What had seemed to be a blank wall a moment before revealed itself as a concealed door under the young thief’s scrutiny. He had been led to it by an almost imperceptible path worn into the stone, a path that ended where the “wall” began.
“Not so much a secret, now, is it?” he observed under his breath as his dagger blade found the hidden catch and the door swung inward. Here was the way-or one of the ways, anyway-that the priests of the vile god of darkness got to the altar below. “And here too,” Gord said softly as he went rapidly down the steps, “is where the chief priest will have his most privy sanctum. Let us hope he is busily engaged in some foul rite.”
A low, indistinct, but somehow obscene chanting came up the staircase. The farther Gord went, the louder the sound became, but he could still discern none of its meaning even when he finally arrived at the bottom of the flight of steps. Deep-throated iron horns suddenly bellowed, adding to the noise at odd intervals, while great drums rambled as an underbeat to the chant, and discordant sounds like the random plucking of monstrous harps accentuated the strange rhythm. The sounds came from his left, so Gord went to his right into a narrow passage.
The darkness was deeper than black, but he had no difficulty making his way, of course, and the enchanted vision granted to him by the sword he had gained while adventuring with Gellor even enabled the young thief to distinguish which passages were the most traveled. When he had a choice, he always selected the least-trod way. After a dozen false leads and dead ends, Gord came to a small, circular chamber at the end of the corridor he had chosen. The only feature or ornamentation inside it was a quartet of ordinary-looking candleholders, each one set into the wall equidistant from the ones adjacent to it.
“This is strange,” he said quietly to himself. “A place like this has no purpose, not even benches, a lavatory, an idol… What might it be?” His actions were not those of someone searching for a place to rest, wash, or worship. Gord was checking the walls, rapidly, using eyes and fingers. Finding nothing remarkable, he worked his way back out toward the corridor. He finally realized that where the tunnel entered the little circle of space, there was a gap between walls, which meant…
“No stone of the passage meshes with those of the chamber!” It was an exclamation of discovery, albeit uttered in a hushed voice.
Darting back into the room, his mind working faster than his hands or feet could move, Gord turned his attention to the high-set sconces, ancient affairs with long prickets for the setting of massive candles. Bronze they were, and each of the four polished too.
“This is the one,” he murmured, noticing that the one immediately to the right of the tunnel entrance was more worn than the other three. Gord gave it a tug, then a push upward, then tried to twist it from side to side. It was unmoving, solid and firmly set.
“This cannot be…” Gord started to lament, his hands still working, and the words were barely out of his mouth when he hit the right combination, first pressing down the spike of the pricket and then pushing upward on the sconce. Accompanied by an almost inaudible grinding, the whole circle of the chamber slowly pivoted through a half-turn. Gord was briefly disconcerted, but because he had half expected something like this, he was not so startled that he forgot to draw his weapons as the chamber turned.
“Who dares intrude in my master’s sanctum?!” It was a question and a challenge at once. The voicing of it caused a foul graveyard odor to fill the little place where Gord stood, the reek nearly gagging him.
There was no choice available to him. Gord’s ears told him the sound of the voice had come from his right. Not eager to be trapped inside the small chamber, he sprang out into the left-hand area of the larger room that the rotation of the chamber had revealed. He hit the ground and spun to face the direction the voice had come from.
The body he saw before him looked at first glance something like a relatively small ogre-a monstrosity with a bulbous, barrel-like torso supported by thick, bowed legs. Its flesh had the pallor of death and a charnel stench to match its appearance. In the next instant he saw an even more gruesome aspect. Long, writhing worms issued from all over the creature’s head-mouth, eyes, ears, nose. They waved blindly. Independently, as If offering their own challenge to the foolish human who had violated this place.
“Hells’ handles!” Gord hissed, springing back in horror from the sight.
That move was fortunate, for the massive thing spat the worms out of its mouth at that moment, and where they fell to the floor the stones hissed and bubbled for a moment. Gord noted with a combination of awe and revulsion that where the things had struck and splattered, the floor was pitted. They were small holes, but if that had been his flesh…
“Hackkahhkk,” the terrible, rotten-fleshed beast coughed. It was bringing up more of the worms from inside its massive chest. And as it did so, it began to lumber toward the young thief, its splayed feet making a meaty, slapping sound on the stone floor.
Gord whirled to his left, slashed out and down with his sword, dived into a somersault, and came up behind the monster’s right shoulder. He was too far away now to strike effectively with either of his weapons, but at least he was safe for a moment.
“Plaaht!” The thing reflexively spat forth another mouthful of the worms, spraying them in an arc that was nowhere near him. Gord saw that but paid no attention. He flashed his gaze toward where he had felt his sword’s blade strike home, needing to know what his slash had done to the foul flesh of the thing’s thick, distended leg.
The yellow-gray flesh had parted under the edge of his weapon, all right, and a wound resembling an open mouth, with its lower lip drooping, was plainly evident there. But the cut shed no blood and oozed no ichor. The squat creature from the pits of the netherworld seemed totally unaffected by the wound. It was now shambling around, turning and hacking deep inside its throat once again.
Gord went into a circling, dancing, diving routine that kept the thing turning and lumbering. After a half-dozen attempts to splatter the young thief with the corrosive worms, the monster gave up that strategy-whether in frustration or because its innards were exhausted of the foul, writhing tubes, Gord neither knew nor cared. During that process he had managed to score several more hits upon the great beast’s legs, but although bone showed when one of these attacks had scored heavily, the monster still came on undaunted.
Now Gord was dismayed, even horrified, to find that the monster had weapons other than its foul worms. From somewhere beneath its mouldering garments the thing pulled forth a pair of sicklelike weapons. Its long arms and the curved blades gave it a reach of some six feet or more on either side. Then it spoke, the first words it had uttered since its initial challenge, while holding the sickles at the ends of its upraised, outstretched arms.
“Now, human, I shall have the pleasure of hacking you into small strips before I feast on your flesh and blood and bones!” Its voice was clogged-sounding, the words slightly mushy, as if the lungs of the creature were rotted and worm-infested too.
The thing was overconfident and, for all its fearsomeness, slow. As it gurgled the last words of its threat, Gord darted in toward the monster’s right side yet again, holding his dagger ready to parry a possible sickle-blow. With a backhand motion of his sword, he chopped at the bone exposed in the monster’s wounded leg and then tumbled away. As he sprang erect behind the creature, he slashed at the leg again and gave a speech of his own.