The portal swung inward with a dull grinding, and disappointment seeped into Garth's breast as he saw darkness beyond. It was not the total, absolute blackness of the tunnel and stair he had just traversed, but it was obviously not the daylight he had hoped for, either.
Nonetheless, he saw little choice. He stepped forward through the door.
To his surprise, he felt a cold, damp breeze on his cheek and realized that he was, indeed, out of the crypts and on one of the stone-paved streets of the city. The darkness was the darkness of night; he had taken longer than he had thought to find his way through the underground passages. Low-hanging clouds obscured the moon and stars, but enough diffuse illumination reached him from the surrounding city to let him make out the immediate area.
He did not recognize the street he was on; there were no lighted torches or bright windows to help him in making out details. The area was quiet and seemed utterly deserted. Since he was unsure of the hour, he could not be sure whether this atmosphere was natural and ordinary.
It occurred to him that he might have come up into one of the ruinous districts, but what little he could make out of the buildings around him displayed no signs of decay or abandonment. Doors were all secure on their hinges and tightly closed, save for the one he had just emerged from, which was located near the corner of a large, old house. Looking back at it, Garth guessed that, when closed, the door would blend in with the ornate stonework and appear to be just part of the wall. He stepped out onto the street, away from the shelter of the wall, and looked about.
An orange glow lit the sky in several places above the surrounding rooftops; Garth could not decide whether it was the normal torchlight of the city going about its business, or something brighter and more sinister. It was the only sign of life he could see; the street he was on was dark and empty for as far as he could see-not that that was very far, since, like most human streets, it curved out of sight in a block or two in either direction.
Sounds reached him, sounds he could not readily identify; he heard a distant crashing, and what might have been voices shouting somewhere, and beneath it all a dull, low-pitched rumbling.
He turned, listening, and decided that the rumbling and crashing came primarily from what he judged to be the northwest, while the voices were on several sides. Furthermore, the rumbling seemed to be approaching; at any rate, it was growing louder.
He wondered what was going on. Did this eerie situation of deserted streets and strange sounds relate to the freeing of the monster? Might it have something to do with the Book of Silence? It seemed ominous; although he saw no obvious damage to the buildings around him, he suspected that, once again, he had triggered widespread destruction. He hoped that there were Aghadites among the victims.
Now that he was aboveground again, and fairly certain that he could find food and water, he was curious. He suppressed his thirst, tucked the book more tightly under his arm, then turned and headed north, toward the rumbling.
As he did, he realized that he was actually very thirsty indeed, and hungry as well, but he did not turn aside. He might obtain food and water by breaking into one of the buildings, but he was not yet desperate and preferred to obtain them legally. Where there was sound, there was life, as a general rule, so he hoped that he would be able to find someone who could feed him if he headed toward the rumbling.
With that in mind, he quickened his pace, so that it took him a moment to stop when he turned a corner and found himself facing a scene out of a nightmare.
The city was ablaze ahead of him, or as much of it as could burn in a community built primarily of raw granite. Towering over the burning buildings stood the monster from the crypts, upright on two legs, with a wagonload of screaming hogs clutched in its claws, the traces whereby the wagon had been drawn dangling from one side. As Garth watched, the behemoth jammed the animals into its gaping mouth and bit down; the remaining fragments of the wagon fell out of sight with a distant crashing.
The horn on the creature's nose gleamed a sickly reddish yellow in the firelight, a thin line of black trailing down one side where its ichor ran. Its eyes blazed golden and seemed to Garth to be alight with madness. Its hide was wrinkled and black, its body shaped like nothing the overman had ever seen before. It was vaguely humanoid, in that it stood upright and used its forward limbs to grasp, but it had a hunched, ugly shape, its body proportions closer to those of a bull than to those of a man-though no bull had ever stood upon such hind legs, each as thick around as a castle tower, and no bull had such talons, long, agile fingers ending in vicious, curving claws.
The thing stood easily a hundred feet high; in fact, Garth estimated that it must have had to crouch down, badly cramped, to fit into the chamber that had held it for so long. The rumbling sound that had drawn him issued from the creature, though whether from its heart or its belly Garth was unsure.
With the hind legs of a pig still trailing from its jaws, the monster turned and reached down toward something Garth could not see over the intervening buildings. It seemed to struggle, like a man pulling at a stubborn root; then, with a tearing, crumbling roar, it lifted up the complete upper floor of a house.
The stones held together for a brief moment, then crumbled and fell through the creature's claws like sand through the fingers of a child, leaving it holding a pitiful assortment of roofing tiles, bedroom hangings, and broken furniture. It flung them aside and reached down again.
Garth had seen enough. He could do nothing at all against this monster by himself; it would take magic to destroy it.
He was determined, however, that it had to be destroyed. He had not seen it kill anyone since it first burst up through the floor, but it was doing incredible amounts of damage, and he could scarcely doubt that it had killed any number of people, perhaps without even meaning to, in making its way through the city. The creature was his responsibility, the overman told himself; he had ventured where he should not have gone, and it had been awakened as a result. He had brought destruction again, as he always did when he agreed to aid the Forgotten King.
He knew what could destroy it, he was sure; nothing could stand against the Sword of Bheleu. That would befitting, using the tool of the god of destruction to kill such a destroyer. That would not atone for freeing the thing in the first place, but it would put the Sword of Bheleu to constructive use. If for any reason the sword should fail, the Forgotten King might well be able to use the Book of Silence against the monster.
He, Garth, could not use the book; he could not read it. He did not have the sword. The sword and the one who could read the book were both in Skelleth. Any doubts he had about swapping the book for the sword had vanished. He was still concerned about the possibility of the King's bringing on the Fifteenth Age, but that was mere theory, while this rampaging beast was a fact. Furthermore, he was certain that the King required more than the Book of Silence for his final magic.
He had to get to Skelleth without delay. His campaign against the cult of Aghad could wait; this monster was a far more immediate threat to the safety of innocents. The time he had spent in making his way through the crypts, or in his leisurely exploration of the creature's prison, or in the King's little chapel, now seemed to have been horribly wasted; the monster had probably killed dozens or even hundreds of people during that period. Even the time he had lain unconscious now seemed unforgivable.
He wondered how he could have been so thoughtless as to have not given the monster's whereabouts and behavior his immediate attention. Even as he spun and headed eastward on a side street, he berated himself for allowing such destruction.
He did not know the city, nor where in it he had found himself, but he knew that the gate where he had left Koros was near the easternmost extremity; for that reason, he kept heading east whenever possible. Almost immediately, he passed through an area where the creature had obviously already been; many of the buildings were stamped flat, the rubble ground into powder against the granite streets. In places, the streets were indistinguishable from the buildings. Garth marveled that none had collapsed into the crypts which, he knew, honeycombed the entire area beneath the city.
He passed several fires, varying from a few smoldering curtains thrown in an alley to conflagrations consuming entire blocks. Only very rarely did he see any humans, and then it was merely a fleeting glimpse of someone vanishing behind a closing shutter or fleeing around the corner of a building. Nowhere were the streets lighted by the usual torches or lanterns, and the shops and houses were dark.
This both reassured and disturbed him; most of the population had obviously fled from the city, which was probably a very good thing, but why, he wondered, were the few stragglers avoiding him? Did they assume him to have some connection with the monster, or to be a threat in his own right by virtue of his species?
Finally he reached the steep slope that led up to the eastern wall of the city, but he had not managed to arrive at the gate. After some study of the surrounding buildings, the firelit rooflines and the parapet of the city wall in particular, Garth decided he was north of his intended destination and turned right.
A walk of four blocks south, complicated by dodging around in the tangled web of streets, brought him to the central avenue and the remembered steps. There, however, he stopped, hanging back out of sight around a corner.
The steps were not deserted, as the streets had been. Instead, what looked like the entire city guard was ranged on them, illuminated by hundreds of torches. Perhaps half were just standing and looking watchful, while the other half were coming and going and bustling about. Garth could not decide what they were doing; part of it seemed to be gathering in stragglers and escorting them up to the gate, but that did not account for all the movement.
Crowds of civilians were still in the area; the overman noticed them streaming in and out of one large building, under the gaze of a row of torch-bearing soldiers.
Whatever was happening, there seemed to be a fair measure of order and organization to it; Garth saw no signs of screaming panic and no bodies lying in the streets. That was promising.
It was important that there should be order, because this was the only way he knew that would get him out of the city; he would have to pass through that array of soldiery and do it peacefully. Had it been a desperate mob, that would have been virtually impossible. They might well have panicked at the sight of him.
Having assessed the situation, he saw no reason for further delay. He stepped from concealment and marched purposefully toward the gate.
As he had half expected, several people noticed him immediately, and a cry went up. "An overman! There's an overman here!"
To Garth's dismay, he could also make out shouts of "Kill the overman! It's another monster!" Other voices muttered and babbled, and he was sure that, despite the outward semblance of calm, this crowd could easily degenerate into a raging mob.
Several of the soldiers had noticed him as well, and one, an officer, was approaching.
"Ho, there!" Garth called. "How goes it?"
"Who in hell are you?" the soldier replied.
"I am Garth of Ordunin; I was a guest of your overlord, but became lost and have only now found my way here."
The man looked uncertain. "What do you want?" he asked.
"To pass through the gate."
The soldier nodded, as if that were what he should have expected. "You'll have to wait your turn," he said.
That was disconcerting. "I think," Garth said carefully, "that it would be wise to let me through immediately." He did not want to seem arrogant, or to take any action that might start trouble, but he also did not want to wait in line; every minute he was delayed from returning to Skelleth meant another minute of the monster's rampage.
"You can wait like anybody else, damn you," the soldier replied.
Garth started to protest, but a call from the dark at the top of the stair interrupted him.
"Have you got an overman down there?" someone yelled.
Startled, the soldier who had stopped Garth turned and looked. The call was repeated.
"We've got an overman here, yes," the officer called back.
"Is it the one who owns this damned animal out here?"