The Black Tower

by Phlip Jose Farmer

  The very skeleton of the man, the rounded skull with its now-vacant sockets where only seconds before eyeballs had stared blankly at the black sky, cracked and fell away, revealing cold vacancy where once a living brain had contemplated the theorems of Aristotle and the verses of Homer.

  An errant breeze swept across the mountain peak, lifting the dust of Major Neville Folliot from the satin of his casket and the wool of his uniform and scattering it across the emptiness beneath the bluff.

  Clive felt himself shudder but brought himself back under control. "I have found my brother. I have now accomplished the first part of my charge. But to know that Neville Folliot is dead is insufficient. I must find out how he died. Why he died, and at whose hand. This journal will tell us much, but I must also see what lies in the black city yonder before I consider returning to England.”

  He gazed out over the black plain. "How can we get down there?”

  "Coffin looks awfully tall, sah.” Sergeant Smythe was kneeling beside the casket. He reached in, lifted a corner of the shimmering satin padding. The edges of a false bottom showed clearly in the light of the swirling stars.

  "Lend a hand, Sidi Bombay. You heard the major.” To Clive's astonishment, Sidi Bombay complied with the sergeant's command. The two men pried the false bottom from the coffin and stood back to observe its contents. "Look at that, sah! Just what the doctor ordered, I'd say!"

  Smythe pointed into the coffin. Carefully arranged in the volume beneath the false bottom lay a complete set of climbing equipment—grapnels, ropes, pitons, picks.

  "This'll be a test of our skill and our courage, I'd say," Smythe asserted.

  "And of our faith," added Sidi Bombay.

  Clive stared at the white-clad man. At one moment Sidi Bombay seemed to know all that was to be known, seemed to have appointed himself the controlling influence of their party. At another, he appeared a mere traveler, a faithful retainer. Clive said, "Very well. There's nothing to be gained by delay. Let us set to our task!"

  Clive had taken the point position in their descent. He felt it his duty as the commander and leader of the party.

  Sidi Bombay had taken the center position of the three, linked with both Folliot and Smythe by a safety line. His tall, almost scrawny frame weighed little, and despite his sometimes startling toughness, Clive feared for the survival of that dry, ancient body.

  Horace Hamilton Smythe, physically the strongest of the three, anchored the party, the safety line knotted around his waist. Should Sidi Bombay fall, Smythe's strong muscles and firm grip might save him. Should Clive Folliot fall, in all likelihood Smythe would find himself bearing the weight of three.

  The descent itself had been physically draining but, other than that, less difficult than Clive had anticipated. As a youth he had climbed the tall hills and gentle old mountains of his native land. He had mountaineered for sport in the Swiss and Italian Alps. He knew that the demands of a descent were those of concentration, caution, and thought more than they were of brute strength or great skill.

  He planned each step, each grip, each placement of finger or toe before he made it. Whenever possible he planned not one move ahead but two, three, four—like a chess player plotting an attack.

  When he saw the fissure he welcomed it for the hand- and footholds it offered, for the opportunity to brace and rest that it might provide. It was only when he braced himself in the opening and peered into the slit in the mountainside, which opened like the iris of a titanic cat's eye, that he saw movement.

  The organ that shot out at Clive could have been anything long and flexible and deadly. The arm of a huge orangutan. The tentacle of a giant squid. The tongue of a monstrous batrachian.

  Like everything else they had found in and of this dark world, it was a dead black. It uncoiled, swept past Clive's face with a deadly whir, and drew back into the fissure. Clive barely caught sight of the serrated edges of the tentacle, and as it withdrew they buzzed audibly against something. From the swirling stars in the midnight sky faint rays of light penetrated the opening in the mountain and were reflected from the glittering eyes of the creature.

  With a chill, Clive realized that it was his safety line that the serrations had buzzed against. Intentionally or otherwise, the thing had cut that line. Clive was now unprotected by the line and disconnected from the two climbers above him on the mountain. If he lost his grip there would be no help from Sidi Bombay or Horace Hamilton Smythe.

  He braced himself, leaned as far away from the mountainside as he could, and peered upward. He could see Sidi Bombay some twenty yards higher on the escarpment, making his way slowly downward. Another fifteen or twenty yards up, Clive saw Horace Hamilton Smythe.

  With all his breath, Clive shouted up to his companions, pleading with them to drop their weapons to him. He had to repeat himself, but at last they heard.

  Sidi Bombay released his staff and it tumbled toward Clive. Folliot caught it with both hands, pressing desperately against the walls of the fissure, bracing with spread knees.

  He held the staff in one hand, bracing with his elbow, peering upward at Horace Hamilton Smythe. The sergeant was a speck of blackness silhouetted against the blackness of the night. He called down to Clive and let go of his pistol.

  It tumbled downward. To Clive it seemed that time was frozen. The revolver fell with infinite slowness, turning end over end, its pattern of diamond stars appearing and disappearing with each revolution, larger and brighter with each revolution, until the revolver was only a yard or so above Clive's head.

  There was a sound from deep within the fissure, a slither mixed with a scraping as if great legs covered with stiff, bristly hairs were moving against rock walls.

  Clive dared not take his eyes from the falling pistol, not for a fraction of a second. If the thing was moving toward him he would have to trust to providence that it would not arrive before the pistol reached his hand.

  The diamonds whirled past his vision once more, gleaming with the brightness of a constellation of suns. Then, with an impact as audible as it was tangible, the revolver thudded into Clive's hand.

  He swung his arm, his palm and fingers dosing around the revolver's grip at the same time as his forefinger moved through the trigger guard. He pointed the revolver into the fissure and sighted along its silvered barrel.

  For the fleeting instants, the fractioned seconds it took to perform these acts, Clive had neither thought nor will. He was a passenger in his own body, an observer inside his own skull. Someone or something else seemed to take him over. Some instinctive or reflexive knowledge guided every muscle in his frame.

  He experienced his forefinger squeezing the revolver's trigger, without thinking or willing himself to do so. The fissure was illuminated by the flash that emerged from the revolver's muzzle.

  The light appeared and disappeared more rapidly than the blink of an eye. In that tiny fraction of a second Clive saw something that would stay with him for the rest of his life, whether that span should be measured in moments or decades.

  A face.

  A monstrous, terrible face.

  Not a human face, but one that held in it something of the human, something warped, anguished, pain-filled and even more hate-filled, that might once have been human. And something of the insectile, for the eyes were huge and faceted and gave back the flash of the revolver in a thousand fractured fragments. And something else, too, something obscene and hateful and infinitely filthy.

  It had been the face's tongue, Clive decided, that had whirred past him and buzzed against his safety line and severed him from the white-robed Sidi Bombay above him.

  And then, as that fleeting flash of light faded, the bullet fired from Horace Hamilton Smythe's American revolver struck that face, struck it dead center, and smashed it like an overripe tomato hurled at a poor entertainer in a cheap music hall in the worst section of Whitechapel.

  The report of the revolver echoed in the fissure, echoed in Clive's ringing ears. And coupled with
the thunder of that explosion was the sickening liquid sound of the face. Smashed. Smashed.

  It exploded, and chunks of flesh and pieces of gore and freshets of its vile blood and even more disgusting fluids, hot and stinking like the deepest pits of hell, washed over Clive.

  He braced Sidi Bombay's staff against the walls of the fissure, stuck Horace Hamilton Smythe's revolver into his waistband, and clung, clung desperately, to the inside of the fissure.

  Gobs of protoplasm hissed past his ears and fell away toward the black plain beneath him. Where hot fluids struck his body he felt an immediate and disgusting abnormal warmth. He blinked and looked down at himself. He was drenched with gore, but even as he examined his clothing and the exposed parts of his body in dismay, the stuff hissed and steamed and bubbled away, dissipating into the cold, dark, dry air of the mountain.

  Hot bile rose in Clive's throat but he fought it back and fought to calm and steady himself before turning his face upward to the others. He called to them, and at his instructions Sidi Bombay climbed down until the upper end of the severed safety line hung within Clive Folliot's reach.

  Carefully, Clive reconnected himself to the safety line, knotting the severed ends tightly.

  He continued his descent.

  The march from the base of the mountain to the black city was uneventful.

  Nothing lived on the black plain, no living creature swam in the black river. At least, none that revealed themselves to Clive or Smythe or Sidi Bombay.

  By the time they arrived at the black city they realized that it was even taller, even more overwhelming, than it had appeared from the bluff where Neville's coffin had been found.

  Within the city the light of the swirling stars penetrated but little. Instead, points of brilliance danced in the air like dust motes in a sunbeam. Each point gave out a minuscule bundle of light, dancing and dipping, intangible and uncapturable. By the uncounted millions the light-motes swarmed, providing an illumination comparable to a gloom-laden twilight.

  The buildings varied in size and shape, but all were constructed with a combination of grace and massiveness that spoke of the nature of their designers. All were black, the only variation in their material being that of texture: some were glossy and shimmered in reflected starlight and mote-light; others were dull as matte.

  It was not difficult to find the center of the city, for here a vaulting monolith curved skyward, its slim black peak disappearing into the blackness of the heavens. The tower was a monolith in more than appearance: it was obviously a single piece of stone. This was true of each and every structure in the city, and Clive Folliot came to suspect that the entire city was in truth a monolith, a single titanic sculpture, or possibly a casting of some black basaltic material that was formed and hardened in one unit

  What if the entire black world was a monolith?

  He shook his head and strode first into the curving tower.

  Through a tall archway he proceeded to a grand black hall. There he observed what appeared to be an altar, and upon it a casket, a miniature of the one in which his brother Neville had lain. Beside the altar stood a gong as tall as a man, and beside it a mallet.

  Without difficulty, Clive opened the casket. Within it lay an object ordinary in shape but nevertheless startling in appearance. It was a key, a small and ordinary key no more than an inch in length.

  But it was made of bronze. It was not black.

  Unhesitatingly he lifted the key from its casket, fitted it into the lock of his brother's journal, and twisted.

  He turned to the final entry in the journal. If you have come this far, he read, you must have found the altar in the Tower of Q'oorna. The Tower of Q'oorna marks the center of the City of Q'oorna. This world is the Dungeon of Q'oorna. Strike the gong, Clive. For now, that is all you must do, but whatever qualms you may have must not stay your hand. MY BROTHER CLIVE, I ADJURE YOU, STRIKE THE GONG!

  There was no question in Clive Folliot's mind that the journal had been written by his brother. He had known that hand all his life; it was similar to his own but was not identical.

  Perhaps he should turn back to the beginning of Neville's journal and read the earlier entries before complying with this one, but he had not the patience. Not now.

  He resented the position in which he found himself. All his life he had been subordinated to his brother and dominated by his stronger will. The very expedition that had carried him from England to Zanzibar, from Zanzibar to Equatoria, and now to this strange world called the Dungeon of Q'oorna— all this had had Neville Folliot at its center, as its driving motivator. Clive had felt no real desire to travel to Africa. He was a quiet man at heart; he fancied himself an intellectual, and it had been his ambition to devise a means of leaving Her Majesty's service and returning to a quiet and contemplative life in England.

  Instead he had traveled thousands of miles, endured hardship and peril, and found his brother—dead.

  But even that had not released Clive from his elder twin's domination. From beyond the grave itself Neville had reached back and commanded Clive's actions. From beyond the grave itself!

  Clive laid the journal on the altar, nodded solemnly first to Quartermaster Sergeant Horace Hamilton Smythe and then to the gaunt, turbaned Sidi Bombay. In a few strides he reached the gong. He raised the mallet and swung it once.

  The sound of the gong was soft but almost unbearably sweet, an infinite harmony of under- and overtones that filled his mind with points of sound that danced and swirled like the light-motes in the city and the spiraling stars in the sky.

  Even before the sound had faded into silence, Clive heard the pounding of feet and the shouts from the City of Q'oorna.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Khalif of Q'oorna

  Clive Folliot whirled. The hall was filled with soldiers. They were Arabs and Nubians and mamelukes. They were armed with spears and with scimitars and with long-barreled, ornately engraved rifles, with bows and arrows, with crude wooden clubs and even stone-headed war axes.

  They came howling forward, brandishing their weapons and uttering threatening sounds and gesturing fiercely, but none actually attacked the three outsiders.

  Clive had returned Sidi Bombay's staff and Horace Hamilton Smythe's American Navy Colt when they safely reached the foot of the black cliff, after Clive's nearly fatal encounter with the face in the fissure. Clive himself was armed—if that is the right word—with the mallet he had used to sound the gong. He held it in one hand, his brother's journal in the other.

  Now Smythe crouched defensively, his American revolver held before him.

  "Don't shoot, Smythe," Folliot commanded. "Hold steady, men. We don't know what they want. Perhaps we can parley with them." He wished that he had something more deadly than a mallet in hand— his military saber, or even the scimitar he'd found on the beach and used against the giant spider. But those weapons were long gone, the saber sunk with the wreckage of Azazel and the scimitar left behind in Bagomoyo.

  There was a shout from the rear of the motley army, and with an inarticulate roar the oddly mixed soldiery attacked.

  A Nubian's spear whizzed past Clive's cheek. He saw Sidi Bombay parry a flashing scimitar with his staff. Sidi Bombay wielded the heavy stick as if he were Little John battling Robin Hood with his quarterstaff.

  A warrior, stark naked save for daubings of mud and strings of beads, swung a club at Clive. Clive parried with his mallet, and as the warrior lurched past him he clipped the man neatly behind one ear. The man slipped behind Folliot, and Clive had no time to look after him.

  From the corner of one eye Clive saw an orange flash. There was a report that echoed like magnified thunder in the cavernous room. He whirled and saw a dagger-bearing dacoit fall to the black marble floor. He had launched himself at Horace Hamilton Smythe, and Smythe had dispatched him with a single shot from his Navy Colt.

  Sidi Bombay, tall and gaunt and cadaverous, was surrounded by attackers. Calmly, he swung his staff, turning to face opp
onent after opponent, keeping clear a circle six to eight feet in diameter, with himself its revolving fulcrum.

  Attacker after attacker went down. Blades flashed, firearms boomed, heavy sticks were hefted, and Sidi Bombay, his expression one of serene detachment, seemed always to swing his staff to the right point at the right instant. Where a scimitar flashed downward, it clashed once against the staff and reversed its arc, whirling away through the air above the attackers. Where a rifle was hefted, Sidi Bombay's staff became a blur of brown wood against the black architecture, the rifle would clatter to the floor, and an Arab would stagger away clutching cracked knuckles.

  Almost unconsciously the three companions had formed themselves into a triangular formation, back to back to back. Smythe aimed his Colt, fired, aimed, fired. Every shot brought down an attacker. The man did not miss once.

  Clive swung his mallet steadily. He was in a strangely detached state of mind. He could see himself, think through each peril and counter. He issued commands to his body, to his arms and hands, to his feet, telling them to shift, to turn, to parry and thrust now like a master of foils, to poke like a bayonetier, and in extremism to swing his mallet like a berserk Viking, slamming it against his enemies, now pounding aside a thrusting dagger, now crushing a foeman's skull like an eggshell.

  How many attackers were beaten to the marble floor, there was no way of counting. How high the bodies piled, how redly the blood ran over smooth black marble, there was no way of knowing. A rage compounded equally of fire and of ice flowed over Clive, flowed through his veins. A goddess of battle sung in his ears.

  But the outcome was inevitable. The odds against Clive and his friends were overwhelming, little short of infinite.

  When Sergeant Smythe's revolver was empty, there was no possible chance to reload. A razor-edged kris was plunging at his tunic and he dodged aside and clubbed the empty revolver against the turbaned Malayan who wielded the kris. The man sank to his knees and Smythe seized the weapon from his hand, instantaneously reversing it to hold the next attacker at bay.