The Serpent Tower

by William King

  Sardec rammed his hook into the creature’s mouth. The jaws slammed shut. The wyrm hissed in rage at the strange taste of the thing in its mouth. God, but the beast was strong. It moved its head and Sardec’s arm was nearly torn from its socket. Sardec smashed it in the face with his pistol butt. The wyrm let him go. More by accident than design Sardec got the tip of his hook into the creature’s eye. He drove it deeper into the jelly until it pierced the creature’s tiny brain. It died with a hiss, not a whimper.

  A man in the furs of a trapper with a blue scarf wrapped around his throat glared at Sardec in triumph. Sardec lunged at him with the butt of the pistol. He held it by the still-warm barrel now, using its weighted grip as a club. The man let go of his rifle and leapt back, whipping out a long skinning knife. His smile widened. Sardec’s heart sank. This man undoubtedly knew how to use this weapon.

  He came forward now, poised on the balls of his feet, confident of the kill. Sardec raised his hook and gestured for him to advance. There was still blood on it. The man flinched at the sight, which struck Sardec as unusual, then the trapper stiffened and fell, and the Lieutenant saw the bayonet protruding from his side. Sergeant Hef grinned his monkey grin up at Sardec, removed the bayonet, and then paused.

  “Sounds like we’ve got company, sir,” he bellowed. “Steady, lads! Steady! Reinforcements are here!”

  There was no way of telling whether what the Sergeant was saying was true but it was the right thing to say at this moment. Their own men took heart and fought with renewed fury. The men who moments ago had been so daringly leaping over the barriers now look scared and panicky.

  Sardec listened and heard the blowing of bugles and the sound of wyrms. Perhaps they belonged to Azaar’s army, but at this point he realised that it did not matter. Whether the newcomers were friend or foe, his own men could not hold their embattled position for more than a few more minutes. He came to a decision.

  What was important now was what the men believed, not what was true. As far as he was concerned those soldiers out there had to be on their side. He forced a confident smile on to his face, and shouted; “The Sergeant is right lads. Just a few more minutes and we’ll show these traitor bastards what for!”

  Almost to his surprise, his words gave the Foragers more heart even than the Sergeant’s. A strange pride filled Sardec that they should have such faith in him. He forced his aching weary body forward, brandishing his pistol like a battle banner.

  Just as surprising was the change that had come over his foes. A few moments ago they had been attacking like rabid wolverines. Now they seemed stunned. A man emerging from the smoke stood like an ox in an abattoir as Sardec pole-axed him with his pistol butt. Others began to throw down their weapons, as the contagion of panic spread. Here and there, Sardec could hear officers and Sergeants shouting and trying to keep their foes steady, but their words had a panicked quality that just added to the confusion. Sardec heard his own voice roaring and shouting mad exhortations, and he was not sure whether it held the exultation of victory or simply the relief of pent up fear of failure.

  He stuck the pistol in the waistband of his britches, and stooped to pick up the long sword of a fallen enemy officer. Brandishing it left-handed he roared at his men to stand firm, to hold on, to reach out and seize victory. In his heart, his most fervent wish was that he knew what was really going on out there.

  The wyrm’s rolling stride faltered for a minute. Something crunched under its enormous paw. Rik looked down and saw the flattened, broken-backed body of a man flopping behind him. Weasel’s musket banged near his ear. Rik turned and saw the former poacher reloading, calm as a man out pheasant shooting, not standing on the back of a huge beast as it forged its way across a battlefield, crushing their enemies under foot.

  From their position on the creature’s back, Rik caught odd glimpses of the battle. He could peer down across some of the ridges, see into the gaps the breeze tore in the smoke clouds. Over to the right a cluster of men tore at each other with bayonets and swords, their faces demon masked by fury and fear, their teeth powder blackened. In front of them a wyrm brushed its way through the heavy cavalry horses like a man pushing through a crowd of beggar children. Behind them, the waters of the ford were stained with the blood of man and beast.

  Asea looked around feverishly. Her silver mask mirrored the emotion of her face. There was a contained excitement in her manner that told Rik that in some way she was enjoying this. Perhaps it was the risk, he thought. Perhaps the fact that she might be hit by a stray ball and thus end her immortal life, added a spice that was normally missing from her days. Or perhaps it was something else entirely, some strange alien emotion that she had brought from her far home world, that he would never understand.

  On the back of this huge beast, as part of a force that was so obviously overwhelming the enemy, he had no sense of personal risk, although he knew that there must still be some. He could feel the thrill of victory with far less fear than he normally felt. It was somehow less satisfying, but, if truth were told, it was enough for him at the moment.

  He could see that everywhere the Taloreans were victorious. There was something about their manner, the way they moved and the way they acted, that said they were men conscious of their superiority, and certain of triumph. They had the confidence to stand their ground in the face of inevitable casualties, a confidence that was swiftly being leeched from their foes.

  Rik understood why. In a few minutes the enemy had seen their positions reversed. They had gone from being the encircling army, attacking with overwhelming advantage, to being in the position they had thought their foes were in. It was the sort of psychological change that could spell disaster for an army, unless its commanders were better leaders than their foes appeared to be.

  Here and there knots of men had already thrown down weapons. Others were running for the woods, or shouting for help or their mothers.

  “It’s over,” said Asea, with utter certainty and not a little spite in her voice. “Let’s hope there’s somebody up there to be relieved.

  It was like a dash of ice water in Rik’s face. He wondered if any of his friends were still alive.

  Sardec stood atop the wall and surveyed the battlefield. It was not, as he felt it should be, silent. He could hear the bellowing of wyrms, and the frantic neighing of panicked horses, and the screams and cries of the dying alongside the victorious shouts of the Talorean soldiers. But compared to the thunderous roar of battle that had assailed his ears a few minutes ago, it might as well have been silent as the inside of a temple.

  Men lay sprawled in the grass, unmoving. They looked as if they were sleeping, but he knew they were not. Dead horses looked like small hummocks. The smoke had started drifting away, to be replaced by clouds of carrion birds. He could see long columns of cavalry approaching from the East, and massive wyrms pulling artillery carriages. It looked like a good part of Azaar’s army had fallen on Esteril’s regiments with the force of a sledgehammer.

  An odd sense of futility settled in Sardec. He knew he should have felt triumphant but instead he just felt tired. He had achieved what he set out to do and held the position, but at an awful cost. He told himself those corpses down there were just humans. They would have been dead in a few scant decades anyway, but he could not make himself believe it, not like he once had. He felt an urge to cry, as he had once done as a child, when contemplating the brief lives of butterflies in a poem his mother had read to him. He told himself the feeling was simply trite and clichéd sentiment, but he could not even believe that, not in the way he used to.

  A bedraggled bunch of Kharadrean officers limped uphill under a white flag. He could see old Esteril leading them, coming in a way to do him honour. He should have been marching to surrender his sword to the chief of the oncoming army. Instead he paused before the walls of the Inn and shouted; “Good sport, youth, bloody good sport. It seems I will not be accepting your surrender after all. Will you accept mine?”

  Loo
king at the old Terrarch’s flushed, smiling face, Sardec felt the urge to shoot him. Instead he forced himself to say; “Of course, sir, it would be an honour.”

  Chapter Six

  Sardec trudged down the hill with the captive officers. He raised his hook to accept the cheers of the soldiers and he could not help but smile at their enthusiasm. For the first time, he started to feel like he had won a victory rather than caused a pointless slaughter.

  He could see enemy troops being led away at bayonet point, herded together without their weapons, under the supervision of hard-faced Talorean infantrymen. Cavalrymen, impassive and intimidating with sabres drawn, watched the defeated as they trudged by. Here and there scavengers looted the corpses of the dead, performing the traditional after-battle rituals on friend and foe alike.

  Beside him, Lord Esteril kept up a steady flow of pointless chatter, going back and forth over the finer points of the battle with a connoisseur’s relish. Sardec was hard pressed to pay much attention to him. He felt like saying he had followed none of this because he had been too busy fighting for his life, but, of course, he was too polite to do so.

  Ahead of him now were a number of enormous bridgeback wyrms. The high command had already dismounted and were clustered around Lord Azaar. Someone had produced a small folding canvas shooting chair for the General and he lounged in it with an appearance of ease and boredom contradicted by the bright intensity of his eyes. The whole scene was mirrored in the silvered surface of his mask.

  The crowd parted as Sardec and his companions approached. Some of his fellow Terrarchs bowed to him. Others watched him with steely, calculating gazes. It dawned on Sardec that he was about to enjoy an hour of fame and that some of those glancing at him were measuring him, calculating how much they should flatter him and court his attention and bask in his reflected glory. Others were looking at him with jealousy, as if he had somehow stolen something that should rightfully have been theirs.

  It was folly but he could understand it. He had been part of such a pack himself once, looking at other Terrarchs as rivals, particularly his peers. A small puff of pride swelled in his breast. He was important to these people, or at least more important than he had been, now that he was the hero of the hour.

  Another part of him watched it all mockingly and with not a little contempt. At dawn he had been making life and death decisions, unsure of whether he would live to see another nightfall. Compared to that, the flattery of fools and the envy of the small-minded was nothing. His smile became a fraction colder. At that moment, he looked like a true Terrarch lord.

  Amid the crowd around the General he saw Lady Asea, and the three Foragers he had sent to warn the General. Weasel still looked insolent, the Barbarian looked smug and the half-breed looked at him with barely concealed hate. Sardec guessed he had earned that in the last year, but could not quite find it in himself to regret it. What did he care for the hatred of his inferiors? The thing that surprised him was that he had even noticed it at all.

  Asea herself looked at him speculatively. Her expression reminded him of a woman contemplating a candy box being offered by one of her maids. Perhaps she found cripples interesting, he thought sourly. Perhaps, after centuries of consorting with the whole of body, there was something titillating about the maimed. He told himself he was being foolish, but there was something about the Lady Asea, her calm and her self-possession, that had always made him deeply uneasy.

  General Azaar rose from his chair and strode to meet Sardec. His limp was barely noticeable, but Sardec was all too aware of it. Here was somebody else who had paid the price that War demanded from her worshippers. As the General came closer, Sardec caught the whiff of the strong scent Azaar always wore to cover the rotting smell of his body. The rot was there too, concealed, and Sardec’s stomach quivered with revulsion. He understood all too well why there were some who considered Azaar’s refusal to gracefully slit his own wrists in the Halls of Forgetting to be obscene.

  “It does me good to see you alive and whole, Lieutenant,” said Azaar. There did not seem to be any irony in his words. His voice was thrilling and sincere, and Sardec heard within it some of the subtle compulsions mastered by the elder Terrarchs. He could not help but feel grateful and pleased, but part of him resented being manipulated even as he basked in the glow of praise.

  “Your servant, sir. It does me honour to present to you our late foe, the esteemed Lord Esteril of Morven.”

  “Lord Esteril and I are old friends,” said Azaar smoothly. “It gladdens my heart to see him again even on such a sorry occasion as this.”

  Lord Esteril bowed, visibly swollen by the recognition granted to him by the famous General. He bowed to Azaar and then for the first time seemed to notice Lady Asea and bowed to her too, in the old fashioned courtly way of the elderly. She nodded her head politely in return. She was not about to curtsey in this mud, Sardec guessed.

  “I hope you will forgive my surrendering to this young lad, Lord Azaar. I mean no slight. It merely seemed to me that your Lieutenant’s splendid defence of his position warranted the honour.”

  Things had taken on a slightly unreal quality. Men had died bleeding in the mud today, and they were all standing here talking politely and in full formal courtly ritual. And yet, he knew that it could not be any other way. The Terrarchs were like that. They were polite and they were honourable. It was one of the things that separated them from beasts and from men.

  The little niggling worm of doubt returned and whispered in his ear that it was the deaths of men that had made these small rituals necessary. What of it, the true Terrarch in him responded, theirs were the lives of mayflies anyway. The worm whispered that their lives were important enough to them and he could not find it in himself to deny it.

  “You must join me in my tent and tell me your stories,” said Azaar, and once again his voice was laced with compulsions. Both Sardec and Esteril nodded and moved in the direction he indicated with his gauntleted hands, to where servants had already erected a small pavilion, and were preparing food.

  Behind them, bullet-torn banners, stained with mud and blood, fluttered in the breeze.

  “How is that you come to be opposing our advance to help your Queen, Lord Esteril,” Azaar asked. There was no menace in Azaar’s manner, merely polite curiosity. They might have been discussing the weather. It was all very civilised.

  “As you know General, my sympathies have always been with Empress Arachne and her policies. Great as my respect for you is, my loyalty is to her and my cousin Lord Malkior.” Esteril sounded quite pleased with himself.

  “I had thought your loyalty was to Kharadrea.” Once again Azaar’s tone was neutral.

  “While Orodruine was alive, my loyalties were clear. He was a great leader, a great Terrarch, but now…” He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands deprecatingly. “There are two claimants to the throne, both with equally valid claims. We have been here before. We all know where that sort of situation has led in the past.”

  Sardec nodded. It had split the Terrarch Imperium with Lord Azaar at the head of the Scarlet Faction, and Lord Malkior and his cronies at the head of the Purple. It had led to the weakening of firm central government, and to the granting of more and more liberties to the human subjects. Sardec could not quite bring himself to resent that the way he once had. He would need to take himself firmly in hand. It would not do to begin feeling too well-disposed towards the lower orders. They needed to be kept in their place.

  “And how is Lord Ilmarec.”

  “My liege is well.”

  “I am very pleased to hear it. I had thought he supported Queen Kathea.”

  “He still does.”

  “Then why does he attack her allies?”

  “He says she needs no allies. All outsiders should leave Kharadrean soil. We shall resolve our own differences.”

  That brought a long silence. Outside Sardec could hear people moving and the subdued murmur of servants. In the distance a wyrm bell
owed. This was news. Ilmarec had been Kathea’s strongest supporter. He was a powerful wizard and could draw on large armies from his extensive estates and his web of supporters. Azaar cocked his head to one side. Once again Sardec thought he caught the whiff of rot through the sickly sweet perfume.

  “May I ask what makes him believe that is possible? Even if we withdraw I doubt the Dark Empire would.” There was the faintest hint of menace in his voice. Sardec would not have cared to have the General looking at him like that. It was too reminiscent of the way a cat looked at a mouse. He recalled some tales of his father’s concerning what happened to those who had opposed Azaar in the past.

  If Lord Esteril was daunted he gave no sign. He raised his goblet to his lips and said; “This is very fine wine.” Perhaps there was more to the old dotard than there first appeared.

  “It is from my cellar back on Marmoth.” Marmoth was Azaar’s estate, a great palace outside the Talorean capital city, Amber. Azaar had been given it as a reward for his victory at Three Fords. The building had been funded by the new Talorean state he had helped to found. It was a very direct reminder of who Azaar was, and whom he served.

  “It does credit to your house,” said Esteril. “Lord Ilmarec has often praised your vineyards in my hearing.”

  “He has visited them a few times in the past. His company gave me great pleasure.”

  “I am sure your company would still give him much pleasure. I am sure he would be delighted to see you in the Serpent Tower.”

  “I may have that pleasure yet,” said Azaar. “And I may take a few companions with me.”

  Esteril laughed. “It would perhaps be better to go as his guest than with all your present companions. The defences of the Tower are very strong, and I am sure Lord Ilmarec will guard his home with as much flair as my young friend here.”

  “I would greatly like to hear your reasons for opposing us,” said Sardec, deciding that a flank attack might be a better way of getting the information Lord Azaar desired. “There has never, to my knowledge, been any cause for animosity between Lord Ilmarec and those loyal to Queen Arielle.”