Swords & Heroes Story #12.5

The Blood-Beast from Hellmouth by Andrew Darlington

Nov 04, 2024

Special Edition of S&H eZine! Story #12.5 - a new ‘Eternal Assassin’ fantasy from Andrew Darlington that will also appear in the author’s new collection, The Eternal Assassin Chronicles: The Lives & Times soon to be published by Tule Fog Press via Kickstarter (click prelaunch link). Don’t miss this campaign featuring three new S&S projects by Darlington as well as Tim Hanlon and David A. Riley.

My first exposure to Andrew’s adventures was “A Place of Ghosts” from Volume 6 of Swords & Sorceries - Tales of Heroic Fantasy. We shared the ToC and I read in his intro: “If any publisher is prepared to produce a collection of Eternal Assassin stories, I’d be delighted to hear from them!” So that’s how this started! So today, I’m excited to present this story for you to taste test and thus tempt you to back the whole collection! + Ed.

“The Blood-Beast from Hellmouth” - an Eternal Assassin Story by Andrew Darlington

For John Brunner and George Holt (E.C. Tubb)

~*~

Who can stop the Blood-Beast, a coward and an Eternal Assassin…?

The plague brought darkness, as though the outer world assumed the same death-shadow as the world’s soul.

The two masked riders, the Eternal Assassin and Valtya Hansard the Coward, arrive at a place of black damp and misery in a shattered wilderness of frost-bound desolation. Between collapsed hovels and ruptured corpses, an uncanny brooding silence hangs over time-worn debris. The foul miasma of particles suspended in a stillness of diseased air, the mephitic of fungus erupts from dead mouths and shattered bodies of slumped corpses that twitch in the pale imitation of life.

The place stinks. The rattle of their horse’s hooves makes the only sound.

“This world is beyond repair,” grumbles Valtya. “Why should even a beast from Hellmouth choose such a place to prowl?”

The Coward is a man whose dark hood and robe conceal a jerkin the colour of dried blood with expensive gold stitching threading its leather piping. His leggings are grimed with the mud of travel.

“This is where it has been driven by torches and spears, back towards its lair. This is where it must end.”

The Assassin is a tall man, slender as a tempered blade, with only his litheness of movement to betray hidden strength.

Some things are inevitable. Some things just happen beyond reason.

It had begun in a small squalid town that breathed an air of defeat. The Eternal Assassin had been summoned for a price scratched together from numerous hoarded purses. He was told how the Blood-Beast emerged from Hellmouth once every twenty-five years beneath a full moon. A beast that could not be killed, which ravaged the town, snatching victims who either vanished forever, or whose corpses were later discovered drained of blood. It was a forever cycle, a pattern with a history that stretched further than memory.

Humans do their best to survive in a world not of their own making or choosing. Some accepted the beast’s periodic appearance as a punishment that must be endured. They held its secret from the world, as a mark of shame.

Only now, a significant number have decided, enough.

Adsiduo Sicarius closes his eyes, to see the pictures adrift in his head more clearly. He can hear the muted drone of lost worlds distant in time and space that overlay this one. Ghost images that are memory and dream inextricably merged, that might have been here centuries or millennia ago. They might be myth, hallucination, or fiction submerged in the soft erosions of tide and time-winds as bright new cultures flourish during interglacial centuries, only to be abandoned and driven south as the ice returns.

At first, he’s pacing the steep gradient up from the white stone quayside of Poseidonis, along the twisted mile of green crystal halls of Atlantis. Then his Assassin’s blade is extinguishing the life of the last tyrant Priest-King of Lemuria, watching dark gouts of blood spurt, and the pitiful cold-eyed figure who dies in the pulsing mess of its own accelerated blood-loss. Now he’s trekking across the plain of Arbelsra within the murmur of winged and crawling things, and simultaneously he’s on fabled voyages across the Skrandi ocean, feeling the salt wind scouring his face. Finally, into the squalid heat and dust of a dark tavern sheltered beneath a glittering palace, where diseased beggars squat and slave-hunters prowl for unsuspecting victims.

There’s remorse too, for things done, and things not done. Feeling the outlines, the adrenaline of events, the soft carnality of sensual delights, the pain on the wheel of suffering. Then he feels himself dying, only to awake in a new body in Zothique’s subterranean chambers of unspeakable tortures.

He’s died a thousand times. That is a bitter price he pays for immortality. Sometimes there are no adequate words. Adventures, there are always adventures, oft-told tales and rumours of fabulous exploits. Of course, the same story sounds different depending on who’s doing the narrating...

~*~

Full Moon. A night howling.

“Has it occurred to you, that as we attempt to quarry the beast towards its lair, that it is also quarrying us?” comments Valtya. “So, is it in some way sentient? Or simply working along cunning instinct?”

It’s a long-drawn feud of attrition through plague-hit hovels. First, the beast is hunting them through ruined halls and down fetid alleys. Then they are hunting the beast, tracking it down narrow defiles of sagging planking beneath shattered roof-beams, the air so thickly repellent they might have been wallowing in a sewer.

As they catch its glimpses, in form it seems human-like, but with a horned crest running the length of its cranium, with a nest of coiling tubular tentacles protruding from between its jaws. With the deep dark eyes of a bull, or a bear. Its epidermis crawling, its splayed feet support a hulking body with spatulate taloned fingers hooked from fur-covered arms. It is such a being as only nightmares breed.

Blades cause it to retreat, only for it to attack again, leaping from shadows, scything its claws in lethal swooping arcs. They catch the stench of its foul breath, avoid its skewed cobra fangs and writhing suckers seeking blood. The people had driven it from the town with a concerted retaliation of torches and spears, as though the plague had made them reckless with their already precarious lives. Driven it back into this hinterland.

But there’s no stopping what can’t be stopped. No killing what can’t be killed.

“I never want to be the shackle that holds you back,” pleads the Coward through the muffle of his mask. “If what you need is to go on alone, you must go on alone.”

“I’m not very good with patience,” grunts the Assassin. He dismounts. All in black, from scuffed knee-boots to the crest of the helmet moulded tight around his bleak, moon-pale features. He tethers the horse.

Valtya shrugs, striving to appear casual. “I’m just trying to consider all sides.”

“Is that why they name you ‘Coward’?”

“They call me Coward because I’m a failed man.” He pauses as though uncertain of saying more, running fingers through hair ribbed in tight black ridges. As if defeated by the other’s gentle anarchistic logics.

“I failed the people who depend on me. I failed them all. But to be fair, I failed myself as well, too frequently to count the times. Because I’m the apothecary who could offer no solace from the plague. Because I have inherited ancient scripts, hexes, and diagrams of the Hellmouth and how to seal it, yet I’ve been too timid to ever use them. If I can avoid it, I avoid it.”

His thoughts briefly, guiltily, return to his wife’s predicament. Seraphina, held as hostage in a cocoon. Her life dependant on the outcome of this foolish mission. As an acknowledged coward, could he really be blamed for escaping that responsibility? Would that not be what was expected of him? Why disappoint their expectations?

“Why do they call you Eternal Assassin? Can you never die? Are you deathless?” Turn the conversation around, turn it away from himself.

“We do have a few hours to go until dawn. I have no wish to see dawn break this way. But we’ve no choice. We are thrown together by circumstance. So, we might as well pass what time we share in conversation. Whether you accept or reject what I say is of no consequence. You know nothing, and it means nothing to me.

“Yes, I inhabit a series of host bodies. The host bodies die. I feel the pain of their dying. But I live on. That is a darkness I carry within. This is the weariness I bear. Never to die, never to know that one day there will be an end. I will go on as those I care for fall away. I sometimes ache to be as humans, to pit my life and my blade as you do, on the edge of oblivion. But that can never occur.”

“Deathlessness is the gift we all seek. You have what we desire. I would trade my failure for your immortality.”

“I learned to use my head when I could not rely on my blade alone. I learned what I need to make my way. I have no loyalty to any but myself. I let the land take me where it will.”

There was a splinter in the back of his mind. For a moment he had a vision, as though seeing through the beast’s perception. It too was merely doing what it must to survive. It was cast into an alien and hostile landscape in which it was despised, feared, and hunted, even as it was doomed by its nature to be a predator. A lone exile in an unforgiving world.

In a moment of strange sympathy, he recognised something of himself. “If the beast is trying to quarry us, maybe we should simply follow its guidance, and go where it wants us to go?”

Valtya dismally dismounts and follows Adsiduo Sicarius deeper into the ancient place, a moss-floored passage hung with red-leaved creepers. Fearing to go ahead but fearing even more to be left alone. Nervously, he glances this way and that as he follows the Assassin.

There’s illumination ahead, made brighter by the gloom. A glittering archway, badly pitted, but with hex-symbols and arabesques worn into its surface, but intact, and running with cascades of light in rippling shimmers. This is Hellmouth. This is the gate through which the Blood-Beast is disgorged.

“We have options,” concedes the Assassin. “They’re not necessarily good options.”

“With who knows what waiting for us beyond Hellmouth? Horrors that we cannot even guess at.” Valtya feels an impossible impulse. Should he run and hide like a helpless rabbit?

“Stop arguing with me.”

“Voicing my opinion is not arguing” protests the Coward. “We don’t all get dealt the same hand in life. We are not all deathless.” Sicarius steps though the light. Nervously, he follows.

There’s a moment of disorientation. A giddiness. Valtya feels his body fighting intolerable pressure. Exploding inwards. The strange sensation of falling apart. Just when it seems he can’t bear any more, it gets worse. Only for him to reassemble, with time and feeling restored. A vicious experience. Opening his eyes makes them ache, the drabness that follows the dazzle makes him blink.

They’ve stepped into a bleak desert landscape of greys and glaring white, grim and unfriendly in the eerie glare of the dying sun. What he saw was unrecognisable. A frighteningly huge moon dominates the sky, with the vast dome of a diseased red sun fixed immovably behind it. The air is so thin and chill there are daytime stars visible. And the landscape slants.

“Is this hell? What do we do now? Are we damned to torment?”

“This is a strange realm,” the Assassin agrees. “But the beast wanted this. It will follow us through the gate, through the weak point in the wall of limbo. We circle it, pass back to our world, and use the hex to seal the gate so it is blocked.”

“I thought you don’t believe in hex magic?” A defiant taunt. He was out of his depth, forgotten and marooned here in an alien dimension, and this man was nothing his textbooks told of.

“Not as such, no. But I have considered that the hex is made up of a sonic code that can open and close this rift.”

“I’ve never given it too much thought,” he mumbled. “As a matter of fact, I’m not the kind of man to face up to such a mystery. I’d rather avoid it.”

There are elevations of grit on either side of the gateway rising to bleak, wind-sculpted turrets of stone. A hard shale surface to a shallow valley. Valtya gives a last lingering glance back at the scintillating gateway, the path back to drab normality…possibly blocked by the pursuing Blood-Beast.

He’s thinking, I did it because he said to do it. That’s the only rationale. I fool myself I was acting on my own initiative, to save my life—and maybe Seraphina’s as an afterthought. Or to satisfy my own restless curiosity. But no, I did it because he told me to do it.

From the corner of his eye, Sicarius notices that wistful glance with a grim smile.

Valtya stumbles, stubbing his toes against something hard and unyielding. Looking down he sees that it is a human ribcage.

The ground is rutted in a sloping pass between escarpments. The two of them scramble their way around the gradient, but there are no cave openings that offer the opportunity of somewhere to hide from the beast. So, they pick their way over gritty sand, between ragged cliffs of canyons and rills to reach a high point from which they can survey the sterile desolation of this broken land.

Valtya has given up thinking what he is doing. He simply fixes his attention on each next step. Eventually, at the brow, he rests on a spine of rock, as Sicarius peers down across the valley that lies ahead.

Never in his wildest imaginings could he have conceived a more hopeless place of despair. A desert world of reddish shale with areas of brown-grey sand. In the far eye-piercing distance, a white surface as flat and polished as a mirror. A crystalised salt ocean. There were the ruins of tall spires that dance on the horizon, rippling as though seen through the turning of a distorted lens.

But closer, in the slate-like desert dip between rounded hills, there are cruder stone-built structures, and wide corrals where giant but placid white beasts are penned, shaggy and repellent. They’re taller and more obese than a person, but low-browed and shambling on two legs that mock human stance; their huge spade-like feet squelch through pools of their own dung. It seems that the two have stepped into either the distant primeval past, or some inconceivably far future.

They slither unsteadily down the shingle towards the low-walled stone pens, driven more by curiosity than reason. No other Blood-Beasts are present, although the nearby structures must be occupied. Meanwhile, the passive creature’s big vacant eyes register no interest, no intellectual activity whatsoever.

Valtya gasps and points back the way they’d come. The beast had passed through the gateway and was shambling down the slope towards them.

“The Blood-Beast, and the herd, are of common stock, which parted a long way back into carnivore, and meat,” says Sicarius. “Cannibalism. Because this dimension holds nothing else, no other food source. And they must refresh the herd’s bloodline periodically by snatching new breeders through the gateway.”

He is seeing the beast differently now. A sense of revulsion at the species. A need for vengeance against their pursuer.

“That’s a foul obscenity. My gut sours at the very thought.” Valtya spits. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“Yes. This is exactly the way it must be,” says Sicarius. “We can use these pitiful creatures. We can smash down the wall of their pen.”

The stones are unbonded, simply interlocking. With a determined assault, the two mismatched men soon manage to broach the barrier, watched by dull uncomprehending eyes. Sicarius leads a terrified Valtya through the gap in the wall, between the hulking herd of beings, to the far side of the corral. Then they began to yell and shove at the monstrous meat-creatures, unsettling them so they were jostling up against each other in their sluggish need to escape the irritant. That sets up further ripples of panic that infects them all. Soon, they’re uttering the shrieking sound of terrible birds, as though they were being tortured.

The first of them bursts through the ruptured space in the low wall, followed by the rest, starting a lumbering but massive stampede. An avalanche of heavy meat in an inexorable wave.

Sicarius and Valtya watch. They see the pursuing Blood-Beast halt in its tracks as it notes the monstrous inundation sweeping towards it. The savage predator hesitates, as though unsure. Then it retreats. The mindless meat-creatures are caught up in contagions of terror, carried by their own inexorable momentum.

The Blood-Beast is swamped, it goes down beneath a clumsy thunder of feet.

The Coward and the Assassin circle the indentations of the tracks left by the thundering herd just as other beasts begin to emerge from the stone structures in confusion to investigate. They’re more concerned with recapturing the lost herd than they are with the interlopers responsible.

Looking across the ruts left by the stampede, Sicarius can see the Blood-Beast’s smashed corpse, crushed into the gritty ground. The entrails were already exploding a bubbling fungus mass. Infected, it had brought the plague back through the gateway into this realm. Its virulence would spread. Perhaps this was the start of the final extermination that would leave this world stripped of life?

While he was preoccupied with such thoughts, the two scramble up the gradient towards where the gateway still pulsed. Once through, and on the far side, Sicarius turns.

“Use the hex. Close the gate.”

Valtya fumbles. “I take no orders. I am my own man.”

“You were never your own man. Do as I say.”

“I’m not sure I can recall…” he mumbles. Then begins the oscillating drone deep in his throat. The luminance dims as the strange incantation continues, and eventually it winks out completely. Valtya holds his breath, scarcely believing what he’s done, expecting at any moment for the light to return. But it doesn’t.

“Is the Hellmouth closed forever? Or just for now, for this cycle?” he gasps.

“It is done regardless. You know the secret of how to seal it,” says the Eternal Assassin in an unaccustomed moment of generosity. “You left the town as a coward. You return in triumph. That is enough. Your wife, Seraphina, will be proud.”

“No,” grunts Valtya. “She will just complain I’ve left muddy footprints on the floor.”

The Blood-Beast from Hellmouth © 2024 by Andrew Darlington. (3000 words) All rights reserved. You may restack this story via Substack but please do not republish elsewhere. Sword clipart by Gilead, used by permission.

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