5.1.03 - OBSIDIAN STEEL

Prologue

The priestess Crone knelt beside Krasa in the rushes. They listened to each other breathe. The rush leaves rattled brittle in the wind. Water lapped against the shore. Somewhere in the mist a dragonfly’s wings rasped and hummed. Then Crone heard bubbles burping to the surface of the water: the god’s breath. The god hid, submerged in the lake, also waiting …

Crone placed a hand on Krasa’s arm.

Krasa prepared. She gathered her hair in a bun, tying it with a leather strap. Then from the sheath on her back, she gently pulled her sword. Its black steel glinted in the sun and she held it point-up before her, blended it with the rush shadows.

The lake vomited the god. Through white spray, massive crocodilian jaws gaped and swung sideways, scything through the rushes.

Human nerve impulses react too slow to escape a crocodile's death snatch, and yet Crone’s brain had enough time to remind her of it while the world reduced to a mouth of teeth. The jaw crushed her and Krasa from shoulder to ankle in a single bite. Teeth the size of knives clamped and sunk through Crone’s limbs - both her legs snapped clean through. All she knew of Krasa beside her was screaming… Screaming echoed in the mouth of a titan crocodile god.

Blood washed the crocodile's throat. He tossed his head, sawing his teeth further into his victims and grinding their bones. Krasa’s screaming stopped. Crone fought to keep her senses.

“Speak to your priestess!” Crone coughed blood with the words. Her rib cage had collapsed on her lungs.

The crocodile's thrashing stopped. If he meant to eat his victims, he would submerge under the lake again to drown them. Instead, he rested his head on the ground.

From deep inside the crocodile, a voice grated: “Heretic!”

Crone forced a response from her smashed chest, “I am brittle-old and my companion a girl!”

Slowly the horrible pressure relented and the jaws opened, spilling out Crone and Krasa. Crone lay still in the rushes, face mashed against muddy shore. She could not move. A giant hand picked her up by the head, and she dangled in tatters. She tried to speak, but managed only a croak and a spill of blood. The Mending Prayer’s words kept fading into the growing darkness every time she tried to remember them…

With a gasp Crone inhaled on mended lungs and bones, and full consciousness came to her mind with a burst of needling pain. Her legs below the knee hung on tendons, but the bones retracted on their tendons and rejoined with her legs. The rest of her crushed body came together, like a puppet whose strings are suddenly pulled. Crone raised her head to look at the god. She noticed then her white hair had become sodden red and she vomited.

She had come so near that time, so near to being raised undead!

“My lord Bleemok,” Crone said.

“There is no heresy greater than the black steel,” the crocodile answered. He pulled the sword from Krasa’s hand where she lay half-sunk in red-stained mud, then flung it far out into the water. It cut through the water with a hiss, and vanished. “You will come with me to face discommunication. It would have been better you had been cut off from our power than to save yourself from death as you did, heretic.”

The flies began to settle. Krasa’s life bloomed red further still through the mud, then washed away in the tide created by a sinking crocodile god.

* * *

Chapter One

Pykralin dropped his chestplate and set his back against the tree. The tree's wet, mossy trunk cooled Pykralin's back and made him shiver from the fever. His tunic was already sopped; sweat dripped down his face.

He leaned his head back to look into the canopy. Sunlight dappled the dense green: myriad shapes of vine, creeper, leaf, flower and frond. Birds chattered songs elaborate as their varieties; monkeys hollered; insects set the undertone in chirps.

This is the look of hell, he thought. Inside him, something burned his flesh hotter than the fever. Tiny jaws chewed away his flesh, freeing his skeleton from the inside out. Some kin of the chewing jaws writhed in his stomach and intestines. Where the chestplate had worn his skin raw, pustules grew as embryos to feed coiled maggots. His feet were too swollen to remove his boots, and he lacked the stomach to see his feet oozing from the foot worm - but his feet could rest now. He could rest now…

Pykralin let the mucus run from his nose, over his cracked lips, running faster with the mix of his sweat. He looked down. Four of his centurians lie dead beside him. Flies, wings shining in sunlight, circled in halos about their heads. Their armor, useless bronze loads, bulged off their bloated bodies. Ants peppered their faces, explored their yawns.

Four centurians, the last of one hundred defeated by heat, disease, starvation, snakes, and insects: it felt a distant sorrow to Pykralin now.

He ignored the flies sopping up his sweat, and closed his eyes against them. Calm spread through him. He felt himself sink into the jungle; he sighed and never breathed again...

At the edge of awareness came a numb scraping at his temples. Later came a wet rasping, a slow gnawing at his skull. He did not open his eyes, he had none to open, but sight came at his will.

Teeth clenched Pykralin's face, chewing. A raspy tongue licked the flesh off his bone. He screamed.

Something started, got to its feet with a leafy rustle. Pykralin rolled and propped up on an arm to look. A leopard, eyes glowing in moonlight, glared back. It crouched in the underbrush, tense, its tail flicking irritation. It stared a moment longer, then turned and slunk into the jungle.

Pykralin looked down at himself. His rib cage wore shreds of flesh. His limbs were gray, bloated, and pocked with missing flesh. A worm stuck its head from a bloody mass where his guts were, and writhed its head searchingly.

Repulsed, Pykralin tried to grab at his sword. Not there. He looked around, and something loose on his skull flopped. His scalp flopped from his skull, he realized, but pressed himself to search for the sword to keep the realization from fully forming.

There! Half-buried in loam beside a boot he no longer wore - he slid rustling through the loam, unsettling a flurry of moths. He snatched the sword with skeleton hands, fingers strung puppet-like with tendons. The blade ripped free from its sheath, metal screeching.

He butchered himself. Sloppily he cut the flesh off his bloody bones, changing the iron’s green stain to red. An hour he stood and cut, obsessed. Then, ignoring the remains of his former self at his feet, he fled into the underbrush.

His sword hacked at fern and bush and vine. Startled moths and beetles shimmered into the moonlight. A monkey high overhead screeched alarms. He stopped. He felt no fatigue, he felt no familiar sensations, but he stopped, suddenly aware of his senseless thrashing.

Pykralin remembered before he died sinking into the jungle, becoming a part: his last mortal sensation, though it too had been unfamiliar, a strange calm in the certainty of death. He sought the calm now, he wanted to unify himself with the jungle, and he wanted to be a thing of life… gods breathe! What was he now?

He dropped his sword and moved on. His bones slipped through and around the underbrush, his passing a whisper of leaf across bone, crackle of feet on loam. He upset an insect, and it alit, bobbing and weaving. He stopped. He watched the play of green jungle light on the insect’s blue chrome. Never had he noticed anything like it before, never before had he been able to see as he did now!

He saw the fanning roots of a tree, it mammoth buttress roots furred in moss, the moss twinkling wetly. Fronds, broadleaf, strangler spades, patterns collaged together, and yet at will he perceived each leaf edge keenly. Shadow and light revealed details out of sight if not for their cast reflections. The corners of his vision caught jots of motion. A stick insect's silhouette on a leaf alerted him when it bent one of its many joints; and its antennae cast blurred silhouettes as they twirled. The night mist danced and weaved on the sporadic jungle air… and now a strong gust pushed the mist curling, eddying through his bones. He realized suddenly something moved his way, something big enough to create its own breeze.

Thumping in the canopy, he heard slapping and thumping of feet against branches. The canopy’s leaves rustled like a river.

At his face a man-sized leaf slapped aside, spitting droplets.

Out from behind the leaf lunged a giant mandrill.

* * *

Chapter Two

The speed of the mandrill's lunge disoriented. What would have been a blur, Pykralin saw in flashes of motion, pose by pose.

All four oversized mandrill limbs stretched toward Pykralin as the beast lunged, its twenty fingers seeking him. Mouth and massive canines opened to howl. Pykralin dodged aside.

But more fingers grappled from above and behind. Three hands clenched his bones. The first mandrill lunged inches past, whistling through the underbrush, and the mandrill from behind held to Pykralin, twisted, yanked, and pulled.

Pykralin's left arm snapped loose from his shoulder. The mandrill's other two hands slipped. Pykralin turned his head enough just to see the second mandrill roll and tumble aside, still clenching Pykralin's dismembered arm.

He felt no pain, just a strange sensation, as if his arm remained, but as a ghost.

The great fanning tree roots to his left shook and rained dew. Thump! Thump! Feet hit the trunk, getting louder. Then branches parted with a hiss and rattle for something huge to drop through.

Pykralin felt the impact under his feet and swayed. Underbrush trembled and a thousand insects unsettled.

Rising from a crouch beside the tree, a titan mandrill locked eyes on Pykralin.

From the canopy all around: warning screeches, howls, chattering. Flocks rose, monkey troupes scattered. Everything fled, except Pykralin.

The first two mandrills circled Pykralin, their arms ready to grapple, their eyes glinting, their big canines splitting their grins.

Three more giant mandrills dropped to the ground around Pykralin, but all these combined lacked the size of the titan under the tree.

The mandrill god. It stood twice Pykralin's height. Its face flushed red, its fur shone silver-tipped, and the skin around its eyes hued blue to offset the yellow eyes. Its supreme dominance showed in more than its coloring, with canines that jutted saber-like, yellow in the pure white moonlight. The fangs moved awkwardly when mandrill-god spoke.

"Skeleton, bow! I have revived you to serve me."

Pykralin's fingers wiggled at his side where his sword should have been. He cursed himself for throwing it away. "I serve my Emperor!"

Mandrill-god laughed - something more like gargling. "And the emperor bows to the gods."

"You fool yourself. We worship you no more! Now, we die before we bow."

"You are dead," Mandrill-god laughed again. The others joined in, their voices maniacal. "Who did your legion come for?"

"We came to aid a city under attack, found it razed, and lost the way back in the rains. You gods destroyed that city." Pykralin said.

"The gods have warned you away from our domains."

"Bah!" Pykralin spat. "I am done speaking with you."

"Very wrong," Mandrill-god said. Another mandrill climbed over the tree's great fan roots. This one had a pike jutting from its back, a back scarred and healed gruesomely around the pike shaft. At the pike's top was impaled a human skull. The skull missed its lower jaw - its jaw dangled from a vine tied around the pike-bearer's neck.

Pykralin felt a faint pull toward the skull, like catching in an invisible current. When the bearer stepped into the moonlight, Pykralin looked up at the skull. A watery face slept, lit up from within by the whiteness of its skull. A man's face, outlined by transparent shimmering like heat, but if heat, then the heat of the moon.

Mandrill-god took the jaw necklace from the bearer's neck, and put it to the skull. The skull sucked it into place, and Pykralin felt a tug in the invisible current.

The ghost face opened its eyes.

"Speak to your replacement!" Mandrill-god commanded.

The head said, "You will serve your god. You will speak to him your knowledge."

"I will not."

"When all you have is a head, and your mouth granted, you will speak. You will speak, and speak soon, so you might have rest. As I shall have," and the face looked to Mandrill-god.

Mandrill-god reached out a massive hand, gripped the head, and squeezed. A crack, then the hand opened, and bone shards rattled to the ground.

"I need your knowledge, and need eyes that see the currents. Repay my trust with service, and I will make your service short," Mandrill-god said. His mandrills circling Pykralin suddenly knotted the circle and lunged.

* * *

Chapter Three

Pykralin hit the ground and rolled. He whipped through the underbrush, hitting stems, leaves, thrashing through fronds, cracking roots, crunching loam. Mandrills howled, stomped after him.

He stuck suddenly, a banana stem wedged between two ribs. Panicking, he bent his legs back and thrust. The stem cracked and a mandrill hollered when the plant thwacked it across the face. Pykralin lurched around, rolled, and sunk.

The loam beneath him gave way, spilling leaves over him. He flailed, grasped, only to push more holes into the loam. With a rush and a hiss, the ground gave way. Black. He cracked against a stone shelf, bounced, stuck in another gap between two rock shelves, and then fell again with a thud.

He could smell too. Strange he never noticed it before - but he had been alive and taken the sensation for granted. The dry peat he had fallen onto puffed around him and caked in his still-fleshy nose holes, and now the smell stung. He huffed and sat.

A hint of light, bluish, came from an angle above, breaking over a jutting rock wall in white motes. His eyes adjusted quickly, and soon he could make out his surroundings. Light and shadow had a twilight effect, fewer colors at the gain of greater contrast and detail. He sat in a ravine, one rock wall overlapping another to make the entrance curved and narrow, and choked with creepers. Outside, mandrills screeched angrily and took out their frustration on plants. Bits of leaf fluttered down the ravine, dancing to the mandrill's dulled echoes and taps of dripping water.

The mandrills were moving away, their chattering underlined with Mandrill-god's rumbling.

Pykralin got up and started to walk about. The pit rose three times his height before the shelf curved over and pinched the entrance into a narrow seam. He could walk five strides from wall to wall. When his feet, bony rakes, combed through the peat, pebbles and bones emerged.

Many bones: knobs and shards and skulls littered the pit floor. Most of the skulls had beaks, tall running birds by the look of their leg bones. Pykralin bent and started to pull one of the leg bones. When he did, he felt the pull in the invisible current, and the leg bone attracted toward his nearest joint. He grasped the bone to stay it.

It looked like a thighbone, but twice the size of his own thigh. He dropped it and searched for a skull. In contrast, the skull was not as large as his own, but with a massive beak: a giant hunter’s caught in a natural pit-trap.

Pykralin sifted around some more, picking up bones, tossing them, the pattern hindered by his missing arm that felt still there. Curious, he picked a rib and let it pull toward his empty shoulder socket. The pull got stronger the closer he put the rib, and then snapped into the socket.

The strangest sensation yet! … Like a strip of flesh grafted to his shoulder. He grasped the rib and pulled. It didn't budge, so he pulled, set himself for more leverage, yanked, pulled some more. At last it cracked out. Pykralin dropped it and picked up some more bones.

There were heavier bones, too. Here, a jungle cat, one of those small spotted ones. This, it came out like a string stuck with moss, a line of tiny ribs: snake; some bigger bones, too, heavy. Pykralin found the skull and tore it loose from vines wrapped up through its eye sockets. It belonged to a bear, trapped down here in pursuit of carrion smell. Maybe Pykralin could find a replacement arm …

A few minutes later he found something … A leg, big bones. Hind leg or foreleg? Pykralin decided not to pull it out, half covered in mud and weed. He wanted it complete. Instead, he lied down next to it, and put his empty socket to it. It snapped into place … almost. The bone end was too big for his socket. That grafted sensation again, but this time more than just flesh, muscle, tendon, enough to make his other arm feel tiny. Along the bear leg, other bits snapped. An elbow, more arm, a toe, toes, big nails. Pykralin flexed his new arm. Invisible muscle clenched his bone, heavy. This felt like a hind leg, it wanted much more muscle than his shoulder could give it.

Pykralin ripped his new left arm from the ground, one steady motion pulling roots and pouring dirt. He raised the new left arm, looked at it. He felt off-balance with it there, awkward with its weight and length. The claws, though, made him feel impressive. He wiggled them. They had less motion than normal fingers, and he had no thumb.

Pykralin let the left arm rest.

He looked up along the overlapped wall. Since the surface curved backward, vines and roots draped down from the entrance. Water dripped away pocks in the stone; ferns took advantage, growing vertically on the wall. Most prominent in the dark and wet, fungus studded the walls as mushrooms, blue and green moss, lichens, and something slimy, slightly glowing green.

Pykralin backed to the opposite wall, then ran forward and scurried up the wall; his right arm leveraged on ferns until he could kick up and grab at a vine … but his new left arm, trying to grab a fern without a thumb, threw him off balance when it failed to grab anything, and his foot slipped on the slime. He tripped, bashed his skull on the wall, and fell to his back.

No pain. Pykralin rubbed his forehead anyway, worried he might have cracked it. It felt crusty with old blood and hair. He got up again, backed to the wall, and ran.

This time he jammed his left claw into the wall, grabbed, jumped at a vine, and caught. The vine tore loose, and he fell again in a shower of droplets.

Again, this time planting his foot on ferns to keep from slipping, and grabbing a bundle of vines … Now he hung by one arm off vines, kicking vainly at the wall for support. He found the one arm enough to support him, with no fatigue, but how to move upward without another climbing arm?

He bit the vine, stretched his arm higher, and grappled at the bottom of the vines with both feet. He had to bite, stretch up, tedious, but eventually he had moved enough to clamp with his feet. Then he moved easily to the entrance crack.

Dawn must be approaching. The light had dimmed, grayed. He stuck his right arm into the crack … It slipped on gravel and he began sliding off, but he jammed his big left in and it stuck. He easily lifted his weight with that new arm, and stuck the right back in, this time making a fist to keep it wedged.

He had to turn his head sideways to squeeze through this part of the crack. He reached forward, and began pulling and squeezing himself through the opening. His bones scraped against the rock, catching often. At last, he had his whole body wedged in.

The overlapping rock face ended overhead, an end to the horizontal, and a start to a new vertical opening. This one opened wider and brighter in the rising light.

Pykralin found, however, that he could not pull his body free. He stuck both elbows in front of him and pulled. The left succeeded, pulling him out lop-sided, face smashed against the vertical wall leading up. Something creaked, too, and clattered when it broke free.

More flexible as a skeleton, Pykralin bent his neck in half to see parallel with the vertical face, then bent his back as he began worming out from horizontal to vertical. His ankles out, the climb up the vertical face rose little more than twice his height.

At the top, he glanced around for signs of the mandrills, and then looked back at the pit. From here, it appeared the crack only descended straight down. There was no sign of the horizontal passage that eventually turned to lead again further down. Perhaps the mandrills, searching from above, had missed this.

Pykralin turned back to the brightening forest. Unseen birds warbled all around, staking their territories early. Looking up, Pykralin wondered if from the birds' roosts he could see where to go next.

But where would he be welcome now?

* * *

Chapter Four

Rain fell for months. Pykralin, down in his pit, listened to the rain. Water rushed down into his home, a steady waterfall smooth as glass except where it broke on rocky outcroppings still unworn.

The water running into the pit brought with it debris from outside. Greenery torn loose, branches, pebbles, and sometimes bones came rolling into the pit. Pykralin waded in the shoulder-high pool that filled the pit bottom, numbed by the waterfall. It trickled, roared, fumed, spurt, ticked, details keen to his undead hearing as details keen to his eyes. But now he let it numb his mind. The unending rain began to wear on him, like his unending life.

From the entrance, which Pykralin had enlarged by chipping away the stone, moonlight poured to a corner of the pit. It spotlighted a bundle of bones Pykralin had collected in his woven net. He had interchanged parts with himself, grafting bones together until his experiments yielded the most favorable shapes. He had made his left arm more natural feeling, and coupled it with a bear shoulder bone. From driftwood wedged into his ribs and jutting as spikes around his shoulder, he impaled a bear, cat, and bird skull. From these he felt nothing, and they never reacted to the strange pull other bones attracted to.

He raked his left through the water, swooshing currents through his claws. Then something big splashed into the pit. Pykralin waded over to it.

It bobbed and rolled in the eddies, sinking, and then drifting toward a corner: a giant mandrill carcass, too big to squeeze into the pit normally. This one's bones were smashed, its insides leaked jelly from tears in the skin.

So, Mandrill-god had returned.

Driven by the floodwaters to higher ground, the god must have met something on its way. Something that could do this to its servants.

Pykralin waded back to his rope and started climbing out of the pit. The waterfall hissed through ferns, moss, mould, and mushrooms rooted onto his bones. He brought his senses fully aware now. If fate had reborn him, perhaps now it made possible his revenge. What else did he live for?

He crawled through the entrance, and then climbed the second vertical face into the jungle. The jungle floor drifted and rippled over a layer of water. The canopy swayed and shivered under the rain. When the jungle moved, its inhabitants kept still. Pykralin stood and waited, tuning into the jungle for direction.

Suddenly a parrot broke from the canopy, dipped low, wings clapping and beak screaming. It rose again into the canopy and disappeared. Then where it first appeared, a flock broke from the canopy. They dipped and swarmed as one, screaming, and disappeared with the first.

Where parrots roosted, few creatures could startle them: a python, a careless monkey, or a false alarm even. Pykralin moved off in the direction they had appeared, betting the parrot's disturbance had been a giant mandrill.

He followed the water currents under the drifting loam. They took him around obstacles, finding the quickest routes. His feet knotted with debris, his shins scabbed with loam as he went. Then another current fixed his attention.

He last felt this invisible current looking up at the skull and ghostly face. Pykralin slowed his pace. The water and drifting debris layer sloshed up to his knees now. He kept to the plants, letting his moss-fern-mold-mushroom carpeted bones blend in. The current increased its pull, beyond the nagging at his mind, and became a physical sensation.

The trees shook ahead. Their boughs shivered off pooled rainwater. Thump. Pykralin stood in the middle of a banana's roots and flexed his left arm. His feet sunk into the soil. He waited, then pulled his legs free and moved ahead.

Somewhere beyond the thick mangrove grove ahead mandrills grunted and hollered. By the sound of it, Mandrill-god's entire troupe gathered there. Now and then the mangrove grove shook. Pykralin started wading into the grove.

Water reached above his hipbones, his footing slipped with the currents. The invisible current pulled at his temples like a finger almost touching his forehead, but never touching. On the opposite edge of the grove, a dense stand of mangroves formed a sandbar with their roots. The mandrills paced the bar, supported by mandrills thrashing in the trees behind them.

Another mandrill came into view, larger than the rest: pike-bearer. He paced along the bar edge, flaying the grass, pounding the water, picked up a stone and tossed it underhand into the water.

A new skull topped the pike, complete with jawbone. In the moonlight, the watery face was an old man, long hair and beard in imperial curls. A weblike thread reached between the skull and Pykralin. Pykralin tried to wave the thread away, but his hand passed through it.

The skull kept saying, "I see the current. It is getting bigger. Back off!"

Too late. Something titan erupted from the water, making riptides that washed over all the bar. A giant crocodile jaw threshed through the grasses. Mandrills wailed and fled into the trees. The jaws snapped shut around pike-bearer. The pike shattered and the skull whipped into the air yelling.

An arm hanging between two teeth scratched at the jaws feebly. The crocodile sunk back into the water, then started rolling in the water, boiling the water, ripping the mandrill apart. Thud. A tree shook, leaves fluttering into the tainted water. Another weblike thread, thick, spun toward the crocodile. The crocodile seemed unaware, unable to see the thread that began wrapping around it and thickening to constrict its lungs.

An air bubble burped to the water surface, and a massive shadow rose. Beyond huge, this crocodile dwarfed the previous one when it climbed halfway onto the bar. Water cut away from its shape and opening mouth. It crawled on half-human forelegs out of the water. A webbed hand waved toward the other crocodile, and another thread linked onto the one tangling the crocodile, overtaking it, until the thread grew too big and snapped.

Crocodile-god displayed its open mouth in show of power. Its eyes set on something in the trees out of Pykralin's sight.

"Retreat higher while my domain spreads!" Crocodile-god wheezed from his nostrils.

"Bleemok!" Mandrill-god shouted from the trees, voice small in the rain and after Crocodile-god's. "Your minion deprives me of another skull and pike-bearer."

"He rolls the flesh from your bearer's body. We eat the flesh of the careless. You know that. Next time pick a wary bearer to carry your skulls," Crocodile-god answered and slipped back into the water. As he sank, a tide curled over his body, rising and drowning the sandbar.


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