by Jack Conner
“Bastard!” Baleron shouted at the Dark One.
Rain hissed off Gilgaroth’s armor. “I have a promise to keep.”
He wheeled about and marched once more up the stairs. The Borchstogs seized Baleron roughly and carried him away into darkness.
They bore him deep into the fetid bowels of the tower, stripped him of everything, even Shelir’s charm, and flung him into a dark pit, where they left him. He missed Rondthril immediately, as without it he felt even more naked than he was. He explored the walls of the pit with his fingertips—smooth and sturdy, unlike those at Gulrothrog.
And he was not alone.
Scorpions and other creatures crept out of their holes and bit and stung him, and no matter how many he stomped and crushed, more seemed to find him. It was dank and dark here in this hole, the walls slimy, and the only noises his labored breathing and the scuttling of his attackers. Sometimes he screamed when something with particularly strong venom found him, and his screams seemed to echo forever.
Throgmar had done this to him. How he hated that Worm. Someday ...
Of course, it was as much his fault as the dragon’s, really. He’d been so consumed by the need for revenge that he hadn’t cared about his own fate. So here he was, and he deserved it. He’d killed Felestrata. He had wielded the sword and been bloodied, just as Gilgaroth had said.
Very well, he decided. He’d face it like a man.
He stayed in the pit for several days. There was plenty of moisture on the walls for him to lick, and for sustenance he had but to grab a handful of bugs and vermin. So much for royal dignity.
The first day, he raged up at his captors and beat at the walls, and his voice grew hoarse from yelling. But after he made his resolution to face his punishment head on, a strange sort of apathy overcame him. He endured the stings and bites stoically, hardly registering them.
Perhaps seeing this, the Borchstogs hauled him up from the dank well on the third day and chained him up in one of the torture chambers, his feet bound to the floor and his hands to the ceiling so that he hung suspended in between like an animal carcass about to be flayed.
The largest Borchstog, over seven feet tall, black as tar, red eyes alight, neared Baleron, studying him, breathing in the prince’s stench, staring him in the eyes, and letting the prince do the same for him.
“Roschk ul Ravast,” breathed the Borchstog.
“Roschk ul Ravast!” said the others.
Baleron waited. He’d been tortured before. Grimly, he wondered how Oslogon techniques of the Art would differ from Oksilon practices.
The only sound in the chamber came from the breathing of its occupants. In the hot, stifling air, even the Borchstogs sweated, their black flesh glistening.
“I am Ghrozm,” said the leader in Havensril, wanting to make sure he was understood. He was so close Baleron could feel (and smell) the Borchstog’s breath on his face.
“I’m Baleron,” the prince said, smiling, his voice light. “Well met.”
Ghrozm ignored the flippancy. This was important to him. He wanted to be heard. “I am priest,” he said. “Sacred calling is Art. Yes. When hear ul Ravast come Krogbur, we hold ... “ He struggled. “Competition! Yes. Hold competition. Who has honor to bring Art Most Sacred, ul Undracost, to Great Savior.” His chest swelled proudly. “It ... is I. I, Ghrozm. Twenty-two did I kill. Some knew I a hundred, two hundred, year. But with own hands did slay them I. Aye, bathed in their blood did Ghrozm. Wrapped their entrails about me like covered in serpents.” He smiled hideously. “All for this. All ... for ... you.” Then, lowly, worshipfully, red eyes gleaming, he said, “Roschk ul Ravast!”
Fear knotted in Baleron’s stomach. Gone was his nonchalance. The Borchstogs of Gulrothrog had never seemed to regard torture with such ... reverence. With dread he watched as Ghrozm gestured at an underling, who wheeled over a tray laden with instruments of ul Undracost. Sharp and smooth, or jagged, or blunt, and more, many more, with such diversity it stunned Baleron, and he knew not what many instruments were for, but all flamed in the light of the brazier.
Lovingly, Ghrozm selected what looked like a set of scissors.
Baleron felt himself trying to twist away. No, he told himself. I will face this like a man. I dug this hole, and in it I will lie, and likely die.
Ghrozm touched the cold metal of the scissors to Baleron’s abdomen. Baleron shivered.
Seeing this, Ghrozm smiled. “Yes,” he breathed. “Yessss.” There was a tremor in his voice now, so moved was he by what he was about to do.
His scissors pinched a small fold of Baleron’s skin between their shining legs. Ghrozm said, “I keep this sacred flesh for rest of days. Preserve it. Worship it. Pass it on to Firstborn.”
He sliced. Baleron screamed.
They tortured him. Savagely. The pain was incredible. He’d known this was coming, but it was still a shock. The Borchstogs lashed him with whips and burnt him with red-hot pokers. His flesh hissed and smoked, and parts of it grew black. Red welts rose all over him.
He steeled himself against the pain. He tried to accept it as part of his due.
He screamed under the Borchstogs’ ministrations and pulled at his chains, but it did no good.
Ghrozm, Baleron’s blood dripping from his glistening black body, laughed, and wept, and laughed again.
They kept Baleron in the torture chamber for days, applying him to various instruments and machines—stretching him, bending him, suffocating him. Sometimes they would peel a thin slice of flesh from him. They insulted his body in a thousand ways. They were masters at their craft, Artists without peer.
He still fought them, but increasingly this was just a physical response he couldn’t help. He was building walls between himself and the reality that surrounded him, that penetrated him, and his mind drifted further and further away.
He dreamt of Shelir, and Sophia, but mainly he dreamt of Rolenya. All shame had been driven out of him. After all he’d endured and was still enduring, he would take his pleasure where he could and not feel troubled about it.
When he wasn’t dreaming of people he knew, and people he’d lost, he thought of Havensrike and Larenthi and the rest of the Crescent Union. Had Gilgaroth attacked any of the other states yet? Had he crushed Glorifel, or was he still striving to destroy its leadership first? What had become of Ungier’s attack? Had Larenthi fallen? How fared Baleron’s father? Queen Vilana?
And so, with every day that passed, he retreated further and further behind his inner walls and fortifications, as though his mind were its own castle, and in a way it was. But was he the mad king, cowering and raging on his throne? Was this the beginning of insanity?
Perhaps madness could protect him. If nothing else, it would make his torment less satisfying.
So he faked insanity. When the Borchstogs branded him, he laughed in their faces. When they stuck long, thin needles into his nerve clusters and twisted them, he screamed, but in between his screams he sang bawdy ballads Salthrick had taught him. When they forced him to drink toxins that would twist his mind and give him nightmares and hallucinations, he carried on conversations with people that were not there.
Ghrozm had seen every trick a prisoner could play on him, though, and he wasn’t fooled. Or, if he was, he went about his business regardless. With every day that passed, he seemed to swell, to grow ever more proud, as though he were an artist who knew without doubt that he was working on his masterpiece. The other Borchstogs moved about him with awe.
Sometimes they would throw Baleron into a pit and leave him there for days or weeks, and seem to forget him, only to haul him up and go at him again even more viciously than before. They used barbed whips and pliers and a hundred other things. The pain was excruciating, jerking Baleron back to reality gasping. Yet he always floated back to his dreamworld afterward and it got so that, as the weeks, possibly months, went on, the pain brought him back to the real world less and less.
He didn’t know when it was daytime or nightt
ime anymore, or if it even mattered in this place.
Eventually Rolenya came to visit him. She stayed for a long while in his pit, just staring sadly at him, saying nothing—at least, the first time. After that, he talked with her for hours. He came to expect her regular appearances. She came often, and so did others—Shelir and Rilurn and Elethris and a dozen more, and though he resisted at first he eventually began talking back to each of them. Was he truly going mad, or was this just another trick?
He didn’t care. At least it was company.
This routine went on for some time, he wasn’t sure how long, but at last the Borchstogs hauled him up from his pit one day and threw him on the floor. It was cold, and he was shivering and naked.
They tossed some rough clothes at him and Ghrozm said (in Oslogon, as he’d learned that Baleron spoke it), “Put them on. Master wants to see you, and you’d better be presentable.”
Carefully, Baleron slid the clothes on—pain flared as the rasping fabric scraped over his raw wounds—and the Borchstogs ushered him out of the torture chamber and down various passageways and up several flights of stairs.
Baleron wondered what new development was under way. It seemed Gilgaroth never did anything without several different reasons. Baleron’s torture and confinement were not just for the benefit of the Betrayer. They served some other purpose, surely, but Baleron couldn’t guess what.
The coming interview could, then, be the real reason he was here.
He limped, because Ghrozm, ul Undracosg, had flayed a ribbon of flesh from the tender sole of his right foot. Ghrozm now whipped him and cursed him for hobbling.
Ghrozm led him deep, deep into the dark bowels of Krogbur. Ultimately they shoved him through an archway beyond which yawned a vast and terrible gulf of unholy blackness. The very air made Baleron’s skin crawl, and he felt bowed down by a great, cold, loathsome weight.
It was, he saw, a massive vertical shaft. The Borchstogs paused when they reached it and uttered words of praise and awe. For his part, Baleron cursed.
The shaft was simply enormous. Downwards it dropped into an unfathomable abyss and upwards doubtlessly to the very top of the tower—not that he could see very far in this dark place. The only illumination came from the Borchstogs’ torches. Nevertheless he could determine that this was a huge, black hollow space, surely in the very heart of Krogbur, what must be its absolute core.
A staircase wrapped the far-flung walls and wound in a spiral along them, and Baleron could only assume the stairs continued beyond the ball of fiery illumination, as he couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. He wondered, though he shuddered to think on it, what could be in the middle of that vast space; somehow it seemed ... full.
Ghrozm forced him up the stairs, which seemed broad enough for an army to march along, and up, and it seemed they ascended the shaft for days. Time twisted and bent in this place. The Borchstogs never stopped, though occasionally they had to drag Baleron along, he was so tired; he’d noticed that the Borchstogs never tired here, in this bastion of evil. Their energy never flagged—indeed the reverse.
As the group rose, winding up and up along the walls, a cold dread began building in Baleron’s heart, an unreasoning panic that filled him like blood fills a vein. This great open shaft was a place of power, he could sense it—great and terrible power. He trembled beneath it and his limbs seemed to lose their strength. But deep in his breast, there was a stirring, a swelling, as that cold sliver inside him, his Doom, feasted on the black energies here like a leech. Gilgaroth is close. For some reason the thought terrified him as never before. Gilgaroth was ... different here.
At last the steps ended and they stood on a rounded platform, a terrace jutting out into the darkness, a lip overhanging the abyss. Baleron strained his eyes peering out into the blackness beyond, but he could see nothing.
The torches hissed and sparked, casting flickering red-orange light on the stone of the platform. They didn’t reveal what lay in the center of that terrible well. They hissed and crackled, and smoke teased at his nose. The hot air suffocated him.
Without warning, twin portals of flame opened in the darkness before and above Baleron. Startled, he gasped. Recoiled.
The portals hovered in the darkness beyond the platform, and Baleron realized he was looking into two great eyes, each one blazing with fire, with a black iris at its center.
Something massive hovered out in all that blackness, something they had come to see.
The Borchstogs gasped and dropped to their knees.
“Gilgaroth,” they whispered. Then, louder: “Roschk ul Kunraggoq!” Hail the All-Father! “Roschk Gilgaroth!”
Baleron stumbled backwards, but a strange force compelled him not to run. Those flaming eyes seemed to bind him.
“Children,” spoke the Presence. When it talked, a terrible mouth opened below the eyes. Inner fires lit its gleaming-sharp teeth from below. There was something of the Wolf in it, but it was not the Great Wolf. No, Baleron knew. Gilgaroth was now ... other. Somehow, this tower, its energies, that power stolen from Celievsti, had strengthened him, and he’d forged a new shape, if he wore a shape at all. For all Baleron knew, he could very well be staring at Gilgaroth’s naked spirit.
Either way, he was so awed that it was only with great effort that he stood his ground. This well ... this shaft ... the center of Krogbur ... where its energies are the strongest ... It gives him power. It’s like a temple he built ... to himself.
“Brave,” said the Shadow, regarding the prince’s upright figure. Baleron shuddered under the fiery gaze, but he stared Gilgaroth firmly in the eye. “Foolish,” added the Dark One.
Something entered Baleron’s mind. It was Gilgaroth, he knew, bright and terrible. His whole world became the pain of that intrusion, burning, all-consuming.
Fight it! he urged himself, and slowly, very slowly, the pain began to subside.
“Mortals,” said Gilgaroth, almost wearily. “You have but a few years on this earth, yet you throw them away so casually. And what happens to you afterwards? You don’t even know. Without Grace, you’re just a thing, a piece of clay. Mud. There is no magic in your blood.”
Baleron wanted to cry out that he had a soul, a purpose, but he could not find the strength to speak. Those flaming eyes absorbed him, and it seemed he drifted, floating on their seas of time and power. All else receded, even the pain. He felt warm now. Safe. Gilgaroth was his entire world.
“Of course,” the Dark One went on, “this was my doing. I cannot fault you for it. Your race fell only because I tempted you away from the Light, and you were cast out of Grace-dom.” He considered. “But you may yet receive the benefits of the Dark. You are my creatures ... or you once were. Many, like those of your kingdom, are struggling to find their way back to the Light—and failing. Of course. You are NOT of the Light. You can never be. You are tainted by what has come before. The very name of the royal house of Havensrike is a corruption of the Oslogon word ‘grochgar’. A grochgar is a stout tree that grows in the west of my land. That is where your rightful place is, Baleron. Turn away from the Light. It is not your true nature. Face the Dark. Embrace it. It is your only route to fulfillment, your only chance to be whole.
“If you serve me, you will be something more than you are. You shall have gifts, and you will live on after your flesh is destroyed. There will always be a home for you in Illistriv—what your kind in your ignorance calls the Second Hell. But there is more than flames and torture there: there is beauty and pleasure, and life everlasting.” He let that sink in. “What say you?”
The prince stared, stunned. Suddenly the Dark One released him from the spell, withdrew from his mind, and Baleron staggered. It was as if he’d just woken up, and it took him a moment to orient himself. He blinked his eyes, and shivered. He was very cold all of a sudden.
He stared up at the roaring eyes of Gilgaroth, the Black Acid of the World.
The Dark One waited.
Baleron said simp
ly, “No.” The word sounded small and pitiful in this place. And yet he knew it held power.
“No,” he repeated.
“Think of what you refuse.”
Baleron gritted his teeth bitterly. “Are you blind? I hate you. I hate this place! I know how you made it. I heard what Throgmar said. You stole the energies you raised it with. This ... tower ... it’s built on the bones of my friends. Elethris, Shelir, Lord Felias ... Rolenya ...”
“Yes, sweet Rolenya ...”
“You ate her soul, you abomination!” Baleron’s eyes filled with tears. His voice thickened. “You horrible, evil THING!”
The Shadow’s eyes flickered. In ruminating tones, Gilgaroth said, “I’d planned for the White Tower’s destruction for years, young one. Years and years. I’d prepared myself to absorb its power. You see, the world’s energies are exhausted, its greatest reservoirs empty. Therefore to raise Krogbur without weakening myself or draining Oslog of its power, I needed to absorb a great amount of energy. Celievsti was perfect, and its fall provided a breach of Larenthi’s defenses.” His mouth twisted. “Thank you, prince, for your part in that. Without you, this tower would not have come into being.”
Baleron shook his head. “No ...”
“Yes. Of course, I did have to tap Oslog somewhat to complete it, for I wanted it to be grander than that tower of Elethris’s—who, after all, was a mere elf and not an Omkar. Oslog soaks up the power I radiate; it will renew in time. By then Krogbur will be the black heart of the world.”
“No ...”
“YES. It was YOU who manipulated the armies of Elves and Men, Baleron. It was YOU who brought Rauglir out of Gulrothrog and into their ranks without examination, and then to Celievsti. It was YOU who ushered Rauglir into Glorifel. It was you that allowed Throgmar into your homeland, and it is you that will still be its undoing.”
“No ...” Baleron shook his head desperately. He felt as though he were underwater. Everything was surreal and distorted, and moving strangely.
