The Serpent Tower

by William King

  Something else baffled its soul sight, telling it nothing was there, even as its fingers encountered evidence to the contrary. Something sharp sliced at its hand. It felt its fingers drop away, along with the burden of weight. The smell of the prey was even stronger.

  Something strange was going on here. It was under attack but could not quite sense from what. Using its arm as a bludgeon, it swept the air where the attacker should be. Once more the Nerghul felt resistance as its fist hit home.

  It lifted its taloned fingers to its nose hole and sniffed. There was no doubt about it. The stench of its prey was on them. It knew then that its target was there. It began sniffing again, knowing that the scent would lead it to what it sought. It would kill it, and deal with the witch in a moment.

  The force of the impact sent Rik flying across the room to smash into the wall. The creature hit with a force like the kick of a destrier. Momentary blackness crossed his field of vision. Stars danced before his eyes. Sharp pain filled his lungs and chest. His knife had fallen from his hand, frantically he felt for it. The creature was sniffing again, its head tracking backwards and forwards as it advanced slowly towards him.

  Asea’s fingers danced frantically through a pattern, drawing a symbol of light in the air. Swirls of light emerged from the symbol and stabbed into the attacker. It flinched, and she kicked out with one foot, her strength enhanced by the strange magic of her armour. The attacker’s knee gave way with a crack of bone.

  A shout of rage told Rik that his companions had arrived. The Barbarian came through the door like an unleashed thunderbolt, surging across the room and thrusting his blade into the creature’s back with enough force to drive it through its chest and out the other side. Their assailant tried to ignore him and get to Rik, but the Barbarian pulled his sword free and cleaved at its neck.

  “Die, bastard thing of darkness,” he shouted.

  The creature turned to survey its new assailants.

  A knife flew across the room and took the thing through the eye. Weasel’s casting was as good as ever, but a throw that would have killed an ordinary man did not even slow this creature down.

  The Barbarian kept hacking. His blade severed the attacker’s neck tearing through ropes of flesh and cables of muscle. The intruder lashed out at him. An ordinary man would have been caught full in the face by that sledgehammer blow but the Barbarian twisted aside at the last moment and took it on his shoulder. Even so, the force of it sent him spinning.

  Sardec fired his pistol. The bullet smashed into the creature. It toppled sideways. Asea pulled herself upright and hacked at its head. Somehow it kept going, reaching out with its slashed fingerless hand and intercepting the blade. Its other hand closed on her and pulled her from her feet.

  Sardec sprang forward, burying his hook into the flesh of the creature’s neck and wrenching with all his might. The flesh came free with a sickly, ripping sound.

  The Nerghul knew it had taken too much damage. In another few moments it might be beaten, and thus fail in its quest. It could not allow that to happen. It needed to escape. It needed to find a dark place to hide and heal. It cast the metal-handed foe from it and sprang for the door. The man waiting there sprang to one side to let it pass. It scuttled as quickly as its battered body would let it up the corridor, heading back the way it came, looking for the open window that would let it vanish into the night.

  “What was that thing?” Sardec asked.

  “A Nerghul,” said Asea. “A creature of necromancy, vat-grown from reanimated corpses.”

  “What was it doing here?”

  “Seeking to kill me most likely,” she said.

  “Someone certainly wanted you dead,” said Sardec. “I don’t think we need look too far to find the culprit. The question is what do we do now?”

  Rik glanced at Asea, wondering whether she would want him to go after Jaderac and Tamara. She shook her head almost imperceptibly. She obviously was keen for him to get on with carrying out her plan.

  “You think this thing will be back, milady?” asked Weasel.

  “Not tonight,” she said. “But I think it will return some other night.”

  “Will there be any more of these things, milady,” the Barbarian, of all people, asked. It seemed far too sensible a question to come from him.

  “I don’t know,” said Asea. “I would not think so, not soon anyway. Creating and animating such a creature has an enormous cost, not only in alchemical materials but on the strength of the creator. I doubt we shall see anything like this any time soon.”

  “May the Light grant it be so,” said Sardec. “It managed to get right into your chambers before it was stopped.”

  Rik wondered if there was a note of reproach in his voice. He supposed Sardec had reason to wonder. Asea had seemed very certain that her wards would protect this place. If she could be wrong about that, what else could she be wrong about?

  “At least it was stopped,” said Asea. “I am grateful to you all for that.”

  “You may, of course, have my room, milady. I will have some of the men remove my gear and bring yours up.”

  “I would appreciate it if you would leave now,” she said. “I am grateful for your help.”

  “I am going to redouble the sentries,” said Sardec.

  “I want to see you after my gear has been moved, Rik,” she said, just as he reached the door. The Barbarian gave him a look full of envy.

  “As you wish, milady,” he said.

  Karim stirred on the floor. Asea bent to inspect his wounds.

  “What did you wish to speak of Lady Asea?” Rik asked. The change of rooms was done. The fire on the second floor was under control. A bruised Karim stood guard outside the door.

  He noticed the maps of the Tower on the table and thought he understood. She shook her head slightly.

  “That creature almost killed us tonight, Rik,” she said.

  “Almost,” he said. “But you are safe now.”

  She paused. “There was a moment when it could have taken me,” she said. “I was stunned and defenceless. It did not attack me. It sniffed the air as if looking for prey.”

  “You are saying my blood protected me again,” said Rik.

  “Perhaps it did, but that is not what I am saying.” Rik considered her words for a moment, looking for the implications. Suddenly, they struck him.

  “You are saying it was looking for me,” he said.

  “Yes, Rik, I am.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Somehow it has your scent.”

  Another terrifying thought occurred to him. Was Asea looking at him with suspicion? That could be as fatal to him as the Nerghul.

  “How could it have that? I have not been consorting with any sorcerers.”

  “I don’t know. A clipping of your hair, a drachm of your blood. Some article intimately associated with you. There are lots of things that could give it your spoor.”

  Rik thought about his evening with Tamara. The shock he felt must have been written on his face.

  “What, Rik?” Asea said. Now did not seem like a good time to tell her about what had been said during that particular adventure.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I am simply not too thrilled by the thought that such a thing could be hunting me.”

  “You should not be, Rik. It will never stop until you are dead.”

  “What harm can it do me now?” he asked. “We almost killed it tonight.”

  “It is a creature of sorcery, Rik. It will heal very quickly and it will learn from its mistakes. Next time, you might not be so lucky.”

  “Next time?”

  “There will be a next time, Rik, make no mistake about it.”

  Rik nodded. “I had better study these plans,” he said. “Being inside the Serpent Tower is starting to look better than being outside it.”

  “It’s nothing to joke about, Rik.”

  “Who says I am joking?”

  Chapter Nineteenr />
  Rik lay on his pallet in the barracks and stared at the ceiling. He was not able to concentrate on the maps he had memorised. He had been restless all night; his sleep constantly interrupted by images of what he had seen when the Nerghul had been cut open. It had been like slicing an apple and seeing worms and rot inside. The thing had looked human but it was not, and it was one of those things that made him wonder. He sometimes had the sense that reality was but a thin skin over the horrible truth of the universe. This night's encounter reinforced that idea.

  He had always thought himself human, or at least half-human in every sense that mattered, but if what Asea had told him was true, that was not the case. He, too, was something that looked human but was not. He was a killer descended from a race of killers.

  The worst of it was that he did not have any trouble believing it was so. He had always felt different from those around him, had always known he was colder and more calculating. Now it seemed that there might have been a reason for that. He was different. He was intended to be so, to be something monstrous.

  He told himself that he was just trying to distract himself from deeper worries. He could so easily have been killed last night. His bruised ribs told him so. Other people had died, and if he had been just a fraction slower, he might have joined them in death. Asea could have died. His friends could have died too.

  And the thing that had done the killing was still at large. It would come back looking for him soon. Perhaps it was waiting out there now. No. Asea had told him that by daylight he was safe; such creatures could not bear the light of the sun. After nightfall, though, it would be a different matter.

  What sort of person would make a creature like the Nerghul, he wondered? Who could have stood aside and watched such a thing come into being. Who would deliberately set out to create one?

  In a way, the answer was obvious; the sorcerers of the Dark Empire. But it was one thing to think such a thing; it was another entirely to encounter such deadly evidence of it at first hand. Nerghuls really existed. They were not figments of a diseased imagination or inhabitants of some cheap chapbook story. They walked this earth.

  And somewhere out there was the person who had created the creature, and used it to try and kill Asea and himself and the other people he knew. He had his suspicions that Tamara was involved. He did not like to believe that he was so stupid that he could have been taken in by a pretty face a third time- but why not? Sabena had made an idiot out of him. Rena had made a fool of him. Tamara could easily be the third in a set of three. At least Rena had not conspired to have him killed, as the other two had done.

  His head spun when he thought about it. Tamara had told him Asea was a traitor to her people. She had asked him to kill Asea. Asea had said that Tamara was a deadly enemy of the kingdom where he had grown up, and oppressor to all his kind. She had wanted him to kill Tamara.

  Somewhere in all their words was perhaps a kernel of truth, or perhaps it was all a lie. The question he had to answer for himself was not who to believe, for he believed they were all lying to him, but what he was going to do about it. He needed to get to a place where he had some control over his life, and that was going to be as difficult as scaling the slippery walls of the Tower of the Serpent.

  It appeared that Tamara may have wanted him dead all along. Why? It did not make sense. If she had wanted him dead she could have managed it back in the Snake’s Head. He supposed there would have been witnesses. She might have got caught. He might have been able to stop her. This way there was no risk to her.

  As so often with him, anger flared alongside the fear. He felt the urge to seek out the sorcerer and kill him before he could strike again. He told himself that his thoughts were insane, that such a course of action would lead to his own destruction, but he could not help his feelings or prevent the idea from entering his mind that perhaps, in some ways, he was not sane. Perhaps a murderous insanity had been bred into his bones.

  What a world it was, he thought. What kind of god would create a place like this? Certainly not the god he had been taught to believe in at the orphanage. That stern, just, loving god would not have made this strange sick place his creation. The thought made him angry. He had been lied to all his life, starting back before he was in any position to realise it. He was being lied to still, by people who had their own good reasons for wanting to keep him from the truth.

  Perhaps, after all, the best thing he could do was desert, slip away into the night, and get as far from this place as he could. But then again, the Nerghul would be waiting for him, and that was not something he wanted to face on his own. With the whole company and Lady Asea around him he had only just survived. He would have had no chance on his own. Staying looked like his only option but staying meant doing what Asea wanted and sneaking into the Serpent Tower.

  He laughed cynically. Under the circumstances it really might just be the best place for him. At least the Nerghul would not be able to get him there. Such was his horror of the thing, that the thought seemed almost sensible. Almost he would prefer certain death in the Tower to facing the Nerghul again.

  There were other things to consider. Stealing into the Tower and doing what Asea asked there might — just might — bring him an enormous reward. It was a gamble against very long odds, but it was one he found himself increasingly willing to take.

  What use was his life to anybody, least of all himself? All he had to look forward to as a soldier was a short career that would most likely end with him as a crippled beggar. If he ran and became a thief, the chances were that eventually he would end up the same way at best, and dangling from the end of a rope at worst. There was no one who would miss him for longer than it took to drink the toast at his wake. He was getting self-pitying, he knew, which he hated so he pushed those thoughts aside.

  He considered the Tower. It was a challenge to his skill, one that would most likely prove beyond it, but that appealed to his vanity in a strange way. If he walked away now, he would never know what he was capable of, whether he could defy the power of an ancient race and one of the greatest sorcerers of the Terrarchs. This was his chance to become a wealthy hero. It meant risking his life but then he did that on the battlefield whenever the regiment marched to war. He could be killed by a stray bullet in the street tomorrow, or in his bed by a Nerghul tonight, if the creature returned.

  He knew then, as that thought sidled into his head, that his mind was made up. He would risk the Tower, and rescue the Princess if he could. Weasel and the Barbarian loomed over him.

  “We’re off to see our friendly local fence,” said Weasel. “We’re to make sure everything you need is ready. Her Ladyship wants to see you. Looks like tonight’s the night for whatever she is planning.”

  Rik’s heart skipped a beat. Too soon, he thought. Too soon.

  Sardec drank his morning tea. He was angry and not a little shocked. Jaderac, and he was sure it was Jaderac, had dared to use the foulest of sorcery against the person he was supposed to protect. The Nerghul was a creature of the vilest kind, created by the darkest magic. He had not needed Asea’s explanations to realise that. He had seen the thing with his own eyes.

  It had killed two of his men, and some of the camp followers within the walls of this very townhouse. It has almost killed him and Asea and the others. He felt like storming off to Jaderac’s mansion, spitting in his face and challenging him to a duel, but he had no proof. Jaderac could simply deny the charge and there was nothing he could do about it except be killed in a duel in which the Easterner would have choice of weapons. That would not keep Asea safe or let him perform his duty. He swore to the Light that if he got the chance he would get even with Jaderac though.

  He wondered if Lord Azaar had got his letter yet, telling of the power of the green light. Doubtless that would cause a sensation in the camp. His next missive concerning the Nerghul would cause a greater stir. It was the first evidence of what they had all suspected, that the Easterners were prepared to use the most despicabl
e of magic in the pursuit of their goals.

  For the first time he paused to consider that Talorea really might lose this war. He believed with some certainty that the Scarlet armies were better trained, better motivated and better equipped than their Purple opponents, but that was only part of the story. Such magic as the Easterners possessed might well tip the battle in their favour. If they were prepared to use necromancy, then they would be able to send Nerghul assassins and field regiments of the walking dead against the armies of the West. Would his own men stand their ground in the face of such things?

  Sardec believed the answer was yes. They had held their ground beneath Deep Achenar in the face of Elder World horrors. They had stood firm in the face of the Nerghul last night. In both cases they had bought victory with their own blood, and his people were not without their own magic. Who knew what Asea was capable of when she put her mind to it?

  None of this was getting him anywhere and there were matters at hand that needed his fullest attention. He needed to make sure the defences were reinforced, that the sentries were redoubled. He had sent Corporal Toby off to find a supply of truesilver bullets. They would be handed out to every man. The money would have to come from his own pocket, but it would be worth it. He intended to see that they were properly prepared if another creature of darkness came at them out of the night.

  He glanced up at the Tower. A greenish glow flowed through its walls, dimly visible even in the daylight. Its ominous spire glared down at them; reminding him that there was nothing at all he could do, if Ilmarec decided to sweep them from the face of the earth. Something was going to have to be done about that but for the life of him, he could not think what.

  Rik looked up from the maps. He was sick and tired of studying them, of running over all the details of the preparations for the attempt on the Tower. And he was nervous now that the event was almost on top of them. Weasel and the Barbarian had been dispatched to finalise the preparations with Black Tomar. If all went well, he would be making the attempt on the Tower today. It seemed too soon, but they had run out of time. None of his arguments swayed Asea. She feared the build-up of power within the Tower. The effort had to be made now, before Ilmarec got a chance to carry out his threat against Azaar’s army.