue tasting the air. It tries to circle her, searching for weakness. She crouches low, hands out, teeth bared, planting her feet with care. A deadly, synchronized dance.
With an ear-splitting screech, the cave devil surges forward.
I’m already in motion.
My first three steps are staggering, uncertain. By the fourth step, I’ve got my balance. The last five I take in a full sprint, then launch myself through the air. I land on the devil’s bony back and wrap my arms around its neck. It lashes its head, its body torquing unnaturally, desperate to knock me loose. I get one arm free and thrust with a single, sharp, upward motion into that soft space at the base of the skull where the bone plating offers no protection.
The creature shudders, lurches. Its legs bow outward in another few wobbling steps, as though its body cannot quite accept what has just happened. I feel the moment when the life goes out of it like a rush of wind.
It falls.
I stand astride my fallen foe, every inch of my body thudding with the roar of my pulse. Wrenching viciously, I pull my spear head free. Blood spurts, hot and putrid. A bellow of victory erupts from my throat, and I throw back my head and let it resound to the stalactites overhead.
As the echoes die, slow applause punctuates the air. I turn, still breathing heavily, to see my brother in an awkward heap on the ground. He tilts his head, gazing up at me from where he lies. “Oh, well done, great king! That warlike yelp at the end really finished off a most magnificent performance. I swoon before your prowess.”
Wiping sweat from my brow, I step back from the fallen carcass. Sul cannot be too badly wounded if he’s still got breath for sarcasm. As for the rest of my party . . .? There were five of us total at the beginning of this encounter. Word reached me of a woggha in Verthurg, a farming community half a day’s ride from Mythanar. I didn’t want to believe it but couldn’t take any chances. So, along with Sul, Hael, and two other brave warriors, I’d set out to investigate.
The people of Verthurg dared not venture out from their cave dwellings to greet us, not even when Hael sounded the zinsbog horn announcing our arrival. I’d glimpsed a few wide-eyed faces peering through windows but nothing more. The farming folk are brave enough in the face of voracious rockwurms and the blind ghost spiders that spin webs big enough to catch a small child. Even the giant bats roosting in caverns near here are but an inconvenience to be dealt with firmly. But cave devils? That’s another matter altogether.
After a brief search, we found someone willing to speak to us through a door. She told us the last place the woggha had been seen. Following her directions, we made our way to this cavern of sharp stalagmites covered in dark green rugs of wurtguth moss, from which waxy flowers bloom. I look around the cavern now at all the blossoms destroyed in our little altercation. Hopefully, whoever owns this plot will be so thankful to have the woggha dealt with that he won’t resent the destruction of his crops.
Grir, one of my men, lies groaning close at hand. The cave devil launched itself at him first of our party. Lur had been quick to defend him. And where is she now? Off to my right, hunched over and clutching her shoulder as blood oozes between her fingers. Hael crouches beside her, asking to see it, and Lur snarls in answer, “I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m fine!” contrary to visible evidence.
Tossing my broken spearhead aside, I make my way to Sul. He sees me coming and holds out a hand. I pull him into an upright position, and he grimaces but quickly turns it into a grin. “Nothing like a little staring down death’s ugly maw to make a fellow feel alive again, eh?”
“Are you hurt?” In that terrible moment before Hael reached him, I feared the devil had torn his face off. But he seems none the worse for wear.
He looks down, feels his body, then shrugs. “Seem to be all in one piece. And you? You’re adding to your collection of battle scars, I see.” He indicates the stripes across my chest where those razor talons ripped through my shirt and into flesh.
“I’ll probably live.” I glance the woggha’s way again. It’s still twitching. But dead. Definitely dead. Gods, but it’s been years since I saw one of those beasts this far up from the Deeps! Cave devils prefer absolute darkness. They are colorless, saggy-fleshed creatures with protruding bones and weird hollows where eyes ought to be. Leaving my brother to find his feet on his own, I approach the dead creature and study it. Its lips are twisted back in a perpetual grin full of savage, razor-sharp teeth. A monster stepped straight out of my worst nightmares.
Green foam dries around its mouth and dapples its gray, hairless hide. That doesn’t look natural.
Sul appears beside me and nudges the monster with one foot. “Ugh.” He shudders. “A fellow like that really should know better than to show his face in polite society.”
Cave devils are always dangerous. Hunters who venture into the Deeps must be wary of them. But this one was different. It was savage. As though it had lost all reason. Numerous wounds gape in its shoulder, haunches, and back, and one of its feet is crushed from a hit of Lur’s club. But it never slowed. It behaved as though it didn’t care about the pain.
I crouch and sniff. My stomach turns over with revulsion. A sour stink clings to the devil’s skin. Like rot.
“Didn’t you get a good enough noseful when you were clinging to the thing’s back?” Sul asks.
“This wasn’t just any devil.” I turn, meeting my brother’s gaze. “This creature was mad.”
The faintly mocking expression Sul wears like armor falters. “You think it’s true, then? The rumors?”
“They aren’t rumors.” I rise and take a step back, staring down at that ruinous hulk. “They’re too numerous to be rumors.”
Leaving my words to hang in the air above the dead beast, I make my way over to where Hael and Lur are helping Grir to his feet. He looks a little worse for wear, but his stone hide gave him some protection against the devil’s claws. Hael slips her shoulder under his arm for support. She looks positively dwarfed by his massive bulk but moves without apparent strain.
“Are you all right, Grir?” I ask.
“Seen worse,” he growls. “Wish you hadn’t spoiled the fun, my king. I wanted a piece of that ugly hide.”
I smile and turn to Lur. “How’s the shoulder?”
“Just a scratch,” she replies bravely through her teeth.
“Good. Then I have a task for you. Get some of the village folk to load up the woggha and cart it back to Mythanar. I want Madame Ar to look it over.”
Lur grimaces with distaste but offers a half salute and hastens through the ruined wurtguth toward the village. I look beyond her to the cave dwellings built into the walls of the cavern. At least twelve folk were slaughtered by the cave devil before a brave farm boy managed to run all the way to Mythanar and beg for help. Possibly more had perished before we made it back here and put an end to the beast. And how many more will suffer the same fate before I can get the Miphates? Before that terrible Mage Wistari and his brethren can use their strange magic to combat the evil waking in the heart of the Under Realm?
In the end, will their powers be enough? Or is it already too late?
“Are you coming, Vor?” Sul’s voice pulls me from my reverie. He stands across the field, holding our morleth’s reins.
“Yes,” I answer. “Coming.”
