XII
Korrgonn stood silent and still as stone atop a flattened boulder of black basalt. That craggy rock, thrown up from the world's core in some nameless, forsaken epoch had never before felt the press of a man’s foot, if the son of Azathoth could even rightly be called a man. It had lingered here through all the world's ages, untouched, unmoved, awaiting its purpose.
Korrgonn’s eyes were shut. His ankh glowed softly in his right hand. A minute passed and then another, and still he did not stir.
The men of his expedition stood about the boulder, eyes locked on Korrgonn. They strove to be silent and still and barely dared to breathe.
The ancient stone beneath Korrgonn’s feet began to rumble and vibrate, louder and louder, until at last it cracked asunder, fractured to its core. It crumbled to dust beneath Korrgonn’s feet, its energy, its very essence drained to serve his need. But Korrgonn didn’t fall as the stone collapsed — he hovered there for a moment, suspended in midair by means unknown, and then slowly sank until his feet again rested on solid stone. He opened his eyes and pointed. “That way,” he said. “That way lies Dagon.”
“That way goes where?” whispered Frem. “Did he say ‘dragon’? I don’t want to fight no stinking dragons.”
Sevare looked at him, but said nothing, his face gone all white and clammy.
Putnam responded quietly. “He said Dagon. That must be the name of some town or village. Probably a dung hole swarming with cannibals.”
The troop reformed their lines, each man in his place, and resumed their trek — Frem and his Pointmen positioned well out in front of the others, as always.
Here and there as they traversed the barren rocky expanse, they came upon carved menhirs inscribed with likenesses of the fish-men engaged in all forms of wanton terrors, vile debaucheries, and grotesque blasphemies, sadistic or carnal. Torture and human sacrifices, even of children, were proudly depicted on those polluted stones, some painted in multiple colors, some mere primitive pictograms, some few lifelike in their skill and detail. The lines and strokes of most of the craven images were wide and clumsy — born of thick, inhuman hands.
As they traveled deeper inland toward the heart of the isle, the menhirs became more frequent and snaked a path through the barren, soulless sea of stone. The island was permeated with an overwhelming sense of age, of antiquity — in the carvings, the rock, even the very air itself.
After a time, they heard deep humming sounds, soft and distant at first, then louder as they marched on. When they neared the center of the isle, they discerned the din to be a chorus of hundreds of inhuman voices that chanted in some guttural tongue and called out to beings from the beyond.
Moag stalked back from the point, low and quiet. He expertly chose a path devoid of loose stone that could shift and give away his position. The task was easy enough for him, for lugron were at home in the high mountains, so careful movement over stone to him came natural. He signaled that more fish-men were ahead, and skulked back until he crouched before Frem and Sevare. “Two guards,” he said in a thick lugronish accent.
“And the others?” said Frem.
“Can't see them. They be down some gully over the rise.”
“Can we get to the guards?” said Frem.
“Their ears are on their kind, so we can make bow range easy, maybe get close enough to gift them with a spear or two. One volley is all we’ll get, and if them shots go high, they’ll land down the hill and we’ll have the whole lot on us.”
“Over there,” continued Moag, “be an evil place. It don’t feel right, and stinks something bad. There be two big pillars over there, bigger than any we’ve passed. They got some giant lizard thing carved into them, with the fish-men bowing down before it, like it was a god.”
“Sounds like we’re in the right place,” said Sevare.
“Get the red giant,” said Frem.
Two fish-man guards lay dead on the cold stone, their milky blood pooled about them, bubbling and foaming as was its wont. One lay on its back, Mort Zag's spear through his head. The throw took it through the eye and came out the back of its narrow skull; an instant kill. The other lay on its stomach, two steel tipped arrows lodged in its back, another in its leg, its head staved in by Moag and Royce as it tried to crawl away and call for its fellows.
Frem, Putnam, and Sevare lay on their bellies and peeked over the rise. Just beyond its crest began a wide stair that descended into a grand stone amphitheater that overflowed with the sight, sounds, and stench of the fish-men. The place, a vast expanse of narrow but steep stone terraces that served both as steps and seating, all arrayed in circular fashion centered about a watery pit at the very bottom. This black pool was more than thirty feet in diameter and ringed with a high altar of black stone.
Scattered around the seating bowl, the fish-men squatted and chanted unholy verses in practiced, rhythmic fashion; hundreds of alien voices rose and fell together, their bodies swayed and rocked in an inhuman, hypnotic dance. No doubt to them, their song held beauty, comfort, and depth of meaning, but to the human ear, it was a skirling, oppressive din, a cacophony of madness that caressed notes beyond the range of any throat or ear of man; their song all the more eerie for its echoes off the barren stonescape of the amphitheater.
“Dead gods, what a stink,” said Putnam.
Sevare looked down on the scene before them and spit a mouthful of tobacco juice behind a stone. “Must be hundreds of them down there.”
Frem took another quick peek. “Hundreds. Oh, boy.”
“A dozen were trouble enough,” said Putnam. “If Korrgonn has us charge that lot, we're done for.”
“Watch it, he's coming,” said Sevare.
Korrgonn crawled up behind them. Putnam yielded his position without a word. Korrgonn looked over the rise and took in the scene below without reaction.
“You gaze now on the home of the dwellers of the deep,” whispered Korrgonn. “An ancient breed, far older than any race of man.”
“Never heard of them,” said Frem.
Korrgonn turned to Frem, looking as if he'd never seen him before. “There's few of them left now, and they don't abide men. They prefer the cold dark of the deep sea and the depths of the earth, where it's quiet; where they still hold sway.”
“Did you know they were here?” said Frem. “On this island?”
Korrgonn turned his attention back to the dwellers. “Those openings in the rock face down there,” he said. “Near the bottom, do you see them?”
“Beyond the pool?” said Sevare.
“Yes,” said Korrgonn. “Those lead to a warren of caverns and underground pools lit only by glowing lichen, if even that. That's where they live. Somewhere very deep there will be a passage that leads into the sea. What mysteries from the Dawn Age and beyond lurk in those warrens, no man will ever know. Like as not, no human has ever seen this view before and lived. Mark it well,” he said, “for after today, it will never be thus again.”
A scream burst out, a pitiful cry of agony that for a moment eclipsed the roar of the dwellers' song. The men inched up the rise again and looked over.
“Dead gods,” said Sevare. “On the altar.”
“I didn't see them before,” said Frem. “Oh, boy.”
What struck the men's hearts cold was what lay on the grim stone altar that encircled the central pool. Atop that ancient basalt slab, stained of old with the blood of untold sacrifices, laid the mutilated bodies of the missing men from The White Rose's scouting party. Each wretched victim tied down and flayed open; the faces of three forever frozen in a mask of pain and horror; their organs extracted one by one by the deft knife-work of the dwellers' high priest. Their hearts laid beside them on the slab, as did their lifeblood, collected in large shells; their intestines extracted and laid bare on platters of flat shell. Lesser priests set to work carving up the innards with long, obsidian knives.
The greatest horror of all was that this atrocity was performed in part while the men still lived, for the fourth man, Sir Rewes of Ravenhollow, a young sithian Knight, still writhed atop the altar even as the stooped priest prepared to butcher him. Rewes fought with all his will. His jaw clenched, he struggled to hold back the screams, to deny the fiends the satisfaction.
Even as the men watched helpless atop the rise, the high priest sliced open Rewes' abdomen; his stone blade cut deep and savage. The old dweller reached his clawed hand into the wound and pulled out a loop of Rewes' intestines. Powerless but to watch, at last Rewes screamed.
The old fiend, assisted now by two others pulled out the whole length of Rewes' innards intact, and placed them on a gruesome platter for chopping into footlong pieces. Their butchery completed, the platters were passed about and the dwellers each took a raw piece and began to eat of it.
Korrgonn motioned for the others to approach the rise. The troops scrambled forward, the last few yards on their bellies so they'd not be seen by the dwellers. The officers bunched around Korrgonn, awaiting orders.
The old priest turned and faced the gathered masses. He raised arms that still dripped with the blood of his victims and peered about with his glassy, soulless eyes. No emotion shone in those dead orbs, or across his stiff face, so alien were those dwellers. Their song abruptly ended and the place went still.
The high priest began to chant. Though old and stooped, his voice rose up over his fellows and boomed croaks of fealty and supplication, beseeching their dark god to grant his favor.
And then his tone and tenor changed, subtly at first, then more so. Each wizard amongst Korrgonn's group felt the mystic power of the high priest’s words, though they were alien and incomprehensible. The weave of magic began to stir.
“Make ready your wizard-fire,” said Korrgonn. “When I give the word, and not before, blast them with your most powerful magics. Brackta to the left; Ginalli to the center, and Sevare to the right. We must kill as many as we can with the first strike.”
“A creature will come from that pit,” said Korrgonn. “A beast from the Dawn Age called Dagon. It’s a thing not of Midgaard. Battle it not, for it is beyond you. I will face it; Mort Zag will assist me if he can. The rest of you are to keep the dwellers off me. That must be your only thought, your only purpose. Do not fail me, though your sacrifice be great.”
“We can’t fight hundreds of those things,” said Frem.
“We won't have to,” said Ginalli. “We have the high ground and it’s wide open down there.”
“So?” said Frem.
“We’ve magic that can deal with them,” said Brackta.
“So many?”
“Two archmages of the League of Shadows can destroy a city,” said Ginalli. “We have that, plus Par Sevare. We can manage them, though we’ll need your swords to assist.”
The dwellers joined in the high priest's incantation, and the ground shook from the power of their call. The lesser priests picked up the conch shells filled of blood and held them before the black pool. At the appointed time, they tipped the shells and poured the fresh blood, the blood of man, into the depths of that evil pit, their alien song droned on all the while.
After a time, the water in the pool began to roil and bubble. At once, the pace and volume of the dwellers' song increased. The chanting reached a manic, dizzying pace. The sounds so loud, so pounding that the men covered their ears and prayed for its end. The dwellers’ magic permeated the air. The men’s bodies shook and vibrated. It was hard to breathe. Their heads felt as if they would explode. Soon the water sloshed over the altar, and then, at the very height of the skirling song, a geyser of crimson water burst forth and shot far into the air, far above the top of the rise, and a great black form followed in its wake, rising out of the well, propelling from the lightless depths. The creature rose up and up, out of the black murk, massive and dark, an otherworldly reptilian monstrosity, a thing of blackest nightmare and fevered babblings, higher and higher it rose, its bulk immense, and the world knew despair, for before them arrived the Old One, Dagon of the Deep.