The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  It was only at his second glance that he truly saw the cow.

  She was standing a few yards from the rickety doors of the barn, and Caris did not even need his farm background to know there was something terribly wrong with her. She stood broadside to him, weaving on her feet; her white and cream hide was sunk over her broad pelvis and barrel ribs as if with long sickness, but the green stains of grass smudged her legs. She had been out to pasture. Caris pushed the door gently open and walked toward her. There was no sign of ambush or threat from the woods, but the sixth sense of a sasennan screamed at him of danger....

  Then she turned her head and forequarters toward him. Caris felt the vomit rise to burn his throat and the sudden chill of sweat stick his coarse clothing to his back.

  There was an abomination fastened leechlike to the cow.

  It was unlike the one he had seen in the marsh, but he knew it for nothing that existed in this world. It dangled, swollen, from the beast’s shoulder like a monstrous tick, mottled green-black and purple and longer than a man’s forearm. By the swelling under the hide where it was attached, Caris knew there was at least four inches of head buried under the skin.

  The cow lowed again and stared at him with sunken and pain-glazed eyes. Caris gritted his teeth—sick as the thought made him, he knew he could never leave an animal to suffer in that fashion.

  He looked quickly about. It was broad daylight now—early, by the elongated indigo shadows. The patrols would be checking every building they found. In a little pile of rubbish by the door, he found some old tools, including a couple of broken scythe handles and half-rotted leather straps. With one of the straps, he tied a bunch of hay onto the end of a handle; with the flint and steel no sasennan is ever without, he lighted this makeshift torch and advanced, rather queasily, upon the cow and its horrible parasite. The poor beast flinched a little from the pale brightness of the fire, but was too exhausted to flee. Caris gingerly gripped her horn and brought the burning end of the torch to the parasite’s slimy back.

  Like a tick, it twitched revoltingly; then it backed slowly out of the wound and dropped to the ground with a horrible squishing sound.

  Clotted with blood and flesh, its head was almost indistinguishable—equipped, Caris thought, with at least three mouths, mandibled like an ant’s, but infinitely more hideous. For an instant, the mouths worked with an unspeakable chewing motion. Then the head swung around, and Caris leaped back as the thing writhed like a snake on the trampled grass and launched itself, with incredible speed for something so puffed, at Caris’ groin.

  As with the thing in the marsh, Caris’ body thought for him. He struck at the thing with all the force of his arm, using the side of the torch like a bat. The mandibled mouth clamped around the wood; the tiny, lobster like claws grappled, and the thing lunged up the handle toward his chest. Horror-sickened, Caris flung the torch from him and ran; he heard the thing’s body thump soddenly against the door as he slammed it shut.

  “Antryg!” Renegade, devious, and student of Suraklin he might be, but he had spoken of the abominations as if he knew them. At least he would know what to do.

  The wizard sat up, blinking, already fumbling his spectacles onto his lacerated face. He took one look at Caris and asked, “Where?” without bothering to ask what. Like a gawky heron, he unfolded to his feet and strode past Caris to the door to peer through the cracks. After a long pause, he held up a cautionary hand and pushed open the door slightly. Through it, Caris could see the cow lying on her chest, too exhausted to flee or even to stand. The parasite had returned to her, now hanging from her throat. Flies were already swarming over the first gaping wound its exit had left.

  Caris was aware that he was shaking.

  Antryg’s voice was deep and oddly comforting in the hot, umber gloom of the barn. “There’s nothing we can do for her now, except put her out of her pain, and I’m not sure it would be safe to get close enough to do that silently.”

  Quietly, Joanna joined them at the door. She made a small noise of utter revulsion in her throat at the sight of the parasite, but nothing more. “It’s an abomination,” Antryg murmured to her, “a thing that has come through a weakening in the Void when a gateway was opened. Or, more likely, it was a parasite on something that came through.”

  She took another cautious look, around him at the cow. “The original host could have died almost immediately,” she said thoughtfully. “Who knows—maybe its parasites started off small and something in this universe made them grow.”

  The remark baffled Caris, but Antryg nodded as if he understood. There was a fleeting appearance of kinship between them, with their blue jeans and white shirts, their tangled, curly hair, and their sunburned faces. After a moment, the wizard walked back into the darkness of the barn, his white shirt a blur in the gloom. Caris saw what had not been apparent last night; the building had two doors, one facing toward the woods, through which they had come the previous night, and the other facing out into a lowland hay meadow. Green sweetness and a sharp square of primrose light breathed into the dim barn in a rush as Antryg pushed open one leaf of the vast portal. The meadow had only been partly cut; cows stood in the long, lush grass that ran down to a stream deep in cresses and ferns. When the wind shifted, Caris could hear another cow groan in feeble agony.

  Antryg murmured, “As I thought.”

  Past the stream, the dark tangle of a quickset hedge marked the road; Caris shivered. He had not thought it so close, and wondered how obvious the barn was from it. Quietly he joined the wizard by the door. “We haven’t time for this,” he said softly. “We have to leave this place.”

  “Don’t be silly.” Antryg drew him back into the protective shade of the barn. He pushed his specs a little further up the bridge of his long nose with one bony forefinger, wincing where the metal of the earpiece touched the bruised mess of his temple. “We have to know at least a little of how to deal with the things. Look at how those cows are moving. They’re all infected. It’s more than likely the things are in the woods as well.” He walked back to the piled hay where he had slept, unrolled his coat, and put it on, the worn velvet rumpled and covered with shreds of hay.

  Joanna had remained by the door to the meadow. She was looking out with what might have been nauseated fascination or what might have been simple watchfulness, for it was only by close scrutiny that someone might be seen on the road on the other side of the hedgerow. Caris followed Antryg back toward the door to the woods, but caught him by the sleeve when he made to go through it. For once, he did not fear the wizard making a break for it. Indeed, he suspected that, unless Antryg was playing a very deep game, Antryg would not try to escape until they reached Angelshand itself. But the thought of stepping outside, where the dying cow and her hideous vampire still lay joined in the brightness of the morning sunlight, made his nape crawl.

  Gently, Antryg shook loose the grip. He slipped through the open door, stepped quickly to where the torch lay guttered out in the dust, retrieved it, and returned. Neither cow nor parasite moved. His hair shadowing his eyes in the early light, Antryg undid the strap, shoved a little more hay under it, and cinched it tight again. He looked up at Caris. “Either come with me or lend me your sword.”

  The descent into the hay meadow was closer to the hell of the Church’s Sole God than anything Caris had yet experienced in his life. He had been trained in the Way of the Sasenna, taught to face and fight and kill any man or woman living. But in the last weeks, he had faced, not man or woman, but things he had never prepared for: the mewing abomination in the marsh; the hideous, icy fall through the blowing darkness that lies between universes; and the ghastly uncertainties of trying to operate by the Way of the Sasenna without a master to command him. To fight even a monster was one thing; to walk through a plague of lethal and filthy parasites was something for which neither he nor his masters had ever thought to prepare him.

  The meadow was full of the abominations.

  What little wind there was
set from the woods; it was only when he and Antryg were in the long grasses of the meadow itself that the smell of blood came to Caris’ nostrils. With it came a foul, half-familiar pungency he did not know, but which nauseated him. There were half a dozen cows in the meadow, drawn there to drink at the spring. Every one bore at least one parasite; some poor beasts had two or three, hanging like swollen, slimily gleaming bolsters from their sides or throats or lying draped over them, if they lay in the grass. The parasites themselves were anywhere above a foot in length; one, twitching over the heaving side of a yearling calf, was nearly four feet long.

  In his rough smock and coarse canvas breeches, Caris had never felt so unprotected in his life. Horror and revulsion made him queasy, but he heard Antryg, peering through the quizzing glass at that sunken body with its hideous burden, murmur, “Fascinating.”

  Around the stream, the long, rank grasses thrashed with their squirmings. Antryg raised his head, curious. “There seem to be a lot of them down there.”

  A sharp rustle in the meadow to their left made Caris swing around, his sword in his hand; his mouth felt dry with fear. “Let’s go back....”

  Antryg, torch in hand, advanced, wading through the deep ferns toward the stream.

  Caris had only an instant’s glimpse of the abomination in the ferns before it struck. It was three feet long and launched itself at Antryg like a striking cobra; Caris’ sword was whining through the fetid air while his mind was still identifying what it was that he struck. His blade caught the thing in the middle of its swollen body, checking the strike as it fell in two pieces; Antryg stepped lightly back as the head end struck at him again, bouncing short, like a hellish ball, its spined mouth snapping. Grayish slime from the split abdomen stank as it pooled in the grass; Caris whirled in horror as the whole meadow around them erupted suddenly into a sea of frantic thrashings.

  It seemed as if every filthy creature in that abominable meadow was galvanized into abrupt and greedy life. From every point of the compass, there were wallowing and lunging toward the two humans. From the hay barn at the top of the meadow, Caris heard Joanna’s entirely unnecessary warning scream.

  The abomination feeding on the calf pulled its filthy, purpuric head from the wound and struck at Caris in a streaming splatter of blood and fluid from a distance of only feet. Caris moved his sword to strike but the thing caught the blade itself, wrapping tiny, hideous claws around it, dragging it down with its huge weight. Reflex made Caris drop the blade and spring back, remembering how its fellow had lunged up along the torch; an instant later he cursed himself for dropping the weapon. Antryg’s powerful hand closed around his arm and the two of them fled through the long grass of the meadow, both knowing it was only a question of instants before that wallowing circle of creatures closed around them....

  But they did not. They fell to feeding, instead, on the split carcass of the dead parasite. Halfway back to the barn, Antryg and Caris stopped, panting, to look back and saw nothing of the dead abomination and the stinking pool of slime around it but a writhing, struggling mass of slimy purple backs.

  Something brushed Caris’ ankle, and he sprang aside with a shuddering gasp. It was a foot-long abomination, plowing through the grass like a determined maggot toward the others. Caris’ whole body was shaking with something more terrible than cold, but Antryg stood, his head a little on one side, watching.

  “Caris, I think we’ve been snubbed,” he remarked. Swinging the burnt-out torch, he walked back up toward the bam.

  It was only when they were very near it that Caris realized that Joanna was not alone.

  There was a wagon and team tied up at one side of the barn. A man in the green livery of a coachman was on the box; a footman, carrying a long, old-fashioned pike, stood beside it, nervously watching the meadow. Caris stopped in his tracks, feeling for his missing sword and cursing himself again for dropping it. But in any case, fighting would be hopeless. From the shadows of the barn, he saw Joanna wave, beckoning. In the gloom behind her, steel flashed.

  Antryg laughed suddenly, and said, “We’ll done!” He strode forward, leaving Caris either to abandon his captive or follow. He had to run to catch up.

  The man standing beside Joanna in the dense shade of the barn was wearing armor of the sort not seen in centuries—a suit of plate that covered the wearer from head to foot. The steel was ornamented with scallop and millefleur, bright with gilding, and every inch overwritten with spells and proofs against the workings of the rival champion’s wizard. It was, in fact, the product of the last days before the battle of the Field of Stellith—massive, proof against both crossbow and heat-spell, and weighing well over a hundred pounds.

  Only the helm of this archaic marvel was missing. From the enormous shoulders, with their cresting and giltwork, rose a head of startling modernity. The young man’s round cheeks and a slight double-chin gave an indication of what sort of form lay beneath all that ensorcelled steel. His hazel eyes were bright with interest and meticulously painted; the soft, dark-brown curls clustering around his face showed an expert’s assiduous hand in their arrangement.

  The emblem on the massive breastplate was that of the royal house of the Emperors of Ferryth.

  It was not the Way of the Sasenna to acknowledge lordship, other than of one’s own master, not even the highest, but Caris bent his head respectfully and said, “Lord Cerdic.”

  The young man waved away the gesture of respect with one massively mailed hand. “That was brave—incredibly brave.” He looked from the desperately thrashing meadow to Caris and then to Antryg. “Do I guess correctly that you are the mage my cousin’s men have been combing the countryside for?”

  Caris frowned disapprovingly, but Antryg nodded. “At your humble service,” he said, with a glint in his gray eyes. “If it please your Grace, I shall keep my name to myself.”

  “Of course,” Prince Cerdic said hastily. “Of course. I would never dream of asking such a thing of the mageborn.” His painted hazel eyes returned to the field again, and concern creased his open brow. “What have you decided about them, my lord? My peasants came to me begging my help. I put this thing on—it’s been standing in a corner of Devilsgate Hall for centuries—and came down to have a look at them, though deuce knows what I’d have done if I’d fallen over out there in it.”

  “When were they first seen?” Antryg asked.

  Cerdic shook his head. “Three, four days ago one of my cowmen reported finding one—a little one, no bigger than a sausage—on a heifer up in the high pastures near the Devil’s Road. He got it to back out with a torch, then it struck at him, and he ran away; fire didn’t seem to bother it. When they started showing up on the herds, we tried poison, and that doesn’t slow them down, either. Perhaps, if your lordship used magic...”

  Caris glanced sidelong at his so-called prisoner, with spiteful satisfaction. Antryg pushed up his spectacles, like a man who is stalling for time to explain why he has appeared at an evening function in a morning coat. “Well, there is a reason I can’t use magic,” he said apologetically. “And in any case, it would take—”

  Still leaning against the jamb of the bam door, Joanna turned her head from the thrashing grasses of the meadow to ask, “What kind of fire did you use?”

  Cerdic raised his plucked brows. “What other kinds of fire are there, my dear? Fire is fire.”

  “If fire was fire,” Joanna pointed out, a little diffidently, “you’d be able to temper sword steel in the kitchen stove. Have you tried destroying them with condensed fire, as in a kiln? The hottest kind of kiln you have...”

  “That would be a limekiln,” provided Antryg thoughtfully. “They have steel hearths hotter in Parchasten, where they can get the coke....”

  “But we do have a limekiln,” Cerdic said eagerly. Then his face fell. “But as for getting them in it—we could only bait one or two at a time, and then they mightn’t respond, if the bait was inside the kiln.” He glanced hopefully at Antryg. “Unless there were some k
ind of a summoning spell?”

  Antryg sighed. “I’m afraid the abominations wouldn’t be the only things such a spell would summon.”

  “And we wouldn’t have time,” Joanna put in and nodded toward the horrible movement in the meadow outside. “The things seem to be multiplying pretty fast.”

  “We may have less time than we think.” Antryg shoved his hands in his jeans pockets and cocked his head to one side. “It all depends on whether they’re ticks or maggots, you see.”

  The remark made no sense to Caris, but Joanna went white with horror. Feeling a little as he did when talking to his grandfather, Caris demanded, “What difference does it make?”

  The wizard shrugged. “The most attractive thing that can be said for a tick,” he responded, “is that it isn’t going to turn into anything else that might have wings.”

  Caris stared at him in shock; the idea that the abominations might metamorphose had never occurred to him. Cerdic whispered numbly, “Mother of God...” He swallowed hard. “But if you will not use magic—if poison won’t work—”

  Caris’ eyes went to the wizard’s face, reading the struggle obvious there as he tried to figure some way of using his powers without summoning down the Council or the Church dogs, as well. Cerdic was watching him intently, and Caris wondered if he could use this unwillingness to turn the Prince from Antryg’s ally to his own.

  Then Joanna asked, “What would you need for a spell?”

  Antryg shook his head. “Something to draw them. They came like ants after sugar to the body of the dead one. I’d probably send out some kind of an illusion of its smell to draw them to the limekiln. Once they were inside it could be fired.”

  “We’ve tried using blood,” Cerdic added, clanking forward and awkwardly folding his arms. “Two or three came to it, but the poison didn’t stop them. We used plagueroot —the most virulent poison there is—quarts of it. The smell alone should have killed them.”