SHANNA AND THE TERROR OF THE RED PRIESTESS

By Meriades Rai

“He’s one of the last of his kind. Perhaps the last. The man-ape Maa-Gor, scourge of the Savage Land, had hunted the sabertooths mercilessly, almost to extinction – and he would have slain me too if not for Zabu.”

Kevin Plunder had related the tale of his meeting with the tiger who would become his closest companion many times, but Shanna had first heard it in the warm shadows of a fetid, snake-infested swamp late one evening, on one of the rare occasions that man and cat had become separated by circumstance. The story was of how Zabu the sabertooth had encountered the young boy who would one day become Ka-Zar, and how he’d subsequently appointed himself the child’s guardian. He was first a surrogate father to the orphaned child and then, as Kevin had attained adulthood, Zabu was his brother – and friend. Never a pet, always an equal. A bond of the soul, even stronger than that of blood.

Zabu had felt Ka-Zar’s death every bit as keenly as Shanna The She-Devil, perhaps – given their longer history – even more so. Now that she was here, in Zabu’s mountaintop cave where the sabertooth had dwelt in hermitage for the past ten months, Shanna’s resolve in seeking out her old ally dwindled. Was it fair to do this, to share the misery that had settled about her like a black cloak since she’d encountered the woman, Doctor Madeleine Presley? Because it was misery; after all, there was no more potent begetter of sorrow than hope.

Shanna gazed upon Zabu now, in the shadowed interior of the beast’s cave eerie-lit by the phosphorent mosses that draped the walls, and she felt nothing but regret for setting foot upon the mountain trail – not least because of the injuries she’d suffered in her recent battle with a pack of dire wolves, injuries that would have seen her perish if not for the enhanced durability and healing capabilities of her physiology. No, it was the look in Zabu’s deep, agate eyes that filled her with shame.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That I led the drach here, inadvertently or not. If I’d known your… situation, I would never…”

She shook her head, staring out through the fringe of her fiery auburn hair not with her customary defiance but with genuine contrition. She looked at Zabu, a magnificent specimen of a giant cat three times as large as a normal tiger, with banded fur of one shade of gold upon another like the ripple of tall grasses in a summer wind, his coloring so subtle that the striping across his powerful back and haunches were nigh impossible to discern. When Shanna had been a little girl back in Africa she’d marveled at the size of the big cats, gigantic and magical in her eyes as so many things are to a child of four years of age; now a grown woman she’d always looked upon Zabu with that same awe and admiration.

But now, here in this cave, another reason for amazement. Maa-Gor the murderous apeman had not butchered every last sabertooth save for one – for, after all these years, Zabu had found another. Perhaps he’d never really searched with true heart before, already having a companion in Ka-Zar, but now – old, lost, so terribly saddened – the cat had sought a mate. A female sabertooth lurked at the back of the save, sleek and guarded but still huge. She regarded Shanna with suspicion, despite Zabu’s obvious approval of the two-legs in their midst, and Shanna could appreciate why.

Any mother would be protective of her litter of cubs, especially when some fool human tempted drachlu’pa into their territory.

“I’m sorry,” Shanna said again, softly, gazing wide-eyed upon this miracle of nature. Five golden cubs – about six months old, Shanna approximated – were lined up behind their mother’s legs, each taking a turn to pop their heads forward, so full of curiosity that they were almost bursting, before being persuaded to shuffle back into formation by a swat of a shielding paw.

Why have you come here, Shanna?

Zabu couldn’t speak the human language but that didn’t mean he couldn’t communicate. His intelligence was augmented far beyond that of a normal animal due to exposure to radioactive mists many years before, and the tiger had enjoyed nigh-telepathic understanding with Ka-Zar. Shanna was familiar enough with her old friend’s mannerisms – the set of his head, the cast of his eyes, and so many other nuances – that traditional speech simply wasn’t required. The cat’s reproach was clear enough.

“A stranger’s come,” Shanna said. “An outsider. She has a story to tell.”

Zabu’s eyes narrowed. Shanna grimaced. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“She says Kevin is still alive, and according to a message he requested be delivered, he wants me to meet him in Prague…”

Three hundred and eleven days ago.

“Share with me the secret location of the Mandragorgona Helix, jungle lord… and I’ll allow you to die!”

The Red Priestess’s cinnabar-stained lips were warm at Ka-Zar’s ear, but he barely heard the young woman’s whispered promise above the sound of his own cries of agony. No that it mattered – the Priestess had been voicing that same pledge over and over in the two days that Kevin Plunder had been held captive in the witch’s cavern lair, and it was true that only her mystic artistry was keeping him alive when he should have been dead. Ka-Zar was a warrior born, however. Two days of torture and he hadn’t broken… yet.

The Red Priestess scowled as her blond foe strained his powerful muscles against his bonds of thickly woven rope and bamboo, and she shook her head in despair when the godless savage turned his face towards her just so that he could spit at his tormentor’s boots. Such obstinacy was… remarkable. And infuriating. What would it take for this fool’s spirit to be shattered?

“Lower him again,” the Priestess snarled. “Longer this time – but make sure he doesn’t die. My healing spells can keep him alive even in his agonies, but they can’t resurrect him. Once dead he will remain dead…”

On the far side of the pit where the trussed Ka-Zar was suspended from an overhead strut on four lengths of rope, two mutated Neanderthals did as bidden by their mistress. Their truncated bodies corded with misshapen muscle as they turned a large wooden wheel, rotating a winch that slowly lowered their captive’s helpless body into a deep well filled with a seething, shimmering mass of red and black. The cavern was filled with excited hissing, the result of hundreds of thousands of tiny, chitinous bodies slithering and clicking and wriggling upon one another. Pir’achai, otherwise known as piranha ants, a particularly nasty breed extinct in the world beyond the Savage Land but still a fearsome predator here in the hidden jungle. Their venom wasn’t fatal, unlike some other insects, but it didn’t need to be; their jaws were incredibly powerful and their hostile temperament was matched only by their hunger for living flesh.

An ordinary human victim would have perished in minutes when submerged in this way, devoured to the bone, but Ka-Zar wasn’t ordinary. At this point in time he wasn’t sure if that was a blessing.

As the jungle lord’s body was immersed in the surging sea of ants – again, for the countless time over these past two, terrible days – and his renewed screams were swallowed by that unholy hissing, the Red Priestess turned away in fury, her enjoyment at her enemy’s suffering having long since ceded to frustration. She was tall, remarkably so, and regally slender in her crimson and magenta robes of blood-dyed silk with a split collar that rose about the sides of her face to form a devilish coronet. Her hair was jet black and woven into a hundred meticulous braids, each tipped with a single bead fashioned from ivory tusk and hanging past the cut of the coronet to her waist where the beads were threaded together to form a delicate belt. She was dusky skinned and sultry, and her eyes – large, dark and utterly sumptuous – were rimmed with the same cinnabar that shadowed her lips.

Her name was Ezlenza, literally translated as blood witch in one of the most common jungle tongues, and that blood, on her hands, was plentiful indeed.

A mere twenty-one years of age, Ezlenza was the most recent of a thousand generations of her kind – the Red Wizards, Priests or Lords, or their female equivalent, whatever the term of the era – and each incumbent was ancestrally linked to his or her predecessor. The bloodgivers were charged with one duty only: to necessitate the sacrifice of one male and one female of noble virtue in the name of the ancient Sun Gods, to ward against the return of the Great Ice that existed in perpetual waiting beyond the boundaries of the Savage Land.

Ezlenza was the daughter of the previous Red Wizard, Malgato, a man bowed beneath the weight of history and holy obligation and who had failed to sacrifice Ka-Zar and his future consort Shanna many years before. Malgato had poisoned himself in shame thereafter, after impressing upon his young kin the responsibilities that now fell to her. But this Red Priestess, unlike so many of her ancestors it seemed, was not mentally deficient. She believed nothing of Sun Gods and arcane rituals, thanks in large part to the teachings of the outsiders who had visited the jungle with increasing regularity these past years, many of whom Ezlenza had sought out to quench her hunger for knowledge. She also comprehended the true workings of the otherdimensional technologies that maintained the Savage Land’s perfectly balanced tropical climate amidst the sub-zero hostility of the surrounding Antarctic; if the ice were to swallow her jungle world it would be down to mechanical malfunction, not the will of a higher power.

Therefore, the Red Priestess cared nothing for sacrifice for its own sake. What did interest her, however, was the rumored existence of a trans-spatial portal between the Savage Land and the world beyond, a gateway known as the Mandragorgona Helix to which this barbarian, Ka-Zar, held the key to unlocking. And she was determined to locate this gateway if it was the last thing she –

“Witch!”

The Priestess barely had time to whirl at the sound of the cry above her, before a heavy weight slammed into her back and sent her sprawling to the edge of the ant pit. She skidded frantically, grasping for a handhold as the soles of her hide-and-fur boots scrabbled at the rim. She looked up and saw, with terror, a female savage with a wild mane the color of sunsets looming above her, her comely face contorted with rage. There was a bone-bladed dagger in the woman’s fist, and she looked more than mad enough to use it.

“Bring him up!” Shanna The She-Devil roared at the Neanderthals working the winch, and the stunted men obeyed without question – not least because the woman was accompanied by a gigantic golden sabertooth with a maw wide enough to swallow either of the mutants whole. Rising to her feet, Ezlenza cursed as she saw Ka-Zar’s body reappear from the well, shedding ants like black rain as he swung from his ropes. Was the jungle lord already dead? In one sense she didn’t care, but if he wasn’t then she’d at least have room to bargain. After all, without her healing magicks, he would –

“What have you done?”

Shanna grasped the Priestess by the roots of her braids and turned her around, pressing the blade of her knife to her throat. In her rage, her precision was shot; she obviously only meant to threaten, but Ezlenza felt the curved edge slice through the crest of her coronet and into the tender flesh beneath, almost ending her life then and there.

“What have you done to him?” the She-Devil repeated. “What have you done?”

Seeing the madness in the woman’s amber-brown eyes, Ezlenza struggled to free herself. Was this love, then? she thought, curiously, for it was an emotion that she’d never felt even though many men from the outside world had fallen for her charms. In that moment she was glad she’d never experienced such a thing, for the utter despair it wrought was grim indeed.

“I can heal him,” she spluttered. “Only me. My power – ”

But Shanna, in her passion, didn’t hear or didn’t understand. She only knew the need for retribution, and in the next heartbeat she took it – not through the sweep of blade across jugular and windpipe, although that would have been easy enough, but through curling a sudden arm around her enemy’s midriff and lifting her so that she might hurl her bodily into the pit of massing Pir’achai. Ezlenza the Red Priestess screamed and flailed, but it was too late. Shanna didn’t even pause to watch the blood witch sink, thrashing, into the eager broth of tiny jaws and legs, turning instead with haunted eyes upon the body of the man she loved.

Zabu was rending bamboo and rope to free what lay within. Shanna pressed her knuckles to her mouth, gagging. Approximately a quarter of Ka-Zar’s bronzed flesh was simply gone, devoured in hundreds of bloodied patches, whilst the remainder of his skin was ragged with thousands of miniature bites. His face was barely recognizable, awash with a mask of blood. Shanna wasn’t to know that her husband had been raised from the pit in a similar state time and again over the past two days, but that the Priestess had healed him anew on each occasion; now, there was no more Ezlenza and no more magic.

And without that magic, even though Shanna immediately set about administering to her beloved’s wounds, there was no hope.

Kevin Plunder – the savage Ka-Zar, lord of the hidden jungle – would be dead before nightfall.

Shanna stood in the arched entrance to the mountain cave and stared out into the night. No city-dweller of the outer world, so accustomed to the perpetual neon glare that lightened their skies, could imagine the total darkness that settled over the jungles of the Savage Land. It was black and forbidding out there. Once Shanna had embraced that blackness and the peace it bestowed, but no longer. Now the shadow seethed with the same lurking fears as it had when she was a child growing up in Africa and men with guns – poachers, slavers and war gangs – had stalked the plains.

Ezlenza the Red Priestess had taken Shanna’s hard-won serenity and sundered it. She had taken her husband.

“I remember those hours we spent searching for him after hearing that he’d been captured whilst hunting,” Shanna murmured, talking as much to herself as to Zabu and his family. “I’m not sure I ever once felt a sense of dread. He was Ka-Zar. I was convinced he’d live forever. Then we found him in that pit, and when I saw him, that… that’s when I knew. I tended him with every medicinal concoction to hand, both from the jungle and the outside world, but it was hopeless. He and I were both normal humans in biological terms when we first arrived here, but over the years our physiology changed, altered by what we ate and drank, the herbs and fruits and water and honey and whatever else, much of which contained physical properties unknown to the planet at large. We became stronger, quicker, more dexterous, more durable. I mean, just look at me now; bloodied and bitten by dire wolves, but already recovered enough to walk. In two days’ these wounds will be little more than scratches. Kevin and I, our bodies could withstand far greater punishment than ordinary humans and we’d heal far more rapidly, and with less surface scarring. But we weren’t invulnerable, or immortal. That… quickly became incontestable.”

The She-Devil bowed her head.

“His injuries were too severe and he died in my arms that night, before the dawn. He died, Zabu. You know as well as I do, because you were there. So why am I… why can’t I…”

She wept then. In that moment she was Shanna O’Hara again, not Shanna The She-Devil; the woman, honest and courageous but also playful and humorous and emotional, not the granite-carved huntress she’d become, the creature with a gaping hole where her heart had once pounded with such passion for life.

The sabertooth padded forward and rested his muzzle against the back of Shanna’s neck, gently rubbing at the tanned skin beneath her hair. She sobbed openly, and reached back and stroked him behind the ears. Aside from when the cat had dragged her unconscious body back to the cave after the fight with the dire wolves, this was the first contact between them.

Zabu said, without words, I forgive you for the dire wolves. And he said, I miss you. You were my family, and this tore us apart. We neither of us could carry on as we had, not without him.

But what the sabertooth didn’t say, words or not, was, I believe.

“I came here to tell you what happened these past twenty-four hours, and to let you know what I plan to do now,” Shanna said. “Out of courtesy. To give you the opportunity to come with me, to Prague, and to England if necessary. Because I am going. There were things in that message, things private between Kevin and I. We… were going to have a baby.”

Shanna looked across at Zabu’s cubs and smiled, sadly.

“No one knew,” she said, softly. “We’d talked about names, for a boy at least. Kevin was convinced it would be a boy. Matthew. But then…”

She bowed her head.

Remember Prague. Neptune’s Ring. Matthew’s Day. I’ll be waiting.

“I know how impossible it is, Zabu. But this is an impossible world, isn’t it? I need to know. I have to do this.”

Zabu nodded, his expression solemn. But then he glanced back towards his lady and his brood, and the message was clear in his beautiful eyes.

“I understand,” Shanna murmured.

And she did. If Zabu had even the slightest doubt in what had occurred ten months ago then he would have been by her side in an instant, she knew that. But, unlike her, he trusted his own senses. Ka-Zar was dead, and there was no coming back. Doctor Presley was mistaken – or she was a liar, and was perpetrating some ill-advised fraud or laying a trap. Either way, it was up to Shanna to resolve this.

The She-Devil hesitated at the entrance to the cave, then glanced back into the phosphorus-lit shadows.

“I’m glad you found a new family,” she said, honestly. “Be true to them, Zabu. His heart… would have ached with pride to see you.”

And then she was gone.

It was an hour before dawn when the sound of soft footsteps padding on stone echoed in the darkness. Madeleine Presley was awake to hear Shanna return to her forest home – a crude dwelling of bamboo and rock surrounded by mangroves and hot springs – because she hadn’t actually slept. Every time she tried to close her eyes she saw Drewitt, the man who would have killed her in cold blood had Shanna not saved her life, or she envisioned creatures stealing through the night and dragging her from her makeshift bed so they might bite into her skull and suck out her brain.

It wasn’t liked she could chide herself for her vivid imagination. This was the Savage Land, and such beasts did exist in abundance here. Nevertheless, Doctor Presley was somewhat anxious to know that Shanna was close by once, despite the increased security this suggested.

“We set off in two hours,” the She-Devil declared, as Madeleine emerged from beneath a bamboo awning and squinted into the moonlight.

“My goodness, your arm! What – ”

“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

“A scratch?”

“Flesh wound.”

Doctor Presley rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. You’re quoting Monty Python and you probably don’t even know it…”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Madeleine frowned. “So, are we going by Drewitt’s plane…?”

“No. I’ve never been a good pilot, but even if I was I doubt we’d be welcome on the ship that brought you out to the ice channels. What with us stringing up three of their crew as dinosaur chow.”

“Us?”

“Alright, me.” Shanna sighed. “No, we’re leaving by a different route.”

“Which is?”

The She-Devil said nothing at first, and in that pause the night was so still that Madeleine wondered if she was alone once more. Then, finally, the other woman spoke.

“The… people who constructed the machines that regulate the climate here, their technological expertise was boundless. To fulfill their remit, of collecting hundreds of thousands of species and preserving them in these jungles, they needed instant access to other areas of the planet. So they utilized a trans-spatial portal, a gateway which – like everything else of their design – has remained functional for two hundred and fifty million years, and which is secreted away in a hidden location not far from here.

“This portal is called the Mandragorgona Helix. For the best part of a year I’ve believed that Kevin died protecting it.” Shanna’s voice was cold in the darkness. As cold as the grave.

“Wouldn’t it be ironic,” she said, “if I now used that same gateway to verify that fact?”

Elsewhere in the Savage Land, four seemingly unconnected but important events were unfolding in that same, pre-dawn passage of time.

Deep in the jungle, weakened and delirious from blood loss and without any notion of where he was headed, the Australian named Drewitt was – miraculously – not yet dead. In the past twenty-four hours he hadn’t succumbed to infection in his ghastly hand wound or to thirst or starvation, he hadn’t fallen foul of the hostile terrain, and he hadn’t been eaten by any of the many and various carnivores that frequented his present location.

So far he’d been lucky. That surely couldn’t last. Or did fate have one last twist in store…?

Meanwhile, not so far away, a lone female drachul’pa – the last of the six-strong pack that had earlier been slain by the fire-haired woman with the flashing blades and her sabertooth companion – was curled beneath the roots of a gigantic redwood tree, shivering in the darkness despite the relative warmth of the night.

She’d lost her family. She was forlorn, desolate. She wished, in that abstract, animal way, that she’d had the courage to stand firm and be butchered with her kin, for surely that was a better outcome than this.

Of course, the dire wolf couldn’t anticipate the machinations of fate any more than Drewitt, who would accidentally stumble upon the drach’s hole just after sunrise…

Then, high above the canopy at the summit of a mountain trail, another family of beasts – this one untouched by tragedy, at least in recent times, at least for now – slumbered blissfully in the phosphorus-tinted darkness. All except one.

A single pair of agate eyes stared out into the night from the cave entrance, searching the indigo-black skies for… what? A sign? Some divine, inscrutable wisdom to interpret as his heart decreed?

I came here to give you the opportunity to come with me, to Prague, and to England if necessary. Because I am going.

The woman’s voice echoed in the air like a siren’s song. Slowly, reluctantly, the sabertooth was coming to a decision.

And finally, deep in the tropical jungle, in the fetid swamplands where no sun ever shone and where even the most intrepid dinosaurs typically feared to tread…

There was movement. There was breathing. Something awakening.

There was the sound of scuttling, slithering, hissing, clicking, biting.

There was a flash of blood-dyed silk, and the cut of a torn coronet, and the gentle clatter of ivory beads upon braided hair. And, most of all, there was the cruel curve of cinnabar-stained lips – or, at least, what was left of them.

The once-female corpse stirred, and ravenous Pir’achai spilled from her hollowed eye sockets and her shattered jaw and all her other terrible, terrible wounds in a red and black flood.

And then Ezlenza the Red Priestess raised a fleshless hand, her dark magicks guttering like shadow flame, and she thought of Shanna The She-Devil and the revenge that she would perpetrate on the savage witch who had killed her…

NEXT ISSUE: Be here next month to thrill to Shanna The She-Devil’s greatest battle yet! The trans-spatial gateway, the Mandragorgona Helix, offers Shanna the opportunity to travel to Prague to begin to unravel the mystery – but this mystic portal is guarded by terrible adversaries that may prove a match even for our brave heroine!