Chapter I: Beneath Ledgrim
It had been many hours since Garvey Dire had seen any sign of life in these lost and forgotten caves far below the city, but now a faint rasp of breath came to his ears, and he realized he was being stalked.
He had delved deep into the subterranean caverns beneath Ledgrim, his lantern spreading its soft yellow rays into the rugged corners of the jagged tunnels that sank in twisting, meandering paths. The sound of his own footsteps covered the breathing of his pursuers, but if he halted suddenly--unexpectedly--he could hear them following. There were at least three of them, breath rasping in and out in asynchronous disharmony.
Two centuries ago the Muvari tribe drove out the degenerate, and cannibalistic Galbran and fortified the extensive caverns in which they lived, making it into nothing short of an underground fortress and city. To Garvey, Ledgrim existed in a wonderland of maze-like tunnels, but since the spiderous sinthral, Shavrena, had slipped through the volcanic steam vents and attacked from behind during the assault by the Warlord Shaxia, he worried that there were more than a few weaknesses left undiscovered in the city's defenses.
He remembered now Lana's warning, which he had blithely ignored.
"Don't go exploring the Under Tunnels alone," she said, her purple eyes stern. "A half dozen Muvari are lost in the Under Tunnels every year. We send out search parties, but rarely is a trace of them ever found."
Garvey assumed that the missing Muvari simply lost their way in the bewildering maze of turns and forks, and took great pains to mark his path so he would have no trouble finding his way back. Now, much too late, he realized that there were dangers in the Under Tunnels far greater than losing one's sense of direction.
It was difficult to locate the direction from which the raspy breathing of his stalkers originated because the noise resonated, rebounding from the walls of the caverns until the sound was a hopeless jumble of faint echoes. Unconscious of the action, Garvey let his hand drift to the pommel of the sword he'd looted from the vaults of the ancient city of Caladrex. Though he still had a lot to learn, he was much more confident in his dueling abilities than when, as his oxygen supply ran low, he first had seen the strange apparition of a beautiful woman below the surface of the red planet, and been catapulted back thousands of years to a Mars undreamed of.
Those first perils he encountered he overcame by virtue of his earth-born strength, which was enormous in the lighter gravity of the Martian world. Since then he had gained a measure of skill, primarily by the patient instruction of his new wife, Ntashia. The touch of the blade reassured Garvey that he was not by any means defenseless, and he crouched suddenly, seizing a chunk of rock and rolling it down the corridor before him.
The sound of the rock careening down the tunnel became a cacophony of echoes, and under the cover of its noise Garvey set down his lantern, slipped his sword from its sheath, and waited to see if the racket would draw out whatever it was that was following him. He didn't have to wait for long.
The stone bounced by a shadowed recess and a six-legged creature leapt into the lighted tunnel from the darkness of an adjoining corridor. A purple tongue stabbed out and impaled the stone through its center, then shook it away and swiveled a head laden with over-sized ears. The beast was reptilian in form, covered with scales that reflected back the light of the lantern in a rainbow of hues, but as the creature stood in the corridor inhaling raspy lungfuls of air, Garvey immediately noticed that the beast possessed no eyes to see him. Yet, as the creature stood, each of the ears swiveled in a slightly different direction as if absorbing and analyzing every bit of sound.
Garvey stood motionless; he remembered the children of Ledgrim telling stories of blind beasts called senrasts that found their prey by sound--creeping in through doors and windows and stealing away snoring children who didn't obey their parents. At the time, Garvey had dismissed the tales as the Martian equivalent of the bogeyman. Now, he was rapidly revising his opinion. Perhaps the raspy breathing of the senrast was not some sort of genetic defect, and it served a similar purpose as the bat's cry--as a kind of sonar to bounce back to the animal's ears.
Apparently confused by Garvey's motionlessness, the senrast shook its broad, scaly head and then began to sniff the air with the double slits of a hump that rose toward the front of its skull amid a cluster of rotating ears. Garvey knew that he wouldn't be able to escape detection now. His scent would be apparent to the beast, and there was no way that he could disguise it. Still, Garvey was reluctant to make the first move against the senrast. He had seen the beast push his tongue through a bouncing rock--a feat that required amazing accuracy and strength. If the senrast was able to do that to a rock, what effect might its tongue have on a human body? Garvey really didn't want to find out.
Garvey bent his knees, getting ready to jump out of the way should the senrast spring upon him. He carefully watched the six legs of the beast so he could anticipate the leaping attack. The former astronaut to Mars was so focused upon his opponent that he nearly didn't hear the arrival of two more behind him. He hazarded a glance backward and saw a pair of senrasts stalking the corridor side by side, leaving him no room to escape. Their harsh breathing bounced from the wall like the sound of buzz saws.
There was only one way that Garvey could see out of this dilemma, and it required heavy firepower. Unfortunately, he didn't have any. He reached up with his left hand, past the golden hoop in his left ear that marked him a married man, and drew forth an already loaded crossbow from its scabbard. The ears of the senrasts swiveled, homing in on this sudden movement, and in deadly concert the three of them leaped.
Garvey pulled the trigger of his crossbow releasing the cable so that it pushed an arrow completely through the body of one of the leaping senrasts. The beast died with a whimper, and it struck the ground, its tongue unrolling from its skull at the impact, and purple blood spattering the cavern floor.
The hapless astronaut barely registered his success from the corner of one eye as the second senrast hurtled through the air at him. Just before the scaled beast reached the pinnacle of his leap he opened his toothless mouth and let his long tongue uncoil, shooting the diamond-hard point like a bullet toward Garvey's skull. As he fell backward, Garvey lashed out wildly with his sword blade, severing the elastic tongue before it could reach him, and then he felt the weight of the senrast's scaly body pound into him.
He staggered but kept his feet, only to feel the impact of the third senrast that attacked from behind. The senrast's diamond-hard tongue struck him between the shoulder blades, and sent Garvey tumbling head over heels into the wall. Garvey felt blood spurting down his back where the tip of the beast's tongue impacted. His neck burned and his whole body felt numb. He lay still, unable to move as the unwounded senrast padded over to him, nostrils flaring, and lungs buzzing.
In the fog of his stunned mind, Garvey thought he saw a human shape move up behind the beast. As the figure moved into the pool of light still shed by the Muvari lantern, Garvey saw a narrow man with a large bulbous nose and heavily lined face glide into view. His eyes were dark and crimson shot in the whites, and his ears were unmarked by any marriage rings. As he walked his mop of black hair, tinged with purple pigmentation, nearly brushed the ceiling. He lifted his hands as if commanding the remaining senrast, and Garvey could see that the fingers were covered with carved and jeweled rings, and around his neck he wore a golden amulet marked with a series of intertwined triangles.
The senrast padded up so close that Garvey could smell its putrid breath as it opened its mouth to administer the death blow, but even as the scaly jaw widened Garvey's fingers regained a small amount of feeling--enough so that he could feel the hilt of his sword that still lay in his hand. He swung numbly, not sure if his arm was really obeying his command to attack, and was rewarded with a jolt of sensation as he lopped off the senrast's head.
As the purple blood of his last senrast gushed forth, the serene demeanor of the stranger changed to an expression of stark terror, and he backpedaled down the corridor, before turning and fleeing into the darkness, his footsteps receding into the quagmire of black.
Garvey managed to raise himself up onto his elbow before the impending oblivion of darkness claimed him, and then he fell hard to the unflinching stone of the cavern floor, his crimson blood mingling with the violet hues leaking from the slain senrasts.
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