"Start with the biggest one?" Kamahl asked. Chainer nodded, and the two of them charged forward dodging vines and screaming monkeys.
"Okay if I kill a few of these screaming, hairy buggers?" Kamahl shouted. A wolf-monkey had pounced on him and was resisting his efforts to throw it off.
"As many as you need to," Chainer said. He didn't even make a chain, he simply reached out and crushed the monkey's skull with his metal hand. The body shimmered and disappeared into Chainer's arm. "I've got the one I need." His eyes were black, and he touched his clenched fist to his forehead. "For Skellum."
Another monkey threw itself at Kamahl. The barbarian chopped it in half with his broadsword without breaking stride. He turned and channeled a blast of fire through his blade at the wurm. The legless dragon screeched in pain, but the blast did little more than singe its skin. It held its ground however, unwilling to risk another blast from closer range.
Chainer rolled away from the centaur's club and whipped a collar around its neck. The man-horse reared up and jerked the chain out of Chainer's hand, and the collar faded as soon as Chainer lost contact with it. Chainer sprinted past the centaur to engage the grendelkin as Kamahl was keeping the tiger and the wurm at bay with blasts of flame. The man-horse galloped after Chainer as fast as the underbrush would allow, with his club raised high overhead.
Chainer had a bigger problem with a bigger club, however. The grendelkin would not move away from the edge of the copse, and he was waving his tree trunk like a scythe in front of him. Chainer couldn't get in under the tree to attack, and the centaur was bearing down on him from behind.
Chainer jumped as high as he could over the grendelkin's next wild swing and latched himself onto the end of the tree with a collar chain. The grendelkin waved its club with Chainer trailing behind it like the tail of a kite. At the apex of the grendelkin's swing, Chainer sent a sharpened weight into the organic seam between two of the armored plates on the grendelkin's back. Chainer let go of the chain that linked him to the tree, and hauled himself onto the grendelkin.
"Eat this," he snarled at the centaur, and unleashed the death bloom directly into the back of the grendelkin's skull. The monster choked in mid-roar and froze with its hand poised to crush Chainer like a stinging fly. Except for the monkeys, who were in constant motion and never stopped screaming, every sentient thing in the area stopped and stared at the dead grendelkin, waiting to see which way it would topple.
Unfortunately for the centaur, Chainer's plan of letting the grendelkin fall forward worked perfectly. Killing the grendelkin removed Chainer and Kamahl's main adversary. Letting its body fall removed five more as the centaur, the tiger, and three of the wolf- monkeys were crushed by the three-ton carcass.
Chainer rode the grendelkin through all obstacles as it crashed to the forest floor. He spiked a short chain into the top of the creature's spine, shuddered, and the giant corpse disappeared up into Chainer's body like liquid through a sucking straw. Instead of falling, Chainer floated, surrounded by a whirling cloud of dust and black light. He felt a bomb go off in his head, and he felt a body-wide sensation similar to when the justicar fried him. Chainer screamed.
Kamahl had blinded the wurm with his broadsword and was preparing to behead the floundering thing when Chainer cried out. He hesitated, then brought his sword down and leaped away from the thrashing coils. As Chainer continued to float and scream, Kamahl felt something angry shift inside the copse of trees. A half-dozen wolf-monkeys still howled on the battlefield, and the trees themselves were starting to move, stretching their branches down and reaching for Chainer and Kamahl. From inside the cluster of trees, a bald human figure came forward. The chanting druid held a crude pine torch in one hand and a thorny bough of red berries in the other. He was painted with bright yellow markings, and a crown of ivy spread from his head down past his shoulders.
As the first tree limb touched the nimbus around Chainer, his scream grew higher and more shrill, building to a crescendo of transcendent agony. Inside the cloud, Chainer turned his black eye sockets toward the encroaching branch. He crossed his arms over his chest, then snapped them down his sides and thrust his head back.
A half-dozen chains leaped from all parts of his body, each lashing straight into the throat of a jabbering wolf-monkey. With his body rigid and his eyes unseeing, Chainer brought all of the monkeys together in front of him with a nauseous splat. He leveled his eyes at the horrid sight he had created and smiled.
The six wolf-monkeys were mashed together like soft clay figurines. Limbs, tails, torsos, and heads were all bent and mashed together, merging into one giant gob of flesh and teeth with no dis-cernable top, bottom, inside, or out. The ones with functioning mouths wailed piteously. Chainer's smile grew savage and cruel under his hollow eyes. Then the entire mass of monkeys burst like a balloon and disappeared in a puff of smoke.
The druid's chant grew louder, and he hurled the thorns into the air. With no animal defenders left, the trees and vines redoubled their efforts to take hold of the intruders.
"Kamahl," Chainer's echoing, musical voice called. "Do it!" Kamahl raised his axe and charged it. He held it by his ear until steam started rising from his hand, and then he cast it high overhead, dropping it into the middle of the copse. Two seconds later, the entire copse was engulfed in bright orange flames, and the druid vanished in a cloud of flame and soot. Debris rained down all around them, and Kamahl took shelter behind the dead wurm. Chainer was less fortunate. A jagged chunk of wood slammed into him, knocking him out of the air and onto the ground.
He heard Skellum's last words again. Remember how I died.
"Always, Master," Chainer whispered, tears falling from the black space where his eyes had been. "I will always remember." And then he fell unconscious to the forest floor.*****
Chainer awoke under the mustard sky. He knew he was dreaming, he could see his body from the outside as he scanned the landscape. The hole in the sky had run almost dry, only releasing an occasional drop. The red sea broke on the shore, driven by storm winds and earthquake rumbles.
Monsters milled around him in their hundreds, stretching out in all directions. They did not react to Chainer's presence but seemed to be in a state of torpor as they shuffled and bumped into one another.
There was a new addition to the landscape in Chainer's mind. The horizon was now broken by a broad, squat mountain whose peak glowed like a star. Chainer shielded his eyes against the glare and tried to focus on the peak. He must be dreaming, for the mountain was shrinking down to meet him, bowing its peak like a servant bows its head.
An indistinct figure sat on a throne at the mountain's peak, backlit by a sphere of harsh purple light. Dazzled by the mad perspective as much as the purple light, Chainer could not determine how far away the figure was, if it were humanoid, male or female. He could see the mountain, however, and he saw that it was not made of rock or mounded earth, but of currency. Huge piles of golden coins and silver markers were heaped on top of one another to create a single pyramid that stretched impossibly high into the sky. The figure leaned forward on its throne.
"Kuberr?" Chainer whispered. Was this what Skellum had wanted him to see? His mentor had sworn frequent oaths to Kuberr over the years. Did he have a vision of the wealth god as part of the shikar ritual?
Mazeura. The figure's voice was deep and sonorous, and it blasted Chainer's secret name through his head so violently that he felt blood trickling out his ears. It's a dream, he reminded himself. It's all a dream.