by William King
A sense of terrible expectancy filled the air. Something very bad was about to happen.
Rik felt the presence of another mind. It seemed, quite obscenely, to be slithering into his very consciousness. It was as if a link of energy flowed between the creature’s eyes and his own, and tendrils of thought passed down that link.
He tried to oppose the creature’s will but could not. It was like opposing a glacier with his bare hands. The thing was slow, certain, implacable, irresistible. Ghostly alien fingers riffled through his memories. It came to him then, that the creature had not been dead. It was not sleeping. It was in some state between the two conditions, perhaps like a bear hibernating through winter. Perhaps his presence had awoken it.
He saw again things he thought he had forgotten as a whirl of impressions flickered through his mind, to be assimilated and digested by the creature in the sarcophagus.
He was a small boy in Temple Orphanage confined to his quarters for being disrespectful to his elders. He was a teenage thief running through the streets of Sorrow with an irate stall-keeper in hot pursuit. In his hand, he held a stolen pear. Behind him the roar of the crowd, getting ready to chase down the interloper was in his ears.
He was a young man in the Old Witch’s chambers. They smelled of old woman and urine and strange incenses. There was a painting on the wall of the beautiful young woman she claimed once to have been. Behind it was the hidden cache containing the rest of her grimoires. He heard feet on the stairs, and hurried to replace the volume whose cryptic secrets he had failed to understand and climbed out through the window.
He raced across the roofs of Sorrow, hand in hand with Sabena. Her golden hair drifted in the wind. The red slates felt rough under his bare feet. The golden spire of the great Temple dominated the skyline ahead of them. He leaned against a warm chimneypot as he kissed her. Its warmth was greater even than that of her body on the spring evening. She broke away at last and said; “Antonio would kill us if he knew. Perhaps we should kill him first.”
He stood before the massive bulk of the Quartermaster and accepted the Queen’s crown, the coin feeling small and hard in his fist. He swore the oath and accepted the greatcoat and the boots and the rifle. The cold air of morning turned his breath to mist. Weasel and the Barbarian gave him the thumbs up. Small wizened Leon elbowed him in the ribs. “We’re soldiers now, Rik,” he said.
All around him were the smell of smoke, the screams of the dying and a mass of warm stinking bodies, exchanging blows, stabbing with bayonets, clubbing with rifle butts. Officers shouted orders. Bones cracked. Blood flowed down the narrow cobbled streets. The Clockmaker’s followers fought like fanatics, like men crazed by religious passion in the service of their atheist leader’s cause. A whey-faced man in the robes of a peddler raced at him, brandishing a rusty cutlass. Rik aimed his bayonet at the man’s stomach and thrust, burying it in warm flesh. The man looked at him with shocked, accusing eyes as if not quite believing that he had been stabbed. He flopped forward and Rik felt a strange mixture of exultation and revulsion at his first kill in the warm blood of battle.
He looked down from the ridgeline at the walled city of Legacy, the Clockmaker’s capital. Behind him bugles called to the troops. Overhead a flight of dragons arced down towards the burning city. Moments later they weaved through the towers of smoke, dropping exploding alchemical eggs that added to the blaze.
He stood in the cave at the entrance to Deep Achenar, looking at a dead magician’s books, certain that within them were secrets that could change his life, while nearby lay the corpse of a dead demon. Weasel and the Barbarian stood close, and he felt certain that they would murder him if he did not acquiesce to their plan.
Here for the first time he got some sense of response from the Serpent Man. He felt an odd flicker of emotion that seemed a combination of hunger, lust and interest. Perhaps it was only his mind’s feeble effort to interpret the alien emotion.
His memories reeled on, covering his first encounter with Asea, and the battle with Uran Ultar in the caverns beneath the unholy mountain. Once more he sensed that odd hunger/interest along with fear/anger/horror. He was not exactly sure why but he had a feeling that the inhuman observer was familiar with the Spider God and both feared and hated it.
Once again he tried to resist the probing. He had slightly more of a sense of how it worked now, and he wrestled with the intruder within his mind, trying to hide some of his most shameful memories, to direct its interest elsewhere. He sensed a cold amusement at this, and he realised for the first time that the creature was actually aware of him as a sentient being like itself. An odd symbol began to take shape in his mind, containing within it the idea of greetings and something else he was not sure he understood.
Slowly, images swirled and began to take form in his psyche.
The Nerghul smashed against another wall and tried to regain its balance. The moving walkways seemed determined to carry it away from its prey, although this entire area stank of it. Filled with inhuman determination it pulled itself to its feet once more and moved against the flow. It was only a matter of time before it found what it was looking for.
The symbols in Rik’s mind changed, flickered, became images that he felt he could almost understand although there was something about them that was very alien, then they wavered into incomprehensibility again before coming back into clear, sharp focus.
As if in a waking dream, pictures appeared before his mind’s eye. He was within a scene, seen through eyes set differently from his own, assaulted by a welter of taste-scents that he could not understand at all, and which served only to confuse him. Then, as if the Serpent Man understood his difficulties, the taste-scents were toned down and finally vanished, and a greater emphasis was placed on sight and sound. He began to understand.
He saw the arrival of the Serpent Men on Gaeia. The Towers had not been built by sorcery. They had arrived intact, dropping from the sky surrounded by coruscating haloes of incandescent air, settling down in pre-chosen locations across the continents. Once they made landfall, the doors in their sides opened, and the Serpent Men emerged to stride the soil of their new world. They were from some far place among the stars, refugees fleeing a cosmic struggle in which they had been on the losing side. They set to work building a home for themselves in a new world.
He saw this Tower as it had been in ancient days, standing atop its cliff. There was no sign of Morven, only concentric rings of raised earth walls and enormous barrows in which larger Serpent Men lived. Workers built corrals and herded beasts. A priestly caste of beings, who looked like the ones in this crypt, offered up sacrifices to strange extra-dimensional entities. Roads stretched off to the distance, to other Towers. Great green needles of a similar substance to the Tower, flashed across the horizons, carrying the Serpent Men about their business.
He saw the first encounter of humans with the Serpent Men, and their recruitment as servants and slaves and pupils. He saw his ancestors worship the Serpents as gods. He felt a surge of resentment. The Serpent Men in their own way were as bad as the Terrarchs. They used his people as slaves, as things little better than cattle.
A sense of contradiction, of amusement, of bafflement, of frustration flowed over the link he shared with the Serpent Priest. Rik could almost smell them. His view zoomed in on other scenes, of Serpent Men trying to teach humans, showing them diagrams, how to make implements. It became clear to him that the Serpent Man was trying to say there was more than a master/slave relationship, that the Serpent Men had been trying to help the humans, to teach them.
Once the creature sensed with certainty that he had understood this, Rik’s point of view became general again. It flickered back and forth across the surface of the world, revealed as a vast sphere, showing other civilisations, other nations.
He saw that the Serpent Men were not alone in their new world. Other alien races swam in its seas, burrowed beneath its surface, rode through the air in weird living machines. There was a sense
of enormous activity, of the meeting of many civilisations, of trade and rivalry and growing tension and hatred. He saw that the Serpent Men were not alone in trying to recruit humans to help them.
He saw the buried cities of the Spider Folk, where many castes of strange arachnid beings scuttled through the dark. He saw humans with living weapons grafted to their flesh, and not just weapons. Men were hooked into massive things like monstrous scorpions, living machines that augmented their strength and allowed them to lift huge burdens in the modified pincers.
Enormous squid like creatures swam through the ocean, the motherships of the Quan, disgorging their smaller children into the seas to harvest fish and the resources of the deep, building huge pearl-domes beneath the waves, monuments to their sinister gods. He saw the largest mothership of all, a kraken-like creature vast as an island, its outline visible in the depths of the ocean, as if he were viewing it from one of those flying ships he had witnessed earlier.
He became aware that he was seeing an actual memory of the being with whom he was linked, and he sensed approval as it noticed his understanding. Slowly a sense of wonder grew within him. He was seeing the world as it had been aeons before the Terrarchs came, through the eyes of one who had actually been there.
He saw tensions mount between the races as they fought for resources and for slaves. He saw skirmishes lead to battles and battles lead to wars. He saw great engines of sorcery unleashed and mighty weapons deployed. He saw the Towers of the Serpent Men besieged by the spawn of Uran Ultar. Great armies did battle. Moth-like flyers assaulted the flying needles of the Serpent Men. Monstrous acid spewing beasts attacked the fortresses. Great mushroom clouds rose over massive explosions that turned fertile land to deserts of glass, and churned the boiling seas. Death rained down from the skies. Clouds of poison gas depopulated cities.
The Elder Races fell into barbarism. The thinking caste of the Ultari Spider Folk succumbed to madness and disease. The Ocean Queens of the Quan went insane or devolved back to being barely sentient. The Serpent Men retreated within their Towers, their sorcerer priests taking to their sarcophagi, determined to sleep until the world was healed. He saw this Tower being sealed, and then attacked with those awesome ancient weapons. He felt the damage to the Tower as agony within his body. He knew that the systems meant to protect the sleeping Serpent Priests had been damaged, perhaps irrevocably.
Blankness. Static. A sense of emptiness, of sleep filled with strange slow dreams. Suddenly the Tower was brought back to life when Ilmarec entered it and found this vault. He awakened this last surviving Serpent Priest, promised it aid; Ilmarec would help it rejoin its brethren and return to the stars. When he discovered the Serpent Priest’s true weakness, Ilmarec used spells to enslave it.
He felt the Serpent Man’s fury as he was bound by sorcery to Ilmarec’s will after an epic battle of mind and souls. The Serpent Man was awake now, but bound within its coffin, still linked to the Tower in strange ways, but unable to affect it. It could not move now from its crypt but it gave Ilmarec its talisman of command, taught him its secrets.
More scenes danced through Rik’s imagination, all of them views of the inside of the Tower, all of them from strange angles, as if the structure itself had eyes within it and he was looking through them. He saw Ilmarec performing experiments, finally learning how to partially heal the Tower, and communicate with its chained intelligence.
Rik saw recent events start to unfold.
He saw Jaderac come. He saw the Foragers and Asea and Sardec on their recent visit. He saw Kathea trapped in her chambers.
He saw himself as he appeared to the Serpent Man now, as he stood in the tomb. He knew he was seeing himself as the creature saw him. He sensed something else. To the Serpent Man he had a mind that could be barely touched or grappled with. He wondered if the truth was not that he was having difficulty understanding the Serpent Man because he was alien, but that the Serpent Man could barely touch his mind to communicate.
A wave of understanding passed between him and his captor then. It was trying to communicate with him. It needed him. He tried to listen, to receive, to empty his mind although he was not sure exactly what he was doing.
A sense of imminent danger grew within him. As it did so, he saw Ilmarec standing in the central chamber of the Tower performing some ritual. Awareness that the Tower itself was a quasi-living thing with its own senses, capable of perceiving things at hundreds of leagues away, flowed into him.
More images flickered into Rik’s mind along with more strange knowledge. He saw that Ilmarec had awakened something deep in the Tower’s heart, the trapped heart of a god, a thing that generated enough energy to hurtle the Tower into the sky and back through the cold gulf between stars.
He saw too what the Serpent Man knew and Ilmarec did not, or could not. The God’s heart was damaged. If Ilmarec continued to draw on its power, to use it to provide ever higher levels of magical energy, then the heart would break. It would explode and the unleashed energy of a million barrels of gunpowder would scorch the earth beneath it, destroying everything for hundreds of leagues around. Everyone and everything that fell beneath the shadow of the vast rising mushroom cloud would die.
Rik knew now what the Serpent Priest wanted. He wanted Ilmarec stopped and the Talisman of control returned to him. He was willing to offer alliance to Rik and his people, to aid them in getting rid of Ilmarec, and free the Princess.
Rik did not trust this creature. He was not sure he wanted it in charge of the Tower any more than he wanted Ilmarec to be.
More feelings flowed from it, of deep sadness mixed with calculation. The Serpent Man would not interfere in this war. The Tower was crippled. It wanted to repair it and depart to find its brethren among the stars.
Rik was adrift here. He was not Asea or Jaderac. He was in no position to bargain with the Serpent Priest as an equal. It was far older and possessed of far greater knowledge than he. He had only one advantage. If it allowed him to, he could move where it could not. It could do things he could not. He did not even know what it could offer him, other than his life, as its side of the bargain. As if responding to his confusion, it withdrew for a moment considering.
More images flickered into his mind. He saw the location of the Princess Kathea, and the way to get there. He saw the chambers in which Ilmarec waited. He saw all the sorcerous engines and defences and traps that lay between them. He saw how to overcome the old fail-safes. More and more knowledge, and alien thoughts flowed into him. He felt like screaming but within moments it was over, and he slumped forward, all contact broken with the Serpent Man.
He knew what he must do. At that moment, the whole Tower began to shake.
Sardec’s eyes were drawn to the Tower as if by some magnetic force. It seemed like a trapped sun burned there, and Sardec half-expected the green death to come raining down on Morven.
The mansion quivered beneath his feet, like the pre-shock of an earthquake. It was like being trapped in the belly of some great beast as it writhed in its death agonies. A smell of ozone filled the air. In the distance he heard things crashing down. Sardec offered up a prayer to the god of his childhood for his own safety and the safety of the others.
Above him the cliffs split. Great boulders tumbled down into the ruins, and then great chunks of the rock face sheared away and began to fall, taking those smooth glassy walls with it.
Wind rushed against his face, and the smell of ozone intensified. Bolts of magical energy crackled from the tower. Then slowly the Tower of the Serpent rose from the middle of the fortress, tons of earth shedding from its base. The whole bottom of the Tower glowed greenly as it flew upward, gathering speed as it went, the great green light of the Serpent’s Fang blinking oddly.
The Tower had taken flight, faster than any dragon. Awe clutched Sardec’s heart at the sight of the ancient enigmatic structure vanishing into night and storm. He knew now how Ilmarec intended to destroy Azaar’s army. He doubted any power in the world could s
top it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The moving walkway carried Rik though the heart of the Serpent Tower. He had an hour at most before the god’s heart at the core of the Tower erupted and destroyed him, the Tower and everything within leagues.
He groaned with desperation. He felt as if he were already dead. He needed to kill Ilmarec and reclaim the Serpent Man’s amulet, return it to the ancient being and hope that somehow it could save him. He did not think the chances of him managing it were good. He let out a long breath, and tried to calm his racing heart.
It was too late to worry now. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the path spiralling upward through the core of the Tower, through the secret levels that no human had ever penetrated before. In his heart the certainty was growing that no human would ever do so again.
The doorway slid outwards as the moving walkway stopped, revealing another corridor without a moving floor. Rik pushed on. This, at least, was something he was used to, being deep within forbidden ground all alone. It echoed his career as a burglar. Only then there had been no powerful demon-summoning sorcerers ahead of him. No lost princesses either.
He clutched his blade in his hand. He had his pistol in the other. He moved carefully, pausing to listen when he came to any entrances, making sure he heard nothing before proceeding passed them. He strode quietly along the corridors. He had been a thief in Sorrow, and often in places where absolute silence was his only protection. Somewhere out there were guardians, Terrarch soldiers, magical defences, and, worst of all, the Nerghul. He needed to hurry but he wanted to take no chances and the two imperatives warred within his soul.
The Tower was eerily quiet. His feet made no noise on the odd stonework, but he felt a strange thrumming vibration beneath them. Almost directly opposite was a window. Looking through it Rik could see the lights of the town, and the smouldering embers of the burned buildings. He seemed very high up now, almost touching the sky. The town spread out below, a glowing pattern of lights, like some Elder sign touched by sorcerous energy. Something about it reminded him of the way the runes had glowed on Sardec’s blade in the tunnels below Deep Achenar.
