As he ran, one of King’s rope sandals broke and went flapping off his foot. He shook his leg as he ran, flinging the broken sandal away. The thought flitted across his mind that if he was lucky, the three-headed monstrosity giving chase would fetch the slipper. The loud growl behind him disabused him of that notion. He kicked off the other sandal with a hop and sprinted as fast as he could across the cool stone floor.
Just as King reached the column and was about to make his jump, he felt his left arm painfully wrenched behind him, when he was pumping his elbow back. Then his whole arm was on fire and tugging him to a halt and upward. His body swung in the air and twisted.
Then he saw it. His entire left arm was in the jaws of the creature’s central head. King was lifted up, hanging from the thing’s jaws.
Then the hellhound violently thrashed its head from side to side, and King screamed.
FORTY-ONE
The scream echoed around the arena until King’s limp form flew across the room and landed on the floor in a heap.
After a moment, King opened his eyes and looked at his arm — or what was left of it. The flesh had been torn just above the wrist and peeled off up past the elbow where the jagged skin and torn muscle dangled down from his shoulder. He could see his radius and ulna bones in his forearm, stripped clean of muscles and tendons. Yellowish-white ligaments were all that held his elbow joint together. His hand was still whole but looked grotesque now, like a Mickey Mouse glove on a stick figure.
His head fell back onto the stone floor with a thunk, and his eyes closed. He tried to scream again, but no voice came. The overwhelming scent of his own body’s blood and meat filled his nostrils, churning his gut. But he didn’t panic. He’d gone through this before. Not the giant three-headed hellhound, but he’d survived mortal wounds on a few occasions. He knew what would happen next. With his eyes still closed, he turned his head. Then he opened his eyes and watched the impossible. The jagged flaps of skin at the shoulder stretched and grew as snakes of musculature slipped out from below it like alien tendrils probing for a meal. The flesh at his wrist grew upward toward the elbow. In a minute, the tendrils of muscle had joined and were filling out. The sensation was pure fiery agony. It sucked the air out of his lungs, but he fought against the building scream and remained calm. It would be over in moments.
Just a few more seconds of world class torture, he thought, then I’ll—
Movement across the arena caught his eye.
Alexander stood on the monstrous dog’s back. He held the massive chain wrapped around the creature’s single throat like a garrote. The hellhound snapped its three sets of jaws and thrashed its heads from side to side, but Alexander refused to let go. He looked like some kind of insane rodeo rider on a dog that weighed more than a tank.
The creature ran from side to side, then forward and stopped suddenly, like a maddened bull. Alexander struggled behind the beast’s neck, then cried out in triumph and leapt off the animal. He landed nimbly on the floor and raced for the side wall and the tunnel entrance.
Is he leaving me here? King wondered.
Cerberus chased him toward the wall. The massive chain sprang up off the floor behind the beast.
The chain pulled taut. The center head snapped up, and the giant animal’s momentum suddenly came to a complete stop. Its legs slipped up out from under it into the air, and the massive beast’s body slammed back onto the ground. The chamber shook from the impact. Dust cascaded down from the ceiling.
Alexander had successfully chained the dog. He smiled from the doorway of the tunnel, then began edging his way around the arena, as the giant creature got to its feet and began barking at him — each vocalization sounding like a peal of thunder in the enclosed cavern.
King looked down at his arm and saw that it had nearly finished knitting back together. He just needed a few more layers of skin. The process felt like a severe sunburn, but in reverse. The healing also left him ravenously hungry.
He rolled to his side and gingerly tested putting some weight on the arm. The muscles were as strong as ever. Like new…because they were. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, then stood.
Alexander ran around the perimeter of the stone arena. Cerberus kept pace at the end of its tether, barking at him in three distinct voices, each taking turns to create an unceasing wave of sound.
“You’re not out of the—” Alexander was yelling.
King looked down at the ground, then at the oncoming beast-dog. He wasn’t out of the radius of its arc.
Crap!
He turned and sprinted for the wall, his bare toes finding little crevices and impurities in the stone floor as he ran and gripping them, propelling him faster. At last he slammed into the stone wall at the far side of the cavern, just as Alexander zipped around the back of him and the massive dog passed him, hot on Alexander’s tail. The wash of air that swept over King reminded him of standing on the edge of a subway platform when a train slammed past without any plans of stopping at that station.
King edged around the circumference of the stone wall, scratching his itching forearm. He saw his sword in the arena. It was bent to hell and too far inside the arc of the hellhound’s tether.
Another lost blade.
He made his way to the opposite side of the arena from where they had entered. There was an identical tunnel mouth. Alexander stood there waiting, as though nothing exciting had happened. The giant dog barked twice more and then ran off toward the far side of the arena.
“Not a word about its bark being bigger than its bite. I nearly lost my arm,” King said.
“But your clever distraction worked. I was able to leash him.”
“Clever distrac—? Did I mention that I hate you?”
“Once or twice,” Alexander replied.
“Today?” King prodded.
“I think we’re up to three. Come on. The lab is this way.” Alexander led them down a long dark tunnel. King ran a hand along the dark wall until it flared away, leaving him only with Alexander’s dim silhouette to guide him forward. “Next, we will deal with the Forgotten. Then the creation of the body.”
Suddenly, the shape of Alexander’s body disappeared in the darkness ahead.
“Right. The Forgotten. But they’re all locked up. Hey, where did you—”
Something smashed into King’s body from the left, throwing him against a wall, hard. He rolled with the impact, and came up on his feet. He could hear a scrabbling in the dark and wished he had nabbed one of the lit torches in the arena.
Something hit him low in the gut, but through long years of rigorous exercise, King’s abdomen was like a rock. The blow still took air out of him, but it did little damage. He thrust down with two balled fists, hitting his attacker before it could retreat and launch a second assault from the gloom. The impact was hard and brittle under his fists, like he had just punched a wooden board encased in bubble wrap.
King could hear Alexander struggling in the dark. Then a match flared brightly. Matches wouldn’t first see widespread use in China for another twelve hundred years, but Alexander and King had agreed to make and use some modern amenities at times when others were not around. Matches were one of their creature comforts.
The match lit a torch sconce on the wall, casting orange light in all directions. They had entered a wider room at the end of the tunnel. Like the parking garage in Tunisia, every surface — floor, walls and ceiling — was covered in wraiths. There were hundreds of them chittering in the dark.