The Tower of Fear

by Glen Cook

  Medjhah relayed the message. Nogah said, “Now!” Aaron heard his bones and sinews creak as he pushed up against the iron door.

  Azel felt the trapdoor pushing up against him. He couldn’t do a damned thing. Everything he had left, it seemed, he needed just to keep his eyes open.

  The Witch was doing it. Somehow, despite the circumstances, she had reached Nakar and was luring him forth. He saw the shadow growing in the brat’s face. Maybe Nakar sensed the passing of Ala-eh-din Beyh. Good thing he’d broken that other brat’s neck.

  He managed a warning grunt. The Witch was alert enough to catch it. “A moment longer, Azel. Only a moment more. Don’t let them come.”

  Don’t let them come. How the hell was he supposed to stop them? All he was now was dead weight. If they managed enough upward force they would tumble him off and all he could do was lie there and watch them climb out.

  The shadow in the kid’s face darkened quickly. The clouds overhead grew more excited. Thunder hammered.

  And Azel wondered not about Nakar’s advent but about the exit he needed to make after he had outlived his usefulness. He was in no condition to end the story of the Abomination.

  “He’s coming,” the Witch breathed. “He’s almost here. We’re going to do it, Azel. We’re going to do it.”

  Aaron slithered up next to Nogah. Chest-to-chest, scarcely able to breathe, they took what room they could and heaved together.

  The trap remained stubborn... then gave.

  As it began moving Nogah grunted, “First!” and sprang with it, as though the climb and all before it had taken nothing out of his body.

  Nogah’s feet were not yet clear when Aaron followed. Nogah threw himself at the child-taker, who had toppled off the trap. And the child-taker took him out.

  What kind of man was he, Aaron wondered as the stubby man, on his back, moved jerkily in lightning flashes and sent Nogah plunging headlong into the battlement surrounding the parapet. Nogah went limp.

  Aaron nearly gagged doing it, was astounded that he could, but found what it took to kick the child-taker in the head. He whirled on the Witch and his son as Medjhah clambered into sight.

  Arif’s eyes were open and watching but that was not Arif looking out. That was something hideous, dark, and evil.

  He could not move, looking at that.

  Medjhah staggered forward, knife falling toward the Witch. She made a feeble gesture, barely in time. The knife turned to flame in the Dartar’s hand, sizzled through the rain. He screamed, flung it from him, fell forward into the woman, bowling her over. A knife appeared in her hand. She stabbed him once, weakly, before Aaron recovered and kicked again, striking her wrist more by luck than design. Mahdah came up, circled to the side, to put the woman between himself and Aaron.

  Aaron looked at Arif again. The darkness within him was growing still but had an unfocused quality, as though the thing surfacing was confused and far from being in control. For an instant, even, it seemed that Arif himself looked out of those eyes, begging help defeating his devil.

  The Herodian sorceress rose from the chute.

  Fa’tad stepped onto the portico of the Residence. His most senior prisoners accompanied him. Witchfires pranced atop the citadel tower. He recognized the veydeen carpenter. “Finally.”

  General Cado observed, “You have done it.”

  Fa’tad chuckled. “So it would seem. Fatig, get the carpenter’s family. However it went they should be there for him when he comes down.”

  A messenger left immediately.

  “Don’t count your chickens.”

  Fa’tad turned to Colonel bel-Sidek. “Sir?”

  “That’s a witch’s game. Two against one and no one alive can match either of the two.”

  Thunder and lightning hammered the night like the crackling bacon of the gods. Clouds spun madly overhead. Rain fell in ever greater torrents.

  Fa’tad al-Akla lost his smile.

  The Witch had regained her feet. She held the boy before her. His face darkened ever more as the thunder bellowed ever more fiercely. “Too late!” she crowed at the Herodian sorceress. “You’re too late, meddler. You can’t stop it now. I can withstand you all till he comes.” She threw back her head, shrieked into the teeth of the lightning. “He comes!” Let Qushmarrah know. Let all the world know. Nakar was coming. The hour of vengeance was at hand.

  In response the Herodian witch knelt beside the ladder well, reached down. Then she rose, helping a child climb onto the parapet.

  The other one... But Azel had broken his neck. Hadn’t he?

  The Witch almost collapsed in her terror.

  Azel cracked an eyelid, considered his surroundings through vision gone fuzzy, listened with hearing gone as feeble as an old man’s. He shut out his pain and fear, examined the situation. As that Herodian bitch brought the other brat onto the parapet.

  He was not deceived. Not for an instant. The sorceress had saved the brat by her art but Ala-eh-din Beyh wasn’t in him now. Had he been there the storm would have ripped the tower apart. But the Witch believed, if only for a moment. Believed and surrendered to the doom she saw as her punishment for having failed her husband.

  Damned fool woman.

  Damn fool man, he. Lying there with both legs and one arm past death’s door and for what? For her? What damnable fool hid down deep inside him, gulling him all along, so that he’d thought he had some chance of making her his own? He was an idiot. As big a fool as anybody he’d gulled during his idiot’s quest.

  He eyed them all, women, boys, father, Dartars. He had no regrets, felt no remorse. But he was alive still. Alive, he had to make decisions.

  The carpenter shouted, “Easy,” at the Witch. He had to shout to be heard above the storm. “Take it easy. Don’t...”

  A fool to the last, that woman. Not thinking with her brain. Deceived by a rustic sorceress from beyond the sea.

  Instead of fighting on, going down swinging, making them pay for whatever they won, she chose the easy way out again.

  She shook the carpenter off, stumbled backward, looked out over the city she hated, then leaped from the parapet.

  Live a fool, die one, Azel thought. She’d defeated herself. She’d lost to herself.

  No one was watching him. It was an effort of herculean proportion but he managed to move one hand from his waist to his mouth. He began to chew.

  He could’ve stopped her, he thought as the shadows closed in. He could’ve shouted. They would’ve killed him but he could’ve warned her before she took that step. He could’ve given her Nakar... The last thing in his sight was the boy. Nakar was looking out of those young eyes, looking at him, and Nakar knew. By holding his tongue he had destroyed them both, Witch and wizard alike.

  Azel used his last ounce of strength to force a mocking smile and a farewell wink.

  Aaron tried to grab the Witch as she backed off the parapet. In the last instant she changed her mind, reached for his outstretched hand. But the distance separating them was too great. Down she plunged, vanishing in the darkness, trailing a scream in which he heard Nakar’s name and a curse upon Qushmarrah.

  Chance? Curse? Whim of the gods? At the moment the Witch struck stone the earth shook. The tremor was barely discernible but it was enough.

  A lightning crack appeared in the leaky wall in the home of that otherwise insignificant woman in the Shu. Plaster chipped away. A hair of water squirted through. The stream expanded swiftly.

  The wall came apart.

  The surge destroyed the next wall it encountered.

  In minutes the hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of water trapped in the maze were in motion.

  It would have been an awesome sight from the harbor had anyone been out there to watch the avalanche of water and rubble and bodies roar down and hit the bay.

  They got Yoseh up out of the shaft. Mo’atabar and the others followed. Soon they had ropes over the side. Fa’tad had men waiting below.

  They lowered the Herodian so
rceress first, so she would be down there when Arif and the injured arrived. Already she had done something to put Arif asleep. Already Aaron understood that when Arif awakened he would not recall the threat that had come so close to devouring him. He would not forget his imprisonment completely but the worst horrors would be cleansed from his mind. He would remember that his father had, indeed, come to his rescue.

  They lowered Aaron right after Yoseh. When he reached the cobblestones he found Laella and Mish and Stafa and even old Raheb waiting. Only Mish had glances to spare for anyone but him and Arif. She had a few for Yoseh, who seemed more embarrassed than pained now that the sorceress had seen to him. His brothers had proclaimed him a hero.

  Laella clung to Aaron and Arif and wept as she had not done since the day he had come home from the Herodian captivity, releasing all her fears and tensions in the form of tears.

  Aaron said, “It’s all right now. It’s all right. It’s all over now.” He glanced at the sky. Once frenzied clouds had gone drowsy already.

  “What about this one?” Medjhah asked Mo’atabar, kicking the child-taker.

  “What about him? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Bled to death, looks like.”

  “Leave him lie. Fa’tad will send a cleanup gang in tomorrow. Let them worry about it. I’m too damned tired. All I want to do is get down and lie down.”

  Medjhah shrugged. He nudged the dead man with his toe. “He was a tough bastard. For a veydeen.”

  “Wonderful epitaph, Medjhah. A real Dartar eulogy. It’s your turn on the rope. Mind the slick.”

  Those who were sent into the citadel to take prisoners and loot and dispose of the dead failed to find a corpse atop the tower. The disappearance was a great puzzle but no one worried it long.

  Aaron had said it was over. That was not quite true. History is the whole loaf, not just a slice. History is a river flowing, events its tributaries. The end of Aaron Habid’s tale was but an event in other stories.

  Epilog One:

  Immediate Events

  Six days after the fall of the citadel Cretius Marco met the Turok raiders in battle. He slew or captured all but a handful. The same day, a hundred miles east, Diro Lucillo received word of events in Qushmarrah. He turned on his Dartar auxiliaries. Joab extricated his men, fled eastward, seized control of the fortified bridges behind the expeditionary force. Four days later, in a lightning strike, his men captured the Seven Towers. Qushmarrah could not be approached from the west.

  Earlier, the Herodian fleet had made harbor in Qushmarrah and been captured intact.

  Eight days after the fall, after intense discussions with Colonel Sisu bel-Sidek, Fa’tad al-Akla proclaimed the Dartar kingdom of Qushmarrah. Bel-Sidek served as his grand vizier the rest of his days.

  Several senior officers of the Living did not survive to see the founding of the new estate.

  Fa’tad sent to the Khadatqa Mountains for the rest of his people. Thus did he overcome the relentless drought.

  Eighteen days after the fall, encouraged by the Herodian disaster to the west, Chorhkni of Aquira marched. He and his allies scored several early successes, but one too many when they captured the commanding Herodian general. The refugee general Lentello Cado replaced him. He ruined Aquiran ambitions at Algedo, where, when the allies withdrew, Chorhkni and all his sons remained dead upon the field.

  Epilog Two:

  A Longer View

  The Dartar Kings of Qushmarrah were five: Fa’tad, who ruled eighteen years; Joab, who reigned six months; Moamar, who lived three years; Faruk, who survived nine; and Juba. Juba ruled for twenty-nine years and was at war every minute of the final twenty-eight.

  Aaron Habid remained a shipbuilder all his days. From his yard came the swift galleys that held Herod’s fleets at bay. His son Arif followed in his footsteps. But his son Stafa became a famous privateer, one of those fearless shipmasters whose predations so incensed Herod that the Imperial Senate declared the Third Qushmarrahan War. His sister-in-law, Tamisa, dedicated herself to Aram and so died childless.

  Naszif bar bel-Abek pursued a distinguished career in Hero-dian service, attaining the proconsular rank and governing three different eastern provinces before his retirement to a villa in Carenia. His son, Zouki (Succo), became a famous jurist and philosopher. A grandson, Probio, elevated the family to senatorial rank.

  Lentello Cado died an old and bitter man, still in exile on the nether shore. None of his magnificent efforts to illustrate the Herodian name earned the forgiveness of his enemies in Herod.

  The brothers Nogah, Medjhah, and Yoseh inherited the wild mantle of Fa’tad al-Akla. On land and sea they harried the Herodian lion wherever it appeared.

  In the fourth year of the Third Qushmarrahan War, Yoseh led a fleet into the harbor of Utium, the port of Herod. He burned the city and the unprepared Herodian fleet, then ravaged the suburbs of Herod itself but failed to penetrate the city wall.

  In the eleventh year of the war the brothers landed an army in Edria, north of Herod, and sustained it there fourteen years, devouring everything Herod sent against them, twice besieging Herod itself. They fought boldly and valiantly but in the end the superior stubbornness and vaster resources of Herod prevailed.

  The Third Qushmarrahan War lasted twenty-eight years. Qushmarrah won every major battle but the last, before the city wall.

  Herod’s legions razed Qushmarrah to the last stone. Two centuries later the emperor Petia Magna ordered a new city built upon the site. It took the name Qushmarrah but was Herodian to the bone.

  Qushmarrah fell in Yoseh’s seventy-fourth year. He survived thirteen more, an active pirate till the day he succumbed to a stray arrow sped by a Herodian marine.

  An old hermit in the sinkhole country lived nearly as long, hunting and fishing and occasionally visiting one of the nearer villages to amuse himself with news of the latest foibles of the world. He never looked back, never had any regrets.