The Doom of Fallowhearth

by Robbie MacNiven

  “I do not know,” he admitted. “There is only one path up the rock, though.”

  “That doesn’t mean there isn’t another through the rock,” Ulma said. “The servants I spoke to in Fallowhearth said these towers were partly built with the aid of the Dunwarr. That much is clear just by looking at them. It’s likely the tower extends at least partly underground, and that there is a secondary route that can be used for sallies or as a means of escape.”

  “Could you find such a passage from the outside?” Logan asked, silently praying the answer would be “no.” Ever since Sudanya he’d endured bouts of claustrophobia whenever he went underground. A tunnel beneath a cursed tower definitely didn’t seem like the time to try to fight his fear.

  “Possibly,” Ulma replied. “I’ll have to ride around it and look.”

  “You do that, then. We’ll wait here.”

  “We should go up immediately,” Ronan said. “Before the witch can prepare her defenses. She will already know of our presence.”

  “Fine,” Logan said, trying not to think about exactly what might be waiting for them, either above or below. Ulma clicked her tongue and urged Ransom to the right, moving around the tower crag from the east. Ronan dismounted and led his borrowed steed to a single, withered tree that stood forlornly next to the start of the path leading up the crag to the tower’s door. He tied the stallion’s reins to one of the lower branches. Logan did the same with Ishbel, trying not to look at the horse carcass as he passed by.

  “We won’t be here long, I promise,” he murmured to Ishbel, stroking her muzzle. She snorted, clearly spooked. That was never a good sign. There was a whisper of sharp steel as Ronan drew his sword.

  “Are you ready?” he asked. Logan looked up at the tower, his expression dark.

  “Let’s just get this over with.”

  • • •

  The path to the tower was hard going. In places the stone gave way to yielding, slipping mud, and at times it seemed almost vertical. It also wound around larger boulders and sections of the crag that were sheer cliff face. Ronan, of course, ate it all up seemingly without even getting short of breath. He paused to help Logan along particularly treacherous sections.

  “I’d welcome the undead if they’d only attack us as far down the slope as possible,” he wheezed, clutching onto one of the northerner’s titanic biceps. Ronan only grunted. His good cheer appeared to have left him.

  For his own part, Logan kept his eyes on the track, partly to avoid slipping, and partly because it seemed whenever he glanced up at the crooked tower, it didn’t look any nearer. He cursed the foolishness that had led him here, sweating despite the cold wind that was blowing across the moor.

  The gusts died for a brief spell, and Logan heard a whinny come from back down the track. He turned, almost losing his footing in the process, to look down at the base of the rock. Ishbel and Ronan’s commandeered mount were both still lashed to the withered tree, though they were pulling furiously on their reins, bending the dead trunk. The third horse seemed to be the source of their distress – it was standing, unmoving, near the start of the track. Logan assumed Ulma had doubled back to join them, before realizing that the third animal definitely wasn’t the dwarf’s tough little pony.

  “Ronan,” Logan said quietly, his heart feeling as though it was about to stop. “Ronan!”

  The dead, rotting horse they’d discovered at the base of the crag had gotten up. Ronan hurried back to Logan’s side, his expression grim.

  “It has begun,” he said as he noticed the decaying cadaver. The thing’s near-skeletal skull swung to one side, as though it was looking up at them.

  “Don’t say it like that.” Logan stared at the horrid undead.

  A shriek pierced the air, making Logan jump so suddenly that he almost went tumbling back down the pathway. They both swiveled as more screams echoed out from the broken tower.

  Logan had heard plenty of screams in his time. They came from all manner of emotions – anger, agony, horror. The worst, in Logan’s experience, were those drawn from despair. They cut to the core of his being, reminded him of everything that had gone wrong – was going wrong – with his life. That was what the screams rising up from the crooked tower did now. They tore out memories of loss, of futility, of abandonment. They made him want to lie down and curl up in the dirt, to cry and never stop. They made him want to end it all. Despair, that all-conquering, irresistible void, swallowed him up and snuffed out every clever word and every cunning thought he’d ever had. There, briefly, in the shadow of the crooked tower, he ceased to be.

  It was Ronan who drew him from his horrified stupor. The northerner was chanting something rapidly under his breath while clutching the amulet around his neck. Though the words were foreign and unintelligible, the sound of them alone rekindled something like hope in Logan’s soul. He wasn’t alone. There was other life on this bleak, wind-lashed moor – strong, vital life.

  “Kellos, light my way,” he snarled as his courage returned. “And Fortuna, guide my steps.”

  He’d never been one for praying, not seriously, but the defiant words seemed to have the desired effect. He felt part of the black, smothering shroud of oppression that had blanketed his soul lift. He took a step further along the track, then another, no longer rooted to the spot. Ronan too was advancing, body hunched forward slightly as though stepping out into a storm.

  And then, as suddenly as it had started, the screaming stopped. Logan was so relieved he almost tripped, letting out a stupid little laugh as he did so.

  The relief passed as quickly as the despair had. The tower still soared above them, unmoved by their defiance. Logan shivered.

  “There will be worse,” Ronan said to him. “Let us push on while we can.”

  Logan almost quailed at that, but drew strength from the northerner’s huge presence. He couldn’t go back, he told himself. After all, there was an undead horse waiting for them at the bottom of the track.

  • • •

  “Damned racket,” Ulma grumbled under her breath, easing Ransom around the base of the tower rock. She had stopped when the air had filled with an unearthly wailing, picking her ears irritably. Ransom seemed unperturbed by it, and she was considering going back to see if Logan or the northerner needed help, but the sound had cut off again. Now the only thing she could hear was the wind sighing through the heather round about her.

  She went back to inspecting the rock she was riding past, her eyes roving over the dark, moss-clad stone. She was no prospector or mason – like her father, she had not been drawn to the mining or mason guilds of her people, preferring the limitless wonders of alchemy – but she knew dwarven craftsmanship well enough. The secrets of stone were no secret to her.

  “Where are you?” she wondered aloud, taking her time with her observations as she led Ransom on. The base of the tower was directly above her, still stout and untouched by the elements. The same certainly couldn’t be said of the upper half of the structure, which had half collapsed. Ulma almost expected a loose piece of masonry to come tumbling down as she passed beneath its leaning side. Typical shoddy manling workmanship.

  She had passed almost three-quarters of the way around the crag when she finally spotted what she was looking for. A break in the moss. Looking at the stonework alone the crack would have been almost imperceptible; a trick of tight, clever angles that made it look like nothing more than a slight fissure. The derelict state of the tower, however, meant thick lichen and small, hardy bushes had taken up residence on the flanks of the crag, and they were absent from that slender section of it. Absent because really there was no rock there at all.

  Ulma dismounted and patted Ransom on the shoulder, smiling as she did so. She’d been doubtful about Ronan’s story of a witch – it all sounded too convenient. She found herself glad to be here, though, rather than festering in Fallowhearth, where there seemed t
o be nothing for them except suspicious townsfolk and unhelpful officials. Even just being back in a place touched by her kindred felt like an improvement.

  “Stay here,” she told Ransom. The pony snorted and lowered her head placidly before beginning to graze.

  Ulma settled her smock, adjusted her goggles and stepped into the narrow, dank passageway carved into the crag’s base.

  It turned immediately left, then right, aiding the illusion that it was simply a short cleft in the rockface. Ulma could barely fit, and she growled as she went side-on, careful not to damage any of the potions stored in her smock. She got a face full of cobwebs and was thankful for her goggles. Another turn to the right, and a fissure in the rocky passage opened up directly ahead, almost pitch black. She let her eyesight adjust, thankful that dwarves were naturally capable of seeing in the darkness of mines and tunnels. Even though her family had never worked the deep seams in the Dunwarrs, such confined spaces held no fear for her.

  She pressed on, the spiked soles of her steel-shod boots clacking on stone. The tunnel continued to rise sharply. As she went, she checked her tinctures for steelburner. She had enough to sear away one, possibly two locks, should she be presented with a barred door. A grate or subterranean portcullis might be a trickier proposition.

  She heard a noise and paused. More screams, faint and smothered by the rock. She pulled her mallet free, with some difficulty in the confined space, before carrying on.

  The passage ended up ahead. An iron grate, as she had feared. She could probably burn through enough of it to work her way past, but it would take her longer. Beyond it she could vaguely make out heaped detritus – the old, abandoned contents of the tower’s cellar, she assumed. She was directly beneath the Northern Watch now.

  She was about to reach for the steelburner when movement on the other side of the grate caught her eye. Not the abrupt movement of another living person, nor indeed the jerky puppet-motions of an undead. She realized that there was something coiling and seeping along the floor. It was a low, dense fog, passing between the iron bars of the grate. Its tendrils reached Ulma’s boots and began to swirl around them, passing by her and down into the steep tunnel.

  Ulma suspected she would have been subjected to all manner of nightmare visions and unnatural chills at this point, were it not for her race’s natural resistance to the arcane.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she growled at the fog, before snatching a vial from one of her smock pockets and smashing it on the ground. Purple fire flared and ignited the creeping miasma. It shrieked, screamed like a living thing, and immediately withdrew, rapidly coalescing and solidifying into the shape of a human.

  The figure stumbled back, its left arm still consumed by Ulma’s flames as it half collapsed up against the grate, trapped.

  Ulma raised her mallet, dragging a sliver of volatile drakesmetal free in the other hand, the concoction capable of turning any organic being into unyielding, lifeless ferrum.

  “Don’t move,” she ordered. “And whatever you do, don’t even think about trying any incantations.”

  • • •

  They were over halfway up the path. Logan had spotted movement through the gaping, broken-toothed maw of the doorway moments earlier. He was too out of breath to tell Ronan.

  In the end, he didn’t have to anyway. Something was visibly coalescing around the old stonework up ahead. At first Logan thought it was smoke, or steam. It moved too coherently, though, with too much purpose, swirling together from around the tower’s base to create the impression of limbs, then a body, then a head. Logan stumbled to a halt just behind Ronan.

  “A spectral ward,” Ronan hissed. “This is the unquiet spirit that forced me back last time. It is summoned to defend the tower’s mistress.”

  “Oh gods,” Logan groaned. “How are we supposed to fight something like that?”

  “Stand firm.” Ronan drew his sword. Pico had risen up on his shoulder and was hissing and spitting, its fur bristling. Logan didn’t bother to unsheath his own weapon. He didn’t know what harm it could do to a wraith. He’d be as well just accepting his fate.

  The thing let out a soul-shuddering howl and fell on them. Logan found himself staring into its gaping, skeletal face, its spectral jaw distended unnaturally, its eye sockets blazing with phantom fire. He couldn’t so much as raise an arm to ward it away as it streaked down from the tower like a freshly unbound demon of the Uthuk Y’llan. He screwed his eyes tight shut as it shot towards him, its ethereal body passing through him. Everything went cold, his breath ripped from his lungs. For a moment he felt as though his heart had stopped beating. He fell to his knees, desperately trying to draw breath, his whole body numb with that abrupt, terrible cold.

  It had hit Ronan as well, though either the northerner’s greater physique or the presence of his familiar had allowed him to shrug off the violating effects of its passage. He managed to drag Logan back to his feet, white-faced and shaking.

  “Without Pico it will freeze our souls,” Ronan said. “We have to reach the tower before it returns.”

  The clansman half carried, half dragged Logan up the last, steep stretch of track. The wraith had split apart after tearing through them both, but now appeared to be reforming once more around the tower door it was bound to.

  “Courage, Logan Lashley,” Ronan panted. Logan moaned again, not wanting to be dragged any closer to the cursed tower. The closer they got to the door, though, the more the spirit seemed to dissipate, its form unravelling back into smoke.

  “It’s weakening,” Ronan shouted, charging the doorway. “The tower’s curse is unbinding!”

  Logan stumbled in his wake, belatedly struggling to draw his sword. By the time he reached the archway Ronan was already there, staring inside, seemingly transfixed. Logan dreaded to think what he had found beyond. Some cursed sorceress, some withered crone, more demented spirits, a legion of cannibal ghouls. Gods preserve him, it could be all of those at once! For a second he almost turned tail and started heading back down the path.

  No, Logan, he told himself angrily. Just because it’s shocking to a huge barbarian northman, doesn’t mean it need frighten you. Trying to take comfort from the ridiculous notion, he tightened his grip on his sword and stepped around the stock-still Ronan.

  In the end, it wasn’t what he was expecting at all. It was Ulma and Dezra.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sorceress was sitting on a fallen mound of masonry just inside the tower door. The chamber beyond had two sets of stairways, one leading through a passage that descended into the tower’s foundations, the other climbing towards its broken battlements. Ulma was standing beside Dezra, scowling, her mallet in one hand and a shard of bright metal in the other.

  “You two took your time,” the dwarf said as Ronan and Logan entered the tower, both panting.

  “I take it you found the other way in?” Logan asked, leaning on the side of the door arch as he tried to recover. A part of him was relieved to find the necromancer before them, but for the most part he was shocked and, as ever, trying to mask it. There had to be a rational explanation, he told himself.

  “I told you,” Ulma said with a shrug, apparently better at hiding how surprised she was than Logan. “Only a fool would build something with only one way in or out. I caught her trying to escape through the lower passage.”

  “Dezra,” Logan said, looking at the sorceress. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be so shocked.”

  “Why have you come here?” she demanded. She was in visible pain, clutching her left arm to her chest. Logan realized that it was badly withered and bony, a sharp contrast to the rest of her smooth, pale skin.

  “Did you attack Ulma?”

  “She tried to get past me,” Ulma said. “Some sort of mist illusion. I didn’t know it was her.”

  “Your damned alchemy scorched away part of my enchantments,” Dezra said. “I co
uld have died.”

  “If it’s only the enchantments holding you together, I worry for you,” Logan said.

  “You can save your worries,” Dezra replied and, with a grimace, extended her left arm. She began muttering something under her breath, words that made Logan’s skin crawl. Ronan’s familiar squeaked, and the northerner raised his sword, but Logan put a staying hand to his shoulder.

  A sickly light suffused Dezra’s upper arm, traveling down as far as her wrist. As it went it left behind unblemished skin in place of the wrinkled, mottled flesh. It petered out before it reached her wrist, though, leaving the hand bony and claw-like. It almost looked like it belonged to a corpse. Logan looked away.

  “I can do no more in the presence of that creature,” Dezra said, glaring at Ronan’s familiar as it half hid behind his shoulder.

  “This is the witch,” Ronan said, seemingly prompted into action by the sight of Dezra’s balefire, his expression fierce as he gestured at her with his sword. “We must attack, before she beguiles us all!”

  “Don’t worry,” Logan said. “This witch and I go far back.”

  “I don’t understand,” Ronan said, Pico still hissing at Dezra.

  “This is the final member of the Borderlands Four,” Ulma said. “Dezra.”

  “Dezra the Vile,” Ronan said, making Logan wince. “The great sorceress?”

  “Who’s the brute?” Dezra demanded. “And why are you all here? Didn’t you distract me enough in the Blind Muir? I told you, I can’t help you, not any more.”

  “Oh, I think you can,” Logan said. “There are questions that need to be answered.”

  “Witch hunting doesn’t suit you, Logan,” she said.

  “Perhaps not, but humor me. How long have you been living in this tower?”

  “I don’t know,” Dezra said. “Perhaps a year?”

  “Do you mind if we search it?”

  “Well, I don’t seem to have the power to stop you.”

  • • •