by Jack Conner
Gilgaroth must have seen Baleron’s indecision, for he said, “Decide, Baleron. You don’t have long. Thorg looks . . . hungry.”
Thorg stuck his steaming snout in Rolenya’s face, and his drool dripped on her breasts. His sharp teeth pressed against her cheek. She trembled and closed her eyes, turning her head aside. She was preparing herself for the end, Baleron could telll. How could he let this happen? There had to be something he could do.
The black wolf’s teeth left red impressions in her skin. She quivered in fear.
Thorg grazed her arm with one of his fangs, slashing open her tender flesh, and she flinched and let out an involuntary gasp.
“Stop it!” Baleron shouted. “Stop!”
“You will serve me?” asked Gilgaroth.
Baleron said nothing. Rolenya opened her eyes. When he glanced at her, she shook her head mutely, too scared of Thorg to say anything. The terrible beast pawed the ground before her.
“You smell delicious,” Thorg told her in his black, unnatural voice. The cuerdrig’s red tongue probed her wound, licking at the blood. “You are,” he added.
The Dark One said, “Cut her again.”
Thorg bit her, and again. With each surgical slash of his fangs, she cried out, and Baleron strained against the Borchstogs that held him down.
“Decide,” said Gilgaroth.
“I’ll never do your bidding again!” Baleron said. “Torture me how you like, that will not change.”
Silently, Gilgaroth inclined his head to Thorg, who bowed and drew back from Rolenya a few paces, then turned to face her, his mouth open and steaming. He was one great, lethal furnace of pride and fury, and he was aimed straight at Baleron’s once-sister, once-lover, forever beloved. All Baleron had to do to save her was betray his kind and kin and all they stood for, and doom the world entire.
He said nothing.
Fire licked from Thorg’s maw.
“Baleron!” Rolenya shouted in terror.
“Rolenya!” he called back.
It was the last thing she could have heard.
The great black wolf opened his mouth, and a column of fire issued from his awful jaws, burning Rolenya alive.
This time, when Baleron closed his eyes, no one stabbed him with a fork.
That night, they did not return him to the relative comforts of Olfrig and the hospital wing but cast him down into a pit again—a different one than before. They did not want him getting cozy. He sobbed in the darkness as scorpions and other vermin stung and bit him. He felt that he might as well be in a hell—the First, Second or otherwise did not much matter to him, save that Rolenya would be in the Second. He ached for her. She had suffered so much because of him.
Why did Gilgaroth torment them like this? Was it because the Dark One enjoyed it, or because he wanted to squeeze just a little bit more out of his favorite pawn? What more could Baleron do for him, anyway?
Baleron didn’t think he could take any more.
Several hours after the events in the arena, Borchstogs under Ghrozm’s command hauled him up from the bottom of the pit in a rusty cage and led him off to a torture chamber, where they tied him up again and brought out the whips and blades and pliers and needles and white-hot pokers. Savagely, Ghrozm and his apprentices whittled away at him.
“You should have given Master what he desired,” Ghrozm said, jaw clenched tightly.
Baleron endured it all stoically. His mind was far, far away. In a way, the torture was almost a relief.
Eventually they dragged him back to the pit and lowered him down it. He crawled out of the cage, bleeding and empty, and curled up on the dank stone floor. Worn out, he fell asleep instantly as things crawled over his inert form and stung him mercilessly, and the cage ascended, creaking, above. He dreamt of Rauglir again, and the laughter of the werewolf mocked him as he ran through an endless aviary, dizzied by the bright colors of the frantic birds. Somewhere his mother called to him, and he ran on, blinded by the birds.
The voice changed to another’s. Someone else called him now, rocking him, and summoning him from slumber.
He opened his eyes, and started.
For Rolenya—dear, sweet Rolenya!—was cradling his bloody head in her lap, stroking his sweaty hair.
“How—?” he gasped. “What—?”
She gazed down at him with such sadness and love that it broke his heart to see. She had to be a ghost born of his weakening sanity, he thought. But then he realized it: none of his ghosts had touched him before.
“Rolly!” he choked and sat up. The effort made him grimace.
Somewhere high above a torch burned in the upper chamber, but its illumination was scant indeed. He could see only the orange glow reflecting off the side of her face, the swell of her cheekbone, the sweep of her black hair, the shine in her blue eye. He could see but one eye, as the other side lay in shadow.
“Baleron,” she said, and hugged him tightly.
He drowned in her warmth, in her loving embrace. He gripped her and squeezed her to him, and she felt small and frail in his arms, in need of protection. Her breasts pressed against his chest, and he tried not to notice.
They rocked in each other’s arms, crying in relief and despair. At last he pulled himself away. “But I saw you die! How’s this possible?”
She lowered her eyes. “He forged me another body, Bal, and slipped me—my soul—into it.” She looked glum about it.
“To what purpose?”
“I . . . don’t want to know.”
They looked at each other for a long moment.
He stroked her soft cheek. “When I saw you die—” He shook his head, unable to finish the thought. Instead, foolishly, he asked, “Did it hurt?”
Tears ran openly down her cheeks and dropped off her jaw as she nodded, and scorpions scattered as the tears splashed the floor, not wanting the liquid to touch them.
“That’s twice now I’ve died,” she said. “I can tell you, death doesn’t get easier with practice.”
“But why are you here? I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. I was just funneled into this body, and they brought me here.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, he smiled. It was the first time he’d been alone with his sister in a long, long time. A thought occurred to him, and he hesitated. Finally, he forced himself to say, “Rolly, I . . . do you know that we’re . . . well, I mean that you’re an . . .” He stopped.
The sweet ghost of a smile graced her face. She reached out and brushed a strand of hair from his cheek. “I know. In Illistriv . . . someone told me. You and I . . . we’re not what we thought we were.”
“No.”
“No.” She looked at him steadily. “But maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
That gave him hope, but he said nothing about it.
For some time, they didn’t talk much, just held each other, and to him it felt somehow right. He felt they were meant to be together. But, then, didn’t every lovelorn fool think the same thing? He didn’t want to talk about it. Why ruin things? Yet, the longer she was near, the more he longed for her and the harder it was not to look at her and touch her as he’d grown accustomed to in Havensrike.
Eventually, he asked softly, “The Second Hell . . . is it terrible?”
She made a face. “That depends on where he places you. At first he put me in a safe place, a place of gardens and streams—it was nice, though I was scared, and there was an awful forest near—but after you refused him he was wroth and threw me into a sea of fire where his Warders . . . savaged me.” The memory, so near the surface, broke free, and she sobbed and flung herself against him. He stroked her hair and cooed in her ear.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”
He held her all night, and it seemed strange to him that Gilgaroth would allow him this, this one moment of happiness. Her heart beat against his chest, and he spoke of happier times. That seemed to comfort her somewhat.
After awhile, she whisper
ed, “You always could make me feel better, Bal. I’ve missed you.”
“And I you.” He paused, cursing himself, then plowed forward. “Rol, I’ve . . . got something to tell you. At Gulrothrog, after we escaped—well, that was you, right, the night Salthrick came? Or the thing pretending to be him.”
“Yes. That was me.”
“Well, when I returned, when we attacked it, we found . . . another Rolenya. Someone pretending to be you. And she . . . he . . . it . . . well, we . . .” He coughed. This was worse than he’d thought it would be.
“I know,” she said.
“What?” He nearly jumped away from her.
“In the Second Hell, in Illistriv, just a few months ago, he . . . that is, Rauglir . . . he came to me, boasting. He wanted to shame me, shame you—to hurt me. He’s the one who let it slip that we weren’t truly brother and sister, and he told me how you . . . how you felt about me . . .”
Heart in throat, Baleron waited. “Well?” he said at last, his voice rasping.
“To tell you the truth,” she said softly, not moving away from him, “I wasn’t as surprised as you might think.”
He tilted her chin up so that he could look into what he could see of her eyes. “No?” he asked, his voice even more a rasp now than before.
“No.”
They didn’t say anything more about it, though they looked at each other for a long, long time. He wanted to kiss her then, but was afraid. After all he’d been through, somehow this still managed to terrify him. It amused him, and shamed him. So he just held her, and she held him, and eventually they passed into sleep.
Upon waking, two fiery eyes loomed over them.
He sat bolt upright, waking Rolenya, and she gasped and shrank away.
No, Baleron thought. No, it CAN’T be. Not again.
But it was. The Dark One had taken the guise of the Great Wolf, but he was even larger now. His slavering jaws dripped hissing saliva that smoldered against the stone floor. His eyes burned, pools of fire in the blackness. He growled deep, and Baleron shook with fear. The Wolf’s musk-stench filled the pit.
“Gilgaroth,” Baleron said, awed.
“I have come,” declared the Wolf.
“Thank You . . . for Rolenya.”
“I have come for her, not you. Unless you have . . . reconsidered.”
“What? You cannot . . . you cannot do this! You can’t give her to me and then take her away, again. It’s not right!” He understood how foolish the words were even as he spoke them, but he couldn’t help it.
Rolenya huddled against the far wall, her eyes, angry but scared, transfixed by the Shadow’s. She did not seem able to bring herself to speak.
“WILL YOU SERVE ME?” asked Gilgaroth.
Baleron understood now why Gilgaroth had given Rolenya to him. He’d given Baleron something precious so that it would hurt more when he took it away. It was the same in the arena, but this was worse, as the gift he’d given was greater: time.
In a small, trembling voice, Rolenya said, “Don’t give in, Bal.”
Baleron tried to meet the Wolf’s gaze, but couldn’t.
“I am not your creature,” he said.
Enraged, the Great Wolf bounded forwards, knocking the prince aside and leaping on Rolenya. She struggled, but she could not fight such a being. The Wolf’s jaws crushed the life from her, and her blood spattered the stone walls and scattered the lurking scorpions to their holes.
Gilgaroth, ignoring the prince’s shouts and fists, devoured Rolenya, right before Baleron’s horrified eyes. Baleron beat at the Great Wolf’s sides so fiercely that he exhausted himself and sank against the wall as far away as he could get, and, weeping bitterly, turned his face away. He closed his hand over his ears to muffle the wet, meaty sounds and awful growls of the Wolf.
Finally, a secret door slid away in the pit wall with the sound of stone grating on stone, and the Dark One backed into it, his red stare never leaving Baleron. Rolenya’s blood dripped from his muzzle.
“I can make her and destroy her a thousand times, Baleron. How many times can you stand to watch?”
The door slammed shut, leaving Baleron alone in the pit.
Gilgaroth was true to his threat, for the next night it happened all over again—and the next.
Every night Gilgaroth created a new body for Rolenya and every night he destroyed it after Baleron’s refusal to aid him. Sometimes he would give them time together first, sometimes not. The prince watched his beloved die time and again, sometimes horribly and slowly. He began to go mad, talking to himself when no one was there, pulling at his hair, which (he knew from the fistfuls) had begun to show even more streaks of silver. Killing himself would be pointless; Gilgaroth would only make him a new body. His only defense was to lose himself in his own mind.
He could not obey the Shadow, could not help destroy the world. If he and Rolenya had to suffer for it, then suffer they would. Eventually the war would reach a point where his contributions would matter little and the Dark One would kill him or forget him. Either way, this had to end sometime. He only had to hold on till then, no matter the cost to Rolenya. She agreed, as she said many times when they were put together. “If all I have to do to save the world is be tortured and die, I’ll do it,” she said. Over and over she urged him to be strong for both of them, to resist the Enemy’s demands.
As Olfrig had alluded to, a huge army of Borchstogs and corrupted Giants and Men and others had gathered at the base of the tower, beyond the reach of the Inferno. Baleron overheard his guards and torturers discussing it. Ghrozm was openly boastful. The forces had been massing for months and their ranks were still not swelled fully yet. When the army was all gathered, Gilgaroth would send them and the dragons north to break the sieges at Clevaris and Glorifel, then to sweep across the whole Crescent, destroying what bastions of the Light remained, and they were few. Baleron knew he had only to wait until then, to that unimaginable day, the day when all hope died, when his usefulness to the Lord of the Tower would surely be at an end.
One day, Borchstogs led him out from the pit and down corridors he’d never been down before, and suddenly he smelled fresh air.
Outside!
Excitement coursed through him at first—he’d lived to see the world beyond Krogbur one more time—but then he grew uneasy. What now? He steeled himself to face whatever new horrors awaited him, and Rolenya.
His captors led him to an outside terrace, where a red Worm waited. Much smaller and leaner than Throgmar, it was more serpentine, and it hissed at the prince, lashing its tri-pronged tail. Nonetheless, it allowed the Borchstogs to strap him into a saddle, while two of their number strapped in behind him.
On a nearby terrace he saw Rolenya likewise being lashed onto the back of a similar dragon. Former brother and sister looked at each other sadly. Neither knew what was about to happen, but it could not be pleasant.
The wind roared and, despite everything, Baleron enjoyed it as it swept through his hair and over his skin. He hadn’t seen the outside world in months, and he blinked at its brightness, even if the sky was covered with storm clouds and all was dim and stark. A tongue of lightning lanced the ground to the left, and he recoiled at its brightness, having to mash his eyes shut. The thunder nearly knocked him off his feet.
When he could see again, he marveled at the vision before him, at the mountains in the distance, the smoking volcanoes, the river of fire off to his right . . . It was so big that it took his breath away. He’d become accustomed to tight environs.
As always, hundreds of dragons circled the tower in neverending loops, screening Krogbur from unwanted guests. Baleron thought of that day when he’d tracked Throgmar here. Then he had supposed the moat-Worms had sensed Rondthril and allowed him to breach their ring, but now he knew the truth, as he’d half-suspected at the time: the Wolf had let him in. Gilgaroth had, as was his way, been playing with Baleron.
Baleron’s mount tilted and he received an unwelcome glimpse over the side o
f the terrace. His stomach lurched. It was a long way down. Krogbur reached to the very clouds and higher still, and the terrace they perched on was well above the Black Tower’s equator. Small wisps of clouds drifted below. Below that raged the terrible Inferno of Illistriv. Souls, millions of them, flashing like silverfish, darted through the leaping flames pursued by nightmarish terrors, the Warders.
On the ground beyond the fire spread a restless darkness: the army. The soldiers were too far away to look like even ants; all Baleron could see was the formations and a myriad of tiny pinpricks that must be their bonfires. Still, he was struck by the size of the gathering: it was immense, stretching off towards the horizon. No might that the Crescent Union could summon could stand against it.
The realization shook Baleron. This army, coupled with these hell-Worms, is the doom of the Alliance. And when the Alliance fell, so would all of Roshliel.
He glanced to Rolenya. She, too, had caught a glimpse of the hordes, and was staring at them with a tight, pale face. Nervously, she looked up from them and shared a grim glance with Baleron.
The dragons bearing prince and princess took off. Flying in tandem, they spiraled down around the thick trunk of Krogbur, taking their time. Overhead, the black stem of the tower rose to the charcoal roof above, ringed by lightning. Thunder shook the heavens.
They passed terraces where powerful Worms lazed on mounds, some of treasure, some were of bones and rotting bodies with flies buzzing around them. More blood-spattered Worms hung like bats from jutting beams and ramparts.
On other terraces stood groups of Borchstogs and other demons, come to get a glimpse of Baleron. When they saw him they pumped their fists in the air and chanted, “Roschk ul Ravast! Roschk ul Ravast!” Some dropped to their knees and slit their arms with knives, flinging their blood in his direction.
The Worms angled out, away from the tower, and just in time, too—any lower and they would have flown through the very flames of Illistriv. Sparks leapt up from the Inferno and the dragons flew through the fiery sprites that swayed and swarmed with the searing currents. Baleron hunkered low, feeling scalding pains on his thigh and back.
