Lod the Galley Slave (Lost Civilizations: 7)
Author: Heppner, Vaughn
Date: 2014-02-13

Fantasy Books by Vaughn Heppner:

LOST CIVILIZATION SERIES

Giants

Leviathan

The Tree of Life

Gog

Behemoth

Lod the Warrior

Lod the Galley Slave

THE ARK CHRONICLES

People of the Ark

People of the Flood

People of Babel

People of the Tower

DARK GODS SERIES

Death Knight

The Dragon Horn

Assassin of the Damned

OTHER FANTASY BOOKS

The Assassin of Carthage

Elves and Dragons

Strontium-90

Visit www.Vaughnheppner.com for more information.

Lod the Galley Slave

(Lost Civilizations)

by Vaughn Heppner

Copyright © 2014 by the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

The Oracle of Gog

The legends of Lod were many, a grim hero of the Pre-Cataclysmic Age. That was long before the pyramids of Egypt rose and centuries before the ships of Crete ruled the seas. In that misty era of sabertooths, mammoths and behemoths, the demonic Nephilim walked the Earth. They were the sons of the bene elohim, who had come down from the celestial sphere and taken wives from among the daughters of men.

Lod may have been born somewhere along the shores of the Suttung Sea. The ancient sagas first mention him as rat bait in the wicked city of Shamgar. That is where he learned his first harsh lessons of life.

I laid at his feet ten gold bars, twenty silver sacks and slaves both comely and strong. To the one hidden in shadows I bowed, and with my dagger cut my wrist, dripping blood, binding my soul with dreadful oaths. Then did Gog speak. He beheld my future. Now my sire is dead, my uncles slain, and I am king of the land.

- From the Testament of Zoar

-1-

“We’ll try the Street of Harlots today,” the rat hunter whispered. A bearded, evil-faced ruffian, he plied a gondola’s long oar.

Lod—the rat hunter’s bait—made no reply. He had found that stillness and corresponding silence warded off the misty chill better than rubbing his shoulders or wishing for a garment or blanket.

Lod was a mixture of gangly youth and rawboned size. His broad, whip-scarred back matched his big hands and feet. Muscles like ropes twisted across him. He had no fat because his young body devoured every scrap of goat meat and soggy turnip he could find.

“Keep watch,” the rat hunter whispered.

Hunched at the prow like a Nebo primitive, with tangled hair and a twist of linen around his loins, Lod squinted through the mist at the canal’s oily water.

The thump of rowing stopped as the rat hunter scowled at Lod. Boat-wood creaked as the man stepped toward the prow where Lod crouched.

Lifting a knout, a leather whip, the rat hunter shouted, “Answer me when I speak to you!” His knout slashed through the air.

When the leather hit Lod’s back, it burned like fire. But Lod kept hunched at the prow, his callused hands clutching the braided eel-rope attached to his collar. He bit his lips, mastering the pain, and his strange blue eyes blazed like some desert prophet gone mad.

“Did you hear me?” the hunter hissed.

Lod’s knuckles whitened as he clenched the leash binding him to the gondola. The leather thongs hissed through the air again. Lod groaned as they bit into his flesh.

“Answer me, slave.”

Lod shuddered as his pale face drained of color, matching his abnormal white hair.

“By Gog!” the hunter hissed, striking a third time. He used brutal strength, drawing blood. “You will answer me.”

“I hear,” Lod said.

“Master!” snarled the hunter. “I hear, master.”

Lod nodded as sweat oozed and mingled with the blood on his back.

The knout dropped onto wood as steel slid free. Gnarled fingers twined into Lod’s hair and a gutting knife touched his cheek. The words whispered into his ear reached his nostrils. They reeked of sour ale and chewed kanda-leaf.

“Who rules here, slave?”

“You do,” Lod said.

“I will only ask once more.”

“You do…master,” rumbled Lod, in a voice that belied his youth.

The hunter let go and stepped back, sheathing his dagger. “Face me, slave.”

Lod unfolded from his Nebo crouch, and on his hands and knees, he faced the hunter. A folded net lay in the middle of the boat. Beside it were three long tridents. The fourth was in the hunter’s rope-roughened hands, with the razor-sharp prongs aimed at Lod’s face.

“You’ve survived where none has,” the hunter said. His teeth were stained black by years of kanda-leaf chewing. “You’ve lived where everyone else has died. What’s your secret, eh? Where do you gain this mulishness?”

“I do not know, master,” Lod lied.

A sneer curled the bearded lip. “Then maybe I’ll sell you to a beastmaster.”

Something akin to fear sprouted in Lod’s heart. He hated it, but the fear gnawed into his iron-hard belly.

“I am good bait,” he said.

“You know how to lure the vermin,” the hunter agreed. “But if you defy me again, I will sell you to a beastmaster. I’ll knock out your teeth first and break every finger. Then the beastmaster will use you as feed for the leopards he trains to attack men.”

Fear tasted like bile in Lod’s mouth. He dropped his head, bowing before the hunter, hiding his hatred.

The rat hunter laughed, an ugly noise. “That’s better. Now attend to your post, bait, and keep a sharp lookout.”

“Yes, master,” Lod whispered.

The hunter took the long oar, the single one he swept back and forth at the end of the boat, rowing through the misty canals of Shamgar.

The rising sun brought a bloody glint to the fog. Shadowy domes, towers and square fortresses appeared like ghosts. Morning sounds heralded the dawn: a bucket of filth heaved into a canal, a gong waking its household, the shrill cries of swamp-beasts who had grown bold during the night. Somewhere in the murk, a priest of Gog called a paean of praise from his minaret, while the crack of a whip, shouted curses and heavy clinks of chain meant a slaver drove his wares early to market.

The mists thinned here. Lod squinted. Fifty feet out, crates bobbed in the water. Atop the biggest crate, licking an obscene claw, hunched a black canal rat the size of a rutting he-goat.

Before Lod could signal him, the rat hunter locked the oar, crept near and whispered, “Today we’ll try something new. Turn around, stretch out your hands and put your wrists together.”

Lod reluctantly obeyed.

The rat hunter bound Lod’s wrists with a braided eel-rope, looping it three times and tying it with a sailor’s knot. The hunter’s rough hands, his craggy features and the skill with which he tied the knot betrayed his former station as a reaver of the Inland Sea. Whatever had brought him down to scouring Shamgar’s canals was a secret he had never shared with his bait.

The hunter grinned, exposing his black-stained teeth. “Do you know there’s a bet on you?”

Lod hunched dumbly like an ox, contemplating his bound wrists, afraid that if he spoke his anger might reveal itself. He had often thought of slaying his owner, but in Shamgar, they impaled such slaves. Lod shuddered. He had witnessed impalement before. Brutish men held down the screaming slave while others hammered a sharp stake up the man’s—Lod squeezed his eyes shut, willing the memory gone. They had planted the dying slave upright so he writhed in agony and thereby provided edification for any others with similar thoughts of freedom.

“Some say no rat will ever gut you,” the hunter was whispering. “Others predict that with me as your new master your days are sorely numbered. What has it been? Three weeks now?”

Lod lifted his head and stared into pitiless cruelty. He understood then that a bettor had slipped silver into the hunter’s palm to weight the outcome.

The hunter sneered, and with his powerful rope-roughened right hand he slapped Lod across the face. “Don’t stare at me, slave. Keep your eyes lowered before your master.”

Lod dropped his gaze as he tasted coppery blood.

Calloused fingers squeezed his shoulder. “Look at the size of you, and with muscles like brass. Who ever heard of bait like you? Gershon was right to fear his bait-boy.” The hunter struck his own chest. “But I know how to handle bait big or small, submissive or defiant. See that fat black bastard preening his claws. It’s surely a double-weight catch, well over one hundred pounds of vicious canal rat.”

Lod choked down his hatred. “Master,” he said, “I need free hands in order to play dead. My movements now will be too jerky and I will not be convincing.”

“You’ll play dead or I’ll make you dead, boy.”

Lod nodded. For years, he had survived the canals, longer than any bait, first as a boy weeping himself to sleep—but with a stubborn core just the same. Then he had become a soulless youth, with every soft emotion beaten out of him. Finally, he had become a legendry animal, a thing of rat hunter lore spoken of in the lowest taverns.

Until a week ago. A week ago the visions began: dreams with fire, blood and the breaking of teeth. The visions seared him, filling his warped soul until he yearned to howl and gnash his teeth like a slavering beast. On the fourth night, lost words had returned to him, words he had learned at his father’s knee.

His father had been a seer, although others had named his father a shepherd. Those remembered words taught Lod that…that Elohim sent visions. On the fifth night, with a fevered shine in his blue eyes, Lod had prophesied in the dark, in the locked shed where they penned him: “Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!”

As they drifted in the canal, the hunter bent low, whispering, “I’ve watched you, bait, swimming like an otter, escaping the rats time and again. You trust yourself. Today you’ll have to trust me, and the skill of my cast. Now into the brine with you, boy,” and with his bare foot, the hunter shoved Lod hard.

Lod tumbled into the sewage-filled waters, the forty-foot leash attached to his collar and the brass ring in the gondola playing out like a fishing line. Water shot up his nostrils as he somersaulted into the depths and kicked, but not too hard. Exploding onto the surface fooled no rat.

He soon bobbed up with his bloody back and slowly lifted his head, sipping air, watching through narrowed eyes.

The great black rat, as big as a he-goat, had stopped preening its webbed claws. Its nose quivered and its whiskers twitched.

From the side of the foggy canal came a splash. Lod knew the sound intimately. A sheep-sized rat had plunged in. Then came two more splashes. The giant black monster on the crates squealed a challenging cry, and then it, too, dove into the water.

Lod had long ago divined the nature of canal rats: greedy, territorial and savage. They were not like sharks. Rats breathed air and not underwater. Just the same, a rat often submerged and occasionally made an attack from the depths. Most often, a rat surfaced, and if the body was a corpse, it devoured the meat as fast as possible. Against a living foe, though, even the giant canal rats might balk.

The beasts were used to the weak, the perishing or the securely bound. Lod had learned early that bared teeth and raking fingers—fighting back, in other words—gave him the seconds he needed either to escape, or for the hunter’s trident to make its strike. That was only true against a lone rat. When the beasts swarmed, they became frenzied, not because their courage increased, but because in their greed they feared that others might gain the choicest morsel before they could.

Four triangular heads arrowed straight for him, ears laid flat and sleek, furry bodies hidden in the waters. Beady rat eyes shone and the oily surface rippled with their passage. The black rat, dwarfing the others, swam that much faster, a champion among the creatures of the canals.

Normally Lod might have waited, for his timing had become exquisite. Because his wrists had been tied, he turned, kicked his legs and used a crippled dog-paddle-stroke with his arms.

“No!” the hunter hissed. “Wait for my signal.”

Lod ignored such madness as he threw a glance over his shoulder. The rats swam faster because he tried to escape, although the wily black rat had submerged.

“Wait!” hissed the hunter. “They’re slowing down.”

Thoughts of the black rat in the depths drove Lod’s legs and made his dog-paddle stroke a clumsy splash. The gondola was ten feet away. The hunter crouched low, a trident in his hand, no doubt the cord attached to it around his throwing wrist.

As the other rats slowed, their noses quivering, Lod felt sharp teeth gash his foot. He shouted. The other rats squealed in rage, and hurried toward him. Pain knifed into Lod’s leg. He kicked hard with his other foot, striking a furry snout. Then he flutter-kicked and dog-paddled with his two wrists tied together.

The rat hunter rose and hurled a trident, with a cord trailing behind the missile. A rat squealed with pain, and two others turned on it. They were cannibalistic, eagerly ready to devour their own. For those two it was their undoing. The rat hunter flung the lead-weighted net, capturing them with their dying brother.

The great black rat surfaced, Lod’s blood staining its incisors. If his hands had been free, Lod would have raked the beast with his fingers and snarled like the mighty sabertooth cats of his homeland. Instead, he kicked, reached out and clumsily draped his bound hands over the gunwale. With a grunt, he heaved himself into the boat. The gondola rocked. The hunter cursed, and the trident in his hand splashed into the water.

Lod huffed and puffed, and he checked the slashes in his foot and leg. They were minor cuts. Under his breath, he thanked Elohim. They might flow with pus later but they shouldn’t infect him too much.

“Fool!” the hunter shouted.

Lod regarded the red-faced man.

“You made me drop my trident, and now the black rat is gone. He was the prize I wanted.”

“You would have had him if my hands had been free,” Lod said.

The hunter’s bleary eyes bulged. With a hiss, the gutting knife came out as the hunter crouched. He yanked Lod’s head back and pressed the blade against his throat.

“You dare speak back? Do you wish me to bind your feet, too?”

Lod yearned to pummel the hunter to death. Instead, swallowing his rage, he said, “No, master. Forgive me.”

For a wild instant, Lod was certain the hunter would slash his throat. Then the man shouted furiously, yanked him upright and hurled him over the side.

“Retrieve my trident, slave.”

Lod dove into the murky water, kicking deep, and soon he groped in the muck. He touched broken glass, and almost cut his fingers. Then his hand curled around wood. The trident—it felt good in his grip. It was a weapon. He pushed off the bottom and surfaced seconds later with the trident in his hands.

“Hurry,” the hunter said. “Give it here.”

The feel of a weapon in his hands intoxicated Lod.

“Slave!” the hunter snarled, grabbing the gunwale with one hand. He leaned out and held forth his other hand. “Give me the trident. Hurry, give it to me.”

As he treaded water, Lod thrust the prongs into the hunter’s belly. The man howled, falling, tearing the trident out of Lod’s grasp.

Lod thrust his wrists upon the gunwale and heaved upward, kicking, wriggling his belly onto the rail as he reached for the hunter’s knife. With a coarse hand, the man grabbed Lod’s wrists. Lod snarled and shoved the dying man’s hand aside. He grabbed the knife’s bone hilt. Then Lod flopped back into the water, taking the knife with him. He madly sawed the eel-skin leash attached to his collar and to the boat. He sawed until the rope parted. Then, with his teeth, he began to tear at the leather binding his wrists, for he could not turn the knife to cut so close to his hands. He yanked and pulled at the leather knot, working feverishly to free himself.

“You’ll die first,” the hunter whispered.

From the water Lod stared up, his face a mask.

The hunter clung to the gunwale, wheezing, with his features ashen. He took a painful gasp and bellowed into the fog for help.

“…what was that?” a voice asked.

“Help!” the hunter shouted. “My rat bait has stabbed me.”

“Hold on!” the hidden man shouted.

The hunter grimaced at Lod. Then his eyes glazed as he collapsed.

Lod twisted and dove like an otter, kicking through the murky waters as he gnawed at the impossibly tight knot.

-2-

Like phantasmal octopi from a dreamer’s nightmare, vaporous tendrils tightened their grip on the city’s canals and sandy channels. Fog glided from the walkways, slipped from the varied cobblestone plazas and piers. As the sun took its first tentative steps into the sky, the mists clung solely to the waterways. A maze of canals and channels threaded past slaver barracks, merchant warehouses, palaces, four-story tenements, timber-built strongholds and galley pens.

The latter two places infested the swamp city like the pox. Brigands and sea reavers used Shamgar as their base. Brutal galley law bound each compound, enforced by the chieftain’s fist, blade or the bribes he paid in gold, wine or the flesh of women.

Above the mist and the alleyways where beggars shivered and lepers huddled, above the squalid parapets where wary sea rovers patrolled, higher even than the towers stained with seagull guano, arose a vast, blunt acropolis. It rose like a shark’s fin over the sea of dwellings, and like a deadly Great White, it made even the blood thirstiest reaver blanch. For on the acropolis was the dread Temple of Gog. The edifice was unlike any in the city. Marble imported from afar towered twenty stories high in a cyclopean cathedral of evil. It was gargantuan, a symbol of megalomania, arrogance and will to power.

The city’s largest canal led past the acropolis. The canal’s thickest mists vomited a lone five-oared boat ablaze with lanterns. A boy beat a warning drum, the oars moving rhythmically and fast. The instant boat-wood scraped against stone, a brute leaped out and hurried across the wharf onto the Temple plaza. He passed man-tall tripods where braziers smoked, their scented coals throwing off a dying glow. With the dawn’s light, the attending priests had departed, taking their stepladders, skull necklaces and bags of costly incense.

The brute—he wore a black jacket, black leathers and shiny black boots—hurried up broad marble steps. Huge, massively built, he had thick simian shoulders and an elephantine neck. Only partly human, he had a long black ponytail bound by golden rings and a trident tattoo red on his forehead. The forehead was much too wide. His hands were outlandish, strangler-sized, and his baleful eyes swirled with promises of death. A notorious killer, he wore a finely tempered blade in a gruesome scabbard. He was Kron the Enforcer.

His sire had summoned him, the reason for his haste—and his fear.

None but a fool entered Gog’s presence without a twisting of innards. Gog the Oracle, Firstborn, child of Magog the Accursed. Kron’s skin crawled. Forbidding secrets surrounded that last name, horrible legends. There had been a time when the Old Ones had walked the Earth and ruled like tyrants, like gods. Their true name was bene elohim. Kron bared horse-sized, viciously strong teeth. Magog the Accursed was a fallen star, a rebel angel driven from the heavens and one who had dared cloak himself in flesh. Kron’s baleful eyes shone with dread. A day had come, a frightful moment when shining ones from above had dragged Magog down into Tartarus. There they had bound him in adamant chains for the day of Elohim’s wrath. So told the grimmest legends.

Kron growled a curse. Did he wish to damn himself? It was ill luck to think such thoughts. He concentrated on the present as he wiped perspiration from his tattooed brow. Why had Gog summoned him? Had his sire swept aside the mystic veil and peered yet again into the future?

Each child of the Accursed, unto the third generation, had a gift, an ability uniquely his own. Gog could peer into future paths that might be…if enough blood greased the way and the stars aligned themselves just so.

This particular gift countless people craved, countless petitioners begged Gog to grant them a favor. They seldom saw the First Born directly. Gog lived apart in the catacombs below. Petitioners pressed parchments and rolled scrolls into the hands of his priests. For his favor, they brought gifts and promised Gog servitude or an alliance. With this prophetic power and countless favors granted, Gog had welded together a spidery empire, striking down those who might trouble him.

Rumors abounded that the king of Pildash and crafty merchants of Dishon had made the trek, as had many around the Suttung Sea eager to know the future. In the past a giant from the Kragehul Steppes had come, and Gibborim from faraway Poseidonis. From Larak, Eridu and mighty Caphtor itself they had trickled in dark pilgrimage. Even proud sons of Cain, Jogli nomads, had begged an audience with Gog.

Kron took a deep breath, attempting calm. He strode toward the Temple entrance where awaited thirteen shaven priests bearing torches. He didn’t fear them. They were only men. Men were animals, like jackasses or oxen, some reminded him of wolves or even panthers, but they were all still just beasts. They carried none of the blood of the high. They had no lineage to the Old Ones.

On the darkest nights, when gloom bit his heart, he pondered his diluted blood and his sire’s pedigree. Gog was First Born. He, Kron, was merely a Nephilim, half that of his sire.

“You’re late,” the chief priest said, his silken robe of funeral purple.

If any other man had spoken to Kron so, he would have smashed the leering face with a single blow, breaking the eggshell brittleness that made a human skull. Instead, Kron’s innards clenched and his dark eyes tightened.

“You have composed yourself?” the chief priest asked.

Kron sought the calm he needed, dipping his head.

“Follow me,” the chief priest said, slurring his words, betraying a mind gripped by the black poppy of Poseidonis.

Only so intoxicated, realized Kron, could mere men serenely enter the inner chamber of Gog.

The thirteen priests lifted their torches, guiding him past towering marble columns. They seemed like mice in a great house. The Temple dwarfed them, dwarfed Kron, making him feel insignificant. He loathed the emotion, warred against it in the darkness of his soul. Gog, Gog the Oracle, Sire and Lord, Suzerain of his Nephilim. The Temple blackness drifted around the knot of crackling light. The swollen dark seemed like clammy fingers. Kron massaged his throat as he increased his pace, keeping among the vacant-eyed priests. He glanced often at the tiles, expecting vipers, scorpions or centipedes to slither into view. The place had that feel.

Huge bronze doors loomed before them, massive doors bigger than a giant or a great sloth. When closed, the portal looked strong enough to halt a rampaging mastodon.

As they neared the titanic entrance, halting before it, the place seemed as if a black pit yawned before them. It sucked the warmth from Kron and stole his courage. He began to quake.

“Gog,” the chief priest said.

“Gog!” the others chanted.

“Come.” It was a single word emanating from the depths of the darkness. It rang heavily, vibrantly and terrifyingly deep.

The priests resumed their drugged march. Kron stumbled after them, entering the inner sanctum. The darkness increased its weight the farther they trod. The gloom pressed down so the flickering circle of visibility shrank. It was an awful phenomenon. Dimly, Kron perceived monstrous idols looming along the path. They were colossi of the Old Ones in bronze, iron and granite.

Now a vile stench arose, a mixture of sulfur, putrid carrion and a reek Kron couldn’t place. The radius of torchlight weakened even more, until the priests seemed like a tiny oasis in a surging sea of blackness.

Kron trembled, for he sensed a vast being before him, one who cloaked himself in darkness. He heard a rattle of chains and a dreadful moan. Torches blazed and the swirling dark parted to reveal a gargantuan ebon altar. Blood trickled down the altar’s sides. Then—before more could be taken in—a slippery thing, like a giant eel or tentacle, slid into view as the shadows congealed and thickened.

Kron felt an unblinking solitary eye upon him.

“Gog!” the priests chanted.

A grunt sounded, an impossibly low noise. It came from a mouth higher than Kron could reach.

He dropped to his knees and then lay on the tiles. “High One,” Kron intoned, hating the ritual abasement. “I crawl before you. For you are the master and I am the worm.”

“You are my son,” rumbled Gog, in a voice like a two-ton gong. “You are flesh of my flesh.”

The words pierced Kron, each syllable a vibration felt in the bones. He strove to maintain his equilibrium even as he heard breathing like a monstrous bull.

Wetting his lips, Kron said, “Instruct me, Oh High One. Command your son that I may obey my sire’s wishes.”

“One—whom none shall name in my presence—has found a willing vessel in Shamgar.”

The twist in Kron’s guts was as a dagger thrust. Surely, Gog could not mean…that one. Kron pondered the implications, and because of the continuing silence, he knew that he was supposed to cringe and cry out. No! He refused. He was Kron, the mightiest of his father’s sons.

The audible breathing grew heavier, and the drugged faces of the thirteen priests became fearfully pale as they cringed and slid away from the looming First Born.

“I have pierced the mystic veil,” Gog rumbled at last. “I have seen a future unattractive and unyielding. In it is a man with eyes blazing fire. He carries a sword of vengeance and is a breaker of teeth. He is a man of pain, of suffering and torments, and…” A foul curse tolled through the darkness. “I have pierced the mystic veil. I have tracked this one through many paths, through many maybes and might-bes. He is slippery and indistinct, the mark of those who serve the one whom none shall name in my presence. Men compare him to an otter, and he is loose in my city. He will probably meet today or the next a chariot lance. Those futures are the worst.”

“I don’t understand,” Kron said. “What significance is there in a chariot lance?”

Silence reigned. Kron knew why. He had interrupted Gog. Worse, he had queried his sire. Yet…he was Kron, and he refused to cringe like the priests around him or ask his sire for pardon.

The silence lengthened, until… “I have pierced the mystic veil and teased out this single clue: my foe’s affinity with otters. Is he a Nebo tribesman who traps freshwater otters in the swamp, or a trader of furs who sells his wares in the city? I do not know. Maybe he fights like an otter or travels in their manner. The chariot lance is easier to read. I deem it represents a chariot warrior, a champion of great valor.”

“High One, are not chariots useless in the swamp and too bulky for Shamgar’s walkways, to say nothing of the canals?”

“You are dull. A dullard. He is probably a plains warrior, a merchant’s mercenary-guard or an outlaw who has cast his lot with the reavers.”

“O High One, if the otter is a trader of furs and the chariot-lance a merchant’s guard, how can I stop their meeting?”

“I have dimly pierced the mystic veil. That denotes strength in my enemy. Yet I have seen you clutching a severed head that bears two fiery eyes. It is in your power to slay my foe-to-be, to cut down a weed that might choke the plans of the mighty. You must sharpen your blade and keep alert. I deem you the most likely to find success if you work as usual, retaining only the use of your attendants.”

Kron let that sink in. Gog needed him! He felt a moment of victory, wondering how to use this to his advantage, how to extract greater rank from his sire.

“Worm!” Gog rumbled. “You are my son, flesh of my flesh. But you must not become too bold.”

Before Kron could react, a slippery something whipped into view. It clutched the hilt of Kron’s belted sword. With a hiss of steel, the blade left Kron’s human-skin scabbard. Kron froze. Had he gone too far?

The sword streaked toward him.

Kron knew an instant of bitterness, yet even still, he refused to beg for mercy.

Then the blade swished over him. It sank into the nearest priest, brutally cutting him and sweeping the human off his feet.

“I baptize your sword,” Gog said, “giving it an enchantment of blood.”

The blade clashed onto the tiles before Kron. Thick crimson droplets struck his cheeks, causing him to flinch.

“Abase yourself, worm!”

Kron hugged the tiles, trembling in fear.

“Even though your foe is cattle, a mere man and possibly a youngling, he has the power to thwart our gift of the Accursed. Now go! Begin the hunt.”

-3-

Lod surfaced between splashing oars and a melon barge’s hull. Slave rowers grunted. A drummer pounded the beat. A whip cracked.

Lod grasped a slimy length of cordage. Black marine grass and barnacles grew out of the bottom of the barge. Despite that, Lod rested, catching his breath.

A lantern followed out of a smaller canal. Mists swirled around an old hunter with crooked shoulders as he swept his gondola’s long oar. The man tried signaling the barge, waving a thin arm. Then the mists thickened and the hunter’s reedy voice failed to pierce the thump of oars and the incessant beat of the kettledrum.

No grin twisted Lod’s lips. The stakes were too high. Except for the iron collar and loincloth, he was naked. He had tied the eel-rope formerly binding his hands to the hilt of his stolen dagger and to his left wrist. The blade trailed him underwater.

Fortunately, no slaver had ever branded him or notched his ear. As bait—a disposable slave—men had deemed it unnecessary to mark him. If he could tear off the iron collar…his eyes narrowed. Most rat hunters knew him. In passing, they had often touched him for luck. Simply because he had kept alive all these years, he had become legendary. Once word reached them that he had slain his so-called master…they would scour the canals just like that old trailing hunter.

He had to escape the pirate city.

Unfortunately, sunken bars rising up like a fence guarded the canals leading into the swamp, and the moment he set foot on a pier or dock, sailors, fishermen, any rat hunter would recognize him as bait. Dare he turn brigand?

Lod shook his head. He had heard of galley law. The reavers of Shamgar were a clan unto themselves. Each stronghold boasted itself independent, secure in its own might. Storm one bastion in bloody battle and the rest would simply bar their gates, saying it meant nothing to them. They were the original denizens of Shamgar, scoundrels hiding from honest men, using the depths of the swamp as a den.

Lod re-gripped the rope affixed to the barge as the kettledrum-beat increased tempo. The steersman above grunted as he threw his weight against the broad-bladed oar. Slowly, the heavy vessel turned.

Mists parted into wispy vapors. A rat boat became visible, not the one trailing the barge, but one mid-canal, with a boy playing dead, drifting in the water. Lod noticed telltale ripples approaching the bait. He wanted to yell out, to warn the poor lad, probably no more than nine or ten years of age.

Lod turned away, unwilling to watch a tragedy he had witnessed a thousand times. In that moment, he knew the answer. He must take the barge to its probable destination.

The reavers of Shamgar lived by the sword, by the fist and axe. They plundered those weaker than themselves and burned out whoever fought too hard. The only law they recognized was someone who hit harder than they did. That someone was Gog and his terrible sons, the Nephilim, and his priests, beastmasters and soul-snatching necromancers.

Yet Gog had not attempted to rule the city, had not stormed the reaver citadels one by one. Instead, through his minions, the First Born had carved out neutral territory and there allowed merchants to set up booths and stalls. Bazaars had grown, prospered, and the reavers had soon realized that it was easier selling stolen loot in their own city than having to risk it elsewhere. Over time, Gog had begun a different sort of conquest, winning adherents to his Order. He initiated them into ghastly rites as he accepted worship and gave rewards of prosperity. Gog taught his initiates the joy of inflicting pain on chosen weaklings. Many rat hunters belonged to the Order, although most never advanced beyond Whip Rank.

Lod decided that he must risk entering neutral territory. There he must steal coin and buy passage on an outbound merchant vessel, or perhaps try to stow away on such a ship.

A shrill scream from the canals told him of the rat bait’s end.

Perhaps before his capture many years ago Lod might have shuddered at that high-pitched scream. He might even have sweated in panicked fear. As an animal, a thing that had survived many years, he didn’t even shrug, so great had become his disinterest in others. But because of his visions, anger burned in his blue eyes at the young boy’s death.

-4-

Kron loathed the milling throng, the clink of traders accepting coins, the endless shouting and the bickering of the bazaar. Was it truly possible that Gog feared one among the humans, this otter?

Two reavers approached him. He had enforcer duty today. They probably wanted to complain about stale beer or something equally useless.

Kron scowled at them, radiating menace.

The two reavers—blade-carrying fighters—hesitated. Then they turned abruptly and strode away.

Kron had no time for useless chatter. That the two had succumbed so easily to his gift—that of mentally inflicting his will upon others—proved that they were not the one he must find. His attendants combed this neutral territory, looking for former chariot warriors, checking fur traders and interviewing Nebo tribesmen. His attendants were hardened cutthroats, noticeable by their brown leathers, boots and peculiar hooked swords. Yet they were mere men, cattle, without a drop of the blood of the high.

Kron brooded. Priests normally kept the peace in neutral territory, backed by a complement of spearmen. He caught flashes in the crowds of priestly red robes and the glitter of spearmen’s polished shields.

In the past, unruly reavers had tested the resolve of the priests, and on more than one occasion Kron had been near enough to wet his blade and put a quick end to any riotous looting. Those days had unfortunately passed. He relished the idea of drawing steel against this hidden one, of severing his head and handing it on a platter to Gog. Man or madman, this otter was still just cattle.

And yet…Gog had shown fear of this one, had openly admitted that the entire web of his secret kingdom was on the hunt for this man. Surely, that could not mean that others were being held in reserve here in case he, the enforcer, failed.

Kron eyed the vast throng. He was the enforcer. No mere mortal could match him in a fight. Among the Nephilim—his brothers—he feared only two; and then only because of the deadliness of their gifts, not because of their skill at arms. Would his sire insult him by stationing others nearby? That seemed inconceivable, and yet, if Gog truly feared this hidden one such a move would only be common sense.

How much did Gog fear? Kron felt unease in his gut. The desire to topple his sire and rule the secret kingdom in his own right burned strong in him. He swallowed a knot out of his throat. Such thoughts were unwise. Gog could read the future. Yet if this hidden one remained cloaked from Gog, if even only partially…

Prickly sweat dotted Kron’s trident tattoo. With the back of his thick wrist, he wiped the beads away.

How much did Gog fear the otter man?

Kron let his hands drop to his sides as he opened himself, a distasteful exercise. He cast about with extra senses that only the blood of the high possessed. He explored the seething sea of humanity, the bovine beasts.

Normally, he lacked interest in the supernatural. It was so finicky and filled with hidden perils. His extra, spiritual senses brushed against the humans. It was an intimate thing, leaving a soiled taste in his soul.

There was nothing, nothing…then shock struck him. There by the hay-bales stood a beastmaster by the name of Inanna. He knew her. She was Gog’s perennial favorite. An eagle perched on her shoulder, while crouched by a bale was a leopard lashing its tail. Her control of beasts was phenomenal. Could she summon the dreaded cave bears, twisted into monsters that even a Nephilim could fear? He hoped not.

There were rumors that some beastmasters strove for control of canal rats. The giant rodents had so far proven strangely resistant to their spells.

Maybe Inanna’s presence here was a coincidence.

Kron opened himself further, ranging farther. There, the black-hooded man munching a pear, dropping a copper into the fruit-seller’s palm…he was a priest-assassin. Kron amended that. The priest wasn’t just any assassin, but the deadly Black Lotus. The killer bore his customary strangling cord, a blowpipe filled with toxic amaranth and a poisoned needle-knife.

Kron knew this was no coincidence. Gog left nothing to chance. Kron’s fear of his sire grew, as did his respect. This was the way to use the prophetic gift. To find the trouble and then use the tools needed to exterminate it. Gog was also being subtle, layering his minions with care.

Kron withheld debate with himself as he used his spiritual power once again. He was certain there must be a third party nearby, and soon he found it. There, the sleek necromancer standing in the shadows of a smithy, he was the third. That one possessed a drop of the blood of the high. It showed in the leanness of the man’s features. The pale lips thinned then, and the man nodded slowly at Kron. Clearly, the necromancer was spellcaster enough to feel a Nephilim’s probing touch.

With a scowl, Kron turned away from the necromancer. Despite his fear of Gog, Kron realized that their presence here was a gross insult. If he failed, how was it possible that mere cattle could succeed? Perhaps it was merely caution on Gog’s part. Still, the implications angered him. He almost strode through the milling throng to confront each, not to slay, but to enforce his will upon them. Then he reconsidered. He pondered what this meant about Gog, and he decided to watch and learn, and to gain insights into the First Born’s thoughts.

More importantly, he determined to find this human vermin and kill him, and show his sire that Kron the Enforcer needed no help when it came to slaying madmen.

-5-

The melon barge’s drumbeat slowed as the clumsy vessel turned into a canal. Along nearby walkways, fishermen with nets slung over their shoulders trudged home. An upset rat hunter jogged past, shouting at a striding tally-master.

The barge veered toward one of the largest merchant wharves in Shamgar. Rising above it in the background was the acropolis and the gargantuan Temple, its marble columns bright in the sunlight. Nearer the wooden piers was a plaza filled with stalls, booths and countless, milling people.

Lod saw stunted Nebo tribesmen shaking their heads as a large nobleman in hunting gear fiercely argued with them. No doubt the tribesmen haggled over their hiring price as swamp guides. Nearby, a bald slaver sold whips. A woman squatted beside a booth, fanning a brazier of sizzling pork as she loudly praised her meaty delicacies.

At the booths, a hundred items were for sale: wines, cloaks, jewels, beer and swords, fishing hooks, tridents, sandals, melons and silk, all the goods from around the Suttung Sea. A thin merchant argued with Shurites selling axes. Traders from Dishon smiled meekly as a reaver cursed their dishonest scales. The plaza was a mass of noisy sellers and buyers, thieves and sightseers. Despite Gog’s patrolling priests, this was probably the only place where Lod could blend in and slip onto an outbound ship.

Lod slid even lower into the water as the barge drifted toward a pier. Drovers there caught tossed ropes, hauling the flat-bottomed barge close and tying it down. Gangplanks slid out and slaves began carrying off melons.

Lod waited, until he took a deep breath and kicked underwater to the oversized steering blade. When the last drover left, he shimmed up the oar and peered over the barge’s railing. Chained slaves breathed heavily. Others slept, with their arms draped on the sweeps before them. They seemed more like oxen than men, with strange, lopsided muscles and shaggy hair.

Lod crawled onto the deck and stole a sailor’s drying tunic. He wound a silken sash around his throat, hiding the iron collar. He drank his fill at the water barrel and picked up an overlooked melon. With it, he slipped overboard and waded into the shallows under a pier. He gorged himself on the sticky green insides. Afterward, with the eel-rope that had once bound his wrists, he tied the gutting knife to his thigh, pulled on the tunic and dared climb ashore.

He expected the shout of a rat hunter or an attendant. Instead, no one noticed him other than a crouching slave who looked away. Lod strode into the crowd, uncomfortable with the cloth rubbing his scars, his gut in turmoil. Surely, the silk around his throat deceived no one. A slaver missing his nose gave him an evil glance. Lod dodged behind a pile of crates and turned onto a new lane. He shook his head, rubbing his hair, trying to dry it.

He actually walked among them. It felt so foreign, so strange. Didn’t they notice he was barefoot? No, no, he told himself. Many rat hunters went barefoot. He must relax and plot with cunning.

“Buy Shurite iron!” a man roared into his face.

Lod flinched, and his muscles coiled.

“Look at those thews,” the trader said, a turbaned man with hair sprouting from his nostrils. “You’re a youngling, aren’t you?”

Lod nodded.

“A mighty warrior is what you’ll be. For that, you need weapons. Where are your weapons, lad?”

Lod opened his mouth, but he noticed a rat boat working toward the pier. The hunter plied his oar much too vigorously.

The trader glanced in that direction and then gave Lod shrewder scrutiny.

Lod backed away, stumbled, turned and strode through the throng of humanity. Oh how he hated Shamgar, hated rat hunters, whips and iron collars.

Bigger, taller, stronger men turned away from his strange blue eyes. Too consumed with his troubles, Lod didn’t notice how others stepped out of his path. His muscles rippled like some jungle beast. His face contorted and changed into grimaces and sneers. The evil of this city, it deserved destruction, obliteration! He wished to gut all the whip-wielders and free all the rat bait, each branded slave bending his back for these vile taskmasters.

A mad laugh bubbled out of Lod, and he noticed at last how a thief blanched as their eyes crossed. Lod slammed his teeth together, and he struggled to control his rage.

Then a sight brought home his peril like a spear shoved into his belly. The old rat hunter who had come to his slain owner’s aid spoke urgently with a Nephilim. The two were by the canal. On his knees, the trembling old rat hunter spoke in a rush, while the black-clad Nephilim exuded inhuman menace. He was huge, massively built. On his forehead, the Nephilim bore a trident tattoo the color of spilled blood.

One of the brown-clad attendants spoke the Nephilim’s name. “Kron, a trader wishes to make a report. He spied a youth wearing a sash around his neck. He thinks it hid a collar.”

Lod stumbled away and crashed against empty barrels. Heads swiveled toward him as the barrels hit the ground.

“There!” the rat hunter shouted, pointing. “It’s him. It’s Gershon’s bait.”

The Nephilim exposed horse-sized teeth. “Come here, boy,” he called, in a voice a bear might have used. It was too deep. No man spoke with such authority, with such a chillingly low timbre.

Lod reeled backward. He had never been this near a Nephilim before, a grandchild of an Accursed. Certainly one had never addressed him before. It was like seeing a perverted angel one moment, leering and evil, and the next witnessing an overman, someone too mighty, too awesome to resist.

“Boy!” the Nephilim shouted, with a commanding voice that stilled the haggling around him.

Lod lurched toward the Nephilim, but then tore himself free of the spell, turned and ran. He frantically shoved shrieking people out of the way, slipping past others.

Shouts followed him. Men gave chase. As Lod passed bystanders, several grabbed at him. Lod punched one in the face, elbowed another in the gut and ducked the sweep of fat arms. Then he broke free of the bazaar and sprinted along a walkway with brick buildings on the right and the canal to the left.

“Get him!” the Nephilim roared, charging, an avalanche in human guise.

Lod glanced back. People flung themselves out of the monster-man’s path. One boy tripped and fell, and the Nephilim’s black boot crushed a hand, bones audibly snapping.

Lod ran faster, soon pivoting hard right onto another walkway, a new canal. Seconds later the Nephilim shouted. Lod glanced back and crashed into a man stepping out of a door.

“Hold him!” the Nephilim roared.

Lod slipped the man’s grasp by darting through the door and into darkness. He tripped because steps led down, and he sprawled onto sawdust and empty nutshells.

Ship lanterns hung from numerous posts, casting dim, flickering light upon a forest of low-built tables. Grinning sailors and drunken reavers surrounded the tables, most sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor. They guzzled from cups, leather jacks and some straight from a clay jug. Many gnawed on pork ribs or slurped spicy soup from a wooden bowl. A nude woman wearing bells writhed in a sand pit in the center of the tavern, clashing small, bronze finger-cymbals in time to the piping flute-player. Other women clad in shimmering silks and ankle bracelets balanced steaming trays of lamb, stew and mashed peas smothered in butter.

The patrons were a rough lot, many armed with knives or sheathed scimitars. A few had propped shields against the tavern wall or laid their spears there. They largely ignored his sprawling entrance. The din of talk, loud laughter and cups banged in unison created a wave of sound that matched the sweaty odor mingling with cooked meats, ale and trickles of incense.

As he stood, Lod wiped sawdust from him. He tried to adjust to the gloom, slowly edging away from the curtained entrance.

“What do you want?” asked a large, sweaty man wearing an apron.

“Uh…”

The main curtain tore away, and the Nephilim bulked massively before the entrance. By some alchemy or spell, or perhaps there was something in each human that sensed his otherworldly nature, the tavern grew quiet. It wasn’t instantaneous. Those closest to the door looked up and then nudged their friends or hissed to another table and nodded toward the steps.

As the Nephilim descended the protesting stairs, the dancer dropped her arms. The flute player halted in mid-note. Sentences died. Half-uttered words perished. A plate of lamb crashed onto a table—the boatswain who acquired the hot meat in his lap made no sound. Every eye took in the Nephilim and the two attendants flanking him.

“N-Noble One,” stammered the large, sweaty man with the apron.

The Nephilim ignored the cringing barkeep as his baleful gaze fixed upon Lod. “Come here, boy.”

Lod backed away, entering the maze of tables.

The Nephilim frowned. Perhaps he was unused to men ignoring his commands. He lifted a huge hand and crooked a finger.

Lod bumped against a post. He flinched and his hands flew to it, touching smooth wood. He gulped, unable to tear his gaze from those strangely compelling eyes. The Nephilim motioned with his finger, and it was as if strings pulled at his heart. Lod wanted to obey. His mouth turned dry. Vaguely, he wondered what had happened to his resolve.

“Boy,” the Nephilim said, in a chilling tone none dare disobey. “Come here. I order it by Gog.”

Lod swayed, and blinked repeatedly. His vow to fight to the death dissolved as if it was this morning’s mist. Yet…there had been a man once—his father—who long ago had twirled a shepherd’s staff. Later, Lod’s father had lain stretched on a sandy beach as reavers hacked his flesh. As he stood here in the shadows, Lod remembered that day. He recalled, too, rats with shiny eyes, black rats, brown rats, rats with diseased and mottled fur. Giant rats by the thousands had hunted him. He was bait, rat bait, trolled in the oily waters of Shamgar, home to Gog the Oracle.

“No,” Lod said, into the silence of half a hundred men who held their breaths.

Those baleful eyes tightened. The finger crooked again as the demonic will radiated with compelling force.

Lod worked salvia into his mouth, hardly more than could wet his tongue. With it, he defiantly spat onto the sawdust.

People gasped. Many blinked. A few began to stir.

The Nephilim swiveled his head, almost as if he noticed the crowd for the first time. “So…” he said. “Gog was right.”

Lod shivered, but he didn’t cringe. He had faced a thousand rats, and won, and the embers in his eyes, the window to his soul, began to flicker. His hatred of Shamgar, of rat hunters, slavers and reavers and most of all Gog erupted into life.

“Shamgar is doomed,” Lod said, in a voice strange even to his ears. “I have seen it fall.”

The brown-clad attendants laughed. So, in several moments, did sailors and reavers chuckle, albeit nervously as they eyed the Nephilim. The huge warrior didn’t laugh, but watched Lod closely instead.

“You,” Lod pointed at a one-eye man with a cleaver in his fist. “Help me against the Nephilim. Stand with a fellow man against this monster.”

“Bugger off!” the frightened reaver snarled.

Again came nervous laughter from around the room.

Lod looked upon them, hateful people. Then he noticed two men different from the rest. Each of those wore leather wrist bracers and each had long yellow hair swept back over their head. Each wore a scarlet cloak, outlanders clearly. They sat erect, and the younger of them, a warrior surely, watched him.

“Boy,” the Nephilim said.

Lod whipped his attention back to the one named Kron.

“What do you know of otters?” Kron asked. It was a strange question.

That narrowed Lod’s gaze as he wondered where the trick lay in this. Yet he answered. “Some say I swim like one.”

“Ah,” Kron said, nodding. “Yes, that silk hides a collar. You are rat bait.”

“No more.”

“No?”

“I am free,” Lod said.

Many laughed, but not Kron. He dwarfed everyone here. He was massive, utterly menacing. He studied Lod so intently that the laughter soon died.

“Gog has seen you, rat bait,” Kron said.

Lod frowned.

“It was in his prophetic sight,” Kron said. “Apparently you have a gift. You are a madman.” Kron chuckled. “Well…you are a youngling muscled as a pit slave and have the feel of deadliness like a veteran knife-wielder. And you speak of freedom, a strange word for bait. Yet, Gog has seen you, and he has found your future distasteful. Thus, he has sent me to sever your head from your shoulders.”

“Seraph,” whispered the yellowed-haired outlander, the warrior with the scarlet cloak. He made to rise. His friend—an older man—held him fast.

Kron raised a sardonic eyebrow as his gaze flickered from the warrior to Lod and back.

A sailor hissed at the warrior, “Are you mad?”

The warrior slumped back to his spot at the table.

Kron shrugged, and he gave his full attention back to Lod. “Gog has sent me for you, if you can believe that. Your future ends here today.”

Lod bared his teeth, his heart hammering. How he hated them. “Elohim,” he said, “let me die well.”

Kron’s features contorted with rage and perhaps too with a touch of fear. Those massive shoulders hunched, while the muscles on his neck stood out. “This is Gog’s city!” he thundered. “It is he we worship!”

“Not me!” shouted the yellow-haired warrior. He was breathing hard, with his right hand twitching. Those nearest him leaped up, backing into shadows.

The warrior shook off his friend’s restraining hand and leaped to his feet. He had princely features, with green eyes and an aquiline nose. Under his scarlet cloak he wore fish-scaled bronze armor and baggy breeches. At his side hung a short heavy sword.

“So and so,” Kron said, who had recovered his poise, although his nostrils flared. “It all begins to come together. You’re an Elonite.”

Many of those who watched shook their heads. Insane valor filled those from the plains of Elon and thereby compelled them to brave deeds.

“You’re far from home, charioteer,” Kron said.

“I’m Herrek of Teman Clan,” the Elonite proclaimed.

“You’re mad!” a sailor cried.

“Bow to Gog, you fool!” another shouted.

“Admit you’re drunk,” a woman said, “and you may yet live.”

“Lad,” the Elonite Herrek said. “Come over here.”

“Stand aside!” Kron roared with baleful eyes.

Herrek the Elonite charioteer, swayed, blinking, and it seemed certain he would retreat. Then Herrek looked upon Lod.

Lod didn’t cringe, didn’t cower. His eyes blazed with wrath, impotent though his anger might be.

Herrek straightened, and he told the massive Nephilim. “I claim the lad.”

Amazement marked that too-broad face. Kron peered at Lod anew and it seemed, if just for a moment, doubt flickered across those arrogant features. Then Kron uttered a harsh word. At the signal, the two attendants stepped forward, freeing their hooked swords, flanking the Elonite.

Herrek also bore a sword, and he shouted, gliding toward the man to his left. He didn’t await death, but tried to deal it. Herrek lunged, slid his blade over the hooked sword and into the attendant’s guts. The man dropped to his knees, clutching his ruined stomach. Herrek spun, his scarlet cloak lifting, and he caught the second henchman’s blade on his own. The ring of steel was loud in the stunned silence. Three times their blades clashed. Then Herrek twisted his leather-protected wrist and the second attendant sank to the floor with a groan.

Kron hissed through his horse-sized teeth.

With his sword, Herrek beckoned Kron. It was an absurd but brave gesture, worthy of a Western plains charioteer.

Kron drew his sword the way an iceberg might. The blade looked puny against his bulk. Herrek roared a desperate war cry and charged.

The clash of steel, the blur of speed awed the sailors, reavers and Lod, who watched open-mouthed. Clearly, Herrek the Elonite was an artist of the blade. The clangor awoke in Lod admiration for the man. Herrek had strength and extraordinary skill. Unfortunately, he fought an elemental of destruction. The massive Nephilim met every blow, parried each trick and maneuver. He did it effortlessly, with his face and emotions seemingly blank. Herrek soon panted as sweat slicked his cheeks.

The uneven fight stoked the fires in Lod’s soul. He knew then his reason for being. He must search the world for Nephilim and kill them.

“Now let us fight,” Kron said. He increased the tempo. Herrek, with his lips frozen in a rigid smile, wildly twisted, ducked and parried with the clashing of sparks. His hair was lank, plastered to his sweat-dripping face.

“Fight, little man,” Kron urged, and he beat his sword against the Elonite’s as if an anvil with a hammer. Herrek’s arm and sword swung back, leaving him exposed. Kron slashed his sword across Herrek’s chest. Sparks sprayed off the bronze armor and Herrek went stumbling backward.

Kron lumbered after him, saying, “Let us make it your head next time.”

Lod grabbed the gutting knife hidden under his tunic, the one tied to his leg. His head swam with visions of victory and hard-given vengeance.

“None of that,” whispered a sleek vulture of a necromancer. Few had seen him enter and slip behind the rat bait. With mummy-dry fingers, the necromancer touched Lod’s arm.

Lod cried out. His knife clattered onto the wooden floor. Then those horrid fingers latched onto his shoulders and the necromancer began muttering vilely into his ear.

Herrek gave a belabored cry, clutched his sword with two hands as he desperately stove off Kron’s ringing hammer blows.

“We serve Gog here,” Kron said, increasing the tempo yet again, forcing Herrek back. “The strong take from the weak.” Kron swung his mightiest blow yet.

Herrek met it, and the extraordinary shock of it flung him against the wall. His eyes betrayed exhaustion and terrible defeat. Panting, he let his arms sink to his sides.

Kron lumbered up, saying, “It is a good rule, a wise rule, the very law of life.”

The necromancer screamed as Lod’s teeth sank into his pale forearm. Then Lod dashed free and across the room. Kron glanced over his shoulder. In that moment Herrek shouted wildly and struck. Kron effortlessly slid aside the blow, and he gave his full attention back to Herrek.

Lod leaped upon a table and hurled himself at Kron’s massive back. It was like a bobcat leaping upon a bear. The braided eel-rope no longer clung to Lod’s leg. He had wrapped one end around his right fist and the other around his left. Lod crashed upon Kron. He whipped the eel-rope around the elephantine throat. He crossed his hands and yanked back with all his youthful strength. He drove his knees into the Nephilim’s back as his ropy muscles grew taut. Lod strained, heaving, trying to dig the eel-rope deeper into flesh.

The Nephilim gasped, staggering. His eyes bulged. With his huge left hand, he reached back. Lod sank bloody teeth into the Nephilim’s palm.

Herrek beat aside Kron’s blade. Then Herrek plunged his sword into the huge chest, twisted his blade and withdrew bloody steel as gore gushed out the horrid wound. Kron reeled drunkenly as Lod tightened his grip, choking off air.

Whatever spell had held the tavern broke. At the terrible crime committed here, against a Nephilim, a son of Gog—pandemonium erupted. Men and women streamed for the door, clawing and fighting to get out.

“No!” shrieked the necromancer, hate animating his normally lifeless features. From his skin-sack, he lifted a bleached skull as blood dripped from his forearm. His wormy lips twisted the air with forbidden words and flakes of bone drifted from the naked skull. Then all at once it whooshed, bone chips and fragments showering from his hands as an oily mass of vaporous evil billowed upward. The necromancer pitched his cupped hands toward Lod.

As the necromancer did this, the one-eyed man who had held a cleaver, screaming and panicked like all the rest—who had retreated deeper into the tavern and was now one of the last to flee for the exit—bumped hard against the necromancer. From his blind side, the one-eyed man crashed against the spellcaster, not even aware that he was there. The one-eyed man didn’t stay to apologize, but deflected as he was, smashed head-on against a post and thereby dashed himself senseless, most likely saving his life.

The necromancer stumbled while in the process of flinging his spell. The swirling, oily mass above him, the vaporous, faintly shrieking cloud, catapulted not at Lod as probably intended, but toward the milling sea of humanity clawing at the entrance.

“No,” the necromancer said.

Most in the crowd fell dead, tongues swelling blackly and eyes dissolving into a gory morass. One among them was the Black Lotus, the priest-assassin. Others fought with greater zeal as fiery pain dotted their skin with erupting sores. Inanna the Beastmaster was also caught within the spell. Outside an eagle screamed and a panther snarled, their wills freed from her formerly dominating control.

The sequence of events was swift, unnoticed by the straining Lod, his face matching in a bizarre fashion the purple of Kron’s features. The strange roars, screeches and death cries mingled with the horrible shrieks and bellows of the crowd. Because of their depletion, more people began to gain the exit.

Meanwhile Kron, with his eyelids fluttering, propelled himself backward, gaining speed. Lod sprang away, rolling between tables, just as the Nephilim thumped hard against a wall. Kron wheezed, and as he stumbled forward, bounced off the wall. He struggled to remain upright. His lifeblood soaked his leathers and dripped onto the sawdust-littered floor. In seconds, able to breathe again and regaining his balance, he raised his sword, although it wavered and trembled.

“Come,” he said, in a terrible voice, while spitting black blood, “dare to engage me.”

Lod grabbed a spear. Herrek raised his blade. The second Elonite, an older man, picked up a shield and joined them. The three closed in on the Nephilim.

Then Lod caught a flicker of movement in the shadows. “Behind you!” he shouted.

Herrek whirled around. The necromancer raised a curved dagger, rushing in. A single lightning slash from Herrek sent the necromancer reeling away, his throat spraying mist.

“I will be avenged,” Kron whispered. His shaking arm dropped until the sword-tip clunked against the floor. He crashed to his knees.

“Remember me in Sheol!” Lod shouted, as he charged.

Herrek advanced, with the shield man beside him. Moving faster than the other two, Lod drove his spear into the Nephilim’s side.

-6-

Hours later, deep in the Temple, Gog learned the news. He brooded in darkness, knowing that a formidable enemy had just escaped his grasp. He had glimpsed the future and understood that those who served the one whose name he had never uttered called such as Lod, seraph.

Apparently, it meant, “heart of fire.”

Gog gave immediate orders to scour the swamps, but he felt certain that Lod and his two companions would win free in their stolen rat-boat. He had learned the news too late.

There would come a day of reckoning, of this Gog was certain, and had even glimpsed that in his visions. He grunted, a sound that made the bound priests who had failed to capture Lod tremble in sick terror.

Gog was patient. He had lived countless years, even as reckoned by the sons of Adam. When the accounting came…ah yes, then the madman Lod would pay in agonies yet to be invented. On this, Gog made a horribly binding oath.

Only then did he turn his attention to these laggards, these priests who had failed him. He picked up the first and grunted a second time. The hideous shrieks of the fool soothed the rage boiling in Gog’s soul.

The King of Great Sloths

Not all stories from the Pre-Cataclysmic Age were about Lod. Strange powers came down with the bene elohim and afterward with the shining ones who made war against them. Many of those powers departed after the end of the Thousand Years War. Some remained and altered the landscape and the animals in them.

This is a tale of such a beast.

-1-

A ponderous great sloth shuffled through the primeval jungle. He had curved claws of such massive size that they forced him to slide his front paws forward on the sides. It was an awkward gait, not made for speed. The great sloth had the shape of a bear and the size of a mastodon. Like a bear, he could stand up on his hind legs. At such times, he hooked his claws around a tree’s branch and often yanked it lower so he could nibble on the choicest leaves. He stood then over twice the height of a two-legs. He had shaggy fur and skin tougher than link-mail. With his heavy molars, he crushed leaves and tender branches. He had also been known to drive leopards off their kill. Then he scavenged the carrion.

In his passage through the jungle, the great sloth crushed ferns, snapped branches and brushed off bark as his tough hide scraped against trees. He panted, having shuffled for many hours. The pant was a heavy sound, and saliva dripped from his pink tongue. Despite the slowness of his shuffle, he moved fast in great sloth terms.

He brushed against another giant tree. The tree groaned and bark trickled down like snow. A loud squawk rose from the great sloth’s shoulder. In the shadows of the primeval jungle, it was hard to determine what had caused the noise. The great sloth turned his head and moaned. It almost sounded like an apology. He tried thereafter not to brush against trees, at least not on that side.

He was not just any great sloth. He was Old Slow, the King of Great Sloths. Distinct from beasts elsewhere on Earth, Old Slow reasoned in a way akin to two-legs. Perhaps as incredibly, he knew that he and his kind were different. All the higher beasts of the jungle within the radius of the celestial isle, within the radius of its otherworldly magic, had this reasoning capacity. The thinking beasts prized their elevated station. Although they had no script like the two-legs, their ancient legends told of the time of the celestials and the war on the isle. It was in the aftermath of the battle that had brought about the great change. The higher animals here also knew that someday evil-workers would attempt to take away their unique gift. The wisest among them had reasoned that only offspring of the celestials would dare try. Those offspring must surely die so that the beasts of the great primeval jungle could continue to reason, lest great sloths, leopards, wolves and others fall again into the brutishness of their kind in the outer world.

The call had gone out, for the feared and prophesied day of evil had finally arrived.

Why did it have to be in my lifetime? Old Slow wanted to know. He didn’t have many years left. He didn’t want this terrible responsibility. Yet he had accepted the mantle of kingship many years ago when he had defeated his father in the mating battle for the queen. Old Slow knew there were younger great sloths eager to fight him for the new queen. Soon one of them might match him in power. Not this year and not the next, but in the year after that he might lose. None of that mattered now because the evil day had arrived.

Intruders had smashed their way through the jungle. Guardian leopards had died under a hail of spines and barbed darts. Old Slow had snuffled a leopard carcass a day ago. He had sniffed the spines. Worse, the feel of celestial magic had lingered in the air. Old Slow knew then that the messenger had been right. The intruders had brought slave beasts, creatures bound by magic to do the will of the celestial offspring.

Old Slow burst through a clump of ferns and into a riotous field of gorgeous flowers. The bright colors hurt his eyes. The flowers blazed as if the petals were gold, ruby and sapphire.

The celestial magic from the isle not only gave the higher animals reasoning power, but it had changed the trees, the ferns, flowers and grasses. They grew perfectly, and the closer the vegetation stood to the isle the healthier they remained.

The squawk earlier made sense now. An ancient archaeopteryx rode on Old Slow’s right shoulder. The archaeopteryx had a toothed beak and colorful feathers. Its old talons clung tightly to sloth hide. The parrot-feathered archaeopteryx had been the messenger, and now guided Old Slow to the intruders’ camp.

The King of Great Sloths slowed as his head swiveled. He noticed a gray scar that cut through the field of flowers like a scab. It seemed wrong here, a ribbon of earthen ordinariness in paradise.

The ancient archaeopteryx, three times Old Slow’s age, squawked a complaint.

Old Slow grunted and increased his pace. He shuffled through the flowers, crushed the juices from moist stalks. He panted. The flowery odors in his mouth suffocated him, too rich, too intense when all he wanted was fresh air. His eyes stung by the time he reached the gray scar, a stone road. Ancient builders had fitted cyclopean blocks into the earth as if constructing a wall in the ground. No blade of grass or weed grew between the cracks, so tightly fitted were the blocks and presumably so deep did they go. The road was wide enough for three great sloths shuffling shoulder to shoulder.

Old Slow stopped and stared at the dirt churned upon the road. Animals never stepped on those stones. He spied footprints in the dust and he spied wheel tracks. The intruders had used the road. That was sacrilege.

Old Slow bellowed, a hoarse sound. Then he continued to shuffle, picked up speed, tore plants and made dirt fly. He soon crested a rise and shuffled down a gentle decline toward a strange object.

He saw an obelisk of black gneiss, with golden marks inlaid upon its glassy sides. The obelisk jutted upward half the height of the trees. Bones lay around it, gleaming bones and bleached skulls. Wolves often dragged half-eaten carcasses there, leaving the remains as an offering to the Old Ones. Old Slow considered it a barbaric practice, but on that score, the wolves were immune to argument.

The golden marks on the obelisk were cruciform, wedge shapes that were a form of two-legs writing. The obelisk had four sides and a pyramidal top. Old Slow used to have no idea what the golden script said. None of the animals had, not even the ancient archaeopteryx.

One of the celestial offspring had read it, however. Several days ago, he had spoken aloud the ancient words. A crow hiding in a nearby tree had overheard. The crow could mimic two-leg speech and was a master of languages.

The words read:

For a distance of one month and twenty-six days, I—Azel—have devastated the districts of Pildash. I spread salt and thorn-bush (to injure the soil). Sons of kings, sisters of kings, members of Pildash’s royal family young and old, prefects, governors, warriors, artisans, as many as there were, inhabitants male and female, big and little, horses, mules, asses, flocks and herds more numerous than a swarm of locusts—I carried them off as booty to Babel. The dust of Tubal, of Heshbon, of Er and of their other cities, I carried it off to Babel.

A delegation of crows and the ancient archaeopteryx had conferred. What did the words mean? The key was the name “Azel.” That could refer to no other than Azel the Accursed, the long-ago chief of the bene elohim. Azel the Accursed had surely raised the obelisk in his days of glory. The other named places must have been ancient kingdoms destroyed by Azel and his hosts.

With a dip of his head, Old Slow acknowledged what he considered the Wolf Shrine. The King of Great Sloths knew the old prophecy. When the golden squiggles of the shrine make sense, then the days of deadly battle lie near.

Old Slow shuffled past the shrine. He must reach the others. He must see the intruder camp. Then he would lead the attack.

Why did it have to be in my day? I don’t want the responsibility. Those were thoughts unworthy of a king, but they were his thoughts. He must fight in order to save this unique reasoning capacity for future generations of great sloths, leopards and archaeopteryxes. Old Slow roared hoarsely, seeing no way out of the responsibility. Then he set his head down and shuffled with a will.

-2-

With his massive claws, Old Slow moved a branch. He lowered his snout and squinted into the distance. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. He saw the stockade. He also saw movement along the top. Those were indistinct shapes. According to the archaeopteryx, those were soldiers in red armor. It didn’t seem right that the ancient archaeopteryx should see better than he did. The parrot-feathered bird was three times his age. The toothed archaeopteryx—the only toothed bird Old Slow knew—would probably survive many years longer, too.

Old Slow grunted as a chill swept through him. He hadn’t felt such a thing since his early years as a young male. The older males then, as now, fought for the privilege of mounting a choice female. His loins had stirred back then as the ripe musk of a female in heat had played havoc with his higher thoughts. As a younger bull, he had shuffled out of hiding and challenged an old bull for the privilege of mating with the gorgeous female who had wriggled her rump in a clearing. It had been a short fight. The old bull had smashed him back and forth until Old Slow had bawled in terror. When the old male let him up, Old Slow had slunk away in shame. The feeling he had felt then smashed one way and then another by that great old bull…some of that awful feeling returned now.

From within the jungle, Old Slow squinted. The brown monster out there had the shape of a great sloth, but moved faster and seemed more dangerous. The beast was huge and moved with a rolling gait.

The archaeopteryx had given Old Slow a name for the creature: cave bear. The wise old bird had also told him that there had never been a creature like that before. That cave bear was unique, a beast altered by magic.

A few of the dire wolves had seen the monster several days ago. The wolves believed that big as the bear was that a hardy group of great sloths could slay it.

That was wolf thinking, all right. Gang up and attack. Old Slow had never ganged up on anyone. But then again, since he had become the old bull, he had never faced creatures bigger than himself. The cave bear out there…

The leopards had agreed with the wolves, which was a first. The reasons were easy to remember. The offspring of the celestials had strange powers. With enslaving magic, the offspring controlled creatures. The offspring had built that wooden palisade in a day and would shoot spines from it. Unlike porcupine spines, those spines killed.

The leopards wanted revenge for the guardians slain several days ago. Old Slow just wanted the invaders gone. The cave bear would be a problem.

The longer he stared at the stockade, the more Old Slow came around to the leopard plan. The stockade was similar to a sea turtle’s shell. To eat the soft meat, one had to crack the tough shell. To kill the two-legs, they had to crack the stockade. Old Slow believed he could tear down those upright logs. Let him get his claws hooked around one and down it would go. The problem would be timing, and if they should wait for more great sloths to arrive. The celestial offspring tore vines off the ancient galley. Once they floated the galley in the bay, it would be too late to stop them from reaching the sacred isle. There they would remove the magic-that-gave-animals-thought.

The giant cave bear waddled into the stockade. Soon, the gate swung shut with a boom.

Old Slow realized the attack might cost him his life. He was the king. He had to lead. He had to fight in the front. What he really wanted was to go home. He wanted to mate again, one more time before he died.

A feeling of mortality rose up. Old Slow almost roared at the pain of it. Death was forever. Never again would he—he eased the branch back into place. What good did mooning about the attack do him? He had lived long. He had been king for many years. Now he must make certain that his sons and daughters would live aware, as he had lived aware all his life. He had to make sure the celestial offspring never floated the ancient galley in the bay. They could not be allowed to reach the sacred isle.

Old Slow shuffled through the jungle, away from the enemy camp. It was time to make the final adjustments. Near dusk, they should attack after a hard day’s work for the two-legs. They should so this before his desire for life overcame his feeling of kingly responsibility.

He still couldn’t believe the size of that cave bear.

-3-

Old Slow led the attack. Behind him, seven ponderous great sloths shuffled their paws sideways, tearing apart clods of grass and dirt. They bellowed. They moved like slow-motion rhinoceroses. Old Slow felt pride at their daring. Several were his sons and daughters, one was his granddaughter. The great sloths of the jungle would make sure that no two-legs ever again thought about entering their special land.

The wooden fort reared before them. It was the shell protecting these soft-skinned, puny two-legs. Old Slow felt the defenders’ terror. The soldiers up there on the ramparts shouted back and forth. Some wore armor. Some were bare-skinned. Those tested bows. Old Slow had listened as crows had told him what bows and spines could do. Two-legs were always clever concerning their toys. They always used tools to aid them. They often laid traps, too. Today, as dusk settled, the wild animals of the jungle would trap the two-legs in their giant bolt-hole.

Old Slow bellowed as if he charged a great bull in a mating fight. The sluggish blood in his veins surged with passion. He might die tonight. Many of the jungle animals might die. But he and they would make certain that no child of a celestial would survive the battle. The enemy was not going to take away their uniqueness.

There! Old Slow could see clearly at this distance. The bare-skinned archers drew nearly invisible strings. The strings twanged. Spines flew. Old Slow turned his head. He hoped the others remembered to do similarly. Spines struck like wasps, and they bounced off his tough skin. Old Slow bellowed. Was that the best they could do?

“Aim at their faces!” screamed a child of the celestials.

Another hail of spines flew.

A great sloth roared in anguish. Old Slow glanced back. Black Snout his dimwit son went down, with spines sticking out of his eyes. The lack-wit must have forgotten to turn his head as the archaeopteryx had told them to do. Black Snout crashed upon the sod and batted at his ruined eyes. He bellowed a terrified cry.

The two-legs on the rampart cheered. They shouted triumphantly.

Old Slow roared, spittle flying from his cavernous jaws. The heat of battle pounded in his brain. He charged the wooden palisade. Two-legs cheered at the blinding of his son. Spears flew at him. The ones that penetrated his hide simply drove him harder, made him even angrier. With a terrific jar, he crashed against upright logs. They shivered at the impact, and he heard wooden cracks and splinters. Two-legs screamed. Shield clattered against shield. Old Slow roared as he heaved himself up onto his hind legs. His massive claws scraped against the logs as he lifted his monstrous arms. On either side of him, the other great sloths smashed against the palisade. Old Slow felt the vibration in his paws.

A soldier on the rampart waved a sword at him. The two-legs stood a foot above his head. Old Slow bellowed at the soldier. He raked his claws, caught the two-legs. Old Slow pulled, and the soldier tumbled over the top and crashed down outside. A great sloth beside Old Slow clouted the two-legs, smashed his helmet. That one wouldn’t give any more cheers.

“Where’s our cave bear?” screamed a two-legs.

Old Slow wanted to know what had happened to the leopards. They were supposed to time this exactly. He hooked his claws on the hacked point of an upright log. Then Old Slow exerted himself, pushed and pulled. He tried to loosen the log as if it was a rotted tooth.

“They’re destroying the fort!” shouted a two-legs.

“Bloodspillers! Form ranks!”

On the ramparts, tough two-legs with shields and spears gathered on either side of Old Slow. They weren’t going to let him pull down the logs without a fight. Other sloths now rose up, and they too clutched logs.

One great sloth screamed, with a spear driven into his throat.

Two-legs cheered.

Old Slow roared at them, the bastards, the naked apes with their unfair tools.

Then the leopards arrived. The sleek, spotted beasts raced among the great sloths. With great bounding leaps and the use of their claws, the leopards climbed the fort’s wooden wall. The spitting great cats bounded among two-legs. Claws flashed. Two-legs screamed. One leopard yowled as a scimitar lodged in its side.

“Archers!” shouted a two-legs.

The leopards didn’t have tough skin. Bows and spines would prove deadly to them. Now, however, hawks and eagles dove out of the darkening sky. One screeched a banshee cry, its talons extended, raking unprotected flesh. With an anguished shout, a two-legs toppled off the rampart as a hawk tore out his eyes.

More bows twanged. An eagle tumbled to its death. Most spines hissed skyward, however, hitting nothing. Now began a desperate battle as great sloths yanked and pushed at the upright logs. Some two-legs charged from upon the ramparts, hacked with their scimitars. Other two-legs went back to back and slashed at hawks, eagles and leopards. Dire wolves howled, packs of them waiting for the great sloths to smash a way into the stockade.

A two-legs in silver chainmail charged with a leveled spear. Howling Bloodspillers followed behind him on the rampart.

Old Slow worked his log. It was loose! If he could loosen two more like this one then he would hurl his bulk on all three and topple them into the enemy camp. Beside him worked another great sloth, his granddaughter. She was smaller than Old Slow, but quicker.

The two-legs in silver chainmail howled a war cry. Old Slow’s granddaughter raised her head. The two-legs hurled his spear. He hurled it with greater than normal two-legs strength. The spear went into her left eye, sinking deeply. She stiffened as a sad cry escaped her throat. She slid as if boneless against the logs that she had tried to loosen. She slid, her massive claws scraped against the rough wood as she thumped dead upon the cold ground.

Old Slow spied the cheering, gloating two-legs with silver armor. He sensed the two-legs’ nature, realized that he had the blood of the celestials in him. Worse, that one had just slain his granddaughter. The offspring of a celestial had done it with an unfair tool just as two-legs always did. Two-legs always cheated, and then they gloated and strutted as if they were mighty bulls of the jungle. In his rage and grief, Old Slow sprang. He had never jumped like a quick beast in his life. It was a clumsy spring. Yet if lifted his hind feet off the ground as Old Slow hurled himself against the palisade. Lumber groaned, cracked and splintered explosively. Old Slow’s heavy molars clicked together as his lower jaw struck wood. The body blow against the wall knocked the wind from him. It also blasted the loosened logs inward. Old Slow, as if he were unconscious—unable to bellow because he couldn’t breathe—fell into the compound, the three fallen logs like a lowered drawbridge.

The other great sloths roared. Old Slow had breached the tough outer shell. Huge dire wolves howled, racing for the opening. The other sloths, encouraged and emboldened by their king’s example, charged and shouldered each other to be next into the camp of the hated two-legs.

-4-

Old Slow stirred. His chest unlocked and he took a heaving breath. The stockade reeked of bloodshed. The screams, shouts and cries of pain told of bitter agony. Waves of hate, fear, delight and madness crashed against Old Slow’s senses. Wolves slew and died. Leopards wreaked havoc and twisted in death. A great sloth bellowed as spears bristled from him as if he was a giant porcupine. The swirling hawks and eagles patrolled the ramparts, unwilling to fly into the darkening valley of death that the inner fort had become.

Old Slow groaned as he rose to his paws. The cave bear crept up on a different great sloth. Behind the shaggy monster followed a two-legs in black leathers. She held curved daggers. Old Slow hadn’t realized that bears fought with such stealth. He had figured the beast as a head-to-head battler. The bear rushed the great sloth who swatted two-legs to death. The mighty beast pounced like a leopard, landing on the great sloth’s back and bearing the smaller creature to the ground and biting its neck. It was brutal, quick and effective.

It also lacked all honor.

Old Slow bellowed. He would kill the cave bear. He would show it how to fight.

His massive claws scraped across dirt as thousands of pounds of great sloth shuffled for the bear. The two-legs turned around. She wore a veil. She ran to the bear and touched his side. The bear glanced back at Old Slow. Then, as if in shame, the huge cave bear waddled for the disciplined knot of spearmen.

The cave bear fled! It feared him. Old Slow shuffled faster as the red-armored soldiers set their shield wall. With them to protect him, the bear charged dire wolves, scattering the wolves as they feasted on fallen two-legs.

Old Slow shuffled at the shield wall. He would scatter them as the cave bear scattered the wolves. He sensed that this was the critical moment. The fight could go one way or the other.

Stars had appeared as night settled. Torches burned and lanterns shone. Old Slow breathed deeply. The stockade reeked of blood and cruelty. He arose onto his hind legs, over twice the height of a two-legs.

The silver-armored warrior who had slain his granddaughter shouted at the shield wall of two-legs. The soldiers bore shields and spears, wore armor and listened to their leader. The silver-armored two-legs held a gore-dripping scimitar and wore a silver helmet.

Old Slow bellowed and walked on his hind legs. He towered over the Bloodspillers. He swung a huge paw. A shield rose to intercept. The shield splintered, and Old Slow fell upon the two-legs. The others cried out. Only one rushed forward. It was the silver-armored warrior, the slayer of his granddaughter. That one thrust his sword. Old Slow took the thrust in his shoulder. Then he bore the celestial offspring to the ground. With bestial strength, Old Slow ignored the champion’s struggles. His foaming jaws found the two-legs’ throat and tore it out.

A few two-legs, the bravest and boldest, charged Old Slow, shouting war cries. Others froze in terror. Some dropped their shields and spears and scrambled over each like frenzied ants.

Old Slow went wild as bloodlust took over. Blades slashed his fur. Some bounced off his mail-thick hide. Some penetrated. All the while, he slew two-legs.

Then the two-legs broke. They ran in terror.

Old Slow bellowed, and he almost rushed after them. His nape hairs stirred, however. He sensed—the cave bear!

Old Slow whirled around.

The cave bear roared and leaped. He had a black tongue and bloodshot eyes. His claws were red and bigger than knives. He smashed against Old Slow and sought his throat. Old Slow met him fang to fang, which saved his life. Then the shock of thousands of pounds of muscled cave bear drove him off his feet.

Old Slow tumbled. The world spun. He bellowed, sickened by fright. This had never happened to him before, not even as a cub. He scrambled, or tried to, and flopped onto his belly. Dizziness made it hard to use his limbs. The bear struck like a wolf then, snapping his teeth. Skin opened to the bone on Old Slow’s shoulder. Blood spurted. Old Slow caught his balance and blocked another teeth-slash with his own heavy fangs. He rose up finally, and one arm hung limply.

The massive cave bear snarled, and he circled. Old Slow turned.

The cave bear struck, but Old Slow batted his opponent away. The cave bear had silky grace compared to a great sloth. Old Slow had more weight. The bear was more of a carnivore, with that brutal meat-eater cunning.

Five times the cave bear rushed in, snapping his teeth or flicking wicked claws. Four of those times, he drew blood. Old Slow reeled. In places, skin hung like flaps. He had never fought a creature like this, one almost as strong, nearly as big and twice as fast.

He desperately sought a stratagem. As the cave bear rushed in for the sixth time, it came to Old Slow. It was a trick, used once on him by an old bull. It was the last time he had lost a mating fight. He had been stronger and faster then, but the old bull had been more cunning.

The cave bear leaped in. Old Slow let the teeth sink into his flesh. He accepted it, swayed back and then brought his good arm down hard on the other’s neck. He rolled onto his back and twisted, and he twisted the cave bear, threw him. The bear bawled in terror as his massive bulk sailed rump-end up and his back flopped hard against the ground. Old Slow scrambled upon the cave bear and let his weight crush down. Then he widened his jaws and clamped onto the bear’s throat. He crushed skin and windpipe. The bear used his claws and ripped out blood and entrails.

Old Slow shook his head savagely. Then he collapsed upon the mighty cave bear, exhausted by the loss of too much flesh and blood. He waited for the cave bear to roll him off and finish him, but that never happened. The cave bear was dead.

But Old Slow was dying. His wounds were too many and awful. He looked up. The animals were winning. The two-legs had broken with the loss of their last champion.

He had done it. He had defeated the invaders.

His reign ended tonight, but the sacred isle remained untouched. He would like to have mated again, but he had fulfilled his charge as king. Here they would remain the animals-that-could-think.

The Serpent of Thep

Lod lived many years, and his youth passed in daring deeds as told in Lod the Warrior. Then Yorgash of Poseidonis captured him. Instead of killing the man, the First Born sent Lod to a galley bench as an oar slave, there to die in painful toil.

Lod plied the oar for many a weary year. He became a legend in the gloomy holds, surviving as he’d once done as rat bait. Once again, he received visions of fire and blood. Perhaps Elohim called to him, to return to His service as an avenging blade, or perhaps they were merely the delusions of a madman.

Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.

-- Isaiah 27:1

-1-

Captain Eglon lumbered onto the pitching galley deck. He drew a scarlet cloak over blubbery shoulders and peered up at the pterodactyl. It floated like some obscene gull, a creature with a thirty-foot wingspan and an odd triangular head. Its vicious little eyes tracked his every move. On its left leg, remarkably similar to an ostrich’s, glittered a copper message tube.

“Get me the beastmaster!” shouted Eglon. Fat enfolded his eyes and puffed around the iron rings on his fingers. He was a glutton, and ever since his elevation, he ate only the tastiest morsels and drank the choicest wines. They had lost a sailing week because he had lain in wait in the Uldor Channel. He claimed he waited until the winds shifted west. The rest of the crew had known it was for piratical reasons. Only after capturing a merchant ship of Iddo and taking aboard eighty barrels of fine Tarsh wine had he agreed to crawl up the coast where Yorgash gathered his war galleys.

The Serpent of Thep rocked in the worsening sea. Its rotted timbers groaned and waves splashed through the lower-deck oar ports. Sun-darkened Vendhyan sailors wrestled the mainmast upright. Next, they used block and tackle and chanted as they raised the yardarm.

With its incredible spread of leathery wings, the pterodactyl drifted onto the yardarm, settling like a crow onto a branch.

“How long must I wait for the beastmaster?” Eglon bellowed.

A lanky, hawk-faced youth wriggled out of the hatch and shrugged on a mammoth-hide jacket. He stumbled across the pitching deck, having yet to gain his sea legs.

“Ah! So good of you to come,” said Eglon, his dark eyes glittering.

The beastmaster swallowed, bobbing his angular head as he tied his hair into a ponytail with a thong of soft calf-leather.

“Climb up there and get me the message tube,” said Eglon.

Young Abimelech eyed the pterodactyl, a savage, unpredictable beast, with a skeletal body and a sharp, bony beak. Accommodating itself to the galley’s roll, the pterodactyl, or slith in beastmaster terminology, folded its leathery wings and greedily examined the sailors. Its forked tongue darted out its mouth just as if it were a giant cobra.

“Are you daft, boy? Hurry up and scamper to your pet!”

“Captain,” said Abimelech, “we should lure it down to the pterodactyl post. The closer to ground level they are the more docile.”

“The post is below deck,” snapped Eglon, “lying in the ballast. There isn’t time to get it.”

Abimelech checked the inner pockets of his great furry jacket. “Captain, I forgot my iron mask and don’t dare approach the slith without it. Therefore we have time to get the post.”

Never a patient man—as a wrestler he had been known for his sudden and furious assaults—Eglon growled an oath about impertinent beastmasters and with one of his huge fists clubbed Abimelech across the mouth, knocking him onto the deck. “Fool! Do you see the storm clouds in the distance? Do you think I have time to wait for your peculiarities? Scamper up there and retrieve me the message tube!”

Dazed and blinking, Abimelech touched his bloody lips and spat out a tooth. As it lay on the deck in a glob of blood, he stared at it in amazement and growing rage. He was vain about his looks and knew for a fact that the temple prostitutes of Lilith snickered behind their backs at patrons with gap-toothed grins.

“Get up!” snarled Eglon.

Abimelech scrambled to his feet, certain the captain would trample him like a hippopotamus if he didn’t. He hadn’t really believed the crew’s warnings. The captain was mad if he thought he could lay hands on beastmasters. With blood in his mouth, he yet affected a haughty glare at the monster surely four times his weight.

“Get me the tube!”

“But my iron mask…”

Eglon raised his fist.

Abimelech backed away, vowing never to forget this outrage. He accepted from his shocked apprentice a sealskin bucket of herring, which he slung over his torso. He put gloved hands to the brackets and began to climb. The deck swayed as waves rolled in. Jagged boulders wet with sea-spray waited a quarter mile away, while far off on the oceanic horizon storm clouds gathered. More than one sailor had muttered that unless the captain found a protected bay they would shortly be draped upon those rocks as crab-food. The mast swayed, knotting Abimelech’s landlubber stomach. He grew pale, and the blow to his mouth left him dizzy and furious. As the slith watched, he hoisted himself onto the creaking yardarm.

The pitch was worse up here, magnified by the slender mast. Abimelech wrapped his legs around the yardarm and held on with his hands. He slid inch by inch toward the beast. Despite the breeze, sweat beaded his crimson features. This was ignoble, a stain to his dignity as a beastmaster: imagine, him crawling on the rigging like a sailor, like a brown-skinned Vendhyan monkey. He was terrified of falling. It was much higher up here than it looked from the deck. The beast’s forked tongue slithered out, and it lifted its head to strike.

Abimelech spoke soothingly as a beastmaster must, concentrating, trying to gain rapport with the pet of Yorgash. It galled him to have forgotten his iron mask, and its lack made focusing difficult. That was as much because donning the mask brought out his beastmaster persona and because more than one beastmaster bore facial scars or had lost an eye from a slith’s attack. The beast unfolded its long wings, opened its beak and screeched its hunger cry.

Abimelech paused.

“Quite dawdling and get me the tube!” bellowed Eglon from below.

Abimelech glanced down, seeing the monster cup his mouth with those huge, blubbery hands of his, the eight iron rings glinting in a spear of sunlight. Licking his lips—his mouth throbbed—trying to balance himself as the yardarm creaked and swayed, Abimelech reached back and fumbled for a herring. He hissed as a wave rocked the galley. Only by dropping onto his belly and clutching the yardarm did he save himself from breaking his neck on the deck below.

“I’m losing my patience, Beastmaster!” Eglon shouted.

Sick with fright and loathing, Abimelech eased upright and snatched a herring from the sealskin pouch. He flicked the fish. The slith caught and gulped it much as a pelican might. Many a wild pterodactyl cruised the ocean shores, its long bill trailing in the water as it trolled for fish. As he fed it several more herring and spoke soothing sounds, Abimelech slid closer. It would have been better to muzzle it first, but… He leaned toward the copper message tube, and grinned as he clutched and unhooked it from the leg harness. He began to slide away. Suddenly, the slith screeched practically in his face, its breath rank and fishy. It slashed its bony beak like a Jogli nomad wielding a scimitar. The bill furrowed across his cheek, ripping and causing blood to spurt. Abimelech screamed, lost his balance and plummeted to the deck.

Captain Eglon nimbly jumped out of the way. For all his bulk and although he had gone horribly to fat, he had once been a wrestler of champion rank. The screaming beastmaster crashed almost at his feet, his neck cracking and deck wood splintering. The message tube rolled out of the twitching fingers and bumped against Eglon’s finely tooled, rhinoceros-hide boot.

The pilot, a short man with a thick black beard and a blue kerchief of Larak silk wrapped around his baldness, knelt by the beastmaster. With stubby fingers, the pilot clutched Abimelech’s jaw and watched the eyes roll up until only the whites showed. A last gurgle rattled and then the once youthful body relaxed. “He’s dead,” said the pilot.

“Good riddance,” said Eglon, while unscrewing the top of the message tube. “I never liked his haughtiness. It seemed unnatural.”

“He stayed to himself,” admitted the pilot, who motioned to several soldiers. “What I wonder is how you’re going to explain this.”

Eglon stopped what he was doing the better to stare at the pilot. The soldiers froze, not daring now to approach within earshot. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There will be an inquiry,” said the pilot.

“He fell and broke his neck. You saw it.”

“You ordered him up there.”

“Me?” said Eglon. “No! I said hurry and get the message tube. If he had brought the pterodactyl post with him he never would have had to climb the mast in the first place.”

“Didn’t he ask for the post?”

Captain Eglon squinted, his hard little eyes sneaking behind rolls of fat. “If you’re accusing me of murder why not come right out and say it.”

“No, not murder,” said the pilot.

“Then maybe you’re going to blame me for making the pterodactyl act up? No. Well, maybe you’ll decide it’s my fault he lacks sea-balance? Surely I should have soothed his fears, sat down with him and let him blather his woes to me.”

“None of those things,” said the pilot, absently scratching at the lice crawling through his beard.

“Then I ask again: What is there to report?”

“They don’t appreciate beastmasters dying.”

“That may be,” said Eglon. “But not even the Gibborim can accuse me of malice when a man falls to his own death.”

“You may be right,” said the pilot. “I’ve never been certain what the Gibborim can and can’t do.”

Eglon’s nostrils flared, which was a sure sign of his unease. “Your problem, Pilot, is that you worry too much.”

The pilot shrugged. He had placid features, with his brown eyes seemingly empty.

Eglon slid the parchment out the copper tube and noticed the seal of Yorgash stamped in red wax at the bottom, a miniature pterodactyl in flight. He handed the missive to the pilot.

As soldiers hurriedly carted the dead beastmaster below, the pilot scrunched heavy brows, his lips moving soundlessly as he deciphered the cruciform printing.

“Well, what does it say?” said Eglon.

The lips continued moving. Then the pilot’s salt-lined face grew stiff. “Unless the Serpent of Thep joins the fleet in time to face Eridu and their allies we’re to be impaled in Poseidonis.”

“Impaled!” shouted Eglon.

The pilot nodded, handing the captain the parchment. “Aye, Captain. A sharpened pole will be shoved up your arse—all of ours—and we’ll be planted upright to squirm for the Master and his courtesans. He says: ‘To sing the paean of pain until our spirits vanish.’”

Eglon blanched; his oiled skin stark in comparison to the blood red ruby clipped to his turban.

“You never should have waited for the merchantman, Captain. That was a mistake.”

Eglon scowled.

“Were better for you to study the clouds,” said the pilot. “Be better for us all, seeing as how I want to avoid that stake as much as you do.”

On the horizon where sea met sky, the dark clouds billowed, pregnant with the promise of rain. This wasn’t a place for a galley, especially not a galley held together with tar and ropes and made of old rotted wood infested with worms.

“Straight across the open ocean then,” whispered Eglon. “We sail straight into those clouds.”

“Aye,” said the pilot, “although we’ll sink for sure if we do that.”

“What other choice do I have?” said Eglon.

The pilot peered at the clouds. “It will mean thirty hours of rowing, so even if we make it we’ll arrive without slaves.”

“What do I care about that?” shouted Eglon.

The pilot scratched his lice-ridden beard; he was essentially an emotionless man. “Thirty hours of rowing is going to kill the slaves all right. Not even Lod is going to survive the voyage.”

Eglon swallowed uneasily, his eyes riveted onto the dark clouds in the distance.

-2-

Whistles trilled. A drum beat. In the terrible gloom rose three hundred naked oar slaves: five men to a bench, a four-foot plank padded with wool and covered by dirty sheepskin. In the Serpent of Thep none had left the hold for over three weary months, ever since the old hulk had been pried from the crocodile-filled lagoon where it had rotted for uncounted years. The stench was vile and evil, each nude rower forced to urinate and defecate where he sat, whatever seawater seeping through the oar ports washing the mess into the bilge below.

The drum boomed and three hundred wretches rose from their planks as ankle chains clanked, one foot on the stretcher, the other lifting to set against the bench before them. The vast loom of each oar was too big for any mortal hand. So cleats had been stapled to them, now grasped by dirty, callused hands with broken fingernails and, for many, disgusting skin diseases. They pulled the huge loom, dropping back onto their plank and causing the tholepin that pivoted the oar to creak. A leather washer in the oar port was supposed to keep out seawater. Unfortunately, many washers were old and cracked. All too often cold seawater sluiced in, followed by the screeching gale. That stirred the vile odors, making sweating slaves grow green.

Three hundred slaves, three hundred desperate men were packed into this hellish pit. Above on deck, shouting sailors stumbled. Their voices were barely heard over the screaming wind. Lashing, driving rain furiously pelted the galley. All around the slaves, rotted timbers groaned and complained.

Hour after hour they had rowed. Officers now staggered down the middle aisle, stuffing wine-soaked bread into their mouths. Lips closed and a slave swallowed. Boom…boom…boom… went the beat, created by leather-wrapped mallets upon the kettledrum. Three hundred tortured creatures, three hundred animals; they were the source of power to his naval machine.

The Serpent of Thep rose upon a mountain wave and slid into a sickening trough. The sea had gotten vastly worse by the hour. A roller, a powerful force of nature, took a mighty oar and moved it contrary to human muscles. Slaves screamed, and the loom ripped from their grasp and smashed against chests and heads. Bones snapped and chains rattled as unfortunates flopped and jerked about.

Whistles blew. The rest of the slaves dragged the huge looms inward and out of the sea.

Armored soldiers clanked as they raced down the middle aisle after the officer with the keys. Shorn of its motive power, the Serpent of Thep slued about in the sea. Groaning slaves, blood seeping from torn skin, looked up like beaten dogs. A heavy lock clicked and a chain rattled as the officer pulled it from the iron manacles of each slave-ankle of that bench. Soldiers unceremoniously picked up the damaged rowers. One, hardly more than a boy, screamed, “No, no, I’m fine! Don’t take me!” A jagged rib poked out of his skin. Cruel-eyed soldiers dragged him howling from the bench. Every slave knew he would not be tended by a healer or bone-doctor, but pitched over the side. It was the fate that awaited them all.

The last extras pulled from the bilge, sick slaves shivering with ague were chained in their place. Soon the officer with keys and his soldier-guards retreated from the hold.

A whistle blew, but the three hundred slaves glared at their tormenters, refusing to row. Again the silver whistle blew. Each rower intimately understood its meaning. A slave’s first duty upon joining a Serpent of Thep oar-bench was to learn what every trill or series of pipings meant.

Word of the sullen mutiny spread like balefire and in moments Captain Eglon lumbered down the steps and into the rowing hold. Rain lashed into the hatch above him and a jagged flash of lightning starkly illuminated the scene. Amid crashing thunder, the silk-clad, ponderously fat captain shook his fist at the three hundred chained beasts in human guise. His other hand held a perfumed rag to his nose. The drummer, whip-masters and officers of the hold had each plugged their nostrils with thagweed. Nard-soaked hankies were only for nobility and captains.

“Row!” bellowed Eglon.

Snarling whip-masters lashed naked backs, the terrible scourge opening skin and making slaves cry out and writhe. Still they refused to push out the giant oars.

“Row, damn you!” shouted Eglon, “or I’ll heat irons and blind you all – and then you’ll row, by Yorgash you will!”

The captain never made idle threats and the three hundred wretches knew it. Yet still they sat sullenly, those who weren’t bleeding or crying out from the whips.

“We’ll die unless you row!” bellowed Eglon, his fear adding urgency to his voice.

Then a large slave stirred. He was a leader, the end man, of a bench. When this man rose, he pushed his handle as far aft as he could. His stroke was the longest and heaviest, his work the hardest. This slave had no fat, no symmetry to his frame. Already a big man, his muscles coiled and writhed upon his arms and on his chest and thighs. They piled one atop the other in grotesque overdevelopment. He dwarfed his mates on the bench, and his hands no longer seemed flesh and bone, but talons, claws of calluses with iron strength.

Six months in a galley killed most slave-rowers, two or three years for the toughest and most strong-willed. Yet this awful brute had rowed twenty long years; he had survived and lived where everyone else died. Pestilence and plague often wiped out entire holds. Similar storms slew thousands each rowing season. Sickness, starvation, whippings, beatings and dull resignation turned into despair and reaped a bitter harvest. But not for this slave: he was different, unique, a prodigy. A long white beard fell upon the massive chest. Long white hair, dirty and matted, framed a weather-beaten face holding two fiery blue eyes that blazed fury like some mad desert prophet.

His name was Lod. He had sworn twenty long years ago to slay Yorgash the High Slith Sorcerer for reasons none now remembered. His name among the rowing holds was legend. Yet for over five years none had heard him speak.

The giant creature of an oar slave raised his head. Lod rumbled, “Let us row.”

Chains rattled as three hundred slaves turned to peer at him.

“You will row because I order it!” shouted Eglon, “and for no other reason!”

“Out oars,” Lod said.

Despite the raging waves, the wild sea and the chances that all their chests would be caved in, the slaves slid out the oars.

“Measure the beat,” Lod told the startled drummer.

Boom!

Three hundred slaves, naked as the day they had slid out of their mothers’ wombs, rose from their benches and pulled. The slewing Serpent of Thep came under control.

With an inarticulate shout of rage, Eglon spun around and clumped from the hold.

-3-

An eternity later in slave-time the rain and lightning and ship-destroying waves ceased, but not the howling wind. It shrieked through the oar ports, whistling and mocking and stirring the wretched odors so coughing and gagging sounds mixed with clattering chains and groaning, protesting beefwood. Unable to witness such cruelty, the sun had long ago fled. Racing clouds hid the moon and stars; perhaps they too had begged off this awful sight. Only madly flickering lanterns illuminated the top deck, creating demented shadows that pranced upon the wicker lattice in the ceiling of the rowing hold. In the very gut of the galley were only two lanterns, one aft and one forward. The flames upon the oil-soaked wicks darted and danced, ducked and wove like whirling dervishes of Shurrupak. Illuminated on the benches were gaunt slave faces that grinned insanely for a moment. Heaving, sweat-slick backs writhed next. Then a whip-master lunged into view, his arm descending, the crack of leather on flesh lost amid myriad other torments.

For over twenty hours these wretches had rowed, over twenty hours of rise and fall and war against the raving sea. Some slaves no longer felt their hands, which had gone numb and frozen onto the handles. Others trembled uncontrollably. From a few oozed a greenish sort of sweat that stank worse than the bilge water. Wine-soaked pieces of bread no longer helped, although for a few merciless floggings did.

Whip-masters prowled the middle aisle, raised a little higher than the benches where the wretches sat. When a slave slumped over the loom, often screeching and more than once vomiting blood, the leather-vested ruffians rushed near and wildly beat the exposed back, crisscrossing the flesh with welts and bloody gouges. Sometimes the slave revived. Sometimes the officer with his dreaded keys unlocked the ankle manacle and soldiers dragged the unconscious slave to a watery oblivion.

At last Captain Eglon staggered again into the hold. His haunted eyes roved over the thinned ranks of animals. “No! No!” he roared. “Look how few are left. Who will row after they’re gone?”

The one-eyed key officer with his stiff gray hair shrugged helplessly.

“You aren’t flogging them hard enough!” shouted Eglon.

“Begging your pardon, Captain, but my whip-masters are near the end of their strength.”

With a practiced eye Eglon studied the slaves. His gift was to know each man’s limit to a nicety. He jerked in surprise as he saw Lod watching him. He spun on the officer. “Roast them! The stink of burning flesh—their own!—that will drive them.”

Eglon departed, and soon whip-masters wearing thick leather gloves prowled the aisle as they clutched brands with red-glowing tips. A slave shortly slumped upon the oar. An awful hiss brought him round screaming.

“It’s working!” shouted a whip-master, a coarse-faced brute with a trident tattoo on his forehead.

“Bless Captain Eglon,” said the grizzled officer.

Another whip-master snorted, and then shot a wary glance up at the hatch.

“I’d better reheat this,” said the first whip-master, holding the iron near his cheek. “Only the hottest touch seems to stir them.”

The grizzled, one-eyed officer nodded.

Lod, who had listened to the exchange, narrowed his intense blue eyes. Here was yet another crime to be weighed upon the balance of the scales of justice that someday he would address with cold steel. He didn’t doubt that he would survive; in that sense he was utterly mad. True, tonight’s drudgery had exhausted him to a state he only once remembered: a time when he had caught fever and raved they said for a month, never letting go of the rowing cleat. He believed he wouldn’t die because after that month he had received visions, blood-soaked nightmares of vengeance and dire slaughter. Since then, the visions had descended upon him with greater frequency, as if his years of torture had at least earned him the favor.

For time without end he had drawn an oar each rowing season. During the winter months they sent him south to the oven-dry pits of Tartarus—there to labor as a beast of burden. With thousands of other harnessed slave-wretches, he dragged vast cyclopean blocks onto barges. Whip-masters reigned there too. Sun-baked savages with flashing teeth, hairy men that delighted in the sounds of cracking scourges and the screams of the doomed. Worst of all, he had learned that the barges sailed to far-off Poseidonis, where the marble helped fashion monumental ziggurats to Yorgash.

Lod shook his head, trying to rid himself of thoughts. Thoughts made life unbearable and brought despair. Despair meant weakness. Weakness devoured strength and led to death. Therefore don’t think. Wait for the visions. Wait…

His eyelids fluttered. He was so weary. Yet to give in meant a red-hot iron upon his back. He snarled. The brands spoke to him, hissing knowledge as they burned. To heat them the captain had the charcoal-fire stove lit. That was only done when they were given bean soup, and they only fared on such while in harbor or when the sea was calm. Shipboard fires terrified even the toughest sailors. The seas, however, tonight, were anything but calm. Thus something dreadful was about to occur. That stretched Lod’s cracked lips into a weird and deadly grin.

Surely his time was near.

Another slave slumped over a loom. The wicked smell of his burning flesh didn’t bring this slave around.

“It’s not working!” shouted a whip-master.

“Somebody tell the captain.”

Lod closed his eyes, rose for the millionth time, pushed his oar aft as far as he could reach, and then groaned as he pulled with all his might. Row! Row forever! Row to heaven and back and then down to the eternal flames of Sheol. Row!

For the first time the visions descended upon him during waking hours. They consumed him, filling his blank blue eyes with sights of fire and spurting blood, with the screams of the guilty. The force of the vision bubbled up until he could remain silent no more.

“Arise, O Elohim! Deliver me, O Elohim! Strike all my enemies on the jaw; break the teeth of the wicked.”

“Silence, you dog!” shouted a whip-master. He lashed Lod with the terrible scourge.

Lod howled, although he rowed; he drew the vast loom. Chanting, he said, “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”

“Silence!” raved the whip-master, his arm rising and falling. “Still thy traitorous tongue, you dog!”

Heedless of the slashing pain, almost delighting in it, Lod chanted, “Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of Elohim before their eyes.”

The key officer yanked the whip-master from Lod. “Leave him.”

“He spouts blasphemy.”

“He rows,” said the key officer. “That’s all that matters for now.”

They turned to Lod. His eyes shone with a fanatic’s gleam, wild, insane, of a desert prophet who would bring blood and thunder to the Earth. He bled. He rowed, and then he fell silent, enduring the agony of life for however long he had left.

-4-

Captain Eglon stood with the pilot at the prow, the dark choppy waters hiding the Serpent of Thep’s ram. Weary, spray-drenched sailors slept on deck, shivering under their woolen blankets, curled up like jackals. Armored soldiers with bronze cuirasses and iron short swords prowled uneasily, their glances tracking in the direction from whence came the breeze. In that same far distance, on the eastern horizon, the first crack of dawn gleamed.

Eglon had wrapped himself in his scarlet Caphtorite cloak. Seawater had stained it and soaked his turban. For safekeeping he had unclipped the ruby and put it in a silk pouch dangling from his silver belt.

“We’re not going to make it,” said the pilot.

“You’re privy then to the Master’s timetable?” said Eglon.

“How long do you think it took the pterodactyl to find us?” the pilot asked. “Abimelech might have told us, certainly, but he’s dead.”

Eglon peered at the smaller man; sometimes he thought the hunch-shouldered seaman mocked him. The emotionless pilot studied the horizon, an old salt, even now scratching at the lice that crawled through his black beard. Eglon shivered. He loathed dirt and anything to do with being unclean. At the Master’s court it had been so different. He wondered for the hundredth time if he had been wise to accept the offer to be a captain. The Master needed captains so he could float a battlefleet superior to Eridu and its allies.

Years ago, they said, the coastal cities of Northern Vendhya had fallen like rotten fruit into the Master’s hands. He’d had little need for war galleys then. Nor did he need many galleys now to keep those cities captive. In recent years the Isle of Iribos had been taken through treachery; otherwise large numbers of galleys would surely have been needed there. Now, however, in order to maintain the siege of Larak, Yorgash had to face down Eridu and its allies on the sea. A few galleys sailed out of Poseidonis; a few crawled up the coast from the Vendhyan cities, while many had been hastily constructed in the Bay of Great Sloths. Those, the pilot had said several weeks ago, had been built from green pine, and for some reason that was bad, although at the moment Eglon couldn’t remember why.

In any case, along the jungle inlets of far Southern Vendhya rested the rotting remains of old hulks. A bold, Southern Vendhyan prince had once challenged Yorgash and had dared to sail north in might. Alas, the Vendhyan prince and his crews had contacted a dreaded, and to them, foreign disease. The Master had hinted many times that he had sponsored the pestilence. In terror the luckless fools had fled homeward, but along the way many had succumbed to the sickness, and the survivors had barely crawled into the endless jungle inlets and bays of that coast and jumped ship. Thus for uncounted years those marvelously built galleys had gone to waste.

Eglon still remembered his day of decision. It had occurred in the garden court. Chimes had tinkled as the courtesans preformed a complex dance for the Master. As he sat on his golden throne, the Master had drummed his ebon fingers on the skull of a city governor who had failed to send his quota. Twin emeralds, green and of flawless purity, had been set in the polished skull’s eye sockets. An eerie, sinful taint, the barest of glows, had shone from the emeralds, as if the governor’s spirit yet peered out.

Worse, however, had been the dreadful, lost-soul moan that issued from the skull whenever the Master tapped a certain sequence with his fingernail upon the necromancy-bleached bone. On a more natural note, squawking, orange-feathered parrots had flown through the garden where the courtesans danced, while a fountain of perfumed wine had splashed behind them. The Master had turned suddenly, catching him lusting after the dancers.

“Wrestler.”

When he had seen the Master studying him, Eglon fell groveling.

“You’ve feasted well these many years on my largesse. Will you now dare the outer world as a galley captain?”

Of course he had said yes. With the Master’s pupil-less gaze upon him it would have been folly to say anything else. So he had been one of the few to actually leave Poseidonis, to sail across the open ocean in a merchantman and back into the world of mortals. There on the stone quays of Mangalore he had been introduced to his soldiers and crew. From there they had journeyed overland three weeks to the jungle ruins of Krung Thep. The long-ago Southern Vendhyan sailors who had fled their plagued ship had given the disease to the city’s former inhabitants and wiped out the people. A day of hacking through jungle vines with machetes had brought him to a rich lagoon full of crocodiles, where a barge full of rowing slaves had been waiting along with orders to arrive at Iribos in three months’ time.

Standing now on the prow deck with the pilot, watching the first streaks of dawn, Eglon heard his belly rumble. So it had those dreadful days in the lagoon. It was one thing to clutch weaklings, lift them high and crack then over your knee, to watch them flop and contort for the Master and his clapping courtesans, but another to command sullen slaves to obedience and make them wade into smelly water filled with man-eating monsters. Failure had been inconceivable. So he had practiced his favorite trick on the first slave who hadn’t jumped fast enough, breaking the spine and tossing the fool into the water. Two reptilian beasts had broken the scummy surface and tugged and yanked the screaming slave apart. It had been a fascinating performance; one he knew the Master would have loved—and it had wonderfully motivated the others. In fact, he had found then that he had a talent for making men move. Perhaps the Master had known that. In any case, although twenty slaves had become crocodile fodder, along with three soldiers, everyone together had dragged the rotting hulk out of the ooze and into deeper water. Hot tar and ropes had done wonders for the old galley until several days later he had sailed the vessel into the sea.

Not only did he have a talent for command, but for piracy as well. The huge red ruby that usually adorned his turban and the scarlet cloak warming his shoulders were but a small part of his newfound treasures. Howling with glee and with a sword in hand he had rampaged across several merchantman decks. Looting was an incredibly delicious experience, immensely heady and pleasurable. Yet all this and his virgin captaincy were about to be lost because they couldn’t get to Iribos in time.

“Seems foolish to sail in late,” said the pilot.

An icicle of fear stabbed Eglon’s chest, making his heart thud faster. “You’re not suggesting we run out on the Master, are you?”

“I’m not daft,” said the pilot, who glanced at him sidelong.

Eglon dared consider the idea; then hastily shook his head. Yet how otherwise could he keep his captaincy, his very life? He grinned suddenly, his corpulent features wreathing into a smile, exposing strong white teeth. “We need rowers, yes?”

“More than half have been pitched overboard,” muttered the pilot. “Just as I predicted would happen.”

Eglon turned around and lumbered at the nearest sailor curled in sleep. With his fine rhinoceros-hide boot he gave the Vendhyan laggard a kick. “Wake up, you lout!”

The sailor jerked awake, trembling to see the captain over him.

“Run to the rowing hold!” shouted Eglon.

“C-Captain?”

“Don’t gawk at me, you dog! You’re going to row!” Eglon lifted his head. “Commander!”

“What are you plotting, Captain?” whispered the pilot, who had crept near on soundless feet.

“Everyone is going to row.”

“Even the soldiers?”

“Are you deaf? I said everyone.”

“The soldiers won’t appreciate that.”

Eglon turned on the pilot, grinning evilly and smacking one of his huge fists into his palm. “When I start worrying about what people like is the day on my own free will I sink my arse onto the impaling spike.”

-5-

Savage yelling caused Lod to stir. Every muscle ached and his hands had become lumps of clay. Groaning, he dragged his head off his arms, which lay folded on the giant loom before him. His back muscles twitched and his head felt as it had the time that an extraordinarily cruel captain had locked a lead hood upon him. He blinked bloodshot eyes, trying to focus on the slaves shuffling down the middle aisle, their ankle manacles clanking. Each of their arms had been cruelly bound behind their backs, their garments in tatters and their faces bruised to purple welts and bleeding at the mouth.

It was then Lod noticed the Serpent of Thep neither creaked nor rocked, nor did its worm-infested timbers shift. Instead, the galley lay utterly still. Seagulls cried outside, and he heard the sound of sawing and hammering. Last night sailors and soldiers had rowed beside him, Captain Eglon himself prowling the middle aisle with a whip. This morning fewer than one hundred exhausted slaves survived on the benches, gaping at this new sight like men awakened from death. Beyond the benches at the stern and prow archers leered with oiled black beards and wearing the peaked hats so beloved by Yorgash’s soldiery. With their shiny eyes they seemed eager to bend their bows and loose arrows at them.

Meanwhile, soldiers with curved knives, perfect for a crowded spot, cursed shuffling slaves, spitting at them, daring them to rebel and shoving them against the back of their heads. They brought new wretches down into the hold to refill the emptied benches.

Twenty years of mind-numbing drudgery hadn’t yet been able to slay Lod’s curiosity. In his lucid moments he often debated with himself over a myriad of issues. He had also become an expert on certain insect species: particularly blood-sucking lice, fleas and delicately long-legged spiders that built such beautiful webs. Occasionally, wasps flew through the wicker lattice above and snatched the spiders, drugging them into lethargy, laying a single dark egg into them and then carrying the paralyzed creature to a wattle-built nest. There, once the egg hatched, the larvae feasted upon its still aware host. Lod knew this to be true because he had broken open more than one wasp nest to find out. Rats had provided him with thousands of hours of contemplation as they scurried and burrowed in the wet sand of the ballast below.

Unfortunately, making pets of them was useless. He had tried several times. Other slaves had always killed them while he slept and devoured their meaty flesh. His most delightful pet had been a lark he had once captured by luring it with breadcrumbs. With bits of rope he had made a tiny cage, hanging it from a splinter in the wooden rib above him. The bird had soon learned to copy the different toots given by the oar master with his silver whistle. Quite often the lark would imitate the calls, causing the rowers to undertake maneuvers that had not been ordered. Finally the captain had demanded that he free the bird—which had made the other slaves happy, for none of them had gotten any rest with the caged lark.

Lod sighed, certain that all those slaves of many years ago were dead. He alone lived on. He alone survived in this dank and dreary world.

“Keep your hands on the oar, White-Hair.” A soldier waved a curved dagger in his face, the edge keen and a bare inch from his eyes.

Lod obeyed, and he ignored a different soldier bending down and unlocking his chain. Then he shivered, which made the first soldier snarl and grab his hair and jerk back his head, pressing the wickedly sharp dagger against skin.

“Twitch a muscle, White-Hair, and I’ll slit your throat.”

Rage washed over Lod. That’s why he had shivered. A yearning to roar and bash their heads together had filled him the instant his ankle was free of the hated chain. Almost he had leapt up to do battle—almost, but not quite. Enough sanity remained for him to bide his time, to wait for the perfect moment.

“Slide to the end, White-Hair, to the oar port.”

Lod obeyed, even though he knew that his original sentence had mandated he always be the lead man, rowing the most difficult position. He slid over the soiled wool, over the empty places of slaves who had lost their lives last night. As he did, the new wretches were shoved off the middle aisle and to his plank. Their chained ankles made it impossible for them to step down. So they fell, one man gashing his cheek against the bench.

Lod, who had witnessed a thousand such brutalities, stared up at the whicker lattice. The sun shone high in the sky. He bent his head and peered out the oar port. No leather washer remained, so his view was excellent. To his delight he sniffed the salt sea instead of the hold’s vile stench. His eyes widened.

Masses of galleys cruised upon the sea in squadrons. Oars moved rhythmically, as if each vessel were a huge wooden centipede crawling across the water. Many had mast poles in place, with sails tied by ropes to the yardarms. Seen from this distance the galleys were beautiful; at least the largest were, with gilded forecastles and purple stern awnings. Bronze armored soldiers packed the decks of many and thousands of archers waxed their bowstrings. Sunlight sparkled off polished shields, making him blink, causing his eyes to water. Flute music drifted near. It timed the rowing in countless holds. Gulls wheeled overhead and sometimes triangular fins cut through the green sea, marking sharks that lived off the garbage thrown from the war vessels. Small punts hurried between ships, while barges struggled to move faster.

Lod leaned the other way as far as he could. They were in a bay of some sort. He saw a vine-covered seawall and behind that slender towers with pearl-colored turrets.

“Iribos,” he whispered. So they had made it after all. He furrowed his brow, deciding from the way he felt that he’d had two hours sleep.

A rowing slave, if he cared to listen, if he had enough desire, heard much from the world above, from the upper deck. Whenever he wasn’t consumed by visions, Lod listened carefully indeed, had been listening for twenty years. He knew all about Iribos.

Several years ago Yorgash had launched a seaborne invasion of this rocky little island. It housed the finest harbor in all the Gulf of Ammon or any found on the two rivers Hiddekel and Phlegeton, both of which poured into the gulf. The small, strong-walled city whose seawall he now stared at had survived many famous sieges. Iribos’ greatest advantage was that the only effective way onto the island was through its harbor. The rest of the island only showed tall, steep cliffs and jagged boulders. But entering the harbor without permission wasn’t easy, or it hadn’t been in the past. In years gone by the galleys of Iribos never used slave rowers and carried few soldiers, relying instead on their greatly envied seamanship to ram and sink their opponents. Knowing this, Yorgash had slyly preached peace, and to show his good will he had sent grain ships to ease the islanders in a time of famine. Heralds from Eridu had warned them that Yorgash intended deceit. As if to belie the warning, yet more grain ships, seven mighty leviathans, had sailed that day into the harbor. They had been monstrous vessels, and the city elders of Iribos had mocked the heralds of Eridu with the sight of them. That night the grain ships had disgorged hidden soldiery: merciless warriors led by the Gibborim, Yorgash’s dreaded children. Gold had greased the palms of certain gate captains, and into the city had poured the Gibborim, with cold-eyed, bearded warriors clutching axes following close behind.

“I’m sorry,” whispered a slave, as he bumped against Lod.

With his reveries broken, Lod straightened, and he turned from the oar port and peered at the man beside him. He was a small fellow with a shock of tawny hair, black circles around his eyes and a bruised face with cuts and awful purple welts. His neck and shoulders also bore the mementos of a beating. His bearing, however, didn’t indicate slavishness. It seemed rather that he had spoken out of politeness, a certain genteel spirit.

“My name is Zeiros,” said the man, holding out his hand.

Lod frowned at it. No slave had tried talking to him for… He couldn’t remember how long. It was forbidden for others to speak with him. That this slave hadn’t been warned… Lod’s heart thudded harder.

“I hope you bear me no ill will,” Zeiros said.

Lod had to concentrate. He wasn’t used to people addressing him; so-called masters yes, but not…others. He reached out and dwarfed the other’s hand with his crooked talons. They solemnly shook: the grotesquely over-muscled oar slave and Zeiros with a smooth palm and the long slender fingers of a philosopher or a master flutist.

“My city is Larak,” Zeiros said. “I’m a moneylender there from the House of Commorion.”

“You’re a usurer?” rumbled Lod.

Zeiros shrugged, and despite the evil of the hold, the snick of locks all around and the rattling of chains, and archers watching them, the moneylender grinned.

They hadn’t broken any of his teeth, noticed Lod. Then, because he had forgotten about the finer points concerning the art of conversation and in his growing excitement, he peered once more through the oar port and started counting galleys. He stopped at one hundred and twenty-four, no longer certain that he wasn’t simply recounting some.

The oar master blew harshly on his whistle. Lod turned back to the happenings in the hold. All the new slaves were in place, the soldiers presently wading through the repacked benches and cutting the leather binding the rowers’ arms. The wretches groaned as they moved numb shoulders and tried to twitch puffy fingers.

“You pigs listen now! Captain Eglon is going to speak!”

Eglon brushed the oar master aside and peered at the hold full of slaves. The captain wore his scarlet cloak, his red ruby upon his turban and a scimitar in a silver scabbard hanging from his sash. Over his silk garments he had donned a burnished bronze cuirass with molded images of dancers under a crescent moon that glittered with crushed diamond dust. At such times Captain Eglon usually bellowed and blustered, an evil smile twisting his features. Today he was pale, his eyes haunted, with his cheeks for the first time that Lod had seen him sagging and weighing heavily upon his face.

“You are here to die for Yorgash,” said Eglon, as if reciting a creed. “Fail in that and your tongue will be torn free and hot pokers shoved in your belly.” It seemed he would say more, as he usually did. Instead, as if his words had brought back nightmarish memories, scenes he could not abide, the captain turned abruptly and fled the hold.

For a moment no one did or said anything. Lod had the impression the captain’s short speech and even stranger actions had caught his men by surprise.

The grizzled key officer of last night cleared his throat, stepping forward. “You new boys shouldn’t think that your allies will board us and free you from your chains. Our orders are to grab spears and kill you if it looks like that will happen. Your only worry is to row when I say or if not to expect a knife in the kidneys. One minute you’ll be thinking, ‘He didn’t catch the fact that I’m not obeying.’ The next instant you’ll arch in agony, a dagger planted in your side. So that’s fair warning. I don’t give orders twice. You don’t believe that, ask your mates on the bench. Now grab your oars. I’m going to teach you what to do while we still got time. Don’t worry when your hands start bleeding. Ignore it. Your paws are going to become wet pieces of flesh before you grow proper calluses. And don’t worry about becoming tired, either. I have whip-masters that will lash you more strength than you ever knew you had. Your only concern is to row and row hard.”

“Sea battle,” whispered Lod, as he took hold of his wooden cleat. That’s why the hold had been refilled with wretches who seemed fresh from the torture chambers. They were leaving Iribos in order to engage in a naval battle. A fierce dread that he couldn’t suppress filled his churning guts.

-6-

Feet stamped above. A whistle shrilled. Weary slaves dragged in the looms, the new men slumping over them. The man beside Lod—Zeiros the Usurer—trembled as he crossed his arms over the giant oar and lay down his sweaty head. He carefully held his hands upward, his raw palms bloody and oozing.

The crack of leather above told of the mainsail catching the breeze. The Serpent of Thep lurched, beefwood complaining. Lod peered out the oar port and caught sight of a shark fin. As the galley rose upon a wave, he saw the outline of the creature and then its dangerous, raspy hide as the top part of its body broke the surface. He had seen sharks before brush up against an overboard man and with its hide tear away great swaths of flesh. He had also heard that carpenters bought cured sharkskin and rubbed it against wood that needed smoothing. The shark pacing them seemed to be at least twenty feet long, one of the smaller varieties. Then the Serpent of Thep thumped down hard upon the waters as the wind drove them onward.

“Aren’t you tired?” whispered Zeiros.

It took a moment for Lod to realize that the moneylender meant him. He turned back around, immediately assaulted by the hold’s stench. The three hundred naked slaves had nowhere to urinate but at their bench.

“Your hands aren’t even bleeding,” Zeiros said.

Lod peered at his hands: ugly twisted lumps of armored flesh.

“Do you have a name?”

Lod considered the question, squeezing his brows. “Lod,” he grunted.

The smaller man asked, “Of what city?”

Lod wasn’t a youngling newly born into the world. He was one of the old ones, the long-lived sons of Adam.

“Caphtor,” he said. “I am Lod of Caphtor.”

“Strong-walled Caphtor of the Nine Gates,” Zeiros said. “Were you a soldier there?”

Once he had been the Captain of the Guard. But that was long, long ago. He no longer spoke about such things.

“Tell me, Lod of Caphtor, will you die here?”

“No!”

Zeiros lifted his eyebrows. “How can you possibly escape this place, my friend? It seems impossible.”

Lod peered out the oar port. He loved this spot on the bench and hoped they wouldn’t return him to the leader position. A wet hand touched his forearm. He jerked round.

Zeiros shrank from him. After a moment when nothing happened, the moneylender relaxed, glanced around, then hunched his head and whispered, “I won’t spoil your plan, Lod. I want off too. As I told you before, I’m a moneylender for the House of Commorion. How does a thousand gold shekels sound as way of reward for helping me escape with you?”

“No.”

Zeiros looked startled. “You don’t trust me?”

“You won’t live long enough to escape,” Lod said.

Zeiros blinked before a snarl touched his lips. “Maybe I’m not a mass of muscle like you, my friend, but don’t doubt my courage.”

“The oar bench slays all,” rumbled Lod, who had heard a hundred such boasts from men all dead now but for him.

“Why won’t the oar-bench slay you?” asked Zeiros.

“Elohim…calls me.”

Zeiros pursed his lips. His lion-colored hair was disheveled and his face looked as if a giant had stamped it with his boot heel. Still, the shrewd eyes hinted at craft, and spirit yet flickered in his green-colored pupils.

“Elohim, the god of blood and thunder?” asked Zeiros.

“The One True God,” Lod said.

“Of course,” Zeiros said. “I meant no offense.”

The fire in Lod’s eyes smoldered. He nodded, accepting the apology.

“You are a prophet, I think,” Zeiros said.

Lod finally noticed the bloody handprint on his arm where Zeiros had touched him.

“It must bother you as a prophet that Elohim’s Temple in Larak has seen better days,” Zeiros said. “Neither our king nor his father before him went to the temple. Our king seeks guidance from the stars, from seers and astrologers. It’s said he even sent emissaries to Gog the Oracle.”

Lod spat upon the creaking wood.

“An ill deed,” Zeiros said smoothly.

“First Born are sons of the Accursed.”

“Quite true, quite true” Zeiros said. “But as I was saying, Elohim’s Temple has fallen into ruin, into disrepute. Free me from the oar bench and bring me to Larak, and I will put a thousand golden shekels into Elohim’s coffers.”

Lod stared at the usurer, the moneylender. That was a kingly sum. Zeiros was no mere moneylender—unless.

“You have a glib tongue,” Lod said. “No one but a king’s son could raise such a sum.”

Zeiros smiled ruefully. “You’re no simpleton, my friend. The truth…” He glanced about and lowered his voice. “I am the House of Commorion.”

Lod shook his head. “You are too young.”

“As you are gifted with an extraordinary physique and iron will, so I am able to make money.”

“By usury?” Lod asked.

“It takes money to make money, my friend. Yes, by usury, by shrewd deals and through buying and selling.”

“Yet now you row.”

Zeiros nodded. “Now I row.”

The barest of smiles cracked Lod’s lips.

“The tale is simple enough, my friend. The king of Larak begged the moneylenders to help him against Yorgash. The former king had squandered the royal treasury. So in its hour of need the city coffers were empty. Thus we moneylenders agreed to his plea, and we paid for the fleet’s increase. Even more, in order to augment our army, we hired Jogli charioteers. Too, we lent our king the sums to hire the king of Eridu.”

“This is bitter news,” Lod said.

“My capture?” Zeiros said, puzzled.

“That Eridu’s king sells his sword to the highest bidder.”

“Ah. Forgive me, Lod. I spoke as a moneylender. The king of Eridu calls his hiring price tribute, but in reality we’re buying his services. Words are cloaks that men wear to hide their actions.”

“No. Words have meaning. To pay tribute is different from buying a mercenary.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Zeiros said.

Lod recalled that men who agreed too readily often didn’t agree at all. He nodded for Zeiros to continue.

“The sums were gathered and the bargains made. Now Larak and Eridu shall join fleets off the coast of the Hiddekel Delta. There they shall sink Yorgash’s Armada. Then charioteers will be unleashed and the Siege of Larak broken. Perhaps the victory will be so grand that trade can be renewed with Northern Vendhya. In any case, with Yorgash’s retreat we moneylenders can recoup our outlays and collect interest.”

“Usury,” Lod said. “But none of this explains why you row.”

“With a bank draft I sailed from Larak to Eridu, to personally give the draft to the king’s lenders of the Exchange. Alas, privateers caught us, and brought us to Iribos for booty. Yorgash has offered a man’s weight in silver for any officer or noble of Larak brought before him.” Zeiros shivered. “A Gibborim spoke to us in the dungeons.”

“One of Yorgash’s children?” Lod asked.

Zeiros had turned pale and his lips bloodless. “Yes, a Nephilim. They know now that Eridu sends its terrible fire ships. They know now that they have no chance for victory against our combined fleets.”

“You told them your king’s plan?”

Zeiros gave him a bitter glance. “Have you ever faced a Gibborim?”

“Once…in battle…” Lod’s face grew stiff. “I killed it.”

“That is a bold boast, my friend.”

Lod shrugged.

“No man can slay a Gibborim,” Zeiros said. “They are too ferocious, too strong and inhuman. What you say…it is impossible.”

The fires in Lod’s blue eyes burned and a terrible, secret smile stretched across his lips.

Zeiros shrank back, and several nearby slaves glanced fearfully at Lod. Perhaps he recognized their terror. For Lod strove to hood his passions, to mask the seething cauldron of his emotions.

That too made the other slaves uneasy, as if they watched a volcano at war with itself.

“Gibborim are evil,” rumbled Lod.

Zeiros hunched his shoulders. “I had to speak to him,” the moneylender whispered, his voice haunted. “I had to speak if I wanted to keep on living. Many of those that now row did similarly. Early this morning they roused us and said we had been given a second chance. They jeered us, mocking our impotence, saying they would only take volunteers. I raised my hand as did everyone else there. I would have done anything to leave that dank dungeon, that wretched pit of misery.” The moneylender peered at his bloody hands.

“Fire ships of Eridu or not,” Lod said, “we sail to do battle.”

“We sail to our death, my friend. That is why you and I must escape. No one can face the fire ships and survive.”

-7-

Amidst the continuous clanking of leg chains, they rowed north from Iribos and toward glorious Larak, self-styled Queen of the Merchant Cities of Shinar. They rowed watch-and-watch, with half the giant oars pulled in at rest while the other half dipped into the vast green sea. Most of the idle slaves slept half-draped over their unmoving looms. It was impossible to stretch out or lean back because slaves worked the oars behind and in front of them. A few of the idle slaves stared dull-eyed at creaking timbers or peered longingly up through the latticework at clouds. Some used stone splinters to carve bone or wood. They did scrimshaw work, for at harbor most captains allowed them to sell the pieces for dried fruit or to purchase the kiss of a slave girl bobbing in a boat alongside the galley.

Soon the silver whistles trilled. Those on watch dragged in their giant oars, while those at rest pushed out theirs and began the stint that would last for hours.

Zeiros collapsed onto his oar, the muscles in his arms quivering. His face had turned pale and his right hand twitched. Lod had to nudge him when the water boy squeezed down their plank. Zeiros, like all the other slaves, drank his fill, water dribbling down his chin and streaking his grimy chest. Because they had so recently put into port the wooden ladle held sweet water, not the putrid swill it sometimes became in the caskets.

As the water boy took his bucket to the next bench, Zeiros whispered, “This is bestial drudgery.”

Lod had no answer for that and peered out the oar hole. The sea was a mere foot away, with waves slapping against the half-rotted lumber. He knew that worms bored through the old wood just as lice crawled from slave to slave and rats prowled the filthy bilge below his feet. Sometimes after a long summer of voyages a galley was emptied, filled with stones and sunk into shallow water in order to drown all the rats, lice and worms. Then divers would roll off the stones, resurface the galley and drag it onto shore to be re-caulked.

Cold seawater splashed through the oar port and struck Lod’s cheek. The galley rode so low because it was heavy with soldiery, and from the sailors he had overhead earlier this morning heavy with newly placed catapults.

Lod shifted on the bench, straining to see further ahead. Masses of galleys spread in every direction. They covered the water like an army of aquatic centipedes, some gaudy and huge, some small. Upon a few of the sleek ships sailors heaved filth overboard, and there triangular fins churned the water. On others, catapult arms thwacked against crossbars, hurling rocks into the sea. The men practiced for the coming fight. On one deck he saw sunlight flash off the silvery mask of a pacing beastmaster. High in the sky wheeled pterodactyls, the eyes of Yorgash, his hated pets and spies. The entire fleet beat north across the choppy sea, a great herd of wooden vessels. In the other direction floundering galleys fell farther and farther behind. One wallowed, waves washing upon its pine deck.

Lod spotted a massive galley with a red-painted sail in the distance, far to the front. According to the sailors he had overheard earlier, two other galleys flew such blood-colored sails. The fleet was divided into three flotillas, three separate squadrons of maneuver, each led by a red sail. At night the three leaders hung lanterns from their bows.

They sailed for Larak, for the glorious merchant capital of Shinar, the greatest of the cities in the land between the rivers.

Zeiros had told him that three and half years ago a host had marched overland; the enemy had marched west from the Bay of Great Sloths and defeated the army of Larak. For three long years thereafter the force had sat outside the walls, besieging the city. Gibborim had prowled the countryside, burning everything and crucifying anyone unlucky enough to fall into their hands.

Lod shook the moneylender’s elbow.

Zeiros blinked bleary eyes, snorting, lifting his head off the unmoving loom.

“Tell me about the fire ships,” rumbled Lod.

A scowl creased the moneylender’s haggard features. “You woke me to ask that? Everyone knows about the fire ships.”

Betraying no impatience, Lod waited as if carven from granite.

Unease crept into Zeiros’ eyes. He dipped his head. “Your pardon, Lod, I meant no disrespect. The fire ships, yes, they are an old weapon of legend. For reasons of my own I used to wonder about them. Eridu, I believed, hid behind their legend. Our king, you see, heavily taxes the moneylenders, heavily taxes the merchants and nobles to pay for the upkeep of our war fleet. Like the sailors of Iribos—or should I say the Iribos of old—the sailors of Larak rely upon the ram rather than the boarding crow. Such tactics take constant training and highly skilled crews, and those require money. Hence the overburdening taxes. But Eridu relies upon neither ram nor crow. She is content to rest upon the legend of her terrible fire ships. Their city fleet is thus small. That in turn means lower taxes for them, and that gives an unfair trading advantage to her moneylenders and merchants. Because of it the crafty traders of Eridu often undercut us, charging less and taking the profits out of our pockets.”

Lod shifted upon the bench, carrying nothing about these profits.

Zeiros dipped his head. “Suffice to say that I decided to pierce this legend in order to force the men of Eridu to man a fleet like ours or to pay for greater complements of soldiers on their merchant ships, or else to take ruinous losses as emboldened pirates captured their trade vessels. Ha! Then let them compete with my rates. They would have to charge more in order to recoup their losses. Well, in my endeavor to learn the truth, I found a courtesan of remarkable talents. She had cunning and a daring that swordsmen only brag about possessing. Through an unusual set of circumstances I was able to worm her into the king of Eridu’s harem. Ha! That is a place of intrigue, my friend, of poisoned cups and whispered words that send the unlucky under the headsman’s axe. There my courtesan flourished, from time to time finding herself in the arms of the king’s eldest son.”

“The son?” rumbled Lod.

“Disgusting, I know,” whispered Zeiros. “The son defrauded his father, but oh, what a delicious piece of information to possess, eh?” Zeiros dared nudge Lod. “The fact that I tell you this shows my trust in you and my certain intent to pay over the one thousand gold shekels that I have promised.”

“Tell me about the fire ships.”

“Yes, of course. As I was saying, the eldest prince delivered most interesting tales concerning those legendary ships. The prince corroborated the stories my House historian had told me and that other of my spies had found within Eridu’s inner wharves. If you’ll recall the old lore, many centuries ago certain sons of Cain took to the sea.”

“The Mehujael,” Lod said.

Zeiros’ eyebrows rose. “Indeed, you’re right. Few lore masters even know that name. My House historian only discovered it by exhausting his oldest tablets. You are well schooled, my friend.”

Lod remained as motionless as before.

“The Mehujael, it’s said, armed themselves with the then newly forged iron swords of Tubal-Cain and the plundering creed of Lamech. And they set upon the sea lanes, swarming like locusts, devouring cities in their path and leaving little but smoking ruins. They decided to pluck Eridu, then the richest city of Shinar. According to the oldest tablets, every pirate, scoundrel and cutthroat of the seas came flocking to the Mehujael. All were eager to partake of the rape of Eridu. Soon the armed horde was disgorged from the armada and thousands of slaves began to dig a trench around the city while thousands more continued to ply the Mehujael oars. No merchant ship or galley could enter or leave Eridu without the consent leave of those bloodthirsty sons of Cain. The city’s demise seemed certain.

“But then one night a man named Bela Zin hammered at the lesser door of the Dung Gate. Once admitted into the city, he told the guards that only he could save Eridu. He demanded to see the king at once. Quite naturally the guards imprisoned him, and that should have been the end of Bela Zin of Shurrupak. However, such an outlandish boast made the rounds and finally the king heard of it. He ordered his guards to bring this Bela Zin to him. Once in his Majesty’s presence, the slender Bela Zin spoke about a concoction of chemicals, the fashioning of odd machines and an even madder scheme. The young alchemist assured his Majesty that only he knew this dreadful secret. The astounded king agreed to the scheme. Nothing else had worked and the day of Eridu’s doom was fast approaching.

“All summer carpenters hammered madly in the inner wharf and the metal-workers were given bewildering instructions. Then the sea chain strung in front of Eridu’s harbor was lowered and out rowed a tiny squadron of ships. The people of Eridu were horrified to see such a pitiful fleet sail to its doom. For a time it seemed as if the shocked Mehujael would let this squadron sail away. Then the masses of pirates and slaves shoved their galleys off the sands where they lay, sliding the warships into the sea. Soon hordes swarmed the Eridu fools. They blocked the squadron’s path back to the harbor and encircled the predestined losers.

“It was then that the new weapon was revealed for the first time. Men on the forward deck of the leading Eridu galley were seen to be adjusting a heavy brass tube, while others of the crew labored at the handles of a pump. Suddenly, from the mouth of the tube a flame licked out, followed by a torrent of fire. As the men on the forward deck swung the tube, the fiery stream changed its direction, pouring down upon the nearest Mehujael ship. At once the stricken vessel was enveloped in flames, which not only consumed the woodwork and rigging but also poured out upon the water and seemed to set the surface of the bay itself on fire. The enemy crewmen screamed and died in agony.

“Now other vessels from the city had their fire tubes in operation. Singly and in groups, the Mehujael vessels were enveloped in flames. Those not yet entrapped turned to flee this dreadful new weapon, against which none could fight.

“Eridu was thus saved and the surviving Mehujael fled to the Jogli Steppes, where they joined other sons of Cain already in the land. Now no history I know of speaks about Bela Zin of Shurrupak after that. Not a few have wondered at his fate. Ah, my courtesan learned of his terrible reward. The king of Eridu of that time realized the power of such a wondrous weapon. So he had Bela Zin throttled in the depths of the city dungeons, lest the alchemist take his secret elsewhere. And the formula of this ‘liquid fire’ the king kept hidden. The kings of Eridu have ever since then passed this secret on to each eldest prince and to certain alchemists forever imprisoned in Eridu’s deepest pits. But only for the direst perils will the fire ships of Eridu sail, lest in some manner the great secret be torn from them.”

“Moist fire?” rumbled Lod.

Zeiros lowered his voice and leaned nearer. “Once I learned the truth of the legend, I sought the full secret of moist fire, of fire that burns on water. Can you imagine the price such knowledge could command? Ah, it enticed me, I admit.” The moneylender’s eyes seemed to shine. “To show you my earnest and good intent I will tell you two of the secret ingredients, the two that I learned of, are naphtha and bitumen.”

Lod shrugged indifferently.

Zeiros’ eyebrows lifted in amazement, and he looked upon Lod as if seeing him for the first time. The moneylender laughed, a short, sardonic bark that earned him the glance of a whip-master.

Zeiros wisely lowered his head. After the guard turned elsewhere, the moneylender whispered, “Yorgash is mad to send his fleet against the fire ships of Eridu. Combined with Larak’s galleys—they say that Yorgash is the blackest of sorcerers, that in a thousand years none have delved as deeply as he into such diabolical wickedness. Only the Accursed, the celestial bene elohim who sired the First Born, trafficked in more vile spells. Yet even Yorgash’s enchantments will fail before the fire ships. Worse, if we remain aboard, we too shall burn.”

“Yorgash is not mad,” Lod said. “The son of perdition will have a plan.”

Zeiros blinked several times. “I’ll grant you that his Gibborim are unbeatable on land, but on the sea it’s another—”

“No!” Lod smacked the oar. “The Gibborim are not unbeatable, land or sea.”

Zeiros smirked. “You are mighty, my friend, but you sit here at the oar-bench just like me, just like all of us. Now the Gibborim do not sit here, do they?”

Lod’s nostrils flared, and he balled his thick fingers into two trembling fists.

The oar slaves around him grew silent and wary, while the oar master sitting near the kettledrummer perked up. He called out and pointed at Zeiros. Feet pounded on wood and whip leather whistled through the air and with a crack landed upon Zeiros’ naked back. The moneylender shouted, and as the whip fell again he cringed. Twice more the whip struck, leaving Zeiros shaking as blood trickled down his back.

“Do not trouble the Old One!” shouted the whip-master. “Agitate him again and you will be tossed overboard.”

Trembling, Lod turned away and peered out the oar port. Fire ships… The thought of burning Gibborim, their pale flesh blackening and dripping off them like wax brought a mad light to Lod’s blue eyes.

-8-

Captain Eglon tore off his cuirass, flinging it into the corner of his cramped quarters. It slashed a sack, spilling sapphires so they rolled onto the floor. Packed crates had been stacked almost to the ceiling, barely leaving room for his bed. The crates held costly silks of the East, jars of shekels and thagweed plugged into slender bamboo shoots, all acquired from his fierce weeks of piracy.

He whirled as a trumpet pealed from outside. The blood drained from his fleshy features. Oh, he should have fled far south when he had the chance. Fool! The Master knew all. Worse, the Gibborim obeyed his orders. With the purest of silk handkerchiefs he wiped sweat from his jowls. The Gibborim’s presence meant death for all who rode his galley. Unless… His dark eyes glittered as fat almost enfolded them in a suspicious squint. Would pterodactyls come at the last moment and snatch the Gibborim aloft? Was that even possible? Or could Gibborim fly? He had heard rumors to that account.

The four iron rings of his sword hand moved convulsively with the twitching of his fingers. If the necromancer tried to escape his doom, Gibborim or not… Rank sweat clotted Eglon’s silk garments, making them cling to his swells of fat. Dare he slay a Gibborim? Dare he try? Was such a feat even possible by a man?

The trumpet pealed again. It was strident, commanding, a clarion call of doom: his own, he was certain.

He ripped a drumstick off the half-devoured fowl at his table, gnawing the greasy flesh, chewing mechanically. His sucked at the hidden caches of flesh, the little bits that tried to cling to the bone. Oh no, no, no. His teeth clacked against the bone and his blubbery lips drew out whatever morsel it possessed. Then he pitched the bone out the porthole, and with his thick fingers he tore off a strip of breast. This too disappeared into his mouth and down his gullet.

To ease his nerves he plucked the choicest vintage from under his pillow. It was a green bottle of Shurrupak wine, from the gardens of Prince Amraphel. With a savage motion he smashed open the neck, and he gurgled the fine wine, gulping, gulping, ah… He smacked his lips. Choice wine indeed: he pitched the empty bottle out of the porthole. Lastly he dug a thumb into a peach, tearing it in half, showing one part into his mouth, savoring the sweet taste and then dropping in the second. The stone he tossed into the sea.

For the third and final time the trumpet blared.

A snarl lifted the left side of his mouth. He was so hungry! He wanted to eat, to devour his sorrows, to calm this dread sense of ending. He sucked down air and dipped a rag into scented waters, swabbing his face and cleaning his fingers.

Oh, to throttle someone, to hear them gasp for mercy… Why did they have to use his galley?

Eglon lumbered to the cabin door. He yearned to kick it apart, to burst through. Instead, he twisted the handle, composed his features and stepped outside onto the deck.

Rows of archers stood at rigid attention, their peaked caps oiled and glistening, their wooden bow and arrow-cases hanging from their belts and lacquered so they shone. Vendhyan sailors scampered into line as shrill whistles blew from the rowing hold below.

Eglon recoiled from the vicious slave stench. How could anyone get used to that? He dug into a pouch and brought up his nard-soaked cloth, holding it against his nose. A thump told of a punt striking the side of the galley. Sweat prickled Eglon’s scalp and now his turban felt too tightly wound upon his head. It seemed too as if lead lay in his stomach. His elephantine knees quivered.

A dark-haired painted harlot of exquisite beauty strode up the wooden stairs hung alongside the galley. She had purple-shadowed eyes, blood-red lips and wore a golden tiara. She moved with a dancer’s grace and possessed marvelous charms. They were poorly concealed by diaphanous strands of silks and dazzling strings of jewels.

The rows of archers stirred. They stared at her with obvious longing, a few of them glancing at each other in amazement. She was wanton, lewd and bold, arching, strutting and taunting them with her smile.

Eglon swallowed in a tight throat. It had been so long since he had stood in the Master’s court. He had forgotten the aching beauty of the courtesans and the way each with a glance could ignite him with consuming passion. He had to remind himself that this harlot was a Gibborim’s pet. She no doubt had sunk far into depravity, deep into perverted abandon. As well embrace a viper.

“Prostrate yourselves!” she cried. “Do not dare to behold the approaching magnificence. Fall and grovel, for Lord Lamassu comes!”

For all his bulk, Eglon threw himself face-first onto the deck faster and with more agility and servility than any of the archers, sailors or soldiers. He well knew the Gibborim and their studied attempts to ape the Master.

After the last rustle of cloth had stilled and the clatter of a wooden scabbard, dread silence ruled aboard the Serpent of Thep until somewhere below a rower coughed and then from above a gull screeched. Eglon trembled as the silence continued. He felt the scrutiny, sensed the evil stare and the oppressive aura of the other, the Gibborim, the Nephilim-born, a child of Yorgash.

“You may rise, Captain,” said the harlot.

Composing his features, willing himself to cringe, to cower and whimper if need be, Eglon huffed and grunted as he worked himself to his feet, all while staring fixedly at the deck.

“You are the wrestler?” The words were softly spoken, as if a cobra had whispered them.

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Eglon said.

“You’re more bloated than a hog,” said with the same cobra whisper, “a ripened pig for feast.”

Eglon dipped his head. He had learned long ago not to take offense at anything a Gibborim said.

“Look at me, hog.”

Eglon raised his head, for the briefest moment daring to look into the Gibborim’s eyes. They were like dots of heated ink, with as much humanity as a preying mantis shows while chewing its kill. With an inward shudder Eglon dropped his gaze. The Gibborim’s face was stiff, stark white and flawless as Pishon marble, his features handsome as a god, a mask almost without emotions. The thin lips betrayed a gigantic haughtiness, a surety of vast superiority. Lord Lamassu, as most Gibborim, was tall and thin, clad in black leather and bearing a narrow sword at his snakelike hip. Eglon knew the Gibborim to have muscles similar to bands of steel, and they were unimaginably fast. He had once seen one scale a wall like a lizard and another snap the neck of a stampeding bull. Worst of all, Gibborim practiced necromancy. It gave all of them—Lord Lamassu included—the taint of handlers of the dead, a sense of crawling things hidden under damp rocks or the sinfulness of a corpse stirring in its tomb.

“He is a buffoon,” Lord Lamassu said softly.

The harlot strutted around Eglon, plucking at his silken garments. “He sweats like a hog so his garment clings to him.” She sniffed loudly. “And he stinks.” She laughed. “Look! He holds a perfumed handkerchief, no doubt because he despises his own stench.”

“I do not tolerate buffoonery,” whispered Lord Lamassu. He scanned the deck. “Over there, an archer dares to stare at me.”

Eglon stepped toward the fool. He knew how to deal with that.

“Hold!” hissed Lord Lamassu, throwing out a thin arm, pushing Eglon backward.

Cold sweat leaped upon Eglon. For an instant he had felt the Gibborim’s inhuman strength. Lamassu stood so tall and thin, looking as if Eglon could break him like a twig. Were a Gibborim’s bones denser than a man’s, his muscles heavier?

“I gave you no leave to move,” whispered Lord Lamassu.

Eglon threw himself onto the deck, groveling and whining for mercy.

“There is a semblance of wisdom in this one,” the harlot said.

“No,” Lord Lamassu whispered. “It is base cunning you witness. He thinks himself clever. It is stamped upon him as if he wore a fox’s pelt. Perhaps that is what so amused the Master, or maybe that he is so obese. I could dine a week on him, perhaps nine days if I kept him alive for the first several carvings.”

“And yet he is so quick,” said the harlot, “almost nimble. There is a nicety of obscenity to it. The fact of his nimbleness bespeaks great strength. How else can he heave his lard so quickly one way and then another?”

“My pet, you anger him.”

The harlot laughed, a brazen sound, as she knelt beside Eglon and grabbed a handful of his jowls. “Not so clever after all,” she said, “Just another boar with rutting instincts. A pity,” she said with a sigh, wiping her hand on his raiment.

“Rise,” whispered Lord Lamassu.

Eglon scrambled to his feet, keeping his eyes riveted onto the Gibborim’s black boots.

“You will turn your vessel south, hog, and move us with haste until I say otherwise.”

Eglon dipped his head.

“The offending archer… Trail him in the sea as shark bait. Let your beastmaster—”

Eglon shuffled his feet.

“Yes?” whispered Lord Lamassu, menace oozing from him.

“We have no beastmaster, Your Excellency.”

“Ah,” whispered Lord Lamassu. “Did he have a tragic accident?”

The leaden weight in Eglon’s gut twisted into terror. Moisture fled his mouth, leaving him unable to eject words.

“Speak, hog,” said the harlot, prodding him in the belly.

“H-he fell from the yardarm, Your Excellency.”

“Did he now?” whispered Lord Lamassu, “How odd.”

Eglon tried to work his mouth in order to explain. He couldn’t. Sweat trickled into his eyes.

“It matters not,” whispered Lord Lamassu “—for now.”

Eglon almost collapsed in fright.

“Use the offending archer as shark bait,” whispered Lord Lamassu, “and when the beasts arrive and begin to feed make sure to line up your soldiery to watch. I detest this simian curiosity, this staring at their betters. I will cull it from this herd. But if that does not suffice…perhaps you will next trail as bait, but not for sharks, my bloated buffoon.”

The harlot laughed.

“Go,” whispered Lord Lamassu. “Attend to your tasks. And make certain that your cleverness does not interfere with your obedience. Your fate has been set by Unrelenting Yorgash, and nothing you do can alter it.”

-9-

Eglon paced the stern deck beside the pilot plying the tiller. Subdued archers and soldiers sat in clumps about the galley, whispering and casting fearful glances at the captain’s cabin. The sun sank into the western horizon, producing long, menacing shadows. They were alone in the vast sea, a small island of rotten, creaking wood, alone but for the triangular fins cutting the waters behind them. The screaming archer had lasted a scant minute once the first shark had taken an arm. There had been blood, rabid churning and the sight of thirty-foot monsters. During the proceedings a few archers had betrayed their unease with twitchy fingers, as if they planned to string their bows and sink shafts into the sharks. Hard looks from bronze-armored soldiers, those who had served before with Gibborim, had dampened such mutinous thoughts. Now the archers sat ashen-faced, mumbling among themselves, forgoing their usual banter or the rattling of dice.

Whistles trilled from below. Giant oars slid against wood as the slaves drew them inward. Other slaves pushed out their oars. The changing of the watch had come.

Eglon turned to the pilot. “Is this why we braved the open ocean? Is this why I hurried to Iribos?”

The pilot shook his head. “It was to forgo impalement, to avoid singing the paean of pain.”

Before Eglon could respond, an eerie moan emanated from the captain’s cabin. Wood rattled and a harsh red light poured through the chinks between the boards. The hellish glare startled the soldiery, many crying out and pointing. The moan became a high-pitched scream, but not one a woman would make. It grated on already tense nerves. The shadows nearest the cabin flickered as if with infernal life. The scream lasted too long. It stretched impossibly, and then the wicked light snapped off and the scream died. Silence and returning gloom lent a sinister air to the Serpent of Thep. The mumbling had quit as men waited expectantly, many holding their breath.

“Necromancy,” whispered Eglon.

“Skull magic,” said the white-faced pilot.

Eglon peered at the captain’s cabin. What if flames truly lit the rotted wood? What if his quarters and those within burned? And lose all that hard-won plunder, he asked himself. Yes! If through it the Gibborim died. Eglon licked his lips and with clammy hands adjusted his turban. Better to not even think such thoughts. Gibborim divined secrets by their arts, by their inhuman cunning. Better by far to play the buffoon. And die?

“Do you know his plan?” whispered Eglon, unable to hide the quaver in his voice.

The pilot eyed him sidelong. “He has not made me privy to his secrets, no.”

Eglon moistened his lips. “How do you think we shall defeat the fire ships of Eridu?”

The pilot scratched his curly black beard. “Hadn’t given it much thought. By magic, I suppose.”

“Yes,” whispered Eglon, “black magic, necromancy, the summoning of—”

A creak of wood stilled his speech.

Motion ceased from the clumps of hunching soldiery. Every archer, swordsman and Vendhyan sailor turned toward the cabin. Out stepped the harlot. Tears streaked her painted face. Fear, stark and wild, twisted her beauty into an ugly mask. It profaned her smooth limbs, aging her. Like a sleepwalker, a somnambulist under spell, she closed the door and shuffled to Eglon.

There was no mockery twinkling in her eyes, no sneer upon her blood-red lips. She seemed glazed, drugged and her mouth twitched. “You are…” She frowned, and then understanding lit her eyes. “Head due west, and make haste. Time…” Her shoulders trembled. “We have little time left.”

“He summons the kraken?” Eglon asked.

Her eyes widened. Then a touch of her old haughtiness returned. “Do not question me, hog. Obey. That is your only concern. Take this galley and head due west.”

Schooled in the Master’s court, Captain Eglon simply dipped his head.

With an even more leaden step than before, the harlot returned to the captain’s cabin, disappearing within, the door closing with a snick.

“Kraken?” whispered the pilot.

“Captain!” shouted a barefoot sailor. The small man ran the length of the galley to them, panting as he said, “There’s a vessel dead ahead, Captain. One of ours, I think, wallowing in the sea.”

Eglon grabbed the small Vendhyan, making the man wince. “Show me! Hurry, go!”

The sailor scampered ahead with Captain Eglon lumbering behind. Archers at the prow hastily moved out of the way. Eglon squeezed between several newly placed catapults and peered where the sailor pointed. The long shadows and sinking sun made it difficult to see, but Eglon made out the almost submerged galley. Some men splashed about it in the waters. Some stood upright upon the deck awash with waves. Others clung to the mast. The wretches shouted and waved, their voices drifting over the darkening sea.

“Do we pick them up?” the pilot asked.

Eglon jerked around. “Pick them up? Are you mad? Lord Lamassu has ordered us west?”

“Then they’re dead men,” the pilot said.

Eglon gaped at him. “Yes! They’re already dead. But we’re not.”

“Seems obvious,” muttered the pilot.

“Don’t you see?” Eglon cringed, his great blubbery shoulders hunching as he eyed the captain’s cabin. Then he yanked the pilot to him and began to whisper fiercely into his ear. Eglon planned to deceive the Gibborim by traveling in a miles long circle instead of heading west. One way or another, he intended on surviving.

-10-

The stars shone overhead as a cold wind blew across the Gulf of Ammon. Choppy waves slapped against the Serpent of Thep as the giant oars continued to dip.

With an eerie creak, the cabin door opened. Out stepped the harlot with a woolen cloak draped over her shoulders and an octopus-shaped lantern swinging from her hand. The flame showed her lascivious features to be as haughty as when she had first boarded ship. She had repainted her face, and now she shouted, “Bow before Lord Lamassu! Abase yourselves and stare not at his glory.”

Archers, soldiers, sailors, everyone vied with Eglon to be first as they threw themselves prostrate. The rattle of the harlot’s lantern was soon the only noise except for the wind humming between taut ropes. Even the rowing-hold kettledrum had fallen silent, all the oars drawn in and the slaves at rest.

“Captain,” whispered Lord Lamassu, his voice as poisonous as ever.

Eglon groveled full-length upon the planking, his heart laboring hard and his breath a wheezing sound. He hadn’t heard the Gibborim’s approach. At times they moved as soft as a cobra slithering upon a sleeping man.

“You will assist my pet, Captain.”

Eglon heaved himself upright, sick with fright that Lord Lamassu would pierce his disobedience, that the Gibborim would discover his artifice. Fortunately, his time spent in the Master’s court now kept Eglon from collapsing in terror. Only one of iron nerves and constitution could long survive in the Master’s company. The evil corrupted, leeching one’s humanity. But a person who could cavort and comment wittily while under the Master’s pitiless gaze could function while terror squeezed his heart.

“Come,” said the harlot.

Eglon followed her into his cabin. She pointed at a large bronze brazier, her gesture clear. Grunting as he picked it up. The bronze was warm, and oily ashes stained the center. He lugged the massive bowl to where Lord Lamassu stood frowning out to sea. At this Eglon’s scrotum shriveled. He set down the bowl and hurried after the commanding harlot. At her orders, he picked up a bronze-limbed tripod as she gingerly lifted a necklace strung through three human skulls. Eglon almost dropped the tripod when a distant scream, one of terrible agony, seemed to thread through his mind. It seemed as if the scream originated from one of the skulls and was not truly an audible sound, but an ethereal wail of despair.

Trembling anew, but this time with a sick fear of the supernatural, he staggered after the harlot, recalling hushed whispers spoken in a lonely tavern in Mangalore. There a broken old beggar had horrified him with tales of necromancy. Hideous torture, exquisitely dispensed by the most skilled of practitioners, allowed the necromancer to flay portions of a human soul and invest it into a skull as a banker deposits coins into an account. The necromancer later used this soul investment to conjure with, a sinister and wicked power, evil and demonically twisted and highly dangerous.

Eglon set the tripod near Lord Lamassu. At the harlot’s orders, he hefted the heavy bronze brazier upon it.

“What is that I see in the distance?” the Gibborim whispered.

Eglon spoke despite the parchedness to his mouth and the painful thuds of his racing heart. “Lord, it is a galley.”

“Men swarm upon its watery deck,” whispered Lord Lamassu. “Sharks circle it.”

Eglon could no longer see the galley, but he wasn’t surprised that the Gibborim could. Yorgash’s children saw in the dark much better than a man could, akin to bats in their ability. As the silence lengthened, Eglon’s heart fluttered and agony lanced his chest. Did Lord Lamassu realize that instead of heading due west they had been widely circling the galley for hours? Eglon wheezed, with his face turning white and weakness dragging his arms. Oh, it hurt to breathe. His heart raced and his eyes seemed to bulge outward.

“The galley is sunken,” whispered Lord Lamassu.

Eglon blinked rapidly, trying to regain his wits, trying to explain.

Lord Lamassu turned toward him.

“Excellency,” whispered Eglon, “g-galleys are mostly wood. It will only truly sink once it smashes upon rocks or a storm breaks it apart.”

“No,” whispered the Gibborim, “there is a third alternative.” A strange smile stretched those thin lips, a smile that made the nape hairs stir on Eglon’s neck.

Lord Lamassu turned to the harlot and took the skull necklace from her hands, and with a clattering of bones he draped it over his head.

Unbelieving at the success of his plot, Eglon stepped back. In a daze he watched Lord Lamassu stroke the skulls, hissing to them in sibilant speech.

Suddenly the Gibborim flinched as if a whip had struck him. His mouth gaped and he shivered in something near ecstasy. Lord Lamassu seemed to expand, to swell and grow in vibrancy. He raised his arms, and it appeared to Eglon that ghostly, silently shrieking forms swirled out of the skulls and whirled around and around the taut necromancer. Lord Lamassu laughed as a god might in jest at the schemes of puny humanity. He scooped hot coals from a box at his feet, holding them in his marble-white hands. They radiated an eerie glow, illuminating his face, making his black eyes blaze with madness. With an imperious gesture he flung the coals into the brazier. They exploded with sparks, and puffs of greasy smoke whooshed upward.

Eglon staggered from the stench, viler than any in the rowing hold.

Lord Lamassu began to scream a chant. Awful and weird it rose, diabolic in its undulating rhythms. With arms outstretched and head flung back, the Gibborim wove a web of fierce enchantments. A terrible, dreadful feeling of evil radiated from him like heat. A sickening thing, it induced terror as if the dead rose and walked among them.

Men groaned and wept all around the chanting Gibborim. Many clapped their hands over their ears. A few, with wild eyes, foamed at the mouth as they leapt overboard. They swam with frantic strokes but were struck from underneath, disappearing in a swirl of teeth and blood, dragged down into the inky depths.

How long this chant continued was impossible to tell. On and on it went, reducing the crew to a pitiful state and exalting Lord Lamassu to necromantic heights. The dark majesty of his evil became unbearable. Men groveled in abject terror as if one of the bene elohim descended from the celestial sphere and walked among them.

Then a hideous cry almost beneath human hearing issued from the darkness. Lord Lamassu laughed victoriously.

Eglon, from where he clutched the mast, squinted into the starlit night.

Strange, awful sounds came from where he had last seen the wallowing galley. A vast, colossal shape darker than the starlit night seemed to rise out of the depths. Eglon blinked and squinted harder, and he moaned. Was it his imagination or did he see huge tentacles that reached higher than the ship’s mast? From the submerged galley came horrified shouts of terror, gibbering men calling upon their gods and wailing desperately. It availed them naught. There came sounds of explosively splintering wood, shrieks and heavy things slapping the water with terrific force.

“O Kraken!” chanted Lord Lamassu. “Heed me, monster of the Deep! Follow me this night to a feast of blood!”

More hideous sounds emanated from lost seamen, and the galley’s destruction in a smashing of wood. It was a terrible and dreadful noise to listen to in the middle of the Gulf of Ammon.

Then Eglon became aware of the harlot at his elbow. Her fingers dug into his flesh as she hissed, “As you value your life, man, turn this galley around.”

He stared at her dull-eyed and uncomprehending.

“Fool! This is our one chance. Lord Lamassu is in disgrace. He was to sacrifice himself and thereby bring the kraken nearer for others more gifted to call. But your hog cunning has aided him, as he knew it would. Oh, do not be misled, man. He knew that you would deceitfully circle the half-sunken galley, hoping to sacrifice it instead of yourself. But what do you think he will tell the Nobles Ones if they ask him what occurred?”

Understanding filled Eglon and the horror of his position. Had he saved himself from a relatively clean death at the kraken’s tentacles in order to end up in prolonged agony on a necromancer’s flaying table?

The harlot laughed. It was an ugly sound. “Someone will surely feast on you, hog, for you are doomed. But if you would scheme another night we must stay ahead of the kraken while we are able.”

Eglon jumped as if branded by a hot iron. He lumbered to the rowing hatch, bellowing orders into the hold as he crashed down the steps.

A moment later whistles trilled and out slid the giant oars.

-11-

As the other slaves cowered and curled around the giant oars, clinging to them as the Gibborim screamed-chanted his evil, Lod’s lips writhed with a snarl and his blue eyes blazed. He knew that the necromancer opened forbidden gates. This Lord Lamassu used unholy deviltry and drew up into the world things better left hidden in the depths.

With all his being Lod loathed and hated the children of Yorgash. They were the offspring of those called First Born, themselves the product of a union between the daughters of men and the bene elohim, the “sons” of the Most High, fallen angels from Heaven who had taken on the guise of flesh in order to rule and wreck this world. At the very dawn of time Father Adam and Mother Eve had fallen to the seduction of Lucifer, and so humanity had been hurled from paradise. Fallen angels and their ilk ever plagued mankind, tempting, scheming, lying and cheating in order to draw humanity deeper into sin so they too would suffer in the fires of eternal Sheol. Not content with their deserved fate, the evil ones forever sought the destruction of others.

So Lod had long ago learned. But there had been a girl, a dark-haired beauty with a laughing mouth, a vivacious pretty with soft hands and eyes that had melted his frozen heart. He had wooed her in the days he had been captain of the Guard of Caphtor. He had been a bold swordsman, the greatest in the Nine Walled City. He had bidden her to become his wife, and he was certain that she would have agreed. But her father sickened, and she went to the Temple of Elohim, there to pray for his healing. He worsened and she grew bitter. The family was not of Caphtor, but from the eastern shores of the Suttung Sea to the north, from the city of Pildash. There men worshiped Gog the Oracle, a First Born son of Magog. Secretly, her father begged her go to Gog, to pay the First Born to gaze into his future and tell him if there was hope or if he must soon die.

One bitter night Lod’s beloved departed Caphtor in company with her father’s armed servants. She made it safely to the evil canal city in the Hanun Delta, and there she paid the priests of Gog and begged the Oracle for a way to lengthen her father’s life.

In the Temple of Gog she learned that this year her father would die…unless. Oh, the evil ones were cunning in their guile, using every artifice to trick and sway. Elohim was wicked, they claimed, His ways too harsh, obviously so if He took her father at such a young age.

Bit by bit, week by week, the priests initiated her into the Order of Gog and she learned that pain and cruelty were the prices for magical healing. Evil burrowed into her heart. She departed Shamgar, and months after her departure, she met Lod again in Nine Walled Caphtor. Knowing none of this, Lod took her to him, crushing her in a fierce embrace. He kissed her eyes and mouth and he told her that never again would she leave him. She smiled softly as of old, and she took him to her father, healthy again and strong.

But she was not the same, although at first Lod did not understand this. She had changed, and she no longer followed the ways of Elohim. She practiced deviant rites and at night called out to spirits. She was of the Order of Gog, a practitioner of Rope Rank, using her knotted cord to deliver pain and thereby pay the dread price that kept her father alive. Lod didn’t notice. For once in his life, he was in love.

Bit by bit she tried to sway him from the path of Elohim. He would laugh and shake his head, and then he would scoop her into his arms. In time, before they became man and wife and against the wise laws of Elohim, he lay with her. Oh, his love was strong and passionate, and in her embrace he felt whole and she fired him so. She indeed was the maid for him.

Then she secretly advanced to Whip Rank, and he noticed that the servants of her father’s house cringed in her presence and that they bore bloody welts upon their bodies. She spoke openly now against Elohim and urged him to go with her to Shamgar to petition the Oracle.

“Do you mean pray to Gog?” he asked in rage.

“He can pierce the mystic veil,” she said. “He will tell us our future.”

“That is forbidden by Elohim.”

“Look around you, Lod. Open your eyes. Elohim fears the First Born, and do you know why? Because He knows that we can become gods.”

“You spout blasphemy.”

“Think, Lod, think!”

He did. His heart grew troubled and he left her even as he yearned for the soft touch of her body against his.

She grew in evil as she defied the One who would have let her father die. She yearned to grow in power, to someday ascend in the Order until she became a goddess indeed, one equal to Elohim.

Life lost much of its savor for Lod. The one he loved, the maid of his dreams, was gone.

It was only during his years at the oar that understanding filled him. Elohim had fashioned a perfect garden for man and woman. But into Eden had slunk the serpent, the great deceiver. He had seduced humanity by his taunt: “You can be like Elohim.” In other words, you can become gods. With this promised plum Lucifer brought sin into the world, and with such black gifts the evil ones continued to tempt.

Lod could have had his pretty…except that deceivers ever tempted and perverted sweet maids with lies. From that day his fury grew at those who had stolen his beloved. From that day his desire to strike back at those who had wounded his spirit expanded into a physical need. In his heart he declared war against them all, a war to the death.

-12-

With a weary heave of his arms, Lod and the others of his bench drew in the mighty loom until the counterweighted end rested in a Y-slotted piece of pine. The Serpent of Thep swayed with the roll of the waves, water sloshing in the bilge below. Slaves draped themselves over the giant oars, exhausted, spent from a night of manic rowing.

Lod peered out the oar port. Land smudged the horizon. Then the harsh cry of pterodactyls jerked up his head. Through the latticework he watched a reptilian beast wheel overhead, sunlight glinting off its copper message tube. Another swept by, its cry filling the hold so slaves shouted in dismay. The snap of leathery wings told of the pet of Yorgash landing on the pterodactyl post.

From on deck Captain Eglon bellowed orders.

“The pterodactyl must bear a message,” whispered Zeiros.

Through the oar port Lod searched for sign of the fleet. Spotting nothing, he lay down his head.

Zeiros nudged him later as cooks passed out fresh bread and a hunk of meat to each rower along with a cupful of wine. Lod thoughtfully chewed the salted beef and nursed the wine with misgiving. Such tasty fare meant a sea battle. The meat was supposed to give strength and the wine to dull their aches and fears.

He slept again and groaned in his sleep. He twitched and his face grew pale. Finally he woke, red-eyed, groggy and fiercely scowling. He lifted his shaggy head off the loom and rattled the rusted chains attached to his ankles.

No slaves rowed. The entire hold rested. The wind drove the Serpent of Thep, the sail above billowing, lines tight and stretching with familiar creaks.

“What do you see, my friend?” Zeiros said.

Lod turned haunted eyes upon the usurer.

Zeiros frowned. The purple bruises wrinkled upon his face. “Are you well? Did the meat upset you?”

Lod peered at his hands. He had crooked fingers, callused, some of the fingernails cracked and broken, others black. With these ugly talons he had pulled the weighted oar ten thousand leagues. His hands were twisted lumps of bone and sinew, trained and beaten to one task: grip, hold and never let go. He flexed his hands. He squeezed his fingers into fists, listening to the knuckles crack. With a churning in his gut he pounded the giant loom once, twice, three times.

The oar master looked up from his stool beside the kettledrummer.

“Careful,” whispered Zeiros. He put warning fingers upon Lod’s forearm.

Lod closed his eyes. The usurer’s fingertips were smooth. Lod bowed his head until his matted, filthy, long white hair swept against the oar.

“They’re watching you,” whispered Zeiros.

“Aye,” rumbled Lod. A terrible grin cracked his lips. His eyes snapped open. Madness shone in them. Dark knowledge swirled in those intense blue eyes. They had seen sights not meant for earthly vision.

Fire. Blood. Slaughter.

“Sit up,” Zeiros whispered in his ear. “The oar master points at you as he speaks with the commander of the guards.”

Through his nostrils Lod drew a deep breath. The galley stink burned into him, filling his lungs, driving some of the madness from him.

Like a bear, a bruin of the high mountains, he raised his head and squared massive shoulders. With an effort of will he blanked his face. He hooded the wild light that sought to leap out of his eyes, the windows to his soul. With ogrish slowness he stretched his muscled limbs and clamped his hands onto the wooden cleats.

The oar master squinted at him. The commander of the guards whispered into the man’s ear. He hesitated and then nodded. Grinning, the commander of the guards strode down the aisle. His armor clanked. He adjusted the bronze clasp that protected the wrist of his sword hand.

“You,” he said, jutting his chin at Lod.

Lod stared straight ahead. He gave no sign that he had heard the soldier.

“Slave,” snarled the commander of the guards.

Ponderously, Lod swiveled his head. He refused to gaze into the soldier’s eyes. The knowledge in his own…

The commander of the guards drew a wickedly sharp short sword. It had been Tartarus-forged and whetted with much slave blood. The soldier pointed at Lod. “No tricks, Brute. No sly fouling of the oars during battle. No bouts of craziness today.” The lean-faced commander scowled. “If you do such things or even think them I’ll hack off your hands.” He laughed. “I’ll hack off your feet, Brute. Then I’ll save you for the Gibborim. Let Lord Lamassu peel off whatever soul a monster like you has left and stuff it into his necromancer’s skull. Do you understand me, you brute?”

Lod gave a slow nod.

“Right,” said the commander. “Just so we understand each other.” He hesitated, hefting the iron blade. Then he slid the short sword into its scabbard and marched back to the oar master.

Lod shivered as sweat oozed from his armpits. His knuckles were ghost-white.

Out of the corner of his eye Zeiros watched him. The usurer hissed, “Careful, friend. They’re still judging you.”

Lod’s nostrils flared.

Zeiros’ brow wrinkled. “What ails you? The fact that we’re about to enter battle?”

Lod squeezed shut his eyes. The iron control that for years had sealed his lips now strained to its limit. Goosebumps pimpled his flesh. Around him, slaves stirred uneasily. Then the moment passed, and the tension in his gargantuan shoulders relaxed. Lod breathed deeply.

Zeiros’ frown became more pronounced.

Lod glanced sidelong at the usurer. He parted his lips. His shoulders hunched. He peered at the oar master, lowered his head and whispered in a harsh voice, “Elohim came to me in a vision.” He shuddered. “It was…terrifying. I am a worm. I am the dung of the Earth.” His lips closed. He clenched his jaws and his entire face tightened. In a hoarse whisper, he added, “Today judgment falls from the throne of Heaven.”

-13-

At a comment from the pilot, Eglon turned around. “No!” he shouted. “Pitch it off the side of the ship. Do you want to stave us? Are you so eager to become shark bait?”

The soldiers grunted as they wrestled the catapult off the bow where they had been about to topple the naval machine onto the ram. They shuffled their feet, gasping, with their hands straining to hang onto the underside of the catapult. Then they rested the front part of the wooden base against the galley’s railing, now on the side of the ship.

“One, two, three, heave!” shouted Eglon.

The soldiers shoved, easing the catapult upward, lifting the back part of the base higher and higher.

“Watch it, man,” said Eglon, using an ivory baton and slapping a soldier on the shoulder. “Step back now.”

That soldier jumped out of the way as the catapult tilted up and over and toppled off the galley. With a splash it plunged into the sea.

“That’s the last one,” said the pilot.

Eglon shoved the baton into his sash. The bow area, the forward fighting deck, looked naked without the half-dozen catapults. The galley also rode higher in the water. The bow didn’t sag dangerously anymore.

The pilot sidled nearer. “What do you think it means that we’ve tossed our catapults overboard?”

Eglon scowled, wrapping pudgy fingers around the pilot’s arm. “Who are you to question me, little man? Eh?”

The black-bearded pilot winced painfully. “I meant no disrespect, Captain.”

Eglon released the lice-ridden pilot, wiping his palm on his silky breeches. He spat onto the planks. “If Lord Lamassu treats me like a dog, if he makes me oversee these wretched tasks, I am still the captain.”

The pilot nodded as he massaged his arm.

Eglon’s vast stomach grumbled and gurgled. He yearned to eat, and yet his appetite had fled. What did shoving the catapults overboard mean?

“The galley will be more maneuverable,” the pilot said. “We’ll be faster.”

“And less able to defend ourselves,” Eglon said. “I don’t like it.”

Together, they brooded upon their fate.

Then a hunched sailor clinging to the top of the mast cried out. The sail billowed and the small Vendhyan swayed above it. His brown-skinned feet rested on twin wooden spurs as his crooked fingers clung to the very tip of the mast. While he was a wretched man, dressed in a loincloth, he had the eyes of an eagle.

“The fleet!” shouted the Vendhyan. “Three degrees to starboard is the fleet.”

Another Vendhyan at the tiller shoved against it.

Eglon and the pilot stepped to the bowsprit where below the ram churned the waters. In the distance rose land. Before that, black specks stained the sea, the fleet of Yorgash.

“Notice the water, Captain,” the pilot said.

Eglon scowled at the choppy sea. Since last night he had become thoroughly sick of it. He hated this watery existence. “What are you babbling about?”

“The brown tint, Captain,” the pilot said.

Eglon peered at the sea and shook his head.

“There are brown streaks in the water. It’s churned mud from the Hiddekel River. The river pours its silt-filled waters into the sea. It proves that we approach the great city of Larak.”

Eglon cared nothing about that. Would he survive the battle? And if he survived, what did Lord Lamassu plan for him? Would the Gibborim blame him for circling the sunken galley? Did the hateful child of Yorgash mean to skin him alive and stuff his soul into a necromancer’s skull? He drew a rag and dabbed his sweaty cheeks. His stomach gurgled. Food, food, he must have food.

Eglon paced the bow deck. Every so often he glanced at the captain’s quarters, where Lord Lamassu and his harlot stirred not. Neither did any foul arts blacken his former hut.

The archers and soldiers said little. The night of the kraken had terrified them. They sat listlessly in groups, dicing halfheartedly. This was a haunted galley. It stank of death, doom and wretched destruction.

It time the fleet spread out before them. One hundred and twenty galleys drifted in the sea. All had taken down their masts, while punts plied between ships. The fleet held a rough crescent formation, with the bulk of the galleys in the center block. The open part of the crescent was aimed toward shore. There in the distance rose the ivory-colored walls of Larak. Smudges of smoke hung over the city. The army of Yorgash sat outside its walls in siege.

Screeching pterodactyls wheeled above the fleet. At times a few landed on certain decks. Those then winged to the Serpent of Thep, each with a stout fiber bag gripped in its talons. The harlot appeared. Without a word, her face a painted mask, she took each bag and brought the hidden contents to Lord Lamassu. Some of the reptilian beasts flew lazily toward Larak, perhaps spying on the progress of the enemy fleet.

As the Serpent of Thep inched toward the armada of Yorgash, a flock of pterodactyls hurried from Larak.

The pilot shaded his knowledgeable eyes.

Eglon paused, resting from his pacing. “What do you make out?”

“A fleet,” whispered the pilot. “I see the fleet of Larak, and no doubt that of Eridu, too.”

-14-

Two wooden herds glared at each other across the choppy waters. The sun rode high, reflecting its cloudless light off the scintillating sea.

To seaward drifted the fleet of Yorgash. Many of its galleys were unpainted and therefore greenish because of the newly cut pine logs used in their construction. The galleys brimmed with soldiers wearing bronze helms that gleamed like gold and holding glittering swords that shone with the bright sunlight. Each ship bristled with catapults and ballista. Three monster galleys led each block, the center formation the largest, the two horns of the crescent half again as large.

The opposing fleet was composed of two unequal parts. The yellow-painted galleys of Larak maneuvered smartly. They were sleek and slender compared to the wallowing hulks of Yorgash. Their rams shone golden, sheathed in polished brass. Two lines made up the Larak Fleet. In a checkerboard pattern they advanced upon the invaders. The other, smaller half of the fleet was painted black. Those ships were larger than the Larak galleys, even larger than those of Yorgash. Upon those decks also bristled soldiery and there too catapults abounded.

One small part of the fleet of Eridu detached itself from those big galleys. These vessels were smaller, and from them projected brass tubes. They were seven of them. Alone they surged, their oars moving rhythmically to drumbeat.

“The fire ships of Eridu,” whispered the pilot.

The seven vessels moved ahead of the fleets of Larak and Eridu and approached the crescent formation of Yorgash. Then the fire ships spread out, giving each other room.

To greet them, yea, to meet them, a lone galley from the fleet of Yorgash set out.

For the last several hours pterodactyls had landed with fiber bags and left them with the Serpent of Thep. At the harlot’s orders sailors had erected a tarp above the forward fighting deck. Eglon, at the harlot’s bidding, had huffed and puffed before his watching archers and soldiers. He had carried the tripod, the brazier and a large sack of coal, he supposed. He had set up the brazier on the forward fighting deck and now awaited Lord Lamassu.

Cold sweat slicked Eglon’s skin. His belly rumbled and the planks he stood on groaned. He wore bronze plate armor upon his torso. His beloved scimitar hung at his side. In place of a turban he wore a helmet. It gave him the appearance of a bloated beetle. He squinted in the sunlight, folds of fat almost hiding his beady eyes.

The archers tested their bowstrings, the sounds humming about the galley. Each chose his best arrow. Soldiers hefted heavy shields and drew their swords. Others greased spears, larding them just below the wickedly sharp spearheads. If an enemy dared grab such a spear, he would be in for a shock and probably a gutting. Sailors with buckets tossed sand onto the deck. The sand was meant to soak any spilled blood and help men keep their footing on a gore-slippery deck. Other sailors readied buckets of oil to heave, in order to drench enemy decks.

“Why us?” whispered Eglon, “why my galley?”

The harlot wore her finery, the little of it she had. Her form, her beauty, her charms, they were all too visible. It distracted many of the men.

She sneered. “Why not us, hog?”

Eglon wet blubbery lips. With his sleeve he wiped his eyes. His lone galley had shed its sail, throwing it overboard, and the mast along with it. They would never need it again. It was his galley that went to meet the fire ships. Behind them watched the entire fleet of Yorgash. All the masters, the Gibborim, and the eyes of Yorgash above, the pterodactyls, witnessed his sacrifice.

The flutes and cymbals from the fleet of Larak piped and clashed a merry tune. The sounds carried easily over the intervening water. None of those galleys advanced. It seemed rather that they mocked the slaves of Yorgash. The behemoths of Eridu swayed in the sea, waiting for the fire ships to spew their wrath. Did the men of Larak and Eridu wonder what the lone galley rowing out to intercept the fire ships could possibly conjure? Were they worried, or did supreme confidence fill the thousands of spectators from the Land between the Rivers?

On the Serpent of Thep the door to the captain’s quarters creaked open. Tall Lord Lamassu stepped out. He wore black leathers and a long, slender sword. Only the shawl thrown over his head seemed incongruous. He hurried from the cabin, his movements too fast; his speed more lizard than human.

Archers and soldiers blanched, turning away from the sight.

The Gibborim greeted Eglon with an evil smile. “No groveling today, toad.” A crocodile laugh grated the wrestler’s nerves. Lord Lamassu snapped his fingers.

The harlot opened a pot, with prongs extracting hot coals and depositing them into the brazier. She continued this, blowing on certain coals, making them glow.

“Yes,” Lord Lamassu whispered in his cobra voice. He snapped open a fan and fluttered the brazier. The movements flickered much like a dragonfly’s wing. The coals glowed hot.

“Open the sack,” whispered Lord Lamassu.

Eglon unwound the string and jerked open the neck, expecting to see coals. He paled. His stomach knotted. For an instant dizziness threatened.

“Pick one up,” whispered Lord Lamassu.

Eglon stared at the Gibborim, at the necromancer. Lord Lamassu wore his evil necklace of skulls, bleached white. Some of the eye sockets contained rubies or emeralds. The skulls in the sack were pitch black. Many of those sockets contained lumps of tar.

“You want me to touch one?” Eglon asked hoarsely.

Lord Lamassu watched him. There was a hypnotic quality to the stare, an eerie inhumanity. “My harlot dares not handle them, for she is not dead.”

Eglon tried to puzzle that out.

“Haste, my hog,” whispered Lord Lamassu, “take up a skull.”

“I’m not dead either,” Eglon said.

“Untrue,” Lord Lamassu said in a dreadful whisper. “You are as good as dead, for your sins have condemned you. It is merely your manner of passing that should concern you.”

Eglon blinked and blinked again. He couldn’t tear his gaze from those hypnotic eyes. Greasy sweat oozed from his cheeks and his stomach burned hollow. Ah… Strength leaked from his limbs and it seemed that his knees would unhinge. He struggled to keep from toppling before the dread Gibborim.

“Fail me in this task, hog, and I shall flay you myself. You shall wail an age in a most special skull. O
h, I shall tease your soul into torment, never doubt it.”

Eglon felt his lips part. To his ears his voice sounded distant and dully spoken. “And if I do this task, Lord?”

That stark white face, so handsome, like a god among men, seemed most mocking. “Several days on the wheel-rack will suffice the masters, provided you can keep yourself alive this day.”

A flicker of the iron that had once allowed a wrestler to joke in the Master’s presence struggled against this hypnotic gaze. Eglon stood immobile, straining to rip out his scimitar.

Lord Lamassu laughed. “No, no, hog. That is futile. Hurry, pick up a skull.”

In a daze, telling himself that it was death to disobey—and that if he stayed alive he could yet plot—Eglon reached into the sack. The black skull was oily, and a shock went through him as he lifted it. Voices screamed in his head, and vomit burned the back of his throat.

“Hold it over the coals,” Lord Lamassu said in his evil whisper.

With his jowls wobbling, Eglon did as he was bidden. The skull grew warm and the voices in his head… Tears squeezed out his eyes. Sickening visions threatened his sanity.

“Drop the skull into the fire.”

Wrenching loose his fingers, Eglon heard the skull fall upon the coals. A whoosh sounded and billows of angry smoke chugged from the brazier, thick sooty smoke. It reeked, and it funneled out of the brazier in unnatural quantities.

“Again,” the Gibborim whispered in Eglon’s ear. “Take another skull.”

“L-Lord?” stammered Eglon.

“How can the fire ships burn what they cannot see, hmm? I must fashion a cloud, a fog. I must turn day into night, or at least gloom. Then we shall see how these vaunted fire ships fare against the kraken.”

-15-

Choking, sulfurous smoke drifted within the hold. Rowers coughed and gagged. Shouts lifted from the barely seen oar master as the kettledrummer pounded out the beat. Chains rattled and whip-masters loomed upon the aisle, a bloody scourge in one hand and a crackling torch in the other.

“Keep the beat, you dogs!”

Lod stood up, pushed the giant loom together with his bench-mates and then heaved backward at the beat. His eyes stung from the smoke; his nostrils burned with the stench.

A scream sounded from the other side of the aisle. Wood clouted against wood as two looms struck together.

“Hold the stroke!” shouted the oar master. “Draw in the oars.”

Lod drew in the mighty loom. Beside him Zeiros hacked and spit. Outside water lapped against the Serpent of Thep as it glided through the sea. Lod cocked his head. He leaned his ear against the oar hole.

Across the smoky waters men screamed just as they had last night. Something immense struck timbers. The planks that made up a fire ship burst apart and the human screams became loud and long. Then a whoosh and the crackling of unseen fire added to the demented howls.

Lod’s skin crawled.

Above them, on the Serpent of Thep, the Gibborim’s chant lifted several octaves.

Lod shuddered in supernatural horror. In the murk, the hell-spawned fog, it seemed as if dead men had risen to walk the planking above. The necromancer employed forbidden arts. He used knowledge brought to Earth by the fallen angels.

Lod swallowed painfully, coughing, spitting into the bilge water.

Heavy slaps struck the nearby waters. Lod peered out the oar hole. He tried to pierce the fog that drifted all around them. Across the choppy waves wood exploded and men shrieked. A terrible, subsonic cry grated upon Lod’s being. Within the conjured fog, something destroyed a galley. Yorgash must have found an answer to the dread ships of Eridu.

Then a breeze stirred and the Serpent of Thep slid from out of the thickest part of the gloom. Lod saw farther than before: perhaps a hundred feet.

“Out oars!” cried the oar master.

Lod’s eyes widened. A lean galley, a yellow-painted bireme of Larak, swung its bronzed beak toward them. On the enemy deck archers pointed and shouted in rage.

Above deck Vendhyan sailors cried: “Enemy galley to starboard!”

The bireme of Larak leaped ahead. Its oars dug in perfect unison and flutes piped and cymbals clashed.

“Out oars!” shouted the oar master.

Scourges whipped naked flesh. Rowers cried out in pain.

“We’re going to be rammed!” screamed a slave peering out his oar hole.

“Larak’s Admiral must have sent galleys into the fog to help the fire ships,” shouted Zeiros.

“Out oars, you dogs!” roared the oar master. “Out oars or we’ll be rammed.”

Steel slid from a scabbard as a whip-master bent on one knee and pricked a hesitant slave in the kidneys. “Row or die!” the whip-master screamed, his face a livid mask of terror.

Wood scraped as slaves hurried to obey.

Lod watched, frozen to the view. The enemy galley aimed at them and seemed monstrously huge. Archers stood on the enemy foredeck, humming arrows. Several thudded murderously near his oar hole. Above, Serpent of Thep bowstrings twanged in return. A Larak archer screamed, an arrow sticking in his shoulder. He toppled overboard, his own galley sliding over him, forcing him deeper into the sea.

The hiss of seawater, the groaning of enemy planks and the galley filled Lod’s vision. He jerked back from the oar port and threw his arms over his head. Slaves screamed all around him and chains clinked wildly. A thunderous crash drowned all other noises. Rotten wood splintered and exploded as a bronze ram smashed through the side of the Serpent of Thep. Fist-sized wooden chunks rained upon howling oar slaves. The ram crumpled a shrieking slave, his blood oiling the bronze beak’s progress.

A flying chunk of wood struck Lod on the head. He slid, dazed, under a bench. Cold sea water flooded past the ram as the Gulf of Ammon demanded entrance to the galley. It splashed Lod in the face, waking him from his stupor. He gazed out the jagged hole and at the enemy galley and then out beyond at the gloomy sea.

Steel rang above. Grapnels thudded upon wood. Gangplanks were hastily shoved out and laid down. Soldiers shouted war cries and armor jangled and feet pounded upon decking. In the hold, bronze groaned upon rotted wood.

The sound of piping and cymbals on the enemy galley changed in pitch and intensity. Men shouted and screamed and blades clashed.

Lod shook his head. Through the hole he saw Captain Eglon lead soldiers over the gangplanks and onto the enemy ship. A blur, a fantastic leap could only have been the Gibborim. But even as the soldiery attempted to capture the Larak galley, the ram began to ease backward. All the enemy rowers moved their oars in unison.

Lod’s eyes widened. He felt a mighty tug on his ankle. The fetter around his swollen leg was connected to the ram-slain slave. That slave’s chain had lodged upon a metal splinter on the ram.

Above, the few ropes attached to grapnels parted with great popping sounds. Gangplanks fell away and soldiers of Yorgash dropped screaming into the sea. They splashed, and those in heavy armor sank out of sight. One soldier grabbed a fallen gangplank. He shouted for help. An enemy archer leaned over his railing and drilled an arrow into the man’s neck. The soldier slid into the depths.

In the hold, the ram inexorably drew out of the maimed Serpent of Thep. It dragged Lod and those slaves attached to him. He and Zeiros and others frantically grabbed at the rowing bench. They clutched with manic strength. Relentlessly the chain pulled at his ankle. With a cry of despair Lod let go, bumping across wood. He hit and struck whatever lay in his path. In that brief instant he understood how a worm felt plucked from its hole by a bird.

He tucked, rolled and managed to land on his feet. He grabbed the rusted chain with his twisted talons. He braced his feet against a rib of the galley. The enemy ram slid and then cleared the Serpent of Thep. Lod jerked the chain and cried out, “Elohim, save me!”

A spasm shuddered through his bulging shoulders. Each muscle seemed to leap up from his skin: stark, straining, warring against the power of the Larak galley, against two hundred straining rowers.

The rusted chain grew taut. It shivered, and with a scream of metal the weakest link snapped apart.

Lod catapulted backward, smashing into Zeiros.

Seawater meanwhile poured into the jagged hole.

The Larak galley backed away even as Captain Eglon and Lord Lamassu led Serpent of Thep soldiers upon its forward deck.

Lod bounded upright. “Praise Elohim!” he roared. He threaded the torn chain through his manacle, freeing himself for the first time in twenty years.

“Back to your post, slave!” shouted a whip-master.

With a snarl Lod spun around. He leaped the distance, took the startled soldier of Yorgash in his arms and broke him.

“The day of judgment is at hand!” Lod roared. “The wrath of Elohim shall shatter your bones!”

-16-

There was little nicety to Eglon’s sword play. Not for him the swift parrying of steel, the cut and thrust of a skilled swordsman. He used a heavy shield and bashed his opponent. He smashed the shield against an enemy, knocking him, pushing and shoving the man off balance. Then he swung the scimitar, one specially weighted with a thicker tip than normal. It wasn’t a scimitar for a sword master, for a skilled artist. It was more akin to a headsman’s blade, an executioner’s weapon. For all his gross bulk Eglon was nimble on his feet. He rushed in quicker than a foe expected and when necessary backpedaled out of danger.

Captain Eglon led the boarding party. He swore, he cursed and he blasphemed. He shouted abuse at his foes. He spit in men’s faces. If an opponent covered his body too well, Eglon slashed at the foot or leg, crippling the fool and then stamping on his face or hacking his neck. He fought as he had wrestled, brutally, with exhibitions of strength.

The Larak galley carried fewer soldiers than the Serpent of Thep. Excellent seamanship, cunning use of the ram was their prized tactic. Thus the handful of swordsmen that had stormed aboard fought an even battle against the enemy soldiers, archers and sailors.

Lord Lamassu tipped the odds. The Gibborim was inhuman, quicker than a wasp. A sword jabbed at him and he wasn’t there. His parries weren’t masterful, they were impossible.

He wore no armor but his leathers. His sword was long and thin. It darted past shields, past blades. The razor tip threaded through armor, poking out eyes and puncturing throats. With lizard speed he struck. An archer drilled an arrow from three feet away. A flick of the sword sent the shaft caroming off into the distance. Then the archer’s head tumbled to the sandy deck.

Blood gushed from the man’s neck and Lord Lamassu darted from the spray. One droplet landed on his shoulder. With a hiss he leaped back. The Gibborim’s godlike beauty twisted into a demonic mask. He knelt, tore a strip from a fallen man’s cloak and fastidiously wiped the blood from him. He curled the rag into a ball and flung it away, and then shuddered.

A spearman who had broken through Eglon’s clump of swordsmen rushed Lord Lamassu. With a wild scream the man bore down upon the kneeling Gibborim.

Lord Lamassu stood, his stark white face once more a mask of serenity. The spearman thrust. Lord Lamassu stepped aside, twitched a fraction more so the human didn’t touch him and then reached a helping hand and pushed the man’s shoulder. With a bellow of surprise the spearman stumbled faster, hit the railing with his knees and pitched out of sight.

“Surrender!” roared Eglon. Blood dripped from his scimitar and his bloated face flushed crimson from the exertion. As he panted and sweat rolled down his cheeks, he noted the way the last enemy handful gripped their swords, the way they bit their lips and glanced a final time at the world. They had retreated to the tiller, a stubborn knot surely wondering why it had to be this way.

Below in the hold slave rowers quit their task and shouted for release, for freedom.

Eglon felt the enemy wavering. It was his gift to be able to sense such a thing. “Surrender!” he roared, “and your lives will be spared.”

One sailor of Larak set down his cudgel.

Lord Lamassu strode forward.

“W-We surrender,” said the sailor. Others around him set down their swords and spears.

The black fog held the ship in gloom. The sounds of the galley-destroying kraken were no longer heard.

“We ask for quarter,” said the sailor, a skinny lad.

“I hear only the bleating of sheep,” whispered Lord Lamassu, and in a bound, a flurry of thrusts and sudden sweeps he laid their twitching corpses to sleep.

The Gibborim spun around. “Get this ship back to ours, unless you wish for the kraken to find us.”

“L-Lord?” stammered Eglon.

Lord Lamassu strode near and pricked Eglon’s fleshy chin, keeping the blade in place. “The kraken hunts and he is enraged. I have poked and prodded him, forcing him to do my bidding. Do not beasts hate such treatment, hmm? Do they not yearn to rend and destroy those who have done such work? I must leash him again and finish my task. Now hurry, you fat swine, and bring me back to the brazier.”

-17-

Wet murder swept the Serpent of Thep’s hold. Water gushed through the jagged rent and sloshed over the middle aisle. Half the slaves shrieked for release, the other half howled as archers fired point blank shafts from the latticework above. Those free rushed the stairs, snarling at jabbing spears and the wall of shields. Every charge was sent reeling back.

“Slay them all!” shouted the commander of archers.

“Mercy!” screamed chained slaves, their hands held up in the age-old imploring sign. “Have mercy on us, masters!”

“We’re running out of arrows!” shouted an archer.

From the stairs, the commander of guards shouted, “Get down in the hold, you dogs. Kill them before they all get free, before they organize.”

Armored spearmen advanced at a walk down the stairs and into a howling sea of desperate, hate-maddened men.

From out of the darkness a spear flashed, impaling a soldier. The man tumbled down the stairs. Slaves howled, charging anew, grabbing ankles and yanking the enemy off-balance. Those unlucky few fell into a forest of iron arms and savage snarls.

“Back up! Back up!” screamed a spearman.

Slaves picked up fallen spears and shields and charged up the stairs.

Arrows shot through the latticework drilled some in the back. Others faced the armored reserve at the hatch and a short, vicious battle took place, slaves jabbing upward and soldiers thrusting down. Soon the last slave on the stairs thumped to the boards, dead or dying.

“Flee out the hole in the side!” bellowed Lod. He had hurled the spear. “Then crawl up the sides of the ship!” He and Zeiros stood in the shadows. Lod held keys and had from time to time dodged to the aisle, unlocking yet another bench of slaves as Zeiros held a shield over him.

“Save us! Save us!” shrieked chained slaves. Seawater lapped upon them. A cruel death by drowning awaited them.

Freed slaves fought against the torrent of water gushing into the Serpent of Thep. A man was swept off his feet and smashed against a bench, lying with his head at an odd ankle. Three men held hands, coming from the side, water sloshing above their knees. The first man grasped the jagged edge of the hole and drew the other two beside him. Then he grasped the edge with both hands and struggled and fought through the torrent and onto the other side.

With that success as evidence, a crowd of slaves rushed the hole.

“I need arrows! Where are more arrows?” shouted an archer above.

Lod shoved the keys into a slave’s hands and told another with a shield to guard him. The pair rushed the aisle, and the man with keys felt under the swirling water, unlocking another bench.

“Keep your shield high,” Lod growled at Zeiros. They still stood in the shadows. Lod lifted an axe that had been kept in a tool trough beside the oar master’s stool. He thudded it into rotten, worm-infested wood. He rained a flurry of blows, wood chips flying.

Hiss, thwack, an arrow quivered in Zeiros’ shield. A second arrow struck an inch from Lod’s latest axe blow.

“Keep the shield up!” snarled Lod. He hammered the axe as three more arrows hissed into Zeiros’ shield.

“I thought they were out of arrows,” shouted the usurer.

“Here they come!” said a slave.

Spearmen thundered down the stairs, jabbing, hurrying this time, and splashing into the hold. Water lapped at their thighs.

Lod smashed through the wall and a terrible grin split his face. He rained more blows as sweat ran in runnels down his face. Expertly he widened the hole to the foggy gloom outside.

“They’re pointing at us,” Zeiros said.

Maddened slaves rose up against the soldiers splashing in the hold, flesh versus steel. Skin versus armor. Slaves swung chains, flinging them into the ordered squad.

“Get ready, Moneyman,” Lod said. He hacked three more times and then embedded the axe blade into the wall of the ship. He grasped both sides of the hole and heaved up into it, wriggling through as splinters dug into his flesh.

The Serpent of Thep rode dangerously low in the water, sinking. Lod squirmed free and plunged into the cold Gulf of Ammon at the same instant a soldier at the railing thrust a spear at him. Sharp steel bloodied his side.

“The axe, Zeiros, hand me the axe.”

A hand shot through the hole and pitched the axe to the floundering Lod. Lod snatched it as he treaded water. The spearman glared at him from the ship.

Lod grinned. “Do you care to die, boy?”

Zeiros popped his head out and began to wriggle free.

That startled the spearman standing above him.

“Hurry, Zeiros,” Lod said, as he floated out of the spearman’s reach.

The spearman hesitated. Lod laughed at him. The soldier snarled and thrust at Zeiros. From the water, Lod hurled the axe. It was a clumsy cast, but powerfully thrown. The top of the axe hit the spearman in the face, dropping him from view.

Zeiros fell into the water, kicking beside Lod.

“What do we do now?” the usurer asked.

Lod shivered with dread as something vast passed below them, a hideous feeling. It felt bigger than a shark, something the size of a whale. Zeiros must have felt it, too, for he turned pale.

“The kraken,” whispered Lod. “Lord Lamassu…” He knit his brows.

“Lod—”

“Shhh,” Lod said. “Listen.”

On the other side of the Serpent of Thep grapnels struck wood. Shouted orders roared above the mayhem of butchery. An unseen Captain Eglon bellowed for men to lash the two galleys together.

“Follow me,” Lod said. “And get ready to hold your breath.”

-18-

From the deck of the captured galley, Eglon shouted orders. Soldiers ran with collected arrows, thudding over the gangplank and onto the floundering Serpent of Thep. The vessel listed dangerously. Sailors lashed the two ships together, using the other galley to keep the Serpent of Thep from rolling onto its side or sliding under the waves.

Lord Lamassu waited beside the brazier. He kneaded his forehead as his harlot plied the brazier with coals. Around them but unseen, flutes and cymbals played and enemy sailors shouted within the fog. They seemed farther away than earlier, perhaps fleeing the kraken-infested waters.

“There!” said Eglon, pointing at the sea.

Archers drew their bowstrings and fired, hissing shafts, drilling swimming slaves.

The pilot approached as he scratched his black beard. It seemed nothing daunted him, although Eglon noted that the small man had wisely switched to the more seaworthy vessel.

“You let them get out,” said Eglon, meaning the slaves.

“Not me,” said the pilot. “They fled through the ram hole.” He grew thoughtful. “The archers lacked arrows. Their commander said too many had been used against this galley.”

“We’ll have to bring everyone aboard this galley,” said Eglon, “and my treasures, too.”

“They’re in his quarters,” said the pilot.

“I know very well where they are,” Eglon said with a scowl. He studied the conjured fog.

“A stiff breeze and we’ll be exposed to the fire ships,” the pilot said. He glanced at Lord Lamassu aboard the Serpent of Thep. “We ought to bring the brazier onto this ship. I’m surprised it’s still standing on that canted deck.”

“And who will carry a hot brazier?” Eglon asked. “You?”

“Gibborim worry about such things?” asked the pilot.

At that moment Lord Lamassu threw his arms into the air.

The archers prowling both decks, searching the waters for slaves, the swordsmen protecting them and Vendhyan sailors all paused in their tasks. From every corner of both ships men cast fearful glances at the Gibborim.

Lord Lamassu opened his mouth. Before he uttered a word, however, the waters around them churned. The sea boiled with activity and the Serpent of Thep and the Larak galley lurched, their lashed sides crunching together.

Eglon stumbled against the pilot. Men everywhere shouted in surprise and terror. The few surviving slaves swimming in the water screamed.

Out of the depths wriggled vast tentacles. Black as night, wet and rubbery, they rose higher than the masts ever had, surrounding both galleys. The ships lurched again as planks groaned. Timbers splintered and cordage creaked horribly. A gross bulk of monster broke the surface. The kraken loomed larger than the two ships combined, with evil eyes and a hideous mouth with a great parrot beak.

Wetly, like falling trees, tentacles slapped upon the doomed ships. Railings crackled and splintered. Men in the path of those rubbery limbs were hurled like flotsam, some into each other and a few into the sea.

Lord Lamassu, who was perhaps ready for such horror, howled unearthly speech. With his stark white fingers he plucked a skull from his necklace. Brazier light flickered from the emeralds embedded in the eye sockets. The bleached white skull seemed alive, knowledgeable with wicked counsel.

Men crouched with their hands pressed against their ears.

Eglon, farther away than most, groaned in dread.

The kraken, the monster of the depths, fixed a terrible eye upon Lord Lamassu. One twitch from those tentacles must destroy the galleys. One convulsive jerk and the lashed-together ships would splinter into junk and wreckage. Before that occurred, Lord Lamassu lifted high the emerald-eyed skull.

It was impossible that such an ignorant monster could know the importance of such an action, but to Eglon it seemed that the terrible eye of the kraken watched the bleached bone, or perhaps it watched the necromancer’s hands.

Lord Lamassu chanted in the screaming speech, and his fingers moved like a baker kneading dough. The skull crumbled. It didn’t break as bone should. It dissolved in the Gibborim’s hands. Crumbs fell at Lord Lamassu’s feet. Crumbs fell in a sprinkle and strange wispy currents swirled around the necromancer’s hands. The wisps shrieked, a wicked sound. The wisps spun faster and faster, and for a moment, a sick instant, it seemed to Eglon that faces, screaming, tortured souls howled in agony.

Lord Lamassu pointed at the kraken.

The wisps tore like arrows at the beast. They darted down the parrot beak and entered the monster.

A wretched, subsonic screech emanated from the kraken. The tentacles peeled off the galleys and the entire bulk of the beast stiffened as it began to slide out of sight.

Eglon gaped. His eyeballs protruded outward. Speech was impossible. Unreality stamped the moment. Then it became insanity. He wanted to howl with mirth at what he saw.

A massive, white-haired brute, a naked man with a spear, charged past cringing soldiers. Archers with their hands clamped over their ears paid him no heed. Others stared wide-eyed at the beast of the deep. Even the harlot remained immobile, near the glowing brazier with coals in her hands.

As if in a dream, Lord Lamassu turned. He stood at a tilt because of the canted deck. The naked slave, the one called Lod, his blue eyes ablaze with monomania, shouted to Elohim for aid. Then Lod swung the butt end of his spear. It connected with a skull dangling around Lord Lamassu’s throat. The skull exploded in a spray of bone, and shrieking wisps swirled into the air. Lord Lamassu staggered backward. The hair stood up on Lod’s head and his white beard bristled. The naked oar slave struck again, smashing a second skull. This time Lord Lamassu shrieked in tune to the wisps dissipated into the sky. Much worse for the Gibborim, with impossible control a tentacle reached down. Its tip wrapped around Lord Lamassu even as he awoke to his danger. Lord Lamassu wriggled his shoulders, perhaps in an attempt to free his arms. Yet even his inhuman strength was unequal to this monster of the depths. The kraken lifted a squirming, demanding Gibborim high into the air, higher than a mast would have reached.

“In the name of Yorgash,” shouted Lord Lamassu, “I command you to set me down.”

The great, rubbery tentacle, the black, mast-sized limb, whistled in its descent. It slapped the water an awful blow, and broke the child of Yorgash in its grip.

Lod turned and ran. The mammoth man sprinted, dropping his spear as he dove overboard. Others stared in dread upon the beast. Eglon blinked, wondering when the nightmare would end.

The kraken screeched a final time in that sick, subsonic sound. Then tentacles began to rain upon the galleys. They smote with fury and splintered the ships, smashing planks as if they were sticks.

Thus ended the Serpent of Thep.

-19-

Lod and Zeiros held onto a plank, bobbing in the gloomy sea. The kraken had departed. Around them, impossible to tell at what distance, the fleets of Eridu and Larak engaged that of Yorgash. Screams drifted around them and the clangor of battle rose above the crash of rams and the beat of drums. Had the city’s galleys rowed around the fog? How many fire ships had survived the kraken’s embrace?

“Who will win?” asked Zeiros.

Lod shrugged moodily. It had been some time since the kraken had slain Lord Lamassu.

“Your vision didn’t tell you the victor?” the moneylender asked.

Two rats sat atop a half-submerged water casket. Rope drifted like seaweeds. Lod scanned the wreckage floating around them. He pointed at something farther away.

Zeiros glanced there and shook his head.

“I see fins,” Lod said.

Zeiros frowned with incomprehension.

“Sharks,” Lod said.

Zeiros looked again. He paled, and turned Lod a sick face. “We escaped the Serpent of Thep and the kraken and now this. It isn’t fair.”

“No,” Lod said. He clambered onto the plank, lifting himself higher as it sank. A smile touched his lips and he slipped back beside Zeiros. “Can you swim a little farther?”

“To what purpose?” Zeiros asked. “If we survive the sharks the fog will part and pterodactyls will find us.”

Lod searched his face impassively.

That stirred something in the moneylender. “What?” he said.

“A thousand slaves have told me that they will survive the oar. If I could, they could. So I have heard for twenty long years. Each time I saw the spirit dwindle in their eyes. Then their spirit died, and soon so did they. What of you, Usurer? Will you give up now?”

Zeiros peered up into the gloom. “I hope you’re not planning to swim all the way to Larak.”

“If I must,” rumbled Lod.

Zeiros shook his head, but he said, “Very well, lead on.”

Lod released the plank, and the two men struggled through the choppy sea.

“Where are we going?” panted Zeiros, seawater spilling into his mouth.

“Save your breath,” suggested Lod.

They swam, and in time neared a wider plank than before. Upon it draped a sodden, weary Captain Eglon. Perhaps he heard their splashing. He lifted a puffy face, and at the sight of them he scrambled to his knees. He lacked a sword, but drew a knife.

“Keep away,” warned Eglon.

Lod and Zeiros kept swimming until they bobbed ten feet from the raft. It looked big enough to comfortably hold all three of them, to keep them out of the shark-infested waters.

“I’ll kill you,” Eglon said.

“Wait here,” Lod told Zeiros. He circled around the raft, swimming strongly, until Zeiros bobbed on one side and Lod the other.

Eglon had shifted so he always faced Lod, although he kept casting nervous glances at Zeiros.

“Put down the knife,” Lod said.

Captain Eglon laughed harshly.

“Let us deal,” suggested Zeiros.

Eglon glanced at the moneylender.

“If Yorgash wins we are your prisoners,” Zeiros said. “If Larak wins you are my prisoner.”

“And that improves my position how?” mocked Eglon.

“We might win our way onto the raft and kill you,” Zeiros said.

“I hold the knife,” Eglon said, “so I deem your threat a weak one.”

“Tread a little closer,” shouted Lod. He closed the distance to nine feet, eight, seven and then six.

Eglon struggled to his feet. He had a blood-crusted gash in his right leg.

“You’re wounded,” Lod said.

Eglon snarled silently. His eyes seemed hot, perhaps he was feverish.

“We will outwait you,” Lod said.

Eglon shook his head. “Not with sharks in the water.” He exposed his teeth. “It will be a pleasure watching you die.”

Lod bellowed and swam for the raft. Yelling, he clutched the edge.

Eglon dropped to a knee and slashed.

Lod shoved himself backward into the water.

The slash missed, and on the other side of the raft, Zeiros heaved up against the edge.

Eglon struggled to keep his balance.

“Climb onto the raft!” shouted Lod.

Eglon fought for balance and twisted his head to see what Zeiros did.

Lod struck for the raft. Eglon stabbed. Lod took the blade in his forearm. His other arm darted up, clutched a silky sleeve and yanked. Eglon shouted and toppled into the water.

Lod slid past the wrestler and scrambled onto the raft. Zeiros climbed up on the other side.

“Your arm,” Zeiros said.

Blood dripped from Lod’s forearm, trickling to his wrist and onto the raft. He ignored it, facing Eglon.

From in the sea, the wrestler frowned.

“Pitch me the knife and I’ll let you climb aboard,” Lod said.

“Why would you do that?” said Eglon, “to torture me?”

Lod shook his head.

“I cut you, at least,” said Eglon. “It was a clumsy stab, but then I’ve been wounded myself.” He sighed wearily, staring out to sea.

“The sharks will come,” Lod said.

Eglon peered at him. “You want me to come aboard. Why?”

A fierce light burned in Lod’s eyes. “I’ve had a vision. You…you will help me.”

Eglon gave a barking, mocking laugh.

“You will guide my ship to Poseidonis,” Lod said.

Eglon stared at him, finally saying, “You’re mad.”

“Perhaps,” Lod said, “but my madness will save your life.”

“What ship?” Eglon asked, “The plank you stand upon?”

Lod used his good arm and clapped Zeiros on the shoulder. “The usurer owes me one thousand gold shekels. With it I will buy or build a seaworthy ship and man it with vengeance-driven warriors. Then let Yorgash beware.”

“Why do you need me for that?” Eglon asked.

“You have been to Poseidonis,” Lod said. “You will be my pilot and help me chart the path there.”

Eglon heaved a weary sigh. He was having trouble treading water. “I dropped the knife,” he said, “and it’s no doubt sinking to the bottom of the sea. But I accept your offer.” He floundered toward the raft.

The other two stepped back as the huge captain struggled aboard.

Then Lod stepped smartly forward and clouted Eglon a terrific buffet on the back of his head. It took two blows before huge Eglon sagged unconscious.

“You lied to him?” asked Zeiros.

Lod shook his head as he began to strip the wrestler. He found the knife and said, “I trust him like a viper.” He cut up the rich Caphtorite cloak. With the silk strips he had Zeiros bind the knife wound on his forearm. Then the two naked slaves clothed themselves at Eglon’s expense.

“Are you serious about building that ship?” Zeiros asked later.

“Were you about giving me one thousand shekels if I helped you escape?” asked Lod.

The moneylender grinned. “You are not like other men, but at least you’re human. Yes, my word is good. As I said before: I am the House of Commorion.”

Lod finished binding Eglon. Then he dove off the plank, returning with pieces of wood, throwing them onto the raft. “These will be our oars, Usurer, and today this is my ship. Now let us see if we can reach Larak before those pterodactyls you spoke about find us.”

The Sword of Tubal-Cain

Lod used the one thousand shekels and built the ship, a mighty carrack, and sailed to the Isle of Poseidonis. There he met a shoal of kraken, summoned by their master. Afterward, on a plank, Lod began a lonely voyage into the uncharted southern ocean.

Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. Tubal-Cain’s sister was Naamah.

-- Genesis 4:22

-1-

The stars glittered in crystalline mockery at the man below. His vessel was a beefwood plank, flotsam tossed on a dark sea of perdition.

He’d sailed for weeks, south by southeast, into uncharted desolation. The last sight of land had been his damnation, the awful Isle of Poseidonis.

Black waves hissed as they barreled at him, threatening burial under tons of crushing weight. In the end, the sea decided on a subtler torment. Each wave in succession heaved him high to view the hopelessness of his plight. Then down he sledded into a trough, surrounded by walls of water.

That he’d survived this long was testament to his will, to his grotesque physique and fury. Hundreds of leagues ago he had been an oar slave in a galley of Poseidonis. He had been a legend, a prodigy, drawing the slave oar for twenty long years. Hatred had driven him, a grinding rage to even the score of life. He’d defeated scurvy, plague, the lash and lung rot. He’d pulled the weighted oar until his fingers had become like talons, crooked and superhumanly strong. His muscles had twisted and expanded. Whips had ripped his back into evil scar tissue. Hot brands had seared his flesh and heated his soul until Elohim had sent him visions of fire and blood. In fevered rage, Lod had burst his chains during a sea battle and he’d floated to Larak. There his fiery oratory and sheer physical presence had won him a band of heroes who wished to strike back at the evil god of Poseidonis.

Weeks later, the isle had hoven into view onto the horizon—it was the last known land in this region of ocean. Beyond, said mariners, the equatorial sun boiled the sea so steaming vapors rose. Bitterly, Lod recalled what had happened next.

***

Harsh-voiced pterodactyls swooped down from the sky. After circling twice, each beast flapped with disquieting haste for the isle. Several hours later, the waters bubbled and kraken half the size of the ship surfaced. With lashing tentacles and parrot beaks, the kraken smashed the carrack and devoured the screaming crew. Lod alone survived and crawled onto a plank. A strong current caught him and carried him relentlessly south by southeast toward the legendary boiling sea.

During the voyage, he starved and knew raging thirst. Yet he refused the bitter fruit of defeat that invisible sirens shrieked at him on the wind. Nor would he drink the mocking wines of futility that sounded suspiciously like the hiss of passing waves. He endured the burning sun that peeled his skin in swaths. With his knife—a most precious possession—he cut his belt into strips and made a hook out of the buckle. Then he lay on the plank one listless noon and lured a gull that must have desired the delicacy of pecking out his eyes. He wrung its squawking neck and drank the blood, and devoured most of its flesh. Later, he used the heart, liver and spleen as bait.

He swore an oath that day. If he survived, he would raise an armada, a grand fleet filled with warriors, and storm Poseidonis. He would topple the brazen idols and shatter the gore-spattered altars. He had not pulled the weighted oar for twenty long years to lose his life like this. A flock of pterodactyls and a shoal of kraken were not going to thwart his visions. His mistake had been in thinking too small. His foe was mighty, possessed of eerie powers, with offspring of terrible renown.

Terrible renown…after many weeks, the equatorial sea began to live up to its evil reputation. Lod grew aware of it one pregnant morn. Waves slapped across the green waters. Far in the distance—

***

Lod struggled to his hands and knees. He squinted. He had long white hair and beard and blue eyes that verged on madness. There was a glow on the southern horizon, a shine, and it wormed dread into his heart.

Did the sea indeed boil?

He lay down, fretted fitfully and drifted into an uneasy slumber. Several hours later, he rose up like a hound with a rabbit’s scent in its nostrils. On the wind, he smelled dirt and wet leaves. He smelled loam and rotted vegetation.

“Land,” he croaked, this his first word in weeks.

He slithered onto his shrunken belly and plunged his hands into the sea. He grunted with effort, struggling to move his plank. The waterlogged wood was too ungainly to move easily, and the ocean swells and current had their own destination in mind.

Lod soon panted, and he glared with savage intensity. How far was the land? He rubbed his eyes. Could those distant specks be birds or were they simply more sun-induced spots that he’d seen for weeks?

He swallowed in a throat racked by thirst. Should he dare drift into the boiling sea or take this slim chance for land? Stiff as an old man, he dove into the green murk. Breaching his final reserves of strength, Lod struck out for what he hoped was land.

-2-

Days later, Lod heaved onto his side. He rolled across silks and seemed to upset the rhythm of whatever he rode on. As if in a dream, he spied a canopy of linen above and all around him. The construction he was in rose up higher than before and then came down with a jarring thud. The bottom of it must have struck ground. Oh. He was inside a litter, one that men carried on their shoulders.

Curtains swept back and a tall ancient peered down at him, confirming Lod’s suspicion. The old one wore a white turban, had a leathery face of amazing nobility, and a beard like the cleanest fleece. The beard dangled past the belt that cinched the man’s saffron robe. The long fingers that held the curtain trembled—because of his great age, no doubt. He wore golden rings with curiously etched hieroglyphs.

From behind the ancient peered short, thickset men, oddly colored brown and blue. They appeared to be primitives dressed in leopard-skin sarongs. Every time a primitive moved, he clanged with a multitude of copper bracelets and anklets. Ah. Lod realized the blue were tattoos of swirling designs. The brown was the native color of their skin. Most of the primitives clutched copper-headed spears, although a few of those were flint tipped. They wore fantastic, peacock-feathered headdresses, but otherwise seemed dark haired.

The ancient chattered at him, with strange clicks sprinkled in his speech.

Lod shook his head, which caused hurt behind his eyes. He lay back with a grunt, saying, “I cannot understand you.”

“I asked,” the ancient said, in the tongue of the charioteers of Elon, “if you’re finally lucid enough to talk?” Despite his gauntness, despite his trembling hands and his head’s tendency to sway, the old one had a strong voice.

“Who are you?” asked Lod. “Where am I and how did I get here?”

The ancient smiled and lines etched across his narrow face, showing that he had most of his teeth. He shoved the curtain wider, and the boniness of his wrist became apparent.

“Four days ago my men found you lying on a beach, tangled in seaweeds. They asked me if you were human or some spawn of a Nephilim. They’d never seen someone muscled like you or with such burnt skin. They wanted to shove you back into the sea for the crabs to feast on.”

Lod passed a hand over his eyes. “I’m Lod,” he rumbled. “I recently captained a vessel of war.”

The disaster crashed upon his memories: the splintered wood, the cries of his sailors and the shock of the cold sea as he’d pitched in. With blood seeping from his scalp and blurred vision, he’d swam to and crawled upon a plank, collapsing in exhaustion. Sharks and worse sea creatures had cruised the crimson waters. Eglon was dead, torn apart by predators. Fortunately, Zeiros had remained behind in Larak. Would he ever see the moneylender again?

“I war against the Nephilim,” Lod said.

The ancient dipped his turbaned head, and Lod saw something odd in his charcoal-colored eyes.

“I’m Zared.” The ancient hesitated and watched Lod closely. When no reaction was forthcoming, Zared said, “I myself dragged you off the beach and into the litter.”

Lod found that hard to believe. Old Zared didn’t look strong enough for either task.

“I’ve spooned you parrot-rice soup these past days,” Zared said, “laid cold cloths on your feverish head. Other than carrying your litter, these warriors, the Holon, want nothing to do with you.”

Lod murmured his thanks. Before either could speak further, wild screams erupted behind them.

The copper-armed warriors shouted; sandals pounded and anklets clashed, denoting a larger band than Lod had realized. He swiveled his legs off the silks and put his feet on the ground. Dizziness made his head hurt. He thrust himself upright just the same and then swayed, feeling nauseous.

Huge jungle trees surrounded them. Thick vines looped from many. Ferns and fronds grew thickly. Lod became aware of the heat and humidity. The screams came from behind the dense foliage, from high in the branches. Then a piece of yellow fruit catapulted out of the trees and smashed against one of the stocky warriors. The sticky fruit dripped from the warrior’s chest in orange streaks. That seemed to be a signal. More fruit rained, along with rocks and sticks. The screams sounded simian. Then Lod spied a huge long-limbed ape swinging through the branches.

The warriors chattered wildly, pointing at it.

The great ape clambered onto a branch about fifty feet high. Wood creaked at its weight, which had to be more than thrice that of the largest warrior. The monstrous creature had a low receding forehead and bloodshot eyes set much too closely compared to a human. Its lips peeled back to reveal yellowed tusks. The beast bellowed and jumped up and down so the branch creaked ominously. With its grotesquely huge hands, it stripped off leaves and hurled them down. The triangular leaves fluttered harmlessly to the jungle floor.

Lod scowled, reminded of the terrible Nephilim ape-creature he’d fought in his younger days in the primeval Zimrian Forests. The great ape up there wasn’t as big or as vile. It was a natural beast like the white apes of the Hanun Mountains.

In any case, the beast’s fury grew. And by an odd alchemy—the rumblings in Lod’s stomach perhaps, the lingering effects of fever and the stupefying weeks at sea—Lod had the impression that the ape cursed them in its animal tongue. It was most peculiar.

“The beast wants us to leave,” Lod said.

Zared turned with astonishment. “Do you understand its speech?”

The question startled Lod. “I understand animals.” One of his secrets to survival long ago as bait had been because of his grimly learned insights concerning the giant canal rats of Shamgar.

“By the spirit of Adam,” Zared declared. “You speak all animal tongues?”

The screaming ape, the strange question and maybe the humidity combined to make Lod wonder if he’d sailed off the Earth’s edge and onto some shadowy realm of unreality.

He massaged his throbbing head. “No. I understand the beast’s actions.”

Zared scrutinized him.

One of the tattooed warriors gained his courage and bellowed at the ape. That warrior had the most copper bangles, and he jangled as he charged, cocking his throwing arm. He had a black spear of oggo-wood.

Zared whirled around, and by it, he showed more agility than someone his age should have. He barked a command.

The warrior almost cast his spear. At Zared’s voice, however, the warrior stopped, lowering his arm. The man glanced back at Zared, and he spoke meekly.

The great ape watched the interplay with transfixed attention.

For a moment it appeared to Lod as if the beast understood what occurred: that the white-bearded ancient had saved its life. The ape hooted at Zared, but it didn’t seem to be a sound of derision, but apish thanks instead. The hairy beast thereupon faced the jungle, screamed and leaped for a hidden vine. He let loose another scream, an authoritative sound.

Other hidden apes quit bellowing. No more rotten fruit sailed out of the jungle and the rain of sticks and stones ceased. In their place came the sounds of creaking branches and heavy bodies that slapped against giant leaves—the sound of the great apes retreating.

“They’re leaving,” Lod said.

“There will be peace between us now,” Zared said with a grin. “We spoke different tongues, the ape and I. But we came to an understanding.”

The feeling of unreality intensified, as if this jungle obeyed principles oddly altered from those Lod knew. It made him uneasy, made his powerful hands twitch.

Zared nodded knowingly.

“You’ve recovered enough of your strength, I think. You can depart if you wish. The Holon have sworn to protect me to the finish, and their vows are irrevocable. Probably there is nothing but death ahead for all of us. If the legends are true, and I most certainly think they are…”

“What legends?” Lod asked.

The old one looked into his eyes, an uncomfortable scrutiny. There was a strange vitality to Zared, a hidden force of will. The old one’s gaze bored into his, seemed to tunnel into his soul. Lod wanted to shake his head, but found he could not. The gaze bored deeper still, with authority.

Zared now spoke in a low almost hypnotic voice. “You said you warred against the Nephilim. Whom did you fight?”

Lod found that his tongue and lips had become numb. Those eyes…they seemed to make it hard to think. He murmured, “We sailed for Poseidonis against its First Born.”

“What happened to your ship?”

“Kraken,” Lod mumbled. His eyelids were heavy.

“Your will is strong, Lod, maybe as strong as your muscles. Tell me about the kraken.”

Lod fought the sleepiness. He struggled against those dark eyes. They seemed to peer into him, to—No! A second time he tried to shake his head and found that he still could not. That stirred an ember of rage in him. He fanned it by a litany of silent oaths. Unreality, a shadowy realm— With a wrench of effort, Lod tore his gaze free of the old man. It left him panting, his knees wobbly and him enraged.

“I’m sorry,” Zared said, and he clapped Lod on the shoulder. “I should not have tested you so soon. But you have little time left. Even one like you—”

“Make sense, old man,” Lod said.

Zared chuckled dryly before he turned to the blue-tattooed warriors and chattered rapidly. Those carrying bags flung them down and dropped packs. Others began to pick up sticks and others gathered the ape-thrown fruit that littered the ground.

“Are you hungry?” Zared asked.

Lod realized he was ravenous. He nodded sullenly.

“Then let us eat.” Zared clapped his hands, and the primitives hurried to their particular tasks.

***

A fire crackled. A log popped and exploded with fiery sparks that were borne upward on a heated draft. Dismal cries echoed around them in the dark, together with the whirr and chirp of thousands of nighttime jungle insects.

Zared half-reclined upon a canopied litter set before the fire. The old one sipped yellow date wine from a goblet and nibbled on stripes of yak meat. Despite the jungle warmth, a blanket lay over his thin legs while he propped himself upon silk cushions. Beside him sat a strange brazier, a small portable pot set on a tripod. The pot was an enclosed container of black iron with a sooty grill, and it possessed an ivory-covered handle. Embers glowed within, and two times now Zared had taken black lumps from a bag, opened the grill and tossed them within. It might have been Lod’s imagination, but the flames seemed to devour the coals with greedy speed.

Lod sat cross-legged with the oldest warriors. He towered over them like a bear among wolves. They circled the main fire, younger warriors acting as servants and guards. Lod and the seated warriors had consumed the thrown fruit. It had a sharp but tasty tang. They had gnawed on the stringy flesh of sloth, garnished with fire-crisped locusts and downed with many cups of beer. The younger warriors had apparently contented themselves with sticky rice balls.

Lod now leaned over and forked more meat out of a large copper pot and onto his wooden plate.

The warriors nearest him grinned and nudged one another. They seemed to delight in his prodigious appetite. Otherwise, the older warriors waited silently, at times glanced sidelong at Zared. The old one stared into the flames. The flickering light gave his elderly features a sinister appearance, like one of the mummified dead with well-preserved, leathery skin. Only the occasional twitch of his fingers, as they gently fluffed his beard, gave any hint of life.

Lod fingered his wooden cup. The canopied litter, the special goblet, the wine and the way these primitive warriors revered the old one—

“Are you their king?” Lod asked.

Zared blinked like one waking from a long slumber. It brought animation to his wrinkled features. His neck seemed to creak and he turned toward Lod.

“Eh?” Zared asked.

“They treat you as their king,” Lod said.

“No, Zared said, “as their patriarch. Kings are a Nephilim invention.”

“I’ve never heard that.”

Zared smiled sadly. “There is much I’m sure you haven’t heard.” He took a deep breath, blinked again and glanced at the goblet in his hand. He set it aside, and he spoke: “You thought it strange before when I wondered if you knew the ape’s tongue.”

Lod kept his face impassive as he silently congratulated himself on picking up a knife earlier. There were too many strange occurrences here. If his watery ordeal hadn’t left him so weak …

“I can read certain thoughts easily enough,” Zared was saying. “A man’s face is a map. It often betrays him.” He arched an eyebrow at Lod. “For instance, you’re wondering if you could fight your way free of us.”

Lod scowled and glanced at the squat warriors around him. He could certainly defeat any three of them, but an entire band just now… They would pull him down as a baying pack of war-hounds would a wounded sabertooth.

“Do not fear,” Zared said, “they do not speak or understand Elonite. They are well disposed toward you because I am.”

“Are you a sorcerer?” Lod rumbled dangerously.

Zared ignored the question. “I am very old. It has given me years to study others. In terms of age, you’re a child to me.”

Lod grunted moodily, not liking that.

“But to return to my point,” Zared said. “Apes are certainly beasts. They do not speak as men. Yet was that always so?”

Lod shrugged. He wore a leather vest and breeches, with sturdy boots, all gifts from Zared. The garments made Lod seem like a hireling of Larak, one of the hinterland tribesmen from the mountains. He’d accepted a scarlet band as well and had tied it around his forehead to keep the shaggy hair out of his eyes.

“In the beginning Adam named the animals,” Zared said. “I have heard it theorized that he could speak with them, and some beasts could speak with him. That gift undoubtedly died in the garden, as so much else perished there.” Zared’s smile waned. “How could that have any bearing on us today, eh?”

Lod had no idea, although talk about Father Adam interested him. It also made him better disposed toward Zared.

“I believe it has bearing because we have reached the farthest radius of Yggdrasil,” Zared said solemnly. “Perhaps you cannot feel it—although perhaps you can or did. It is a strange sensation…otherworldly.”

Lod sat up.

“Ah,” Zared said, “you did feel it.”

“Is that what makes the boiling sea?” Lod asked.

Zared must not have heard the question, for his gaze returned to the flames. It seemed as if the animation drained out his dark eyes and into the fire.

The flames crackled. Logs popped. Sparks showered toward the stars. Then old Zared began to speak in a low tone. Lod had to lean forward to hear the muttered words.

“I have primordial knowledge, my young friend, passed down from generation to generation. In the first days in the garden, humanity’s mother ate from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

“I know the old lore,” Lod said.

“Perhaps,” Zared muttered, “and perhaps you only know part of the story. The Serpent tempted Eve, and she ate from the tree. Then she gave to her husband, and he did eat. Their eyes became opened, and they knew that they were naked.”

“Elohim drove them from the garden,” Lod said, “and He set a guardian Cherub before the East Gate. None now may enter Eden, lest they eat from the Tree of Life and live forever.”

“Indeed, indeed,” Zared said.

“What does any of that have to do with this Yggdrasil and the great ape today?”

Zared was slow in answering. “I know a terrible truth, my friend. I have held onto it for untold years. Never have I breathed a word about to others. Yet now I feel I must. You are a strange man, Lod, spewed from the sea onto dry land. Are you a gift of Elohim to me, a helper in my hour of need? I think so; and thus I will tell you a secret from the very beginning.”

Despite himself, Lod shivered as a dread feeling worked up his spine. Who was this old man?

“Eve ate the forbidden fruit,” Zared said, “but she spit out the seeds. Before the One Above drove them from the garden, Eve scooped up several of those seeds. She carried them with her as she and Adam stumbled into the wild world. For ages she kept them. She never dared use them and she couldn’t find it in herself to cast them away or burn them in a fire. She never told Adam she had them. Probably, he would have demanded she destroy the pips. Finally, in her old age, Eve gave the seeds to Zillah, who became one of the wives of Lamech.”

“I do not know those names,” Lod said.

“Zillah married Lamech. In fact, she was his second wife, his favorite. He made his first wife Adah serve her in unhallowed ways. You should know that before that time no man had married two or more wives. A man was content with a single woman, as Elohim had shown Adam in the garden. Lamech brought polygamy into the world, and much more! Ah…my friend, so much changed with Zillah and Lamech. You have heard about the ancient Song of the Sword?”

Lod frowned. Lord Uriah might have spoken about it once, but he couldn’t remember.

“Lamech was a mighty warrior,” Zared said. “He composed and recited the first known poem.” The old man cleared his throat before saying:

“Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
wives of Lamech, hear my words.

I have killed a man for wounding me,
a young man for injuring me.

If Cain is avenged seven times,
then Lamech seventy-seven times.”

“Yes,” Lod said. “I have heard the poem before. It was many years ago.”

“Notice the vanity of Lamech,” Zared said. “Elohim had laid a curse upon Cain for killing his brother Abel, but the One Above also protected Cain by pronouncing a curse against any who would kill Cain. He would bring vengeance seven times as hard against any who dared to slay the world’s first killer. Now Lamech said he would pile on an even more dire revenge with his own hand and that for merely wounding him. In his mortal wrath, Lamech made himself to seem even more deadly than Elohim. What vain boasting. What awful pride. Where did it come from, eh?”

Lod shook his head. He didn’t know.

“They were mighty people in those days, Lod. The first ones had great vision and understanding of things we can only dream about. Lamech hoped to exceed them all. As a metalsmith uses bellows to heat flames in order to fashion a sword, so Zillah’s words enflamed her husband with vaunting ambition. Yet she bought more than mere words. She also possessed the seeds to the Tree of Knowledge.”

“The ones Eve stole from the garden?” asked Lod.

“The very same,” Zared said. “I do not know how Zillah won the seeds from Eve. That is a secret hidden in the mists of time. What I have discovered, though, is that long ago Zillah and Lamech came here, burying the seeds in fertile ground. They had to do it far away from anyone else in order to keep it a secret. Every few years they trekked to this distant land to see the tree’s progress. They waited, first spying seedlings and then a young tree they named Yggdrasil. Finally, Yggdrasil bore fruit, and they did eat. Against the advice of his second wife, Lamech gave fruit to his first wife Adah, and she also did eat.

“This fruit was not like that in the middle of the garden in the first days of Earth. It was darker, heavier and pregnant with evil power. It did not open Lamech’s eyes or that of his wives. Instead, it gave great wisdom of a dark kind to their children. You may have heard of them. Adah, the first wife, gave birth to Jabal. He was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. The Jogli nomads are some of their descendants. His brother’s name was Jubal. He was the father of all who play the harp and flute.”

“Are those evil things?” Lod asked, perplexed.

“When the modes of music change, so change the people’s hearts,” Zared said. “As they danced with wild abandon as drunkards, the sons and daughters of Lamech darkened their hearts against Elohim. They did not seek a future paradise in the life to come. They sought to make paradise on Earth.”

Lod pondered that.

“Zillah bore a son. His name was Tubal-Cain, and he became a mighty man, a hero of old. None could best him in a fight, and he led his brothers into savage battle, winning countless wars. He also forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. Indeed, he hammered the first sword. Well, the second. The first sword was made of flame, held by the guardian Cherub of the East Gate. Tubal-Cain made a weapon in its image. It was this sword Lamech used to slay the young man who had wounded him. From the time of Tubal-Cain men began to war against each other. First, the sons of Lamech slaughtered the sons of Seth. They made chariots, bows and spears, and brought red ruin to the land. Finally, the sons of Seth forged weapons to defend themselves and fight back.

“Yet this son of Lamech, Tubal-Cain, wasn’t the worst of the lot,” Zared said. “The deepest evil came from a woman named Naamah, the sister of Tubal-Cain. She grew in black wisdom and understanding, and she studied the forbidden lore of the stars. Her eyes were opened, and she sought for ways to communicate with the unseen world, with the spirits above. Naamah was the first to speak with the bene elohim. She had long, beautiful hair and the sweetest of charms. With seductive knowledge, she lured the first of the Fallen down to Earth, urging them to take on fleshy forms.”

Lod shuddered.

“Yes,” Zared said, as if lost in thought. “The family of Lamech has much to answer for. That was long ago, of course. Yet I believe that Yggdrasil still stands, bearing its wicked fruit, lo these many ages.”

“Do you wish to eat from it?” Lod asked.

Zared blanched, and he shook his head. “No, no, I want to chop it down and burn out the roots. I have come to destroy Yggdrasil, lest the First Born and Nephilim learn of it and come to devour its bounty. Then their plans will become greater with more sinister cunning, perhaps making them unbeatable.”

“Why is this land different from other lands?” Lod asked.

“That is a keen question.” Zared rubbed his rings against his garment, and his eyelids flickered. It took him a moment to regain his bearing. Then he began to speak again. “Perhaps certain animals have eaten Yggdrasil’s fruit, gaining greater wisdom, or their offspring have received this understanding. Or perhaps there is something of Eden in this place. Some wonder if Yggdrasil has worked a change on the land, because it is a thing of original beauty and greatness.

“What is this change, you wonder? Yes, I can see the questions in your eyes, Lod. And I see the distrust that stirs in you. I know more than you can imagine. But in any case, some hold that the tree has warped the surrounding lands like unto Eden in its pristine glory. Some believe the animals in this realm have reverted to their original ways and have regained their lost cunning and intelligence. We lie at the edge of this transcendence, and the great ape this afternoon displayed wonderful understanding. That, my muscled friend, is why I wondered if one who swims ashore in this strange land could speak with tongues of animals.”

Lod pursed his lips. The old one had repeated himself, as if he’d forgotten his first words. Was that simply a matter of great age, or was there something else at work here?

Zared reached into a bag, extracted several coals, leaned near his portable firepot, flicked open the grill and tossed in the coals. The fire seemed to leap at them, instantly igniting them. Then Zared shut the sooty grill. Afterward, the old man picked up his chalice and sipped date wine, staring off into the darkness.

Lod found himself staring at the fire. That was a strange story, yet it seemed to hold the ring of truth. In his imagination, the dancing flames took on the shapes of Zillah, Adah and Lamech. What would it have been like in those early days of Earth? How had this old man come to know such secret things?

“I have lived countless centuries, Lod,” Zared pronounced. Then he stood, and there was majesty about him, a powerful vibrancy.

The blue-tattooed warriors whispered to one another, and they hurried onto their bellies, prostrate before the ancient patriarch.

“Tubal-Cain and Naamah opened evil doors indeed. They brought great change to the world. Men stabbing and killing each other in wars was bad enough. Naamah brought down terror in the guise of fallen angels and their offspring.” Zared sighed. “The truth, Lod, is that I have grown weary of men cowering before the First Born and their dread Nephilim offspring. These celestial hybrids lord it over humanity through angelic powers given them by their blood. They practice necromancy, drinking the souls of men and women. I say that must end. That is the second reason why I have come. An old saga speaks of Tubal-Cain’s original sword, the one Lamech wielded to slay the young man. It is not as other swords on Earth, but strikes like lightning. Perhaps after all these years, the Edenic influences have burned away the corrupting evil of the sword, to turn it into an avenging weapon. Or perhaps it is time to use fire to fight fire. Naamah used her evil wisdom to call down the bene elohim. Let us use the ‘fire’ of Tubal-Cain’s sword to drive the First Born and Nephilim off the Earth.”

Lod’s heart thudded at the idea. What a glorious hope. He laughed as a tiger might if given human speech. With such a sword, he might return to Poseidonis and slay its god.

“You have a holy fierceness in your soul, Lod. I see it shining through your eyes. I mean to find the seedling of the Tree of Knowledge and perform these tasks. I am old, and I fear for humanity. Too many are content to let others face the Nephilim, while they themselves know temporary safety. Maybe Elohim sent you to aid me. Maybe you’re to be the captain that inspires hosts to do battle. I wouldn’t say this to another as young as you, but I invite you to join me, Lod. What’s more, I challenge you to dare this danger with me.”

Lod’s blue eyes blazed with visions of fire and blood, with the broken teeth of his enemies and shattered limbs. To storm Poseidonis, to slay its Gibborim defenders and its First Born aping as a god, using a sword of lightning—

Lod surged to his feet. “I would be honored to join you, Lord Zared. Yes! I accept your challenge.”

-3-

Sunlight filtered through the jungle canopy, bathing Lod in muted green light. The air was close and humid, choking his thoughts. For four sweat-drenched days they trekked through this endless maze of vines, ferns and towering jungle trees. The Holon primitives wielded heavy copper knives and hacked out a path for Zared’s litter.

A sense of unreality had grown throughout the journey, a feeling of terrible perfection. Flowers blazed in riotous hues: blood red, aquamarine blue and a yellow that challenged the sun. Vines, fronds and creepers grew in thick profusion. The plants were always strong, always healthy and radiated intense colors. Monstrous pythons coiled around mossy branches and watched the men’s passage with an eerie intelligence, forked tongues flickering. Monkeys that screamed in the distance grew stealthily silent on their approach. Parrots and cockatoos hid themselves, only occasionally peering from behind broad leaves as the party took its leave. Despite the profusion of life, for the past few days snares had remained empty, although the Holon plucked giant beetles from under rocks or off the ground and speared them onto sticks to roast in the fire. They and Lod also feasted on grubs. His hard life had taught Lod to eat whatever lay before him.

Zared did not dine with them, but ate from his private stocks. The ancient remained in his litter most of the day, content to pore over brittle scrolls, feed his firepot more coals or catch up on his sleep.

Lod began to regain his formidable strength. He had always healed quickly. What’s more, Zared gifted him with an iron knife. The peculiar blade had the heft of a short sword, with saw teeth near the hilt. Farther up it became heavy as a machete. With it, Lod took his turn chopping vines or he ripped them from the path. Unfortunately, the surreal otherworldliness of the jungle had become a psychic weight. It made ordinary actions an effort of will. Sometimes Lod found himself staring at a vine, contemplating its beauty. Then he snarled and hacked it down. More than once, he shoved a stupefied primitive, waking the warrior from his trance. The man would give him an abashed grin and slink off. Tall and gaunt, Lord Zared alone seemed unaffected.

Lod presently raised his green-smeared knife, and he paused as goosebumps pimpled his muscled arms. His neck hairs stirred at a hideous sense of evil, watching, plotting—

With heart pounding, Lod whirled around and gazed up at the surrounding trees. From a branch almost directly overhead, an archaeopteryx shifted in agitation. It had sooty-colored feathers, a lizard tail and a terrible, toothed beak. It turned its head sideways and regarded Lod with an eye like obsidian.

Lod’s flesh crawled in loathing. He felt malice and ancient cunning emanating from the bird, and something worse.

The archaeopteryx opened its beak.

Lod felt his heart thud heavily. If the bird spoke—terror swept over him. Lod clutched his knife with maniac strength so the muscled cords on his arms rose like cables. Frozen into immobility, he stared at the weird avian.

The bird squawked harshly, its cry grating. From the branch, it leaned toward Lod as if threatening to swoop down. Lod sensed hideous danger, as if the bird had poisonous talons or as if its beak could pluck out his soul.

Lod roared wildly, shook off his immobility and lifted his knife to throw. He wanted to obliterate the bird.

The archaeopteryx exploded into flight on its broad, stubby wings. Squawking as if someone had stepped on its lizard tail, it circled through the canopy. Soon the squawks changed into taunting shrieks. It almost seemed as if the bird wanted Lod to follow.

Lod squinted as he watched the creature. His terror of moments ago…what had caused it? Lod licked dry lips. He debating going to Zared. And tell the old man what exactly?

The bird shrieked, and it watched him.

Lod rubbed his jaw. He no longer felt the terror, the oppressive evil. He shook his head. If the vile bird wanted him to follow, he would do the opposite. So Lod perversely plowed ahead in his original direction.

He hated the bird, and in proportion to that hate, a sense of expectation grew in him. At first, it was a premonition. Lod felt that if he could tear through a few more leaves, brush aside a couple more vines, he would find…a curiosity. As he progressed, a different feeling crept upon him, as if an olden treasure awaited discovery, which made perfect sense, really. Ruins from a lost age must lie about everywhere, hidden in this dense jungle.

Lod wielded his knife up and down, hacking and slashing. He advanced relentlessly, following this premonition. In time, he panted and greasy sweat dripped from his beard. He gulped painful air, and with a curiously detached sense, he felt as if he’d hacked for hours. A faint warning somewhere deep within him tried to pull him back. He wiped sweat out of his eyes and might have pondered this sense of unease. Then he spied a golden gleam. It came from behind towering ferns, a cluster of them just ahead.

The golden glint came from about twice his height. He noticed that this circular area was devoid of jungle trees, and it made him hesitate once more. He no longer heard the Holon. That was odd. Ever since meeting the sooty-colored bird…

Like a sleepwalker, Lod approached the ferns. For a languorous moment, he contemplated lying down. He yawned, and a rich, cloying scent made his nostrils twitch. One part of him counseled flight. The other—

Suddenly recognizing the strangeness of his own reactions, Lod roared and hacked at the ferns. The heavy iron blade cut through foliage and clunked against stone. This was the treasure. Something in him knew it with a greedy thrill. He ripped aside the tall plants to reveal glassy black stone, gneiss. He furiously chopped ferns until an obelisk towered over him. On it he saw golden hieroglyphs remarkably similar to those on Zared’s rings.

Lod studied the hieroglyphs…and then his eyelids grew heavy. The symbols wavered as if he viewed them through a haze. He wanted to know what they said. He yearned to speak them aloud, and his lips parted as if he would mouth them despite his lack of understanding. How long he stood like that, Lod had no idea.

Eventually Lod stirred. He heard…distant shouts. That seemed—with an oath, he backed away from the obelisk. It made his throat convulse. Sweat beaded onto his dried skin. With agonizing slowness, he turned and croaked a cry. No one would hear that. Gathering his determination, taking a deep breath, Lod bellowed. It left him limp and drained, and he faced the obelisk. It was so beautiful.

Lod only grew aware again at the sound of footfalls. He rubbed his eyes and wondered why he felt so tired. Then Zared emerged through the foliage. Distinct from every other time, no Holon accompanied the patriarch.

The gaunt ancient stopped short on sight of the obelisk. Then his dark eyes shone. Zared limped nearer.

“Can you read the hieroglyphs?” Lod asked thickly.

Zared gave Lod a startled glance as if surprised he was there.

“Why do you think I can?” Zared asked slowly.

Lod pointed a thick finger at Zared’s golden rings, the ones adored with smaller hieroglyphs, but similar in design to those on the obelisk.

Zared studied the obelisk’s script, and his eyes became glassy. He began to read, and his voice became more monotonous as he progressed:

“Lamech the Mighty Hunter dragged the sons of kings behind his chariot. He gouged out their eyes and broke their limbs. He took their women in his arms and listened to their cries. He stepped on the necks of heroes and cut down the brave… ”

Zared grew quiet and his features paled. His eyes continued to scan back and forth, drinking in the ancient hieroglyphs. His lips moved mechanically throughout, and he drew a long breath, as if to continue reading aloud.

Muscles stood up stark upon Lod’s neck. He shivered with rage. He envisioned Lamech dragging beaten warriors and enslaved wives behind his chariot, leading long lines of captives, and the foul rites committed upon their persons. Lod’s heart thudded and his trembling increased. A strange paralysis settled upon him as Zared read Lamech’s boast. Now hatred seethed and a vein in Lod’s temple surged with pumping blood. He gathered saliva in his mouth, and he violently spat at the base of the obelisk.

That made Zared blink, close his mouth and frown faintly. Then fear filled the ancient one’s eyes. His ringed fingers trembled. His head swayed and he stumbled backward. With a pitiful cry, he wrenched his gaze from the hieroglyphs.

“Lod,” he whispered.

Lod yet stood, red-faced, his muscles like iron ridges. It seemed his heart would burst from his awful struggle to move.

Zared staggered to Lod and he laid a hand on the feverish flesh.

Lod bellowed, and he stumbled away from the obelisk.

“Flee!” Zared shouted.

Lod lumbered for the trees. And he almost stopped in shock. Out of the corner of his eye, he spied the archaeopteryx as it watched them from a hidden branch.

Lod bellowed again, brushed past vines, bulled through ferns and then went to one knee, exhausted. He realized that he’d been in the grip of some depraved influence. He almost glanced back. In horrified wonder, he realized he wanted to go back and gaze at the obelisk, at the great treasure from—Zared! Was the old one still back there?

Lod struggled up as Zared joined him in the foliage. The ancient appeared wan and his skin brittle parchment.

“Tell me what happened,” Zared said.

Lod told him, including his sight of the evil bird and his impressions concerning it.

Zared shook his head. “You’re like the men of old, Lod. It’s uncanny. Your volcanic will, your determination, it amazes me. If I’d realized your strength, I would have warned you about this. The trap is very cunning, only luring those…well, those like you and me.”

“Are the hieroglyphs a spell?”

“A cunning trap lain long ago by Naamah,” Zared said. He glanced back, shuddered and regarded Lod. “It might be wise if from now on you remain in sight of my litter. There may be other obelisks, other ancient pitfalls. I suspect her sorcery has put this land under a terrible curse.”

“The sooty-colored bird—”

“The archaeopteryx,” Zared said with distaste. “It must be a guardian beast, the reason it seems to haunt the obelisk.” He hesitated and then added, “Naamah employed many blasphemous abominations. The archaeopteryx is probably one of those, a fusing of various animals that made a mockery of all. Archaeopteryxes are said to hold a peculiar cunning, sometimes able to mimic intelligence. Don’t hesitate to kill it, but never eat its flesh, no matter how hungry.”

“Is it poisonous?” Lod asked.

“In an odd way,” Zared said, “yes. Now come. We must return to camp. After this ordeal you must rest. Tomorrow we’ll push on and hopefully reach—well, we’ll see tomorrow. Come!”

Lod sheathed his knife and followed Zared into the jungle. He vowed to redouble his vigilance concerning abominable beasts and…to remain in sight of this old man. Sorcery: he hated it.

***

The Holon had grown quieter, and halfway through the morning Lod realized they had become silent. They moved sluggishly, with staring eyes and expressionless faces, yet their peacock headdresses seemed to bloom more brightly. When sunlight reflected off their copper blades, they gleamed with a bloody shine.

Zared finally climbed out his litter and ordered the primitives with greater force until he seemed like a sheepdog herding its flock. The ancient one’s efforts were only partially successful. The Holon weakly chopped at vines, and as Zared’s voice became hoarse, they halted more often for him to rest. Also, the foliage grew with unbelievable density and the vines and stalks seemed tougher than before.

Twice, out of the corner of his eye, Lod thought to spy the archaeopteryx. When he straightened to check, a broad leaf swayed contrary to the wind or a branch quivered. But of the bird with the lizard’s tail, there was no sign.

Then Lod broke through the riotous growth, and he stopped short in shock. Before him blazed beautiful flowers. Gold, red, orange and violet, the petals seemed molten in colors. They spread in a carpet to a nearby shore. Steam rose from those lapping waters. Had he reached the boiling sea?

Across the water an island rose, and upon the isle stood a great mountain, a volcano. The top of it glowed with terrible heat so vapors rose. A profusion of jungle growth surrounded the volcano. Lod squinted. There to the left of the volcano he could see the tip of towers or ancient ruins, poking through the jungle. A feeling of awe filled him. Did a sapling to the Tree of Knowledge truly grow on the island?

“We must make camp!” Zared shouted into his ear.

Lod blinked slowly.

“The stench of sorcery is everywhere here,” Zared shouted. “It tries to break our wills and subdue us. Who knows what Naamah hoped to achieve? She has changed the very land, I believe, or laid a heavy curse upon it. Or it may be that her sorcery befouled the land as she practiced ever darker rites.”

Lod said nothing. He already knew these things. Why did Zared bother saying them again?

“We’ve a lot a work to do before we reach the isle. Lod, can you hear me?”

Lod turned his head until he stared into Zared’s eyes. “We can’t reach the island. Look, the water steams because it is so hot. We don’t dare take a raft across or we’ll burn ourselves to death.”

“Trust me, Lod. I know how to defeat the boiling sea.”

Despite his misgivings, Lod followed the old one. After an hour’s trek along the shore, Zared discovered a hill of vines that bloomed with soft white flowers each the size of an elephant’s ear. Zared declared that here they would camp.

Relieved of Zared’s ceaseless commands, the Holon sank to the ground in apathy, the clank of weapons and the thud of bags their only sounds. Soon, most of them slept. The others stared listlessly into the distance.

After Zared personally checked each warrior, he summoned Lod, who followed the gaunt ancient to the flowery half-hill.

“Saw through the vines and tell me what you find,” Zared said.

Lod tried to hack through them, but the vines foiled him with a mixture of tough bark and moist inner stalks. He finally used his knife’s serrated teeth. The task proved messy because sticky white sap oozed from the wounded vines.

“Hurry, Lod,” Zared said impatiently.

Lod sawed vines and found more matted layers underneath. He discarded his vest to expose a mass of oar-thickened muscles and sawed furiously. His arms and chest were soon drenched with sap.

“Deeper,” Zared said. He had grown visibly agitated and often peered over Lod’s shoulders.

Lod gave him a puzzled glance.

“The legends say—deeper!” Zared declared. “Dig into the mound.”

Lod sawed what amounted to a hole into the vine half-hill until he seemed to spy something different back there.

“Reach in with your knife.”  Zared’s voice quivered with eagerness. “Use your hilt. Tap it.”

Lod reached in so his shoulder thrust against vines bleeding white sap. He felt something hard back there and banged it with his hilt. It thumped, sounding wooden.

“What is that?” Lod asked.

Zared laughed shrilly. “It should be a barge, my friend, the one Zillah and Lamech used long ago.”

Lod withdrew his arm and gave Zared a dubious glance. “That was centuries ago. Bore worms and rot will have destroyed any wood from that time.”

“Reach in and thump it again,” Zared said.

Lod did.

“Does that sound like rotted timber to you?”

Lod admitted it didn’t.

Zared clapped his hands. “I believe a mystical property, or perhaps a spell, preserves the ancient barge. Such I’ve heard is the case, and now I believe it.”

“You plan on trusting an ancient wreck to get us across the steaming waters?” Lod asked.

“Not just any wreck,” Zared said. “Look at the size of the vine mound.”

“I see it.”

“Keep sawing, Lod. I’ll go stir the men.”

-4-

The days merged into timeless effort. Zared built a fire and cast sulfurous powder upon the flames. A vile-smelling cloud billowed. As long as it burned, the rank odor woke the Holon from their stupor. They toiled with copper knives and hatchets. Lod continued to saw with his knife.

As they began to expose the ancient barge, Lod marveled. Its elephantine size, ornate rails and the soundness of its wood amazed him. In many places, the vine sap had over the centuries dripped onto the ancient planks and soaked as deeply as an inch. This Lod discovered with his dagger, by prying into wood. The sap had hardened the timbers and probably aided its resistance to the elements. Long ago, it appeared, artists had stained bizarre designs onto the outer hull. The sap had obliterated most of those, although above the ancient waterline some mythic beast yet showed a toothy grin. Unfortunately, cordage, ropes and what might have been a sail lay in useless heaps of rotted fibers.

Similar to the galleys of Poseidonis, the hold held benches for rowers. Enough sound oars appeared to remain, given the number of Holon. All this Lod informed Zared after his single inspection of the hold. He refused to climb down the hatch a second time.

“But you’re our rowing expert—” Zared said.

Lod shook his head, and madness gleamed in his eyes. His fingers convulsed. The desire to throttle whip-masters who had beaten him for twenty tormenting years—his eyes narrowed as he studied Zared.

“Lod!” Zared snapped his fingers.

Lod rubbed his eyes, frowning. What was wrong with him?

“You will remain above,” Zared said, “on deck.”

Soon, the Holon dug a trench from the barge toward the hot waters.

From the edge of the jungle, Lod hacked moist ferns and broad leaves and carted them by the armful. He laid them in the trench and hoped thereby to oil the keel and assist the vessel when they attempted to haul it to the water.

On his eighth trek, the center of his back prickled. Lod had felt this before, together with a sense of dread that sight of the archaeopteryx brought. He chopped a fern and pretended to lose his grip. The knife tumbled from his hand. He made a loud oath and bent to retrieve it, and secretly slipped a stone out of his pouch. Lod whirled around, spied a leaf that moved oddly and heaved the stone.

A half-second before the stone obliterated the leaf, the archaeopteryx shrieked and exploded into flight from behind it. Lod heaved another stone. The archaeopteryx ducked in flight, shrieked again, and blurred its wings as it bent its head and furiously gained height. Lod heaved a third time, but the stone failed to reach that high and dropped back into the jungle.

From its safe height, the archaeopteryx circled and watched with interest.

Lod retrieved his knife and glanced at the demon-fowl. His loathing intensified with a feeling of fear. The bird seemed ancient beyond reckoning, and that made no sense. It seemed hopelessly malignant and filled with evil guile. Lod stared too long perhaps. His neck tingled, and he snapped his head around.

Grass rustled to his left. It seemed a sound of stealth.

Lod backed away. Had the archaeopteryx cast an inhibiting spell upon him? The grass rustled more. Lod turned and sprinted, and barely in time. A monstrous python reared up and struck with a thud of noise. Its wedge-shaped head was as big as an ox’s. Even though it missed, the giant snake slithered after Lod. The archaeopteryx swooped lower then, shrieking in what seemed like rage.

Lod roared a warning as he sprinted for the barge. The python moved dreadfully fast, crushing tall stalks in its slithering. The beast had to be twenty, thirty feet long or more.

Fortunately, Zared was alert and shouted a command. The Holon dropped their wooden shovels, picked up weapons and ran to help.

Lod glanced over his shoulder. The python reared up a second time to twice the height of man, and it swiveled its triangular head. A black forked tongue flicked. Perhaps it didn’t like the odds, for the serpent hissed at Lod and retreated.

The archaeopteryx gave a furious shriek, circled twice more and then veered for the island.

Lod watched the bird as sweat trickled down his face. Something about it seemed vaguely familiar. He wished he could put his finger on it.

***

“Do you think the archaeopteryx went to the island’s ruins?” Lod asked Zared that night.

The old man reclined in his litter and sipped date wine. Several fires burned around the barge while Holon prowled between the flames with knives and ready spears.

“We must be alert tomorrow,” Zared said.

Lod thought that an odd answer. “What about a sail?” he asked.

“We have men and oars.”

Lod laughed harshly. “The Holon move sluggishly on land. I don’t see why they’ll do any better on the steaming sea. What I don’t understand is how you’re able to resist this dulling the rest of us feel. Unless your rings are magic talismans—”

“I abhor magic!” Zared declared. “No. I am schooled in old lore and have trained more than many men’s lifetimes for this day. A sail would be ideal…but the archaeopteryx shows us that ancient evils stir against us.”

“Yes!” Lod said. “Ancient evils—the bird feels like a Nephilim. No, that’s not right. I hate it with a similar gut reaction that I normally only feel for Nephilim or First Born.” Lod scowled. “I don’t understand how evil can live in such close proximity to Yggdrasil.”

“That is a foolish thought,” Zared said. “Do you not realize that the great rebellion began in Elohim’s very own throne room? I refer to Lucifer, of course. Evil can live in very close proximity to good. There is nothing strange about that at all.”

Lod shrugged moodily. Tomorrow they sailed—rowed for the isle. He yawned and stretched out on a cloak. Why had the archaeopteryx flown to the island? What did the vile creature plan next?

***

In the morning, the barge plowed through the steaming sea, propelled by the uneven strokes of the Holon. The watery heat put sweat on Lod’s brow. If the ancient vessel should sink…

He tried not to think about that. At least the wood held. The sea didn’t burn it. Maybe sap from the vines preserved it.

Lod wrinkled his nose. A vile stench rose from the hold, from the sulfurous powder burning in a flattish brazier. As long it sizzled, the primitives shook off the dulling influences. Zared still had several bags of powder, so they shouldn’t run out. Lod wondered if the powder came from the coals devoured in Zared’s personal firepot.

In any case, Lod stood at the tiller, enduring the steaming vapors coming off the waters. His muscled arms heaved the thick blade one way and another. The barge did not ride the waves as his plank had, but smashed through them. The heavy thuds against the timbers, the way the vessel groaned and creaked, worried Lod. He had climbed down the hatch once and lifted the cover to the bilge below. Too much water sloshed over the sandy ballast. The barge leaked badly. They should have smeared pitch or tar between the planks, but they’d owned neither substance. So now, Lod tried to ease the vessel through the waves to make the best time they could.

Zared pointed starboard. “I see the archaeopteryx. It paces us.”

Lod eyed the bird. It was hardly more than a speck in the sky. Old Zared still had excellent eyesight, it seemed, although his balance could be better. Speaking of which, Lod saw Zared stagger as the barge surged upward and then fell downward with timbers groaning.

“Hang onto something,” Lod shouted. “It would be a pity for you to fall overboard and scald yourself.”

Zared gave him an unreadable glance before grapping a stanchion. Afterward, the old man intently watched the island and then the waters around them.

“Is something wrong?” Lod asked.

“I don’t trust the bird. It’s here for a malicious reason.”

Neither spoke after that. The jungle odors dwindled with each stroke toward the isle. The murky depths turned a progressively deeper green, while a salty brine smell battled the hold’s sulfurous stench.

Zared went below, added more powder and returned with glowing embers in his black firepot with the ivory handle. He ran bony fingers through his patriarchal beard. He frowned, and then he craned his neck, studying the sea in all directions.

“Are you expecting trouble from the sea?” Lod asked.

“In truth, I expect trouble everywhere. This place…”

Lod pushed his bulk against the steering oar. Sluggishly, the barge hove toward the island. He could smell the approaching foliage, the damp greenery that burst in profusion upon the isle. He thought about the carrack from Larak and their approach to the Isle of Poseidonis. Kraken had risen from the depths then. What would rise up here?

Oars clunked as the Holon propelled them toward the mystic isle. Lod spied an area of bubbling, and steam rose hotter there. He thought to see glowing lava chunks in the water. The boiling sea was living up to its reputation.

With a heave, he pushed the steering oar again, taking them around the bubbling area. The isle drew closer yet.

“There,” Zared said. “Do you see?” He pointed at the island, at a gray portion along shore.

Lod shaded his eyes from the sun. “It looks like stone.”

“Yes.”

“An ancient dock maybe,” Lod said.

“Exactly,” Zared said.

Lod glanced sidelong at the old man. “Have you been here before perhaps?”

Zared appeared not to hear the question.

“I asked—”

“I heard you,” Zared said. “Yes. I have been here before…long, long ago.”

Something about the way the ancient one said that made Lod ask, “How long ago? Who are you really? How do you know so much? I think it’s time you told me exactly.”

Zared regarded him, and it seemed for a moment as if the old man would strike with his firepot of coals. Finally, the ancient grinned. “Do you not yet realize, Lod? I am very, very old.”

“Yes?” Lod rumbled.

“I am Zared, son of Jared, son of Mahalalel, son of Kenan.”

Lod shook his head, not understanding.

“Kenan was the son of Enosh. Enosh was the son of Seth. Seth’s father was—”

“Adam,” Lod whispered.

“My great-great-great-great-grandfather was the first man. Like them, I have lived now into my nine hundreds. Different from other men, the patriarchal line was gifted with long life. And it is true we often beget children late in life. I lived before the coming of the bene elohim, and I saw their fall. These rings are from that time, and they contain a certain influence. Lod, I have watched humanity throughout the centuries. Men used to understand that Elohim delivered them from the hands of demonic gods. Now the First Born and Nephilim bedevil humanity as once their fathers did. Men today are not like those of old.”

“Did you live during the time of Lamech?”

“He was of my generation,” Zared said. “The youth he slew was my brother.” A troubled look came over the old one’s face. “I fought the sons of Lamech, and I held Naamah for a time in my stronghold.”

“What?”

“That was long ago,” Zared said. “Now…now I have finally come to the island to tear down Yggdrasil.”

Lod pointed at the huge volcano. “Why bother? That mountain will spew lava soon enough. That should destroy the sapling from the Tree of Knowledge.”

Zared made a harsh sound.

“What aren’t you saying?” Lod asked.

“Can you not read the signs? The volcano should have blown ages ago. Sorcery holds its fury at bay. No, Lod, we have much to do on this island.”

“Where is your axe to chop down Yggdrasil? The copper blades of the Holon won’t do that.”

Zared lifted his firepot. “I do not need an axe.”

“A simple fire to burn it down?” asked Lod, dubiously.

“This is no simple fire.” Maybe Zared saw Lod’s questioning glance. “Long ago, in the days of war against the bene elohim, the greatest shining one summoned balefire from the heavens. I was there. I saw it fall like lightning and burn with great haste. What’s more, I went to that strange fire as it died down. I dared poke a branch into the supernaturally hot flames. It nearly consumed my stick. Yet I managed to bring the flame to a box of coals. I have kept the fire burning throughout the centuries, Lod. Once these flames are fed fuel, even green wood… Believe me, once I salt the tree with these coals, it will burst into fire, consumed with startling speed.”

“What other marvels are you waiting to unveil?” Lod asked.

Zared didn’t answer. Instead, he watched the approaching shore.

“Where is the bird?” Lod asked.

Zared glanced around. “It is gone. It has hurried into the jungle.”

“To the ruins, you mean?”

“Yes, to the ruins, I suppose. Now let me watch in peace, Lod. I must set my mind for the coming task.”

-5-

The Holon would not leave their places on the oar benches. They sat like statues, their chests slowly rising and falling. It was the only indication they yet lived.

“What does this to them?” Lod asked. “I think you must know.”

“Ancient sorcery, my friend,” Zared answered. “You felt the power of the obelisk. There are others on the island.”

“Only those with rings like yours can move freely, is that it?” Lod asked.

“You move.”

Lod stared at the old one. There was something dreadfully wrong with this island.

A wan smile twitched across Zared’s lips. “You are a Seraph. I knew men and women like you. The fires of zeal burn hot in you, protecting you from many evils. It allows you to resist the sorcery. Yes, I feel I must finally confess.”

Lod grew tense.

“I had a prophecy concerning you, a helper in my hour of trial.”

“To help you burn the tree?” asked Lod.

“And other things,” Zared said. “Come. It is time.”

“No,” Lod said. “First you must tell me everything, not just toss me hints.”

“I have told you all. We are here to burn the tree and collect Tubal-Cain’s sword.”

“And what else?” Lod asked. “Why does the archaeopteryx have the stink of sorcery about it?”

Zared’s ancient face grew leaden, and he turned away before saying, “I am afraid that we are also here to kill, Lod. More I will not say. More I do not dare, not here, or she might hear. Are you with me or will you remain on the barge until I return?”

“Is it safe to leave them here?” Lod asked about the Holon.

“We must hurry. Otherwise, I fear for their lives. Keep on your guard, Lod. We are in great danger.” Without another word, Zared jumped over the gunwale, landing on the gray stones of a sunken dock.

Lod followed, also landing on the heavy blocks. At Zared’s command, he had driven the forward part of the keel onto these ancient cyclopean stones. According to Zared, the blocks had once stood taller than a man. Over time, they had sunken into the beach so they covered it like shingles of stone.

Zared led the way. He carried his firepot in one hand and a gnarled staff in the other. Lod followed, with his two-foot dagger snug in its scabbard. He also had a pouch of throwing stones that he’d collected throughout the trek.

Lod stopped at the jungle’s edge. Zared paused, looking back at him. Frowning, Lod tried to pinpoint his unease. He stared back at the barge, listening to the lapping waves. Wood creaked at times. It was the only noise. No…he heard a distant rumble. He realized it must be the volcano gurgling with lava. His eyes narrowed as he concentrated.

“Are you ill?” Zared asked.

Lod raised a hand. What was— He snapped his fingers. “I don’t hear any birds, any insects. Why is that?”

Zared moved his shoulders uneasily. It might have been a shrug.

“Are the animals hiding?” Lod asked.

“I doubt it,” the old one muttered.

“You know what’s wrong, don’t you?”

“I have a suspicion, nothing more.”

“Tell me,” Lod said.

“I think the animals have fled the island.”

“Did the insects also flee?”

“I suspect so, yes.”

“No,” Lod said. “I don’t believe you.”

Zared raised his eyebrows.

“Nothing lives on the island, no animal, insect or man or woman. They did not leave. They died.”

The ancient one blanched. “That is a remarkable conclusion. How did you reach it?”

Lod snarled as he peered at the jungle growth before them. Why would all the animals and insects die? It was unnatural. “Is this a product of the sorcery?”

“Come. We must hurry.”

“Why can the archaeopteryx live here if other beasts cannot?”

“You are a fount of questions, Lod. You weary me. Good-bye. I have no more time for you.”

With a nimbleness he hadn’t shown before, Zared strode into the jungle. Lod almost let him go alone. He debated returning to the Holon and leaving this godforsaken land. Instead, with his heart beating with fierce emotion, he followed the old one. He was determined to burn Yggdrasil and keep its fruit out of Nephilim hands.

Soon enough, he reached the fast-moving Zared. The old one nodded in greeting. Then the ancient concentrated on his footing, often disengaging a sandal from tangled roots or stepping over a mossy fallen branch. It didn’t get any easier as the two men trekked deeper into the gloom. Damp heat oppressed them, and the jungle was as silent as a tomb except for the thud of their boots and sandals. The air burned down Lod’s throat. He felt vile sorcery tickling against his mind, against his soul, a dank force that attempted to still his limbs and quell his beating heart.

“Stay close to me,” Zared said. “Perhaps the influence of my rings will protect you.”

That seemed an odd comment. Then Lod noticed a faint nimbus glowing from the hieroglyphics on the rings. That set his teeth on edge, and he realized despite Zared’s words earlier, there was something tainted about those trinkets.

“Where did you get those?” Lod asked.

Zared paused as he climbed over a large mossy bole. He peered as the rings as if looking at them for the first time. “I think they were a present. Yes, that’s right.”

“From whom?” Lod asked.

“Long ago…long ago…Naamah gave them to me.”

“The sorceress?”

“Yes. She made them in the days she was my captive.”

Lod scowled. “They shine. Do you see that?”

“Because she is near,” Zared said.

“Do they corrupt your thinking?”

Zared seemed to ponder that until he shook his head, and he slid onto the other side of the fallen trunk, continuing through the jungle.

Lod followed, more uneasy than ever. Then, past several large trees, he spied a plinth of black stone. It lay to their right, and large golden hieroglyphics shone upon the gneiss.

“Ah!” Zared cried from ahead. “Here it is.”

Lod bulled past a wall of vines in time to see the old man alight onto a forest path. Zared hurried out of view.

Sweat streaked Lod’s face and his mouth was parched. He shrugged off the strap of his canteen and let warm water trickle down his throat. In the hidden distance, the volcano rumbled with greater noise. He waited, half-expecting it to blow. Finally, he capped the canteen and hurried along the trail, gaining speed. He was about to shout for Zared to tell him to wait. As he drew down air, he burst into a huge clearing.

Lod stopped in amazement as his head craned upward. Before him towered a great ziggurat of stone. It seemed to reach upward into the heavens. Each section was smaller than the one it sat on, although a mighty set of stairs led upward. To see this here in the middle of the island—how many thousands, tens of thousands of slaves had toiled and died to construct the monument?

First, the same slaves must have torn out hundreds of trees to make room for the ziggurat. The jungle fought back, though, seeking to reclaim what it had lost. Gigantic vines snaked over the great edifice, as if they could choke the stone and crush it. Upon the thick cables bloomed hundreds of thousands of large purple flowers of gorgeous color. The vines and flowers sought to bury the ziggurat, leaving only the stairs and the scintillating golden house upon the towering apex bare.

Zared stood several feet away from the base of the stairs, staring at the mighty monument. Maybe he heard the scuffle of Lod’s boots. The old man turned suddenly, and he said, “The flowers are the purple lotus. You must be careful here, Lod, not to breathe too deeply. Otherwise, you will never awaken again.”

“Purple lotus, you say?” Lod asked, with his hackles rising. “I have heard it said that necromancers use the evil bloom for their incantations.”

“Yes,” Zared said in a soft voice. “It is true.”

“Listen to me,” Lod said. “Tear off those rings. They bewitch you. Then unleash your balefire. Use cleansing fire and devour the lotus. Burn down everything. We must hurry and do our appointed task, departing before this place destroys us.”

“We must first reach the top before we attempt such a thing.”

“Why? What lies in the golden house?”

Instead of answering, Zared took a step toward the ziggurat.

Lod grabbed one of the ancient’s arms. Given the shrunken muscles, he was surprised to feel the man’s strength. “I know about ziggurats, Zared. The evil ones cut out the hearts of the living high on top. This is a dread place, filled with ancient evil. You must listen to me and tear off those rings. They corrupt your thinking.”

“No!” Zared shouted, and he tore his arm out of Lod’s grasp. Before Lod could grab him again, the ancient one bounded forward and reached the steps, moving up them with the agility of a goat.

Lod scowled. He liked this less and less. He could feel the island’s oppressive weight of sorcery, the doom of thousands, tens of thousands perhaps, and the lost, shrieking souls of the damned. Vilest necromancy had been practiced here, the worst of the demonic arts. What was wrong with the old man that he raced up there? Why did he wear a sorceress’s gift of rings? Zared had a secret, and Lod didn’t like it that this was the place where the ancient would probably reveal it.

This was the moment of decision. What should he do?

Lod watched Zared scamper up the steep steps. The old man meant well, and he had a worthy goal. But this place reeked of sorcery and it had probably unhinged Zared’s mind. Maybe that’s why his plank had drifted in this direction these many weeks. Elohim had sent him to help Zared. Lod felt his heart hammer in his chest. He knew the truth. For twenty long years he had urged the One Above to break his chains so he could hunt the Earth as the avenging blade of Elohim. Now he had the opportunity to act his part. Dare he turn away and run for safety?

“No,” Lod muttered. With a growled oath, he set his face and marched for the ziggurat, reaching the bottom steps. He put his boot on the first one and began to climb. The steep stairs rose upward too far. Soon, sweat sprung onto Lod’s face and his breathing came in heaving gasps. How did that old goat find the stamina to run as he did?

Lod cursed under his breath as he watched Zared disappear into the golden house. “Old fool,” he muttered.

Instead of increasing his pace, Lod steadily strode upward. The jungle floor grew farther away, the treetops neared and then he spied the volcano. A thin line of black smoke trickled from the cone into the cloudless sky. As he continued up, he listened to his own labored breathing and the thud of his boots. Then a terrible scream broke the silence. It echoed out of the golden house. A second later, the archaeopteryx shrieked triumphantly from within.

With a hiss of steel, Lod freed his blade, and then bounded up the steps as fire burned in his blue eyes. The soot-colored bird with its lizard tail flapped out of the golden house and shrieked at him as it climbed into the air.

Lod ignored the archaeopteryx. He didn’t think it had made Zared scream. In seconds, Lod reached the top of the stairs. He had climbed to a dizzying height. The golden house stood before him. It loomed large like a temple, with marble columns adored with wicked designs of powerful men holding down naked women of great beauty as they raped them. The scenes reminded Lod of Gog’s Temple in Shamgar. He snarled as he plunged into the gloom, passing a heavy door, entering the structure.

It had a vaulting domed ceiling, and light shone down from arches above. A great altar of black obsidian squatted in the center, with channels for blood to flow. Mighty heaps of treasures were piled against the walls: golden chalices, coins, opals, rubies, silver crowns and glittering jewels. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, seeking his friend, Lod finally spied Zared. The old one lay sprawled on the tiles with a spear in his belly. Blood pooled around the old man, pumping from the ghastly wound.

Lod sank into a fighter’s crouch, with his arms outstretched, glancing left and right. He saw nothing move, although a statue of a woman stood near the altar. She wore a golden mask of startling intricacy. It was breathtaking. The statue’s limbs were marble of flawless purity and proportion. The ancient sculptor must have been a genius. Expect for its perfect beauty, the statue was amazingly realistic.

Lod kept scanning back and forth. Someone had thrown the spear. He saw another statue farther away, of a large muscled warrior, one a full head taller than Lod, with a bigger breadth of shoulders. The statue had a golden helm with upright green feathers. At its side sat a scabbard of gold set with precious rubies. Both statues wore purple cloth, and it seemed then as if the woman’s dress stirred.

“Beware,” Zared whispered.

Lod’s nostrils flared. He hated the evil ones and wondered where they hid. They must be behind the altar. He wasn’t fooled, and anticipated them any second. As he waited, listening for the faintest sound, he noticed that even in falling Zared had managed to keep the firepot from spilling its precious coals.

“Where is the enemy?” Lod asked thickly. “Are they behind the altar, or did they flee out of this house?”

At his words, the statue of the woman blinked. The mask had eyeholes, and the hidden orbs did the blinking. She laughed in a dry and vile manner, although the mask remained as before.

“Naamah?” whispered Zared. “Why did you order him to…to…?”

“You always were a fool, Zared,” the golden-masked woman said.

Lod finally realized she wasn’t a statue, but a person with incredibly white skin and a golden mask. Did the same hold true for the warrior? Where else could the spear have come from?

“Despite your foolishness,” the woman said. “I imagine you brought me a present. You always enjoyed giving me things.”

“No…” Zared whispered. “I have come to finish an old task, one I should have attended to long ago.”

The woman laughed as a succubus might, taunting. “You loved me once, Zared, when I was your captive. You accepted my rings. I see you still wear them. You had a strong spirit, but I see it has finally succumbed to me.”

“No…”

“Oh, don’t be angry, Zared. Come. Tell me truly. You came to regain my good graces. If that is true, I will keep you animated after you pass and let you press your cold lips against mine.”

Lod shuddered in loathing. “Are you a dead thing?” he asked. “Is that why you live on an isle of the dead?”

Her head twitched toward him, and Lod could feel her burning gaze. “Vain warrior, do you not know in whose presence you stand? I am Naamah the Beautiful, the lover of angels and the seducer of the bene elohim. I have known many a fiery embrace. And now this ancient son of Seth has come crawling back to me, hoping for a final kiss. Can you not see the poetry in that?”

“You are doomed,” Zared whispered.

“Puny man,” she said. “What do you know of doomed? I have eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, from its seedling planted long ago by my mother. She did eat, and it enflamed my mind with great guile. You come to me with your pot of balefire. Yes, does that surprise you that I know about it? My archaeopteryx sniffed it out days ago. Yet I allowed you to come. I have need of his blood, Zared, and the blood of the rowers who lie like dead men in my barge on the docks. I have decided to walk again in the world of men.”

“No,” Zared said.

“Yes!” Naamah said, and she clenched her hands into fists. “I have supped for many long centuries, gaining in understanding. With my sorcery, I have kept the volcano at bay and the weak-minded and simple far from Yggdrasil. Now, as the First Born and the Nephilim flounder, I will show them the path to immortality and perfection. I am Naamah, and my sorcery shall walk the land in power. My knowledge brims with understanding. I see deeper than any on Earth. I have eaten my fill of the Tree of Knowledge. I have—”

“Lod,” Zared said. “Beware the warrior statue—”

“Statue?” Naamah asked with dripping mockery. “Do you think I fashion crude stone-walkers like Draugr Stonemaker once did? No. You gaze upon Tubal-Cain, my brother, the greatest warrior of an age. None can defeat him in battle.”

The seeming statue of the warrior moved stiffly.

“Tubal-Cain died long ago,” Zared said. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

“What is death, worm?” Naamah asked. “With my arts, I have kept him…well, perhaps not in the vibrancy of his first life. I will admit that. I have animated his body, and it obeys my will. In full life, he was an invincible warrior. Now that he does not feel pain or the passage of steel in his flesh, none can best him. He will be my eternal champion. Even the Nephilim and their fathers will learn to fear the corpse of Tubal-Cain.”

The warrior—the dead thing that once had been the first metalsmith—drew its sword with a shing of steel. The blade shone, almost blinding Lod with its brightness.

Lod staggered backward, throwing up his arm before his face. He blinked rapidly, his eyes tearing. He needed to keep his vision.

The animated corpse took several quick steps until it stood beside Naamah, guarding her.

“What is your name?” Naamah asked Lod. “You have muscles indeed and will make a good lover.”

A snarl curled Lod’s lips. He had expected the dead one to move sluggishly. Instead, the corpse of Tubal-Cain moved with speed.

“Speak, man, while you are able,” Naamah said. “It is unwise to displease me.”

“He is Lod,” Zared said, coughing up blood afterward so it dribbled down his chin. “He is a Seraph, a blade of Elohim come to hack out your guts.”

“He is a pup and soon to lie on the altar and give us his life’s blood,” Naamah said, “although I admit the brute has strength. I am almost tempted to take him on as a lover first. He must find his tongue and praise my beauty before I would consent to that.”

Lod thought furiously as the woman talked. She was a sorceress, and perhaps she was a dead being like her brother’s corpse. Seeing the thing’s speed just now… How did one slay one of the animated dead? Lod didn’t know. The thing bore Tubal-Cain’s famed sword. The blade’s painful shine proved that. His pitiful weapon paled compared to it.

Ah! Lod understood then. Kill the sorceress and that might slay her magic. The way to win was to destroy Naamah.

With a roar, Lod leapt to Zared. He grasped the end of the spear and drew it out of the old man. Spinning around, drawing back his arm as he sought the middle of the wooden shaft, he cast the bloody spear, hurling it at the woman. The missile would have certainly found its mark—Lod cast true. But the corpse of Tubal-Cain lunged into its path, taking the point in its breast. The bronze-head sank into dead flesh and the shock of the spear caused the corpse to stagger backward. Then it clutched the weapon and drew it out of its chest.

“Fool!” Naamah cried. “You have simply given my brother the missile he’ll use to slay you.”

Where another man might have cursed his fate, Lod acted. He let go of his dagger. It clattered onto the tiles. Then he twisted toward Zared and grabbed the firepot of embers, ripping the handle out of the old man’s weakened grip. Yanking off the lid, scorching his fingertips, he hurled the contents as if tossing out curdled milk. The glowing coals flew the distance, fanning into fire as they moved.

The corpse of Tubal-Cain had already drawn back its casting arm, aiming the bloody spear at Lod. Before the dead thing threw, a coal carrying ancient balefire touched its marble flesh. The others thudded against it, clinging to the thing’s purple cloth. Its reaction was startling quick. With a whoosh of sound and supernatural flame, the corpse of Tubal-Cain burst into balefire. The flames licked upward ten, even twenty feet, radiating intense heat. The flames touched the ceiling of the golden dome even as great oily puffs of black smoke billowed into existence. The stench of burning skin filled the house atop the ziggurat as the dead thing staggered back and forth.

Naamah screamed, and she beat at her dress as she fled from the human torch. She dampened her smoldering clothes, saving herself. But such was her frantic motion that she dislodged the golden mask. With a clang, it struck the floor.

The burning corpse of Tubal-Cain also crashed upon the tiles. The thing writhed for an instant, but already the consuming balefire neared the completion of its task. For one moment longer, the thing attempted to rise. Instead, it fell back, and its arms and feet flaked into greasy ashes.

“Brother!” Naamah shouted.

Lod looked on in horror. The woman—without her mask she was hideous with mummified features. Her lips must have long ago peeled back to expose her teeth. Her eyes stared out of dead flesh.

“Naamah,” Zared said, and he spoke with horror from on the floor.

She screeched and reached for her mask.

Lod roared with rage and loathing. He picked up his two-foot knife and raced at the woman.

Maybe the corpse of Tubal-Cain saw that and acted. Did the raised dead think? In any case, the burning thing drew its famed sword and slid it across the tiles at its sister. The heated metal clattered, bumping against Naamah’s feet.

She looked up, saw Lod and made an instantaneous decision. Grabbing the hilt of the sword, the flesh of her palm sizzled. Naamah screamed in agony even as she dove and rolled like an acrobat. The action startled Lod. Her dress whipped about and the flesh of her hand continued to fry as smoke oozed from her grip.

Lod slowed, and he blinked continuously. It gave Naamah time to regain her feet. She stood with her dress flapping about her flawless legs. Grinning hideously, she advanced upon Lod, with the sword held expertly in her smoking hand.

“I will carve your flesh from your bones and hurl the bloody chunks onto the altar,” she said, lunging smoothly.

Barely in time, Lod regained his senses and parried the blow with a clash of iron. A piece of his knife chipped away and rang upon tiles. The sword of Tubal-Cain remained as sharp as ever, the contact not doing it the slightest harm.

“My brother taught me to fight, outlander. I shall enjoy this.”

For a brief flurry, they exchanged ringing blows. Amazingly, she matched Lod’s tiger speed and he was unable to beat down her blade.

“Your muscles are mere show,” she said. “You are weak.” She twisted her blade, and lightning flashed in Lod’s eyes.

He backpedaled as tears streamed from his orbs. A glance showed him his notched blade. After another few passes of steel, his knife would surely shatter.

“Are you alive?” he asked thickly. “How can you hold a hot handle?”

“Because I am superior to you, mortal,” she said.

“You are mortal, too?”

“Am I?” she taunted. “I have found the secret to eternal life. It is called animation.”

“Lod!” Zared shouted. “Look out behind you.”

Lod ducked as he turned. He heard the flap of familiar wings. The archaeopteryx shot above his head, with its talons extended. The bird shrieked and flapped even as Naamah rushed forward. The two collided. Naamah swatted it aside with the sword, cutting it in half. Her phenomenal speed was like a jungle cat.

Lod acted in that moment. He hurled his knife. It twirled once in full rotation and sank into her left eye. Her head rocked back, and Lod expected her to fall. She shrieked instead, grabbed hold of the hilt, and drew it out of her skull.

Lod knew then that she was an animated thing. The sorcery to keep her alive—in a fashion—must have slain every other living thing on the island. Perhaps the archaeopteryx had also been an animated dead thing.

The woman drew out his dagger as black gore spilled from the ruined socket.

Lod charged her from the blind side, but she reacted and hacked at him. He took the blow on his shoulder. The blade of Tubal-Cain cut deeply, to the bone. Yet his fingers latched onto purple cloth. He heaved, and he threw her at the smoldering remains of her brother.

“No!” she shrieked. They were her last words. She stumbled and her feet tangled. Tripping, she thudded onto the tiles and slid against the greasy ashes of her brother.

For a second, Lod watched. He glanced at Zared. The balefire no longer—

A whoosh caused him to whip his head about. The final embers still contained enough substance to catch against her flawless legs. Fire burst into life. Naamah sat up, beating at the flames, but it was too late. The fire spread, and then a giant flame reached upward. Greasy clouds of smoke billowed and balefire began to consume the sorceress.

Lod backed away even as blood flowed from the deep cut on his shoulder. That arm hung limply. As he turned to Zared, the volcano rumbled in greater noise. Did that have anything to do with the sorceress’s passing?

Lod staggered near and knelt beside the ancient one.

“No,” Zared wheezed. “Don’t worry about me. You must flee, Lod. Her sorcery kept the volcano at bay. You heard her. Now that she is gone, her spells begin to unravel.”

“What about Yggdrasil?”

“Lava will take care of it. Now go, Lod, flee. I’m as good as dead. I can feel my life ebbing away. I’ve lived too long, I think.”

“You lived long enough to help rid the world of an ancient evil,” Lod said.

“You are gracious.” Zared coughed. “Please, save yourself and live. Continue the good fight, my boy.”

Lod hesitated, and he asked, “Did you love her once?”

“Long ago…as a young and foolish man—”

A deafening blast cut short Zared’s words. Lod looked up.

“The volcano is erupting,” the old one said. “Flee, Lod. Take care of my Holon. Do this as a favor to me.”

Lod hesitated. Even as he did, Zared’s eyelids fluttered, closed, and he died.

A second blast shook the entire golden house. Piles of coins tumbled from their perches. Without another thought, Lod stood, raced to the sorceress and kicked the sword of Tubal-Cain out of her charred hand. He used a cloth to pick up the hot grip. Then he raced for the door. The shoulder cut was deep, and he would bleed more, he knew. But he had survived worse.

By the time he was halfway down the stairway, hot lava blew out of the volcano. Lod saw it spewing into the sky in fiery chunks. The ziggurat rumbled, the steps shifted, and Lod barely kept his balance. With grim determination he continued down, vowing to live through the end of the isle of the dead.

-6-

The Holon rowed while Lod steered. He wore a heavy blood-soaked bandage around his shoulder. He craned his neck as another powerful eruption shook the air. Black smoke billowed out of the volcano as red lava consumed the land, flowing against giant trees and causing others to burn. Large waves slapped against the barge and the nearby sea boiled as it grew hotter and hotter.

An ancient age had ended today. The animated corpses of Naamah, Tubal-Cain and old Zared had gone from this Earth. With them disappeared Yggdrasil, the seedling from the Tree of Knowledge. What dark schemes would Naamah have unleashed if given the opportunity?

Lod shouted hoarsely into the hold for the men to row harder. Then he steered the best that he was able. Despite his shoulder, Lod grinned in his beard. Fire and bloodshed and the breaking of teeth—he meant to scour the world of Nephilim evil and stamp it out with a vengeance. This was a good day, even if it heralded the passing of Zared, son of Jared. He would remember the old man.

Then Lod put such thoughts aside as he guided the barge toward land. He had a vessel and a crew again. What’s more, he had a fateful sword, a dangerous weapon. He would put it to good use. Yes, it was time to plan, but first he bowed his head and said a prayer of gratitude to Elohim.

He was alive, and he had greater wisdom because of this day. Somehow, he had to devise a plan, one that would slay the god of Poseidonis and rid the world of his evil presence.

The Bronze Mask

By a long and circuitous route, Lod returned to Lord Uriah and the Suttung Sea region. He brought the sword of Tubal-Cain with him, but he left it in Havilah Holding when he went to Shamgar to hunt for Irad the Arkite. He feared the sword might fall into evil hands otherwise.

The first war against Gog as told in Giants, Leviathan and The Tree of Life brought Lod full circle. He went to the swamps of Shamgar to do his part. The stories Gog and Behemoth tell of Lod’s fate there and beyond.

Sometime after the actions as related in Behemoth, Lod once again found himself in the region of the Suttung Sea. Here one named Aran tells of the beginning of the second war against Gog.

-1-

Nineteen of us remained, desperate, wet and miserable. We huddled under huge old oak trees on a hill overlooking the trade road that led to the Arkite Mountain passes. Sleet slashed against the leaves and ricocheted onto our faces. If we weren’t so damned hungry, not even Lod could have kept us waiting for the caravan.

I preserved my saber in oiled cloth, clutched against my chest. Water had soaked the leather I wore as a hood. An icy drop leaked from it and slithered under my collar. It made me clench my teeth so I wouldn’t shiver.

Those around me had laid their sabers on wet leaves or even in the mud. They used the oiled cloth as shawls. Maybe that’s why Lod had moved apart. The point was to keep our sabers from rusting. The finely tempered swords were more precious than gold. At least that’s what Lod had said on our first raid when we’d found them in a gilded chest. If he had to remind the men of that, he might hit someone. That would be bad for morale. The men had become whiny as if we were a pack of mangy hounds.

“Tell him, Aran. This just ain’t no good.”

I refused to look up and acknowledge the words directed at me.

“Bezel has read the omens,” Jot said behind me. “You know that. This is a cursed day. If we stay, all we’ll have is more rotten luck.”

Several of the men glanced at me. I saw the hope on their wet faces, a dog’s hope that its master won’t kick it anymore. They were afraid. We were always afraid before a raid. But it was worse today, if you could call this gloomy weather day.

“Aran—”

I shook my head.

The rain kept pouring, forming rivulets in the mud and trickling past our feet. Mine were wet, my boots soaked. Half the band went barefoot. The rest of us would be in a few more weeks. Except for our first two raids, we had proven to be miserable outlaws. I couldn’t understand why Lod stayed with us.

“Tell him, Aran.” This time a blunt finger jabbed into my back.

Without turning around, I said, “You tell him.”

“Lod don’t listen to me.”

If I turned around that would shake water from the leather over my head so it drained under my collar. Some of that would trickle down my back and that would make me shiver. So I stayed still, crouched under these foully dripping leaves.

We endured and waited for the caravan to appear. Then to our left a small section of hill crumpled. It just slid down, mud, leaves and old branches. Water gushed like a waterfall, although it quickly lessened into something a giant might’ve sounded like if he took a piss. The leaves, mud and water slewed into a gully.

“That’s another omen, ain’t it, Bezel?” one of the others said.

“Could be,” Bezel said in his old man’s voice.

The others began muttering. I heard, “We ought to just slip away. Let Lod raid the caravan if he wants. I just want to be warm again.”

“And find something to eat,” another added.

I stood abruptly.

The others looked up at me, some in fear.

“Nobody’s running away,” I said. “We’re a band. We’re brothers. We all swore on that when Lod offered to help us. We swore in Elohim’s name.”

“We’re starving. We’re soaked to the skin. Maybe we’ve all been fools.”

I looked to see who had said that, but each man dropped his gaze, even old Bezel with his gray beard. We were all starting to look similar: beggars with ragged clothes.

“I’ll talk to Lod,” I said.

“Just don’t mention any names,” Jot said.

I scowled. I’d been doing some thinking. “Nobody said this would be easy,” I said. “But we’ve got reason to be here. Tam, Gog’s men butchered your stud bull, remember? Jot, the enforcer whipped you in the village square. Do you remember how they yanked down your pants, Bezel? The enforcer branded your ass before all the women. All of us have reason for taking up weapons. Now which of you wants to go crawling back on his belly to Gog’s men?” Before anyone could answer, I added, “They’ll whip you to the bone now. They’ll kick you in the ribs until they break. They might even nail you to a tree.”

“We could slip back,” Jot said. “Or fade into Dishon on the coast, become dockworkers there. At least we’d eat our fill.”

I tore away the oiled cloth and brandished my saber. “Nobody’s running away from his brothers, not unless Lod lets him go.” I looked around. “Which of you wants to fight me?”

I was the youngest, maybe the third strongest, not counting Lod. He was stronger than any five of us. But I was the fastest, faster even than Lod. Maybe more importantly, I hated with some of the fury that drove Lod.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said, “if you promise to wait.”

“Of course we’ll wait,” Bezel said. “We’re just talking. We’re hungry. Hungry and cold.”

Several others nodded.

I opened my jacket, wiped the blade against the driest part and wrapped the oiled cloth back around the sword. Only then did I slip and slide through the mud. This was a miserable day, too gloomy, too filled with bad luck and ill feelings. Couldn’t Lod sense it?

Our leader stood on a boulder and stared down at the trade road. The rain lashed around him. Of course, he ignored it. He ignored everything that other men complained about. A bull of man, Lod wore a leather jerkin and breeches. He was strong, with misshapen lumps for hands and gnarled fingers. That had come from drawing the slave oar for twenty long years. What truly marked Lod were his features: long white hair and a flowing white beard, with intense blue eyes that burned with the madness of a desert prophet.

Lod waged a one-man war against the Nephilim, against their father Gog, the First Born who claimed to be a god and now had taken over these lands, the backwoods areas between Dishon and Carthalo on the coast. Before my birth, this had been Nebo Land. They were Stone Age primitives, living a wretched existence. For reasons known only to them, the Nebo had left this region and moved closer to Shamgar, the prime lair of Gog’s expanding kingdom.

Lod knew more than we did about the Nebo, the politics of the coastal cities and Gog, and I think sometimes he had a particular reason for being here. He was an old soldier who tried to train us. Sometimes I thought he tried to teach sheep how to be wolves. The two successful raids had each been the same. We had burst out of the forest, screaming and waving our weapons. Most of the caravan guards had run away. Lod had killed the tough ones. We others had slain those we could catch. We had been excited to see those who usually tormented us running away for their lives. It had been even better hacking them to death, although I always felt soiled afterward. I’m not sure why.

I came to stand beside the rock Lod stood on, about to open my mouth.

“The men are edgy,” Lod said in his heavy voice. He kept looking down the road, searching. Until then, I hadn’t even been sure he knew I was here.

I nodded, although he probably didn’t see that. “It’s the rain,” I said.

“The rain is our ally,” he said, “yes, in more ways than one. I think this is the kind of weather they’ll use to move him.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that. I didn’t really care. But I surprised myself by saying, “Not when you’re cold and hungry the rain isn’t your ally.”

Lod looked down at me.

A week ago, his look would have shriveled my tongue. Most of the men stammered when Lod addressed them personally. In a way, he was more like the Nephilim than he was like us. He didn’t have the blood of the high in him, but he was a killer. Where the Nephilim were rabid sabertooths. Lod seemed a savage guard dog. We were the sheep. I’d lost some of my fear of Lod because he’d taught me the sword in the evenings. He barked his instructions and often punctuated them with a blow against my wooden practice blade that numbed my hand.

“What does being cold and hungry have to do with anything?” he asked.

According to what he had told us before, Lod had endured twenty long years at the oar. Some of the men didn’t believe it, but I did. Lod didn’t feel pain the way others did. Or if he did feel the aches, the hunger pangs, he submerged them with his blazing hatred of the Nephilim and Gog.

“Some of the men are thinking about running away,” I said.

Lod jumped off the rock. Mud squelched at his landing. Some spattered against my breeches. He put a leathery hand on my shoulder and squeezed with his powerful fingers.

“I’ll tell you a secret, lad. Ten dedicated men can do more than a hundred indifferent scoundrels. One man filled with holy zeal is better than ten dedicated warriors. You have the fire, Aran.”

“You want the men to run away?” I asked. In that moment I felt he didn’t really care about them. Lod was after something else. That seemed clear to me now. I wonder why I hadn’t seen that before.

“The men will fight,” he said.

“Not unless you talk to them.”

“You’ve already done that.” He clapped my shoulder. “I saw you draw steel on them. By it, you’ve become their captain. Today the band has become dangerous.”

Did he really believe that? Or was he trying to bolster my courage?

“Bezel has read more bad omens,” I said.

“Yes!” Lod said. “This day is bad luck for the caravan traders. I can feel it. They’re finally going to move him toward the coast.”

What did that mean? Move who to the coast? “What if the traders don’t appear?” I asked.

“Do you doubt they will?”

I licked my lips. He had promised us they would show today. Why was it so important to him?

“I see it!” the lookout shouted.

I turned, raised my hand against the rain and tried to peer through the curtain of falling water. I saw a smudge on the trade road. Was that a covered wagon, an eight-string team of oxen? It was impossible to tell. But who else would be out in this rain?

Lod swung a bag against my chest. “Divide these loaves. Let the men eat.”

He’d been hoarding bread? We hadn’t eaten anything but tree bark for three days.

“Only hunger is keeping them here,” I said.

Lod laughed strangely. “Eating builds appetite as well as strength. Once they down their portion, they’ll become lions greedy for more. Go. Divide the loaves. Talk about the wine and roasted beef waiting for them in the caravan. Tell them the rain will make the guards careless. We’ll butcher them this time.”

I clutched the bag against my chest, felt the hard loaves in there. My mouth was already wet with saliva. I had a wild impulse to run away and gobble all the loaves myself. Instead, I slipped and slid back toward our miserable band. I wasn’t sure if the bread would gladden them or make them angry that Lod had been holding out. I hoped Bezel was wrong about our luck. I had a bad feeling about this.

-2-

Oxen plodded along the muddy road. Eight beasts pulled each wagon, eight beasts in pairs that rattled yokes and made chains clink. They dragged a covered wagon with outsized wheels. The wheels churned through mud and puddles. The driver on the buckboard hunched miserably, with an oiled slicker and hood shedding the rain.

What struck me was the lack of scouts. Usually captured nomad boys ran ahead. Or if the merchants had hired them, a chariot or two careened down the road to check conditions. Most caravans lacked chariots, however, as only nobles from Dishon on the coast or Nephilim possessed them.

The wagons lurched and creaked in slow procession, with axles squealing. There were seven great vehicles, houses on wheels. One by one they trundled past. I glanced at Lod. These were the biggest wagons I’d ever seen. They seemed different than the trader’s vehicles we’d spied before. I doubted big wagons like this tried to thread through the Arkite Mountain passes to the south. So where did they come from?

We lay in a gully near the road and peered through long grass. Soaked and cold to the bone, I shivered uncontrollably. Teeth chattered around me. Lod kept staring. He lay as if sunning himself on a rock. He clutched a brace of javelins, with his sword in a sheath slung across his back. I glanced a second time. That looked like a new sword or one different from what he usually used. Where had he been hiding it?

Instead of asking that, I whispered, “What are we waiting for?”

“Where are the guards?”

“In the wagons,” I said, “keeping dry like any sane man would do.”

“That’s no way to run a caravan.” He sounded angry.

“The rain’s our ally,” I said. “Remember?”

For some odd reason, that seemed to cheer him, although no smile softened his leathery face. “Which wagon should we hit first?”

“The way they’re moving, it’s going to be the last one now,” I said.

“If you’re going to be captain someday, Aran, you need to learn how to think.”

Think? I was freezing. My hands were going numb. And I had the feeling he was just saying that, as if he played a part with us. Frankly, I wondered if I’d have the courage to get up and charge when Lod gave the word. Something different was going on today, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I didn’t buy Bezel’s omens. Gog could tell the future, they said. He was the oracle, and he was a First Born, son of a fallen angel.

“We always charge the guards first,” Lod said. “It surprises them, and it lets us see who the fighters are. Now they’re holed in one of the wagons or they’re spread out. If we leap up screaming and attack wagons where they’re not, that will give the guards time to think, to gather their courage. They might charge us. That will make some of our men run.”

I scowled. I wanted to think as a warrior—no, as a soldier. Lod said warriors fought for glory, soldiers fought to win. But this rain… It pummeled my body with wet cold. It splashed mud in my face. If I could stop shivering for a minute—

“Listen to me,” Lod said, raising his voice, talking to the men. “We keep silent today until I tell you to yell. We’re going to catch up to the last wagon first.” He pointed. “You five crawl into the back and kill anyone snoring, whoring or dicing. Aran and I will take care of the driver. The rest of you be ready. If nothing bad happens, we’ll regroup and do the same to the second to last wagon. When the guards finally pile out—then we’ll scream like lunatics, charge them and make them run.”

I wiped water out of my eyes. That was brilliant. Come at them like a thief in a back alley. What kind of tactics was that anyway?

“Let’s go!” snarled Lod. He scrambled onto the road and began running, splashing mud.

I stood and looked at the others. “Get up, Jot!” I shouted. “Earn your keep, Bezel!” I slapped the old man’s butt with the flat of my blade. Those two always hung back unless I watched them.

Lod said we had to fight together. It was the only way that men could defeat Nephilim. Not that we had met any Nephilim since we’d become outlaws. Our outlawry was training, the kernel of a rebellious army that would one day rid our land of the hated enemy. That’s what Lod kept telling us.

Jot shot me a murderous glance. I showed him my teeth. His fear helped ease mine. He scrambled onto the road, but slid around too much.

“You’d better not fake a fall into the mud,” I shouted.

I don’t know why Lod had said to keep quiet. The rain drowned out everything.

We sprinted after the last wagon, nineteen desperate souls drenched to the skin. Lod had been right about eating a mouthful of bread making everyone hungrier. He dashed out of sight, headed for the driver. The madman simply lacked understanding of fear.

“Climb into the back! Kill them!”

Jofe the small one reached the tailgate. He threw his saber into the wagon, leaped, caught hold and began climbing in. A moment later, he flew out backward. Blood jetted from his throat. He hit the mud with his shoulders, somersaulted backward and landed on his belly. Gore kept pumping.

“Kill them!” I howled. I sprinted faster, passing men.

Another of ours tried to climb in. A spear sprouted from the back of his head. It was gruesome, sickening. It would take a strong man to do that. Then a huge warrior appeared in the covered wagon. His head was too big, and he had a tattoo of a spear on his forehead. He laughed, showing us square teeth. He brought up a blood-colored shield. Then he heaved his spear into Jot’s chest.

“Nephilim,” Bezel screamed. “Nephilim are in the wagons!”

The pit of my stomach shriveled even as my legs kept churning, bringing me closer to the wagon and closer to this monster. A new rage erupted then, part shame and part fury for what they had done to my wife. I also realized something in that calculating part of my mind that never stopped. The tattooed warrior was too small to be a Nephilim. Nephilim were giants. This warrior was big, but—he was a half-Nephilim.

“Run!” a man roared.

I blinked rain out of my eyes. That had sounded—

I skidded to a halt as the wagon slowed. Then Lod sprinted into sight. It had been his shout I’d heard. At the same moment, the tattooed half-Nephilim exploded out of the wagon. He had a sword, a big one. It swept aside a saber and smashed into a man’s chest.

Lod snarled, and even on the run, he hurled a javelin. It sailed perfectly in the rain and thudded into the half-Nephilim’s neck. No, I take that back. The slashing rain must have deflected the javelin. It gouged skin from the half-Nephilim, tearing out, but it caused the warrior of Gog to trip and fall face-first in the mud. Then Lod flew past, away from the caravan. I heard the thud of his feet.

Confusion made it impossible to think. The half-Nephilim rose out of the mud as blood poured from his neck. Another appeared at the back of the last wagon. He held a net. I heard a beast snarl as it leapt from the wagon. It was impossibly huge, a monster. There was another one and then more of them piling out. Did they mean to hunt us in the forest?

“Run!” I shouted, pivoting as I said it.

It was a trap. The wagon train had been a trap.

The new half-Nephilim hurled his net. It spun in the rain, landing on old Bezel, ensnaring him and making our seer fall.

I took off running. Whatever else happened, I had to stay free. If they caught me, if they caught any of us…they would use tongs and pinchers until we sobbed for them to kill us.

-3-

Branches flashed before my face. I stumbled, snapped my head back as a twig clawed me and my knee crashed against something. I went flying, thudding against the cold earth as the air whooshed out of my lungs.

Behind me, beasts bayed. I’d caught a glimpse earlier of one tearing out a man’s throat. These were heavy things with short legs. They looked like dogs but were hyaenodons, with massive crushing jaws and spotted hides. Each creature must have been twice the weight of a man.

Lod grabbed the scruff of my shirt and hauled me to my feet. The man’s strength was incredible. “Run!” he shouted.

My legs felt wobbly and I realized Lod kept a hold of me. For all his girth, the man could move.

“We have to…” I panted, trying to catch my breath. “Fight, we must fight them.”

Lod grinned down at me. His eyes held madness so I shivered with dread. The feeling of wildness radiated off him. “Soon,” he said.

“Now,” I said. “We have to do something before we’re all dead.”

He let go of me, and I almost went down. Fortunately, my rubber legs stiffened. It was then I noticed that I’d managed to keep hold of my saber. That was something, although I didn’t think it made me a soldier, just that someday I might make one—if I lived long enough.

Then a hopeless, bloodcurdling scream echoed off the trees behind us. A hyaenodon snarled with savage joy. “Help!” a man shrieked. Other beasts snarled and I heard crunching bones.

“They’re killing my friends,” I sobbed.

“To me!” Lod shouted. “Run to me!”

I stared at him, and I almost crashed against a tree because I wasn’t looking.

“We can’t defeat them,” I said. Hearing those splintering bones had stolen my courage. I didn’t want to turn and fight, but run until I was far away from those things.

“Have faith, Aran.”

“Faith?” I spat. A stich of pain knifed into my side. I’d been running hard for too long. My friends died one by one. I saw now that this outlawry had been a terrible mistake. We should have fled to Dishon and become dockworkers as Jot had suggested. Gog’s men had come to our village and demanded our oaths of allegiance. We should have given the oaths and fled later. Who could stand against hyaenodons and half-Nephilim? Not nineteen hungry outlaws with a madman as our leader.

“Bezel was right,” I panted. “Bad luck today.”

“It’s not over,” Lod rumbled.

I ran beside the mountain of muscle. Why had he bothered with us anyway? What secret game did Lod play? Before my birth, men had corralled Gog and his allies. They had sent giants to the East Gate of Eden, the legends told. A young lad had thwarted Gog and his allies, the young man and charioteers of Elon. The grasslands were many leagues west of here at the western end of the Suttung Sea. Shamgar was at the eastern end of the Inland Sea. It had been many, many years since charioteers of Elon had driven their vehicles through the Nebo forests.

Another dire scream punctured the wet air, making me cringe.

“How many of us are left?” I panted.

“Just a little farther, Aran,” Lod said. “You can run there. You’re a determined lad.”

I listened to Lod’s voice. Where did he get his confidence? Putting my head down, I ran. Rain slashed against my face and trees blurred past. Hyaenodons howled behind me. They sounded closer than before. The rough shouts of half-Nephilim and other soldiers of Gog told me they ran almost as fast as their beasts.

“Why are there so many of them?” I panted.

“They guard a treasure,” Lod said.

“Gold?”

He made a sardonic sound. “Nothing so cheap, I’m afraid.”

“I could use gold.” Everyone in our village was hungry and poor. Gold would have changed our lives.

“Yellow dirt won’t buy you freedom,” Lod said. “You need courage and skill to gain something so precious.” Lod shook his head and water flew off. “None of you have any skill at arms. But a few of you had courage.”

“What do you mean, had?”

“Not too many of you left now.”

“What’s the use of stopping to fight then?”

“I wish I could have thought of another way to do this,” he told me.

I glanced up at Lod. What was he talking about?

“Gog moves at last,” Lod said, as if divining my thoughts. “He doesn’t have a behemoth, but he can still win. We need the caravan’s treasure if we’re to thwart Gog. Besides, we owe it to him?”

“We owe Gog?”

“No. Soon you’ll understand.”

I stumbled.

Lod grabbed me by the shoulder before I fell. By main strength he hauled me along. Another pain-filled scream echoed through the forest. How many of us were still alive? This was butchery. Bezel had been right. This was a bad day.

Then Lod and I burst into a clearing. A hard laugh bubbled out of his throat. “We made it,” he said.

I cast him a hopeless glance.

“Run now, lad. Run as you’ve never run.” He shoved me, and I stumbled but maintained my feet.

After several hurried strides I glanced back. Hyaenodons burst through the forest, each showing bloody teeth. With a strangled sob, I looked forward again and pumped my arms. Somewhere deep inside me I knew I’d rather have turned and fought. Plain old fear drove me. Picking up my feet, I flew across the wet grass. I heard the pound of Lod’s heavy boots behind me. With ease, I sped ahead of him.

The hyaenodons howled evilly, racing after us. A second glance over my shoulder showed men of Gog bursting through the tree line. Many of them wore the black leather of Shamgar enforcers, half-Nephilim. They would catch me soon. I knew that, but the fierce desire for life was too strong for me to act heroically.

A groan escaped my throat. Ahead of me waited hidden men, soldiers by the wet flash of armor. This was another trap. The caravan guards had driven us here. So much for having faith.

A wild laugh penetrated my numb mind, sounding like Lod. “Men of Gog!” the white-haired champion roared. “Today you will taste defeat, for the charioteers of Elon are upon you!”

The hidden soldiers in the grass rose to their feet. They wore mail and leathers and clutched long lances. One of them stood taller and bigger than the rest. He wore fish-scale bronze armor, a scarlet cloak and a bronze helm with a Y-slot for his eyes. A large horsehair crest lay sodden, but it look princely just the same. He bore a heavy short sword at his side, but clutched a lance like the others. His wrists were thicker, and he wore leather guards on each.

The charioteers of Elon gave a loud hurrah, and they charged the hyaenodons and the enforcers and men of Gog. I’d never seen anything like it. It bewildered my senses and failed to register fully.

I noticed things, though. First, the enforcers in their black leathers were bigger than anyone else, larger even than Lod. That made sense. Angel blood, fallen and diluted to be sure, but celestial heritage none the less pumped through the veins of the forehead-tattooed champions. They fought like whirlwinds, their swords buzzes of flashing steel. Each of them severed steel-shod lance-heads, nullifying the reach of the charioteers of Elon.

There were more warriors with horsehair crested helmets than men of Gog, but they were smaller and I’d wager weaker. Yet those of Elon didn’t act weak. They fought together as a team. Many lost their razor-sharp points. With the flat of their wooden poles they hammered at half-Nephilim faces and chests. While they did, younger, more nimble men launched javelins over their betters. The wobbling shafts found marks, and several of the black-clad champions of Gog went to their knees and then flat onto their backs.

If only the hyaenodons hadn’t been here. The giant dog creatures wreaked bloody havoc. More than one took the steel of a chariot lance and snapped its long shaft, pouncing upon the charioteer and ripping off the bronze-protected head with a single savage twist of its blunt muzzle.

Lod roared his battle cry, and he leaped upon a hyaenodon. With one sinewy iron arm around the beast’s neck, Lod rode the creature and stabbed it in the side again and again. His sword flashed, and bone and blood gushed or tumbled from the beast.

I shouted, waving my saber, and I dashed to help him. Cutting, stabbing, slashing and dodging, the battle continued in a blur around me. I felt cold teeth in my side, and I found myself lifted bodily from the ground. Raving, I hacked at the beast that had seized me. Then Lod thrust that sword into its neck. The creature sagged onto the wet ground, and then Lod thrust his blade into the dirt and pried with his fingers, opening the dead beast’s jaws.

I lived, with several puncture wounds in my torso, and I began to shiver uncontrollably.

By that time, the battle had turned to butchery. Half the charioteers’ number lay in the grass, dead or dying. The rest circled the last enforcers, and young men heaved javelins into them, killing those of Gog as if they were brute animals.

Finally, the last soldier of Gog thudded onto the ground. Lod and the thick-wristed leader of the charioteers walked over the battlefield. With spears, they slew wounded enforcers and put hyaenodons out of their misery.

“Bloody work,” the champion of the charioteers told Lod.

Lod wiped his face with a rag before flinging it from him. “It isn’t over until we win.”

“Do you think he lives?” the charioteer asked. “Do you think they brought him along?”

Lod indicated the battlefield. “Why would so many of the blood be here otherwise?”

“Did they suspect us, do you think?”

“No,” Lod said.

I staggered forward then. A glimmering of understanding tore the veil from my mind. “You planned this?” I asked Lod.

“To kill sons of Gog, yes,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You used my friends as bait. You lured the half-Nephilim to their deaths. But it cost everyone I knew.”

Lod stared at me with those cold blue eyes of his. He was a killer, a man with a mission. “Your friends died as free men.”

“Free?” I shouted. “They died in terror, chased down and butchered from behind. You used us. We trusted you, Lod.”

The big man didn’t flinch, but kept on staring at me. “What did you hope to achieve?”

“What?”

“Why did you pick up the sword, Aran?”

“To live and act as men!” I shouted, “To drive Gog’s killers from us.”

“You did, and so you shall. You bought your freedom with the blood of your friends.”

“You could have told us what you planned.”

“No,” Lod said. “I could not. The prize is too precious. Gog moves at last. He means to conquer the shores around the Suttung Sea. He has gathered allies, as we must. As important, we must reunite the Seraphs. Only they can hope to shield the sons of Adam from Gog’s ocular vision.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, with hot tears of grief streaming down my cheeks.

The charioteer of Elon walked up then. He removed his helm, revealing a noble face with green eyes and red hair. “I am Herrek of Teman Clan,” he said.

I sucked in my breath. I’d heard of the prince of the Elonites, son of fabled Lord Uriah.

“Gog can see our futures,” Herrek explained. “Knowing them, he can thwart us by sending assassins or armies wherever we are weakest. Men do not have Accursed Gifts, nor can we use the blood of the high to block Gog’s sight. Yet some among us burn with passion. Elohim, in His wisdom, has allowed such to shield against Nephilim sorcery. Lod has the ability, as does a man chained in the wagon caravan. We need every Seraph there is if we’re to win this war to the death.”

“And for that you sacrificed my friends?” I asked.

“No,” Lod said. “We aren’t sorcerers. We do not conjure with blood. But we didn’t tell you everything. That is true. If your friends had fought hard like you—”

“Don’t lie to me, Lod,” I said. “You sent us against the wagons knowing enforcers might be lying in wait.”

Finally, the white-haired man turned away. He shook his head and took a deep breath. “War is a dirty game, Aran,” he said, without looking at me. “Sometimes, there are hard choices.”

“Which my friends paid with their lives,” I said. “What have you paid, Lod?”

Herrek stiffened, and he glanced at Lod.

The big man turned and loomed before me. He laughed without a trace of humor. “I will break bones and smash teeth. I will light a fire to Shamgar to ensure it burns. Lastly, I will hack the bloated bulk of Gog as I kill him. This is my promise, Aran. This is my vision. I will bring fire and blood. I will bring death to the sons of the bene elohim. For this I have suffered many a long year, and I agree to willingly suffer more. If I could say sorry to you, lad, I would. But I cannot, for I am not.”

Lod closed his mouth. Then he brushed past me, and he lumbered for the trees.

-4-

We surprised the remnants in the wagon caravan. Lod led us in a howling attack. We spared none of them. In the center wagon was the prize, the treasure that cost me the lives of Bezel, Jot and the others.

Why did they die? Why did Lod help us?

In the center wagon lay a captive. He wore a bronze mask over his entire head, his hands chained behind his back. Lod helped him down, while Herrek ordered a burly smith to set up an anvil.

Why would the enforcers put a bronze mask over a man? It made no sense.

Now that the battle was over, Lod stood apart with his muscled arms crossed over his chest. He stared off into the distance. Herrek of Teman Clan spoke quietly to the masked man.

That one was slender, and there was something noble about him. Finally, Herrek held him as the captive laid his head and bronze mask on an anvil.

Several ringing blows were enough to obliterate the lock. The captive stood, and with trembling hands pried off the mask. With an oath, he removed it.

I stood there in awe. The man’s face had a glow, a shine to it. I don’t mean to say it was like the sun. No. It was like the moon in a way, a gossamer shine that radiated from his cheeks, his forehead and even from his eyes.

I’d heard a legend of one named Joash, a young lad captured by the giants, the sons of Jotnar. Years ago, Joash had walked into the Valley of Dry Bones and found a fiery stone. The giants and Joash had inured themselves to this thing stolen from the Mount of Heaven. The story goes that Joash escaped the giants and beat them to the East Gate of Eden. There, he helped the guardian Cherub defeat the champion of the evil ones.

My friends had died to help free the greatest Seraph of all: Joash. How had the men of Gog captured him? I don’t know.

Herrek cheered, and he hugged Joash. Then the slender man turned and walked to me.

His eyes…I’d never seen eyes like that. Lod had strange orbs with a fiery zeal. These eyes were different, with more compassion, perhaps even with more knowledge. Joash seemed more like me, a man caught up in great events, who had then done great deeds.

“I’m sorry,” Joash said. “I-I know my words are meaningless. I’m truly sorry that your friends died today. If I could—”

“No,” I said. “I think I’m beginning to understand. There’s a war coming.”

“Yes, I think so,” Joash said, “a terrible war.”

“And your side needs you.”

“We need you, too,” Joash said. “I want you to join me.”

He didn’t say join them. Joash said to join him.

My heart hammered in my chest, and I found myself nodding.

“It is settled then,” Joash said. “You’ll come with me. I want you to meet my wife.”

“She’s here?”

“No,” he said. “She’s in Elon with Lord Uriah.” Joash smiled, and he clapped me on the shoulder. “It has started,” he said. “Now we have to make sure that we end it this time for good.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That the war isn’t over until we’ve destroyed Shamgar and slain Gog.”

He said more. But that’s not important now. The point to my story is to tell you how I came to join the Elonites and Lord Joash specifically. What about the war against Gog, you ask? That’s a tale for another day.

The End

To the Reader: Thanks! I hope you’ve enjoyed Lod the Galley Slave. If you liked the book and would like to see the series continue, please put up some stars and a review. Let new readers know what’s in store for them.

—Vaughn Heppner