by Jack Conner
He left the building, gasping as he took in the destruction of the castle. It was little more than a huge pile of smoking rubble, flames rearing from it.
Throgmar the Betrayer, as Baleron would ever after think of him, was flying above the ruins lancing the earth with his terrible fire. Many sorcerers battled him, combining their forces to drive him off. Baleron wondered if the fair-haired mages who’d slain Nebben were still alive, but it didn’t matter, not really.
Seeing the Great Worm, the prince’s eyes narrowed. His heart twisted.
“Throgmar,” he snarled.
It had been the Worm who was responsible for all this. Rauglir was just a slave to the Dark One’s will. Throgmar was his own being, master of his own fate. He had pretended at friendship, or else he’d betrayed it. Rauglir was evil throughout; though he was a thinking being, he was nearly as mindless in his lust for blood and pain as Rondthril. He had no choice in what he was, or very little. Throgmar, it seemed to Baleron, was a different matter. He could’ve chosen otherwise. He could’ve been good. And that made his crime all the greater.
“You’ll pay for this,” Baleron promised, and meant it.
With a heavy heart, he re-entered the hedge maze, aware that Rauglir was still on the loose, that the werewolf could even now be hunting him through the labyrinth. Yet the only threats that bothered him at the moment were dead ends.
Irritated, he hacked his way once more to the white gazebo that straddled the stream and knocked on the trapdoor leading down into the safe chamber. It slid aside to reveal the dirt- and soot-smeared face of Kenbrig.
“Where’s Mother?”
For some reason, that caught Baleron by surprise. He had not prepared himself for telling what had happened.
Unable to speak, he shook his head.
Shock spread over Kenbrig’s face, and for a moment the two brothers shared an unfathomable pain.
Kenbrig beckoned him inside, and Baleron descended into the chamber to find only the king present. Logran had gone to fight Throgmar.
“Where’s the queen?” Albrech asked, rising.
Baleron told him. Lord Grothgar did not take the news well.
“So,” he seethed, “your lover killed your mother, and you were too slow to stop it.”
Baleron said nothing.
The king’s eyes twinkled maliciously, almost madly. “When I’m done with you, boy, there won’t be much left. Not that there was much to begin with.”
Baleron felt knots twist in his gut. He had lost all favor with his father. Had lost hope of ever gaining any favor, or even redeeming himself in part. This was worse than after the fall of Ichil.
His future loomed darkly before him. His life would be bleak. He would be stripped of command, useless against the Shadow. He would be a pariah to his people, an untouchable. All who looked upon him would sneer. He would be a miserable wretch, even more so than he was now.
“No,” he said.
“No?” said Albrech. “I will say what happens in my realm.”
“I won’t be in your realm.”
“What?”
“Yes,” said Kenbrig. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m leaving,” Baleron said.
“Where to?” asked his father. “Where could you possibly go?”
Instead of answering, Baleron ascended the ladder, ignoring their calls to stay and listen to reason, and closed the cover after him, silencing them.
Once beyond the labyrinth he searched for the warring mages and the flaming Worm, whom he could see had set fire in his fury to a good part of the city. Castle Grothgar stood on a round hill overlooking Glorifel, and so Baleron could look down into the streets. The sorcerers had driven Throgmar away from the royal quarter and were assaulting him with every weapon at their disposal. Baleron knew that they would’ve killed the dragon by now if not for the traitors among their order, the get of Rauglir.
He hurried to the stables and saddled up Lunir.
“Come on, old boy,” he told the glarum. “We’re going for a ride. And we’re not coming back.”
Lunir cawed in annoyance.
Baleron needed a sword. He could not just bring Rondthril, that was clear. Thus, after taking to the air, he landed amidst the vast smoking ruins of the castle, attracted to the spot by a glimpse of winking metal—the ruins of the armory. Gratified, he picked the most vicious sword he could find, as well as its scabbard, and a bow and a quiver of arrows. All he strapped to Lunir’s saddlebags, then mounted the glarum once more and took to the skies.
The wind whipped him, whistling through the chinks in his armor. It felt good to be airborne again, and Lunir seemed to enjoy it too.
Ahead Throgmar swept low over a middle-class neighborhood, jetting a plume of fire that set dozens of roofs ablaze. The streets instantly filled with panicked residents, and a bucket brigade formed to fight the fires.
The core group of sorcerers traveled up the Street of the Gods, Logran at their head. He held not a staff (which was strapped across his back) but his gleaming white bow notched with a long, pearly arrow that seemed to burn it gleamed so brightly. He loosed the arrow. It drove through the air into Throgmar’s flank, penetrating the Worm’s armor. Throgmar screamed and flamed his attackers, but a second mage threw up a shield that deflected the fire.
Though wounded, the Worm was far from seriously hurt, yet he seemed to see that he could do no more here, not now that the sorcerers had weeded out their wolves-in-disguise.
“FAREWELL, MORTALS!” he bellowed. “MAY YOU ROAST IN GILGAROTH’S OVEN!”
Logran loosed another arrow at the Worm, but Throgmar’s wings beat the air and knocked it away. Throgmar turned his back to the sorcerers and winged off. He crossed over the city wall, too high for arrows to reach him, and flew out over the Borchstog hordes and then away, far away.
None save Baleron pursued him.
The prince didn’t know where the Worm went, but he would find out, and there he would make the bastard pay.
On his dark steed and bearing his unholy sword, with his Doom following him and vengeance burning a black hole in his heart, Baleron took up the pursuit and did not look back.
King Grothgar glanced up when the trapdoor slid away, admitting sunlight into the hidden chamber below the hedge maze. He squinted into the brightness.
“Come out,” came a familiar voice.
“Logran?”
“Yes. The dragon is gone.”
Albrech emerged into the waning light of day. A chill breeze blew, but the hedge maze blocked the worst of it.
Albrech’s gaze instantly turned to regard Castle Grothgar, and shock nearly froze him. The castle was no more. All he could see over the green wall of the maze was a thick column of smoke and the top of a mound of rubble. A quick scan showed flames rising from different quarters of the city.
Something died inside him.
Kenbrig climbed out, too, and took in the carnage. “Our home ...”
Logran nodded sadly. “It’s all gone, my lords. But we will rebuild. We will start over. At least the Worm is gone.”
“The Worm!” snarled Albrech. “I told him it was foul! That traitorous son of mine, that son of a ...” He paused, thinking just who Baleron was the son of, and what had happened to her. Tears rose in his eyes. He felt his iron resolve slipping. For all his life, he’d maintained strict self-discipline, and an unrelenting composure. He’d allowed no personal weakness. It was how he’d kept himself going all these years. And now, after the loss of his wife and his castle, his sons, the torching of his city already under siege ...
Kenbrig gripped his shoulder. “They will pay,” he swore. “Baleron will pay.”
“That’s going too far,” Logran said.
“Is it?” Albrech said. “He’s the cause of all this. He’s the one who brought all this upon us.”
“He is bound by his Doom. He meant no harm, though I fear harm will come to him.”
“What do you mean?”
Logran frowned. “Baleron ...”
“He’s dead?” Somehow the prospect did not seem all that distasteful to the king.
“No. He’s gone. He chased Throgmar from the city. Or, rather, followed him. It looked as though he were ... tracking ... the Worm.”
“The fool!”
A strange, inhuman chuckling sound stopped him short. His blood ran cold. All three men spun about to see the dark, bloodstained form of Rauglir in wolf form, coiled and ready to spring.
“Don’t speak ill of my beloved,” said the wolf.
Logran, who now carried his staff, was caught by such surprise that he did not immediately bring his powers to bear, and by the time he recovered, Rauglir had already launched himself upon the king.
Albrech was too startled to dodge or even draw his sword. Everything was going too fast. In a second he would be dead, and all he could think of was that it must be his wife’s blood that matted the fur of his assassin.
Kenbrig shrugged off his shock. He dove between the leaping werewolf and his father, intercepting Rauglir’s lunge, and his snapping jaws.
Rauglir bore him to the ground, ripping open his breast and throat.
A fireball shot out of Logran’s staff and buried itself in the wolf’s side, knocking him aside. Rauglir screamed and crumpled, flaming. As he began to fade, he slipped forms, becoming Rolenya, or at least her body, naked and fragile and dying.
The king slumped to his knees between his son and daughter, feeling the crack in his mind widen further. His shoulders shook uncontrollably as sobs racked him.
Logran knelt by Kenbrig and felt the prince’s throat for a pulse. Wearily, he shook his head.
How can this be happening? It was too much. Much too much. How could one man be expected to endure all Albrech had in such a short amount of time?
When clarity finally returned to him, he turned to the Archmage bitterly and said, “Do you know what really galls me?”
“No,” answered Logran dully. The bodies were being carted away, and he had been speaking with the soldiers performing the task. “What, my lord?”
“That now that that son of mine, that incestuous snake—now he is the Heir!”
Logran blinked. “Dear gods, you’re right ...”
Before he could say another word, horns blew out over the city, and General Kavradnum hurried over. “We must get to the wall, my lord. Ungier is attacking!”
Chapter 15
Filled with wrath, Baleron rode Lunir beyond the borders of Havensrike and crossed over the jagged peaks of the Aragst, the Black Wall that separated Oslog from the free nations that hemmed it in to the north. Images of revenge flashed through his head, drowning out everything else, while far ahead of him flew Throgmar, and Baleron cursed him with every breath.
At last Baleron passed beyond the Aragst and entered Oslog itself, the terrible waste that was Gilgaroth’s empire. Here the land was largely barren and riddled with fissures and sinkholes and dotted with rotten ridges and black lakes and bubbling yellow pools of sulfur and vast stretches of marshland. Baleron flew over a dark forest that surely held countless horrors, as well as endless blackened plains that looked impossible for a mortal to cross.
Patrols flew through the air, squads of glarumri, as well as Ungier’s vampires and the assorted other creatures spawned by Gilgaroth and his foul bride Mogra. None of the patrols bothered to intercept a lone glarumril, which they assumed the prince on his crow to be. Likely they thought him a messenger.
Baleron almost hoped they’d attack. He ached to spill some blood, even if it cost him his life.
The further he drew into the Wolf’s domain, the more fear gathered inside him. Stories of Oslog had terrorized him all his life. Just the same, he pressed on relentlessly. Sometimes Throgmar would set down and rest for a bit, and his pursuer would do likewise from a distance.
The days passed. Baleron ate sparingly, having little appetite, and what he took in was caught mainly through use of the bow he’d brought along—small game and the like. He hated to eat anything in this land, but at least it didn’t kill him.
He wished he had one of Logran’s bows that could pierce the armor of a dragon. That would come in quite handy.
On the fifth day, he beheld It, and the world changed.
It, of course, was the Black Tower—what Baleron would later come to know as Krogbur.
At first he didn’t know what he was seeing, not really. It was merely a black line with a fiery base sticking up from the horizon far away. As he drew closer, he saw the scale of it, the tremendous, mind-shattering size of it, and felt the evil emanating from it like heat off a midday rock. Awe and dread descended on him, strangling the very breath from him. He’d never seen or heard of anything so grand, so terrible. Its magnitude staggered him.
The dark tower stretched from the flat, charred ground to and through the black roof of the heavens. Rising from the heart of a terrible inferno, a great pyre that stretched halfway to the clouds, the tower was black and beautiful in its construction, like a piece of sculpted ebon. Like Celievsti it seemed all of a piece, not made of bricks or slabs but one massive thing. Sprouting from it were countless terraces, small and huge, and also long, thick beams that would have seemed to serve no purpose at all had not dragons hung from them by their rear claws, like bats cling to cave ceilings, or by their tails. Other Worms roosted on the huge terraces, dark and glittering. The dragons were mere dots at this distance, yet he didn’t think any were half the equal of Throgmar, who continued to wing toward the tower. Obviously it was the Betrayer’s destination.
How tall did something have to be to reach the clouds? Baleron wondered. And how could Gilgaroth have kept its existence secret? For Baleron had never heard of the Black Tower in all the lore he’d absorbed over the years about Gilgaroth, and he had absorbed quite a bit. Roshliel was drenched in the Wolf’s mythology. In many ways, Gilgaroth’s history was Roshliel’s; the one had shaped the other. And it was well known that Gilgaroth, the Face of Hell, had always lived below ground in the vast fortress of Ghrastigor, which jutted out from the edge of an abysmal chasm through which rushed a great river of magma. The only towers he frequented with any regularity in his wasteland were those that rose from Ghrastigor.
But this tower was quite real, and quite massive.
Baleron marveled at the spire and the great inferno it rose from, the huge pyre that wreathed its lower reaches, the fires leaping about it but not seeming to scorch the tower. The nearer Baleron got to it, the more convinced he became that the fires were unnatural. He could see, or thought he saw, nightmarish shapes ... swimming ... or flying ... moving through them. They seemed to be in pursuit of something.
In the air beyond and above the terrible inferno was a great grouping of evil about the tower. Scores if not hundreds of Worms circled it in a dense, scaly swarm, as if basking in the evil of the place. Baleron could not at first divine their purpose.
He flew over hundreds of dark strongholds, most showing only their tops above ground, having roots far below. Most the prince believed to be Borchstog fortresses, but others, he supposed, might be occupied by Men or Dwarves or Giants. Large troops of various races marched hither and thither across the land, doing their Master’s bidding.
None bothered Baleron.
Perhaps this too was expected?
He didn’t care. He just wanted to unleash his rage, afraid that if he kept it too long within himself it would burn him up from the inside, leaving only a smoking husk. It didn’t even bother him that, by treading deep into Oslog, he placed his very soul in danger—for Gilgaroth, it was said, did not feed on flesh alone, but ate souls. It was said that he most enjoyed elvish souls, as in them he could taste the Grace of the Omkar, and consume it. Eating their souls lent him power. Human souls only gave him fuel. Baleron supposed that if his soul became a meal for the Tempter, and he mixed with the other trapped souls in the bastard’s belly—otherwise known as the penultimate summit of the Seven Hells—at least he h
ad a chance at seeing Rolenya again. Together they would be tortured by the Warders of the Second Hell for all eternity.
Such a fate should have horrified him, but it didn’t. At least he would be reunited with her. Yet, for her sake, he mustn’t let that happen.
He would kill Throgmar.
He would kill Rauglir.
He would kill Mogra.
And then he would kill Gilgaroth, end his Doom, and free the millions of souls the Enemy had devoured over the millennia. He would destroy the Second Hell. He would keep on killing until there was no one left to kill.
So he told himself as he drew closer to the Black Tower. It still remained a thick black line on the horizon, stretching from earth to clouds.
He began to see squads of Trolls and other giant beings, not to mention terrible monsters, some loose and some in chains. Huge steaming fissures split the earth, and smoke rose from many.
Watchtowers shot up all over like fungi, from the plains as well as the ridges. He passed over another great mountain range, and that night Throgmar found rest in a cave near one of the peaks. Baleron watched from the next mountain over. On the following day he followed the Worm down from the mountains and out over the flatlands from which the tower arose.
Patrols thickened the air, and Baleron had to fight the urge to turn back, to flee. The cloud of dragons continued to circle the Black Tower and he realized they must serve as some sort of aerial moat—and here he was approaching it! He was just minutes away from entering it. Should he turn back? Would they see him for whom he was and destroy him? There were hundreds of them! Perhaps thousands! How can there be so many? His hands shook.
Throgmar entered the aerial moat and the dragons that screened Krogbur altered their courses to give the Leviathan passage, creating a hole in their scaly, ever-shifting net. Throgmar plowed right through the moat, heedless, as if none of the other dragons existed.
