“Move!”
That word came from Greenleaf, who shouted in Gord’s ear at the same instant that the thief’s muscles came back to life. He had not felt the druid’s initial touch, but now the healing magic had worked, and he could fend for himself again!
“Thank you,” was all he could get out before the druid dashed off to go to the barbarian’s side. Gord stood and moved carefully to gain a position where he could attack without fear of interfering with his friends. Within a few steps, the last vestiges of stiffness left his limbs, and he felt as fit as he had before.
Gord could see that Curley Greenleaf was touching Chert, just as he had ministered to Gord moments earlier. At that moment the bear gave an awful roar, shuddered, and lay still. The scaly demon stood up, pulling free from the embrace of the mortally wounded Yurgh. The cataboligne was torn by tooth and claw in several places, and yellow-green ichor dripped from its wounds. Throwing its head back in triumph, the cataboligne howled a cry of victory. Filled with bloodlust, it ignored the men and reached down to break and crush the bear. Just then, Chert struck again.
The first swing of his humming axe only grazed the demon’s right arm that was reaching for Yurgh’s motionless body. But the barbarian recovered quickly, and the weapon’s backswing took the demon on its other arm, putting a deep gash in it. The demon bellowed again, but this time its shout was not triumphant.
“Come on, you blue bugger, fight me!” Chert challenged.
The demon accepted, spinning with catlike speed and swiping its uninjured arm in a clawed blow which tore into the barbarian’s chest, unbalancing him and allowing the towering monster to use its wounded arm to strike and hold Chert. The demon’s long claws sank into his flesh, but the barbarian was not finished. He worked his right arm free and struck again.
“Brool!” he managed to cry, as the battle-axe again impacted on the demon’s severely wounded left arm. This time the blade bit true, and the limb was severed from the monster’s body. With a shriek, the cataboligne leapt off and away from Chert, grabbed up its lost arm, and held it up against the place from which it had been severed. As Gord watched with a mixture of fascination and horror, the demon’s sickening ichor flooded over and into the twitching arm, and a blurring seemed to occur around the wound. The demon was reattaching its lost limb!
Gord was moving up to stab the monster while its attention was elsewhere, but before he was close enough to do so, a sheet of roaring flame sprang up between him and the demon. It was said that such creatures revel in fire, but evidently this one didn’t. The thing roared in anger when the flames appeared, but continued to concentrate on repairing its arm.
At first the fire seemed hesitant to approach the demon’s body, almost as if something prevented it from coming near. The crackling fire danced in a ring encompassing the monster, and all the while it kept working on its arm. The flames went out for a second and then reappeared, this time in a blazing mass that enveloped the thing and threatened to consume it-but too late! Now whole again, the creature raised its arms and brought them down, and as they lowered, the flames dimmed and began to die. Scorched and smoking, the demon strode forward away from the last licking tongues of fire. As the last of the flames died, so did the greenish luminescence that had swathed the demon, again making the thing invisible to those without special sight.
Not hampered by the lack of light, Greenleaf advanced toward the monster, stopping less than a spear’s length away and adopting a defiant stance. Chert was off to one side, back on his feet but obviously still trying to recover from the onslaught he had suffered, and now once more left in the dark.
Thanks to his sword, of course, Gord could still see. As demon and druid confronted each other, Gord circled stealthily around on the side opposite Chert until he was behind the creature’s field of vision. He continued to creep as the monster spoke.
“Little druid, your useless spells are nothing to me. I would have used my powers to destroy all of you long before this, but I enjoy breaking such miserable creatures as you with my bare hands!” The demon was speaking softly, with malign persuasiveness, but Greenleaf stood immobile in front of the thing, spear held in both hands before him, refusing to flinch or show fear.
“Humans beg so wonderfully, and shriek and cry when I slowly pull and break them…. What fun, what joy!” the cataboligne continued to purr evilly. One blue, clawed hand reached out slowly in Greenleaf’s direction. “Perhaps I will make you into a replacement for my last servant, the one you thoughtlessly destroyed above, when I finally go free from this prison to-”
“Shitmouth!” Greenleaf shouted as he stabbed his spear into the demon’s slowly reaching hand. “You think I am taken with your foul enchantments of voice? Take that!” And so saying, the druid struck again, this time tearing the other grabbing hand with the keen spearhead.
By this time, Gord had reached his destination behind the monster. Recoiling from the two painful spear attacks, the cataboligne backed full into Gord’s own assault. Its lower back was unprotected and unprepared, and both shortsword and long dagger went home, driven in to their hilts by the young thief’s muscles and the demon’s own motion.
For a second, the monster continued backward, convulsed with the shock of the assault. Then it jerked forward. The dagger was yanked from the grip of Gord’s left hand by the sudden move, but the sword held fast in his other hand, and a geyser of stinking ichor shot out as the enchanted blade tore free of the wound. Howling and yelling the foulest curses, the monster turned to lunge at its new tormentor.
“Now, Chert, at him!” said the druid in wrathful voice, as he cast a second spell to renew the glowing on and around the demon.
The first thing Chert saw was the demon turned away from him with one clawed hand pointing upward-and Gord suspended in mid-air, several feet away from the claws and some thirty feet above the cavern floor. Without stopping to think about what he beheld, the wounded barbarian pounced forward and sunk his great axe into the monster’s thigh once again. Curley Greenleaf followed with a spear-thrust into the demon’s other leg a split-second later. The two blows hurt the creature seriously and broke its spell. Gord plummeted to the stone below. He managed to come down on his feet, tumbled to absorb most of the force of impact, rolled away, and came up shaken but not seriously harmed.
The demon was now terribly hurt, but it was not ready to break off and seek escape. Confined in this underground place for centuries, the monster was no longer sane-if any such thing can ever be said to have sanity. Its desire was to inflict pain and death now. This malign wish had pervaded the demon’s existence, but never with such irrationality as now when it was itself suffering the pain it loved to wreak on its victims. Forgetting about its magical powers, despising flight, ignoring the knowledge that it was able to pass the door which formerly held it imprisoned, the cataboligne sought only to kill the humans challenging it, and to do so most hideously.
Even as its body toppled forward, crippled legs no longer able to support it, the demon grabbed for the barbarian and took Chert down beside it with a swipe of its claws. The other arm lashed out for Curley Greenleaf and scooped his body in close where the demon could maul the druid with its fangs.
The sight of his friends being bloodied drove Gord into a rage. He ran forward without reservation and began raining a furious series of cuts and stabs down upon the scaly back of the prone demon. Some of the blows glanced off the thick plates of horn that covered the cataboligne, and others were not serious wounds-mere scrapes and pricks to the mountain of malign substance receiving the blows. Nonetheless, over a period of time that could not have been nearly as long as it seemed, Gord’s small sword wrought a terrible tattoo on the demon’s hide. Bluish flesh parted in places, and filthy ichor spewed forth under the razor-sharp edge and needlelike point of the young adventurer’s dripping blade.