Lord of the Black Tower: A Mega-Omnibus (5-book epic fantasy box set)

by Jack Conner

  Seeing Raugst’s weakness, Vrulug leapt forward, plunging his blade into Raugst’s side. Raugst screamed. The blade burned like fire. He threw himself aside, feeling blood trickle down his flesh. Still the wound burned, as though the blade had left a residue of acid.

  Saria’s shade continued to try to throttle him, but now that he had a moment of respite from Vrulug he slashed his blade through her incorporeal form, and she flew back, seeming to diminish.

  “Enough!” Vrulug roared.

  He sucked in a deep breath, his chest swelled, and Raugst could feel the puissance in him throb. He was using the Moonstone, summoning its powers. Everything else in the world seemed to vanish. There was only Vrulug, drinking up all the light, all the life, crackling, shimmering. The wolf-lord swelled, gathered his strength—

  He loosed his breath, but it was not the same fiery red breath as before. The wave that gushed forth between his terrible fangs now was black. The dark tide surged toward Raugst.

  Trembling, Raugst raised his blade. Niara, help me.

  The black wave struck it.

  BOOM!

  The impact flung Raugst back and turned the world into all shades of color. He heard bells and saw suns born and die. He heard his nearly-forgotten mother call his nearly-forgotten human name, and he smelled flowers and saw Niara’s face.

  The noise and pain receded, and he saw Vrulug slumped against the far wall near the bloody altar, atop a pile of corpses and body parts, breathing heavily. Smoke wreathed up from his wolvish maw.

  Raugst heard footsteps coming up the stairs—Vrulug’s priests coming to check on their master. Raugst must hurry.

  Breathing heavily, he heaved himself up. He put one foot in front of the other and dragged himself toward Vrulug. His sword scraped along the floor. It seemed very heavy. With great effort, he stepped over a body, lifting one foot, then the other. His sword left a trail of blood in its wake, grating loudly along the marble floor.

  The wolf-lord, barely conscious, watched him approach with heavily-lidded eyes. Saria circled him. Raugst could hear her hissing sobs in his ears.

  Closer and closer he drew to Vrulug. Time seemed to slow, and hours passed, and years dragged into centuries, and still he could feel the echoes of that explosion. Smoke trailed up from his light-blessed sword.

  Then he was standing over Vrulug. Saria shrieked and wrapped her ghostly talons around Raugst’s throat. You will not touch him!

  Unable to breathe, he lifted his sword. His arms almost buckled under its weight.

  “No,” said Vrulug. His eyes opened. “No ...” He was too weak to summon his fires.

  Raugst brought his blade down with all his strength. Vrulug’s armor shattered. Blood spurted. Raugst chopped down again, and again, widening the wound. Then he thrust his hand inside, hearing Vrulug’s moans, and rooted around in the warm, sloshy guts of his friend until he found what he sought. His breath caught in his throat. The thing was hard and rough, and covered in fluid, and so hot that it nearly burnt his fingers. Nevertheless, he yanked it from the steaming wound—it did not come easily—and held the glistening, gore-coated Moonstone up to the light. It was the Last Gift of Man, or once had been, but now it was grotesque and corrupt, and Raugst felt filthier just holding it.

  Vrulug, still alive, grabbed it from his hands. “Thief!” His voice was watery, his lungs filling with blood.

  The black-robed priests spilled into the room. The High Priest’s amber eyes widened, then narrowed. “Stand away from the Master!” he shouted, air whistling strangely in his nose-less face. The red light of the braziers flickered on his maggot-white visage. His sharp teeth were slicked with slaver.

  Suddenly, pain filled Raugst. Gasping, he stared downward. Vrulug’s sword stuck out from his belly, and Raugst’s blood coursed down the blade to flow over Vrulug’s clawed hand. While the priests had distracted him, Vrulug had run him through.

  Blood bubbled on Raugst’s lips as he tried to form words to curse the wolf-lord with. Saria, laughing, throttled Raugst with greater ferocity. He could not draw breath. The world dimmed and faded. All except for Vrulug’s eyes. They blazed with hate and fury. Raugst gasped again as the wolf-lord twisted the blade, shoving it up under Raugst’s ribs.

  “Die,” Vrulug growled, pushing the blade deeper, seeking Raugst’s heart, a sneer on his wolvish lips. “Die, my friend, and burn in the fires of the Second Hell.”

  A sword glanced off Giorn’s helm. His head rang. He stabbed forward, feeling hot black blood gush over his hand. The Borchstog fell away. Three more replaced it.

  A sword whistled out, slashed at his face. He dodged back. The blade sliced his cheek.

  His bad leg gave out. He fell. The floor smacked his back, driving the breath from him.

  Borchstogs swarmed toward him. He tried to rise but slipped in the blood of a soldier. The Borchstogs converged. He saw their blades lift, hover over him. They flashed by the light of the lightning and the fires, sharp as needles.

  “Farewell, King of Men,” said one. It had seen his crown.

  Giorn closed his eyes. Niara, I am coming.

  Fire suffused Raugst as Vrulug’s blade dug inside him, seeking his death.

  With his left hand, Raugst reached out and gripped the blade in his naked flesh. Blood, red blood, trickled over his fingers. Vrulug shoved deeper, harder, seeking Raugst’s heart, but Raugst clamped his hand tight and the blade stilled.

  The pain was great. He wavered, and the world grew dim, and the darkness from the altar seeped into him. He grew cold, and the world receded, and he saw a great black shape looming over him and knew it was the One, come to claim his soul at last ...

  Somehow he gathered the strength to lift his own blade overhead. He gripped its hilt in his right hand and summoned all his might for one final blow.

  Vrulug’s priests, momentarily stunned, moved forward to help their lord.

  Vrulug shoved harder, forcing his blade up under Raugst’s ribcage—Raugst could feel the grate of metal on bone—shoving toward the heart ... closer ... Raugst seized Vrulug’s sword tighter, slicing flesh and tendon. He only needed another moment ...

  Vrulug’s face turned fearful, even as Raugst’s blood puddled on the floor. In his other hand, the wolf-lord raised the Moonstone. It glistened with viscera, but it was so hot that it burned through its coating, smoke rising from it.

  It was Vrulug’s last hope. Once more it seemed to swell, and the world around it receded. Darkness emanated from it. Its energies were building for one more burst ...

  Raugst bunched his muscles, readying for the final blow. Saria still wrapped her ghostly talons about his neck, choking the breath from his lungs. Stars flashed before his eyes.

  “Kill him!” said the High Priest.

  Vrulug’s priests closed on Raugst, daggers glimmering.

  Raugst wasted no time, said no final words. This was it, what Niara had kissed him for, this one moment. Staring Vrulug in the eyes, using all his strength, he slashed down, ignoring Saria, ignoring the priests that even then stabbed into him—he slashed down and struck the Moonstone with all his might.

  The Moonstone ... cracked. The sword shattered, bursting brightly, showering all around with white fragments. The priests screamed and fell back.

  Raugst, pierced in half a dozen places by their blades, grinned fiercely down at Vrulug. “Farewell, my friend,” he said.

  Vrulug growled hatefully, his eyes savage.

  The Moonstone exploded.

  Black light and white suffused everything. It turned the world to fire and pain, and Raugst howled in agony, feeling his flesh blister and peel away as if torn from his bones by a powerful hurricane, and then the world turned to white, and he knew no more.

  All the Borchstogs near the temple felt a tremor, saw a flash of many lights from the tower, and heard a strange roar. They glanced up at the graceful white spire to see purple, green, and red light glowing, then fading, from the topmost chamber. Smoke sifted through the chamber�
�s windows. As one, a wave of dizziness and confusion swept the Borchstogs, and they knew, without being told, that Vrulug was dead.

  Desperate, the Borchstogs inside the temple quit raping and slaughtering and stormed the tower. They ascended to that topmost chamber, what had once been the Inner Sanctum to Illiana, to find that all was blackened and smoking.

  A score of pale-skinned corpses, or their blackened husks, lay upon the floor. To the side, propped against the blood-stained altar, clung the smoking remains of Lord Vrulug the wolf-lord, master of Wegredon, favorite of Gilgaroth, he who would have destroyed the peoples of the North. Steam rose from his skeletal jaws, imitating life, and, as the Borchstogs watched, one of his arms fell to the floor and broke. All that remained of him was a blackened skeleton.

  Shards of some unidentifiable artifact littered the floor. Borchstogs looked at them but did not touch them.

  A final smoldering body drew their gaze. This skeletal figure was of a man, and he had been blown across the room by the force of the explosion. In his right hand he gripped a sword, or the shattered remains of one. All that existed now was the hilt and the fragment of a blade that jutted up. The Borchstogs saw strange lights gleam on the sword, and they refused to go near it.

  They were also intimidated by the man himself. For, though he was clearly dead, he wore the most ghastly grin upon his blackened face.

  White light flashed. The Borchstogs fell back, screaming.

  Giorn opened his eyes to see Hiatha standing over him. “The Light,” she gasped. “It’s returned.” She stared at her hands in amazement.

  She helped him stand, and just in time. A Borchstog rushed them. Giorn knocked its blade aside and prepared for a thrust. No need. Hiatha raised a hand. Light flashed from it, and the Borchstog burned away.

  Giorn stared around him. All the other priestesses were stepping forward and aiding the soldiers, not with swords but with their powers. Light gushed from their hands and fingers, and Borchstogs fell away, howling.

  As well, some calamity seemed to have been sensed by all the Borchstogs at once. Many screamed and beat their chests and slashed themselves, and the human defenders looked on in surprise. Not Giorn. Giorn had not expected this, but he had hoped for it, prayed for it. Vrulug was dead.

  “It’s a miracle,” Hiatha whispered.

  “No,” Giorn said, half in gratitude, half in disgust. “It’s not the work of the light at all. It’s the work of a demon.”

  “What ... ?”

  “Never mind.” He gestured to the Borchstogs, whose advance was now in disarray. “See to them.”

  Hiatha led her priestesses against the enemy, and the creatures screamed and gave back. The priestesses stood arrayed on the inner wall at regular intervals, and when Hiatha gave the signal they blasted into the Borchstogs simultaneously, like the very wrath of Illiana herself. Streams of white light poured from their hands and from their blessed artifacts, lancing into the Borchstogs and roasting them where they stood.

  Giorn rejoined the fray, stabbing furiously, spraying Borchstog blood with every stroke. All around him, priestesses called on the light, and the Borchstogs died in agony. Soon they began falling back from the wall, crying to each other to retreat.

  Giorn encouraged them by leading a host of riders out from the gates of the inner wall. He brought his riders against the scurrying Borchstogs, lopping off their heads and grinding them into the mud. He laughed as he rode one down, splitting its skull to the nose. All around him, the outer city burned, and he rode through it in a red haze of fury, along with his riders, skewering the Borchstogs where they hid and smashing them when they tried to form into defensive positions.

  They fell back, gravitating toward the Temple of Illiana. There before its gates they massed, and Giorn stared at the smoking tower and felt a great darkness there. The air seemed to hum, and there was a bitter taint on his tongue. The hackles on the back of his neck stood on end, and his riders muttered fearfully. Even Hiatha paled, her eyes fixed on the Inner Sanctum.

  “Roschk Gilgaroth!” the Borchstogs cried. “A Uchas Saria!”

  Seeming to gather strength from the darkness, the Borchstogs rushed Giorn’s forces. At the head of his men, Giorn drove like a fist into their ranks, and beside him Hiatha and her sisters smote the creatures with bursts of light. The Borchstogs pulled men from their saddles, hurled spears at priestesses, and for a moment it looked as if the demons might rally, might prevail. The dark energy in the air intensified, and Giorn could feel a heaviness descend upon him and knew it came from the Inner Sanctum. Something powerful was there.

  Blood spattered him, and a rider beside him listed over and fell from his saddle, gripping the spear that stuck from his chest.

  “Ra!” Giorn said, spurring his horse. “To me!”

  His men surged forward, a great wedge plowing into the Borchstog masses, dividing them and trampling them. If there had been more of them, if so many of the demons had not gone off to loot and rape and torture, they might have won out. But Giorn’s men were many, and mounted. As well, the priestesses of Illiana blasted light from their fingers and burned the Borchstogs to cinders where they stood. At last Giorn broke through, and the Borchstogs scattered.

  His men laughed. Captains urged him to rout the demons, to pursue them, and he assigned General Levenril to see it done.

  “But where will you go?” the general asked.

  Giorn pointed to what had been the very essence of Light and Grace on earth. Now the tower’s top smoldered, sending black gouts of smoke across the stars. At least Vrulug’s cloud was beginning to disperse.

  “Something evil is here,” Giorn said. “I must see to it.”

  He dismounted and made his way inside. A group of soldiers came with him. He steeled himself against the horrors he would see, but even so he was not prepared. White, slender bodies ravaged, mutilated, used ... Blood dripped from the walls, and ran in congealing rivers across the white marble floors. Several Borchstogs had remained to amuse themselves with the priestesses who had survived, and Giorn gladly led his men against them, making their deaths as painful as he could. Die they did, but as they perished they cried, “Roschk Gilgaroth! A Uchas Saria!”

  Giorn puzzled on it as he mounted the stairs of the central tower. Drenched in blood and sweat, breathing in labored gasps, his sword arm tired and his dulled blade dragging on the steps, he hobbled up the tower alone, his soldiers safeguarding the rest of the temple, and at last came upon the Inner Sanctum. Here the darkness he had felt was very powerful, and growing, as if some dark Thing had shoved a toe into the doorway of Fiarth and was trying to widen the gap, to drag the rest of It through. All the love and tenderness in Giorn was ground down, made bitter, and he wanted only to fall to the floor and wait for death.

  He forced himself through the archway and beheld the small white room and the butchered corpses. There was Vrulug, it had to be, and there Raugst’s blackened remains. But what seized Giorn’s attention was the altar, black and awful, and giving off a chill, as well as a sulfurous stench.

  The heaviness in his mind grew. He found himself lifting his sword, swinging it around, meaning to slice at his own neck. He dropped it, and it clattered to the floor beside a smoking body. Breathless, knowing he did not have much time before Gilgaroth’s presence grew strong enough to destroy him, he hobbled over to Raugst’s corpse. The bastard gripped the shards of Niara’s light-blessed sword in his hands, and the remains of the blade still glimmered with strange lights. Giorn ripped it free. Turned to the altar.

  “Now for you.”

  He stumbled toward it. Darkness filled his mind. The chill sapped his strength. If not for the opposite power the sword emanated, he had no doubt he would have collapsed or even slain himself on the altar, right beside the body of a priestess that lay slumped before it. It must be her blood that stained it.

  Gritting his teeth, Giorn crossed to the slab, dragging his bad leg behind him.

  A wispy figure rose directly befor
e him.

  Die, he heard in his head. Strangely, he recognized the voice, or perhaps its author, though the voice was made by no human lips. It was Saria’s, the temptress of legend, the woman who had seduced him and stolen the Moonstone. That was why the Borchstogs had chanted her name. As the highest servant of Oslog nearby, and the guardian of this altar, she commanded them now.

  “You failed,” Giorn said. “Your troops are scattered, your cause lost.”

  You look so like him, you know. So like Orin. I did not see it before. Orin reborn ...

  “You seduced and betrayed us both, I suppose, that’s the only similarity. Only I will have my vengeance.”

  She flew at him, wrapping her ghostly hands about his throat. Their coldness shocked him, and he could not draw breath, despite the fact that Saria’s talons were phantasmal. She still had power.

  Just like Aunt Yfrin, he thought. And just like her, her power must come from the altar. Destroy the altar, destroy Saria.

  Wheezing for breath, Giorn stepped over a body and approached the block of stone, which seemed to throb with horrid energies. He felt a Presence reach out from it, toward him ... but the doorway was not wide enough yet. It was getting wider, moment by moment.

  Giorn raised the sword, admiring the whitish lights that danced in the shards. He gripped its hilt in both hands, using his right hand and arm to give his blow strength, and pointed the shards downward.

  No! Saria cried.

  A deeper voice, wordless but mighty, growled in Giorn’s head, and his legs turned to jelly. He nearly wavered, and for a moment his weapon angled toward his breast, but he turned it aside and drove the sword down into the black altar.

  He saw light, felt a blow, and heat, and was flung back. The world grew gray and dim.

  He blinked. The world snapped back into focus. His soldiers stormed up the stairs, their footsteps echoing on the marble walls. They must have been drawn by the noise. Giorn picked himself up and stared about him. No sign of Saria. And the altar ... it was not white anymore, nor black. It was grayish and cracked. The sword hilt jutted up from the slab, and the remains of the blade no longer glimmered.