A broad-shouldered man wearing a fur cloak steps from the shadows, carrying an iron club dotted with studs. At his side stands a young albino girl, wearing a pink dress that highlights the softness of her colorless face and her pastel eyes. Two daggers are thrust into a sash at her waist, which is tied into a bow at her back. A single pink rose is woven into her snowy white hair.
The soldiers at the temple doors look at each other nervously. They see the black horns curving up from the giant's head, and a scar in the shape of a thick malformed handprint nestled between them. The soldiers' numbers have been thinned in recent days, so these troops are part-timers and washouts from training, misfits who have dropped out or been kicked out, but who now find themselves called up for duty. Soldiers have been found dead throughout the city, whether ambushed when reliving themselves in a shadowed part of the street, waylaid in an alley, or killed in their sleep. None of these failures would be here if the wages had not been doubled, something that is easy to do when the number of dead troops who need not be paid has freed up more more money for salaries.
“Halt right there!” The soldier's nervousness is betrayed when his voice cracks.
The albino girl draws both daggers.
A soldier at the back of the line decides to throw his spear from the back of the pack, then advance with his saber. That is when I drop from the wall above him.
I catch his head as I fall and break his neck when my feet hit. I fling him into his comrades at the front of the line, so that they must spin around to contend with the threat behind them, which is when Taur charges. Liana follows in his shadow, letting the colossal man clear a path. I bat aside a spear with my tail, and the soldiers ruefully learn that their spears are suitable weapons when pointed at adversaries across the street but are no use in close quarters combat.
I spray acid into the face of one soldier, who is taken out by Liana's daggers in both kidneys. Sensing the blade behind her, she sidesteps, lets the point pass, then parries and thrusts.
Taur's club has not been idle, but has been crushing the opposition, striking powerfully against panicked men who are trying to wield their spears against a giant in their faces. Taur headbutts one man, then rips the soldier's throat with his tip of his horn as he turns. The bull man snaps the butt of his club into one soldier's face, smashing his teeth, then drops down the end of the club by pulling the handle down into his abdomen. Despite the soldier's helmet, the impact of the blow stuns him, and he falls to the pavement, where the small albino girl weaves among the fighting men and their long spears to deliver a finishing thrust with her daggers.
At the sight of his fallen companions, and the sound of their dying moans, one soldier spins and starts to run. Taur raises his bat and shouts, “Tell them what happened here!”
“You're not going to finish him off?” I ask the big man.
“No. You always leave one to tell his story. If you kill them all, people who arrive have to figure it out.” The bull man wipes his bloody club on the leggings of a fallen soldier. “But leave a survivor, and his terror scares everyone who hears his tale, which grows with the telling.”
“I like how you think.” I spring up to the wall over the threshold and enter the temple by crawling upside down.
“You were supposed to enter through the upper floor windows or a balcony.” Liana wipes her daggers clean and enters the temple behind the large man.
“The windows are all barred.” As I enter the temple I remain on the wall. “Notice we just passed through double doors. By the time we reach the inner doors, the outer doors have closed.”
“It's an aviary,” Liana says, looking up in awe at the ceiling, where the orange-furred bats circle, then land beside adherents who lie on mats.
A misconception of vampires and vampire bats is that they have fangs that they use to drink blood as if through hypodermic needles. Taur, Liana, and I witness the reality in action, when one of the furred bats with the head of a fox dips his head down and uses flat incisors to scrape the skin at the victim's neck, in this case a woman with a shaved head and snake tattoos covering her almost nude body. The bat's flat teeth slice away a thin layer of skin as if with a scalpel, and the bat's narrow red tongue repeatedly dips into the pool of blood at the wound to lap it up.
“These people are sick,” Taur observes, shaking his head. “Why would they do that?”
“Look at her eyes,” I tell my companions. The woman's previously clear eyes have become glassy, and the pupils dilated.
“She's drugged.” Liana looks at the snake woman closely. “Probably something in the bat's saliva has a narcotic effect so the victim doesn't wake or fight back.”
After I give Taur the nod, he whacks his stone club against the marble floor several times, and I see that we have everyone's attention. The temple is not only filled with the scarred devotees who come to have the bats lap at their bleeding wounds but adherents with the most severe body modification I have yet seen, with arms or legs amputated, legs and fingers sewn together, ears cut off, tongues split, and scales tattooed from their shaved heads to their feet. Many of them are naked to display their work, and gather around a towering statue of the snake goddess in the form of a stone cobra rising twenty or so feet above the floor where they lie in adoration, both praising and beseeching Ashera.
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As odd as these freaks are, no one has seen the likes of us, a giant bull man with horns, an albino girl, and a walking gecko. Silence falls over the temple as worshipers stop to gawk at us.
“People of the bat kingdom!” I shout. “I have spoken with your king and promised him your deliverance. Today this scripture is fulfilled in your presence: Grant me power that I may deliver the oppressed and free the captives.”
“Who are you?” a snake woman cries out. The tips of her split tongue quiver in her anger.
“We are followers of Lord Riyel, believers in God the Healer, whose temple you have usurped.” I reply as I scamper along the wall to a statue of Ashera, which stands in the shadow of the towering cobra idol. “Look at how you've disfigured and maimed yourselves. You're a bunch of fakes imitating your fake snake goddess, who's just a generic demon.”
“I am a reptile!” she screams. Some have so thoroughly mutilated themselves that they can only flop on their mats in response.
“Sorry, but you're more skank than skink,” I retort and I'm surprised when the line falls flat. I thought it was really clever, but obviously it didn't translate well from English to Siskalian. Even Taur and Liana give me blank looks, and I'm thinking I could use a drum splash right now—buh-dum-tssss. “Trust me, being a reptile isn't as fun as it sounds. I can't even urinate.”
“Kill him and eat his flesh!” an obese man shrieks, whose bloated face is even more unnerving by the fact that he's had his eyelids removed. It's hardly surprising that he's thinking about eating.
“You don't want a gecko, fatso. We taste terrible.” I have hopped from the walls and am now perched on the head and shoulders of the Ashera statue. “What you want is a water monitor. They taste like chicken.”
“Chicken?” A bald woman with metal studs in her face and overly long ivory fangs gives me a puzzled look.
“Chukkar,” I reply. What kind of hellhole planet doesn't have chicken?
“Chukkar?”
“Sage grouse?” I offer and am met by knowing looks. “How can you improve your body by cutting it? If you can't create a human, what makes you think you can improve on one?” I ask from my perch atop the idol.
Liana and Taur have moved to stand with their backs to the statue so that they can face an increasingly agitated and incensed crowd of worshipers and deformed mock-reptiles.
“Can I improve this statue of Ashera by breaking off its arm?” I ask rhetorically, and the crowd breaks into a roar.
Go with the scriptures, Vic. Resting both hands on Ashera's cold stone head, I begin to sing...
God made the tree breathe and stretch to the heavens
but they killed it to carve a dead image
of a false god.
They cannot bear the burden of their statues.
The stones will revolt against their idolatry
and their idols will crush them.
I see that some of the Red Riot have entered the temple, robed and masked. I still rest on the stone shoulders of the Ashera image, who is carved as a fertile, voluptuous woman, wearing open robes giving an alluring view of her large breasts. That is the point, of course. Ashera is the temptress, offering sensual pleasures to her followers and the allure of taking a new form as a reptile, which is seen as a symbol of power.
The queen appears on the balcony, drawing all eyes upward. She is a short woman with dark eyes and a weak, chubby face. Her skin is covered in boils, which might explain why her cape is a black gossamer fabric. Beside her stands a tall, thin woman who looks more substantial because she is clad in silver armor, polished to a lustrous gleam.
“My subjects and followers of Ashera!” The queen addresses the group but seems to shrink into her cape. “Today we will find who is the true reptile, and who is false!”
The crowd cheers, with the Red Riot hoisting their weapons and the disfigured lying on mats as “snakes” making pathetic hissing noises.
“Will the lizard man accept the challenge and stand against my champion, Ashera's chosen?” The queen looks at me with her beady eyes set in dark sockets. Her hateful sneer makes her boil covered face even uglier.
The crowd cheers.
I want to correct her and yell, “It's gecko man, you ignorant dwarf!” but I realize it's no use. Some day when this is all over I will launch an education campaign to make certain that no child leaves school without knowing the obvious differences between a gecko and a lizard.
I proclaim loudly, “I accept in the name of God the Healer, whose temple you have overrun!”
The tall woman in armor looks at the queen, and I realize that they are lovers. The armored woman climbs the railing and seizes a red serpent banner, which tears under her weight when she swings over and falls, gradually lowering herself to the floor as the fabric rips, where she lands with a clink of her metal-shod feet on the stone while drawing her double-edged sword.
I give her points for the dramatic entrance. I leap from the statue and spray acid from my snout in midair, but she drops her visor with her left hand, so that the mist lands on the plating and rises in a caustic vapor. She swings her sword one-handed with her right arm, forcing me to twist my body as I sail through the air. Thank God the Healer that I am flexible, because I just missed the blade by pulling a Keannu Reaves Matrix bend.
She kicks with her foot, forcing me into a leap and barrel roll, so that I come down beside her. Having regained her footing, she swings her sword again, but I leap back. She swings her sword back and forth, creating a broad path, while kicking on the off beat. She draws a short sword and holds it high while sweeping her sword in front of her This combination of low slicing cuts forces me back, but the high guard short sword keeps my from leaping over her swings and attacking her head and neck, which is further complicated by the fact that she's wearing full armor.
I'm forced to deflect a swing of her sword by using my manacled wrist. I parry the blade, but the tip nicks me on the way out. Sword and knife fighting is always clean in the movies, but you just can't start swinging blades without someone getting cut.
I scamper backwards to evade a swing of the sword when my hind legs suddenly fall. My forelimbs grasp the stone floor, but my snout is met by a kick with a metal clad foot. I jerk my head to the side, so I only catch a glancing blow, but I am knocked back and fall into a pit. My wide eyes on the side of my head, coupled with my low-light vision give me a clear view.
I am falling into a pit of vipers.