by Paul S. Kemp
“You could go shirtless in winter with that pelt,” Nix said to Egil.
The priest’s powerfully built shoulders, chest, and back were covered in dark hair.
“I have,” Egil said with a chuckle. “Ready?”
Nix leaned over the side and touched the water with his hand. “Warm at least.”
Both of them leaped off the boat and onto the top of the stairs that led to the door in the tower’s dome.
“Go on now, Mere,” Egil said.
“Be careful,” she said, and took position on the rower’s bench. She struggled to work the oars, but managed them well enough to get the boat turned and heading back to shore. The darkness soon swallowed the boat, leaving Egil and Nix alone on the lake, standing on a submerged tower, twenty paces above an ancient graveyard.
“Strangely, this doesn’t feel unusual to me,” Nix said. “You?”
“If the tower’s filled with water?” Egil asked.
“Then we go swimming,” Nix said.
Egil eyed the door. “Open it.”
Holding the glowing, etched-eye crystal in his palm, Nix took out the magical key he’d purchased in the Low Bazaar.
“Give us a fish,” the key said.
Nix felt around in his satchel, pulled out the first thing he found, a browning apple.
“You get an apple,” Nix said. “Later, I give you whatever you want.”
“A fish,” the key said.
“Gewgaws,” Egil breathed.
“You get a fakkin’ apple and you’ll like it,” Nix said. “Otherwise, I’ll drop you in this damned lake where you can rust away for a thousand years.”
A long pause then, “Give us an apple.”
Nix gave the key a bite of the apple, let it chew, then stuck it in the round keyhole. As always, the key warmed and squirmed in his hand as it changed shape to fit the mechanism. It shifted several times, struggling with the lock, but at last it stopped moving and Nix gave it a turn. The lock clicked open and the smooth, metallic door slid aside as if on rollers. The stink that emerged on the stale air, like corpses ten days dead, made both of them gag.
Wincing at the stink, Nix stepped onto the small landing just inside the tower and aimed the beam from his light crystal into the tower. Metal walls glittered, their surface covered in complicated strings of glyphs and sigils, all of them etched deeply into the metal. Nix had never seen anything like them, not even at the Conclave. He could discern no method to their placement, either. The spirals and whorls and serifs and sharp angles twisted and turned this way and that, a disjointed, chaotic script that reminded Nix of nothing so much as the thinking of a madman. Or an alien mind, like the serpent men. Staring at the writing overlong made him uneasy. It was of another time, another world, and men weren’t meant to see it.
A spiral staircase snaked down and around the interior of the tower, the stairs seemingly forged out of the wall. He swallowed and stepped farther in, Egil following. The door slid closed behind them before the priest could stop it.
“Fak,” Egil cursed.
“Hsst,” Nix said, but too late. A wet hiss sounded from down in the tower’s depths, causing the hairs on Nix’s arms to stand on end. He covered the crystal with his hand and he and Egil froze on the landing, listening.
Nothing more.
The etched eye of the crystal squirmed against Nix’s palm. He lifted it to his lips and whispered, “Very dim.”
More agitated squirming against his palm, but the crystal did as he commanded.
He slowly released his palm from the crystal. The dim light it shed was similar to that cast by a full moon. He and Egil took another step into the tower, to the edge of the landing, and let the glow shine down into the tower’s depths.
Their breath caught when they saw the grotesque form attached to the wall a third of the way down the tower. The dream had not communicated its horror. The shapeless mound of grayish-blue flesh was three or four times Egil’s size. Lines and ridges and boils and puss filled abscesses and thick blue veins covered its form. A glistening substance that looked like phlegm coated its skin and caked to a crust in its creases. As they watched, one of the ridges opened to reveal a rictus filled with a handful of sharp teeth as long as a dagger. Strings of yellow spit stretched between the fangs. The mouth snapped shut. Another opened elsewhere on the fleshy mound, another, another. The creature was covered in mouths of all sizes, all filled with sharp teeth. The horror they were looking at belonged to the world no more than did the alien sigils. Fortunately it looked like it might be sleeping, or perhaps it was just insensate.
Queasy at the sight of the thing, Egil and Nix backed away from the ledge. They put their heads close together and spoke in tiny whispers.
“Fak,” Egil said.
“Aye,” Nix said. “That’s about the size of it.”
“What’s the plan?”
Nix glared at him in the faint light of the crystal. “I always come up with the plan. You come up with the plan this time.”
Egil was already shaking his head, the eye of Ebenor wagging at Nix. “I smash things and make pithy yet profound observations. You make plans and then things go wrong.”
“Did you say ‘pithy’?”
“And we always have this kind of conversation before risking our lives. See? Pithy and profound is what that was.”
Nix was nonplussed. “Who are you?”
Egil ignored the question. “I also said ‘then things go wrong’.”
“I won’t argue that,” Nix said. “Fak. I wish you had your lucky dice.”
“Aye. Now plan, small man. Rose needs us and that thing looks unfriendly.”
Nix crept back to the edge of the landing and shined the light along the tower’s walls, down into the depths, taking it all in.
The glyphs and sigils carved onto the walls stopped just above the point where the creature was attached to the wall. He pondered over that for a time, deducing purpose.
The staircase descended all the way down, though the creature’s enormous bulk blocked it a third of the way down. The stairs ended before a door very much like the one they’d entered through. There was a metal chest near the door. Nix estimated rough distances then backed away from the ledge to regroup with Egil.
“The tower’s watertight, so there’s that,” he said in a whisper. “Nothing else good though.”
Egil waited so Nix went on.
“I think the sigils are to keep the creature from crawling up to the top. Probably they fed it or tortured it or… whatever they did to it, from the top.”
Egil ran a hand over Ebenor’s eye. “They drew it up the wall, maybe fed it from the top, and while they did that, they put their treasures in the bottom.”
“Maybe makes sense,” Nix whispered. “Maybe also makes us fakked. The stairway goes all the way down and ends at a door like the one behind us. There’s a metal chest at the bottom.” He consulted the dream-vision he’d had of Odrhaal. “I think the chime is in it.”
“Fakkin’ chime,” Egil said. “Why’d they put them here? What’s the point?”
“Secreted them here at some point during the war?” Nix speculated. “To keep them from the wizards? I don’t know. When do sorcerers or mindmages or anyone who trucks in magic do things that make sense? Add to that the fact that we’re talking about serpent men and this shite makes even less sense than usual.”
Egil tiled his head to concede point. “So?”
“So… I have a plan. It’s a very bad one.”
Egil waved him on. “That’s assumed. Continue.”
“The only way to get past those sigils is fast. We have to leap down the tower.”
“Too far,” Egil said, frowning.
“That’s why we go fishing first.”
Nix stared at Egil until the priest’s eyes widened in realization. “As bad plans go, this may be your worst ever.”
“Agreed. I have nothing else.”
“Seems like we’ve been saying that a lot this time
through.”
“Aye, that.”
Nix let Egil digest matters.
“Even if we get down there and don’t break legs or skulls, then what? We still have the thing above us.”
“We go through that door.”
“And then?”
Nix raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Fun’s in finding out?”
Egil grunted.
“I told you it wasn’t a good plan.”
“You said it was a bad plan and you were exactly right.” He ran a hand over Ebenor’s eye. “You have enough line in that satchel?”
“Pfft. Enough line? Who’re you talking to, Egil? Enough line. Besides, I only need half the length of the tower. Not even that, as I’ve got to err short. Meat, too. Had it for the key.”
Egil blew out a breath. “Line will probably snap.”
“Could,” Nix said, nodded. “But I always buy the finest. And I had this enspelled for extra strength.”
Egil nodded, considered, finally said, “Fak it. We go.”
Nix tapped him on the shoulder. “No one will ever believe us if this works.”
“No one would believe half of what we’ve done,” Egil said.
Nix unslung his satchel and started working on his lines, one ear on the creature below. He wound two lines together to make a single, stronger line, then measured it off in armspans, estimating the length.
Egil sat beside him, eyes closed, praying.
“One for me, too, yeah?” Nix whispered.
Egil nodded without opening his eyes.
Nix took a small piece of now rotting meat from his satchel, frayed one end of the line, and used the freed fibers to tie up the morsel of meat. He tied himself into the line, a full-on harness that ran under his legs just under his arse and up through his crotch. He left lots of slack after him so he could do the same harness for Egil.
“Like a chair, see?” he said to the priest. He pulled at the line. “Though if this line slips up into the crotch, I’m likely to never have children.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” Egil said. “With the small bits you’ve got hanging in there, I’d wager you could fit a couple ropes between your legs and hit nothing vital. Me, now…”
Nix grinned. “Neither pithy nor profound, priest.”
“No?”
“No.”
Nix harnessed Egil to the end of rope, both of them grinning the while. When he was done, Nix checked the length of the rope once more.
“Going to be a little short. I’ll cut it the moment we’re down. We’ll fall the last bit.”
Egil nodded, the grins disappeared, and they shared a look.
“I didn’t mean it when I said your plans always go wrong,” Egil said.
“I know that.”
“I did mean what I said about your crotch, though.”
“Not the first time you’ve been wrong about something,” Nix said. “Here we go.”
They crept to the landing and shone the dim light from the crystal down the tower onto the quivering mound of stinking flesh. They positioned themselves for a clear fall and Nix lowered the meat over the edge toward the creature. When it was low enough, he swung it toward the creature.
It thunked into the creature and Nix tensed, ready.
Nothing.
“Shite,” he hissed. It occurred to him that the creature might not even eat meat. It probably didn’t need to eat at all. Still, with nothing for it, he swung the rope again and hit the creature once more.
Still nothing.
“Wake it up,” Egil said.
Nix nodded, shouted, “Open your fakking mouth, beast!”
A great tremor shook the mound of flesh. Two score sets of eyes opened all over the creature, all of them bloodshot and swinging wetly in their sockets. A dozen of them looked up at Egil and Nix, focused on them, and then a score of fanged mouths opened, hissed and growled and roared.
“Good morn to you, too, fakker,” Nix said. “Breakfast time.”
“It could spit it out or chew through the rope,” Egil said.
“Little late for that, priest. Time to roll your fakkin’ dice.”
Nix swung the rope at one of the medium sized mouths and the creature snapped at the morsel. The moment its mouth closed, Egil and Nix leaped of the ledge, both of them shouting, intent on dying defiant if die they did.
Nix’s stomach hit the back of his throat. He was aware of the glyphs and sigils in the wall flashing as they fell past them, each arcane character shooting lines of green or red or yellow energy across the length of the tower, but their fall carried them past so quickly that they outran the magic.
He caught a flash of eyes and mouths snapping at them as they fell past the creature. The floor rushed up fast, too fast, but the moments stretched slow, too slow, and Nix imagined himself hitting the bottom at speed, lying there dead and broken, or worse, broken but alive and unable to move as the horror crept down the wall for him.
The rope jerked taut, held on one end by the creature’s mouth, and the sudden stop was so jarring that it cut short Nix’s shout and made him feel like he’d run into a wall. The immediate stop pulled all the air from his lungs, cinched the rope so tight on his legs and arse that they went numb, and caused him to bite his tongue. The rope bounced him back up, but only for a half-beat before the rope between him and Egil snapped taut and jerked him down again. Egil grunted from the impact and bounced up while Nix fell back down. They bumped against one another, causing Nix to see sparks for a moment.
Above them, the creature’s mouths roared and slobbered. Egil and Nix hung there suspended three or four paces above the floor, gasping, pained.
“Cut it, Nix,” Egil said through gritted teeth.
Unable to breathe, his entire body aching or numb, Nix fumbled for the dagger at his belt.
Another series of wet rumblings and roars sounded from above, a sickening sloshing sound as the creature started to move. But instead of the creature’s downward motion lowering them closer to the floor of the tower, they started to rise.
Nix glanced up at the quivering mound of flesh, its dozens of eyes fixed on him, its huge body undulating wetly down the wall. Three of its mouths were working in unison to reel in the rope.
Shite and shite.
“Nix!” Egil said. “Cut the damned rope!”
Nix finally got his dagger drawn and sawed at the rope. The magic that made it extra-strong also made it extra-resistant to Nix’s blade.
“Damned gewgaws!” Nix shouted, sparing Egil the need.
They rose another pace or two, another, and the creature oozed down at them.
He sawed more frenetically, finally cutting through the first of the two ropes he’d twined together.
They rose another pace. The creature came down another.
“Shite, shite,” Nix said. He finally cut through the second rope and he and Egil plummeted the short distance to the floor, hitting it in a tangle of limbs and gear. They wasted no time, despite their pain. Both of them staggered to their feet and over to the chest.
Above them, the creature wormed its bulk down the wall, teeth snapping, slobber falling like rain.
Nix took his key from his satchel, dreading what the fakking thing would demand.
“Give us a carrot.”
Nix could hardly believe it. “Finally got some luck.”
“Hurry, Nix.”
Nix gave the key a bit of carrot and shoved it into the chest. It warmed while it did its work.
The creature was getting closer.
“Nix?”
“Hit that fakkin’ creature with a hammer or something,” Nix snapped. “Come on, key!”
The key cooled and Nix turned it. Inside the chest were pages of thin metallic plates inscribed with an alphabet Nix had never seen. On top of them, in a leather harness, were six hollow tubes, all marked with magic sigils. Nix grabbed the harness and, unable to resist, three of the metallic pages. He shoved the lot into his satchel.
“Nix…” E
gil said, the tension in his voice as sharp as a blade.
“I know,” Nix said.
He looked up to the see the bulging form of the creature nearly down. Mouths extended from its form, almost like short arms, and snapped at the air.
“Move,” Nix said, and ran to the door near the chest. To his relief, he saw a keyhole like the one they’d seen on the door above. Nix still had the key in hand.
“Open it,” he said. “Now!”
“Give us a pomegranate,” the key said.
“Fak you and your pomegranate!” Nix said. “Open this lock!”
The creature let itself fall from the wall and hit the floor in a huge, stinking, wet heap to the floor. Scores of eyes fixed on Egil and Nix and the creature rolled and squirmed and bulged toward them.
“Fakking gewgaw!” Egil said, cursing not at Nix but at the key. He threw a hammer at the creature and the huge weapon hit the mound of flesh with a sickly thwack. The creature roared but did not slow.
“Give us a pear, then,” said the key.
Nix held the key up before his face. “You’re going to end up in the gut of that thing behind me where you’ll eat nothing ever again unless you open this fakking door! You hear me?”
Egil backed into Nix, trying to keep his distance from the snapping mouths.
“Nix,” the priest said.
The key was quiet for a moment. “You owe us a pomegranate.”
Nix shoved the key into the lock, felt it warm, the bit fitting itself to the complicated, enchanted mechanism.
“Hurry!” Egil said.
The key did its work, Nix turned it, the door slid open, and he and Egil piled through. The door slid closed behind them, cutting off the frustrated growls and roars and hisses of the horror.
“Fak,” Egil said, breathing heavily.
“Seconded,” Nix said, his heart a hammer on his ribs.
They stood in small square room, perhaps three paces on a side, their backs to the door. Another metal door was opposite them. The glyphs and sigils etched into its surface made Nix dizzy. He saw it had a keyhole like the others.
“Is that another lock?” Egil said.
The creature slammed into the door behind them. The wall shook, and the metal groaned. The creature slammed into it, again, again. The metal bent and veined under the stress.