The Serpent Tower

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was quieter in this part of the Tower. Almost like one of Asea’s wards had slipped into place when he passed through the entrance. The sounds of pursuit fell away. Rik ran on slamming into walls in his panic, until he forced himself to stop and take his bearings and study his surroundings.

The walls glowed with their own soft internal light, dimmer than within the tower chambers. It suggested secrecy and stealth and some abominable purpose. Rik found it easy to imagine painted Serpent Men priests creeping through these tunnels and spying on their fellows, selecting sacrifices from among them and then carrying them off into the gloomy regions below as offerings to their demon gods, never to be seen again, never to be asked after.

He told himself he was imagining things, that he had read too many cheap novels, that the chances were that he could never guess or understand the motives of creatures as alien as the Serpent Men. They were not even as human as the Terrarchs. They had been created by other gods, under the light of other suns if Asea was to be believed. And now he stood within one of their secret places.

The question was: how was he going to get out alive.

The Nerghul raced in pursuit of its prey. Ahead it sensed life. A group of soldiers stood around an entrance while one of their green clad officers harangued them about something. The Nerghul ripped through them, smashing them to one side, forcing them out of its way, as it hurtled through the archway.

A few strides took it round a corner and out of their line of fire. It paused for a moment and inspected itself for damage. The bullets had torn its flesh, weakening it somewhat but it knew that given time it would heal.

The walls around it burned with sorcerous energy and it sensed powerful spells designed to maze and confuse intruders. Even as it realised that, the spells began to warp and twist its sense of direction. It paused for a moment and concentrated on the scent of its prey.

As long as it could hold on to that it would find its victim.

Rik pushed on down the corridor. His eyes adjusted to the gloom and he noticed that sometimes, strange symbols swirled along within the walls. They did not seem to be doing this in response to his presence. He felt as if he was merely the witness to something that was always going on. The corridor carried him towards a split like a serpent’s tongue. One branch went up and the other continued on the same level. He took the path heading up. The lights became dimmer. The air became staler. The oppressive sense of alien presence continued to grow.

At times dizziness swept over him. At first he put it down to the bad air but after a while he realised that it was more than just that. Magical energy was all around. Sometimes he felt as if he were crossing invisible lines of it. He felt a tingling on his skin and pressure in his ears that should not have been there. The path curved and branched, curved and branched. Always he kept to the left hand path, the one that went higher. The deeper within the Tower he went the stronger the sorcerous pressure became.

He felt as if something was opposing him, willing him to retreat, not to proceed any further. There were times when his feet felt like lead, and it took an enormous effort of will to continue to press forward.

He took another step and felt something click beneath his foot. He cursed himself for his carelessness. He had been so busy trying to deal with the sorcery he had neglected to look for the most basic of traps.

He glanced around waiting to see what would happen: wondering if he had triggered something that would seal the corridors or summon a guardian. He had encountered such things in the treasure rooms of merchants back in Sorrow. For a long moment nothing seemed to happen then the floor underneath his feet began to move.

He struggled to maintain his balance as the stone started to flow like a river at a uniform pace, carrying him upwards and inwards swifter than a man could run. He tried to turn but there was nothing he could do. No matter how fast he ran he was carried along: all his efforts were doing was slowing his progress and exhausting himself.

Eventually he sat down on the stonework and marvelled at the Elder World sorcery that could make the glassy stone flow like a solidified form of water. He felt as if he were on a sledge being carried upwards, at forks he was effortlessly and dizzingly moved between switches so that he became lost. He was moving so quickly and so randomly that he doubted he would be able to remember his way back even if he were allowed to depart.

Had he triggered a trap, he wondered, such as ancient kings set for tomb robbers? Or was this a sorcerous defence set by Ilmarec? The thought that the ancient wizard might know he was here filled him with fear. His swift progress had taken on an air of unreality now. The lights blurred by, the stone felt warmer. He wondered if he was being carried out of his world and into another, passing perhaps from the reality of Gaeia into some extra-dimensional hell.

Ilmarec laughed with pure pleasure then began the final stages of the ritual. He was dimly aware that somewhere far away an alarm had been triggered. The moth wings of a warning system beat against his senses. Intruders, he thought, but there was nothing he could do about it now. He needed all his concentration simply to keep control of the Tower’s intelligence.

And there was something else too. Somewhere another entity had seized control of part of the Tower. Had the Old One waited for this most critical moment to try and rebel? He promised himself if that were the case he would make it pay for its insolence and soon.

Right now he had other more important things to worry about. This was the most important stage of the ritual. If he failed here, the magic would run out of control and the consequences would prove incalculable. So much energy saturated the Tower that if he failed to rein it in, even this mighty structure would be destroyed. A power like that of a god lay at the Tower’s core ready to be unleashed. If he failed to control it now, everyone within the Tower and for leagues around would be destroyed.

Under the deepest compulsions, the Old One had been most insistent on this when it warned him of the consequences of any mistake in the ritual. He gave his fullest concentration to invoking the magical symbols it had taught him. He would not fail. He must not fail.

Eventually, Rik saw that the moving ramp ended inside a cavernous chamber. Along each wall were enormous sarcophagi. In the middle of the chamber was an altar. The dim greenish glow still illuminated everything. He stepped out into what looked like an ancient tomb. He had a sense that what was buried there was not entirely dead.

Slowly, reluctantly, he pressed forward to inspect the nearest sarcophagus. It was long and low and he could see that the lid was made of translucent green crystal. Inside was a skeleton of a creature long dead. It has not been even remotely human. It has a strangely shaped ribcage and a long neck and a skull like that of a giant serpent. A small gem had been set right in the middle of its forehead. Tatters of scaly skin still clung to its bones. Long snakes of cable emerged from the walls of its coffin and led into its flesh. What ritual significance might they have had, he wondered.

He checked another sarcophagus and found something similar. When he looked closely he saw the serpent-like cables led out of the coffin and into the wall. Glancing around he saw that something was different about the sarcophagus across the chamber. Its inhabitant appeared better preserved.

As he moved closer a sense of dread grew within him but he was compelled against his will to approach the thing, and he feared what he would find when he got there.

Looking down into this crystal lidded sarcophagus, he saw a robed figure. It was a Serpent Man, clearly one of a different caste from the ones in the other coffins. It was slimmer and lighter and full fleshed. The preservation was perfect. It could almost still have been alive.

Its scales were finer, and the patterns on them more intricate, as if its skin had been tattooed in intricate dizzying patterns of sorcerous significance. As he looked on them the patterns he had seen flickering in the walls above came to mind. There were echoes of them here, and perhaps links to them.

The Serpent Man’s neck was long and thick and muscular like the body of a constricting snake. Its head was large and reptilian, the jaw outward jutting, the forehead bulging. The eyes were lidless. The creature’s irises were golden and as Rik glanced into them he sensed intelligence there, something cold, swift and dangerous. It came to him that he should not have met the thing’s gaze but it was too late, contact of some sort had been made. He tried to look away and found he could not. He stood transfixed, like a small bird before a large venomous serpent.

“I fear something has gone very wrong,” said Asea. Sardec did not have to ask her for explanations. The rain fell harder smashing against the window panes with all the force of the storm, but it could not obscure the Tower. Glowing light enveloped it now. Sheets of green lightning leapt up from the Serpent’s Fang to light the lower bellies of the bloated clouds.

A sense of terrible expectancy filled the air. Something very bad was about to happen.

Rik felt the presence of another mind. It seemed, quite obscenely, to be slithering into his very consciousness. It was as if a link of energy flowed between the creature’s eyes and his own, and tendrils of thought passed down that link.

He tried to oppose the creature’s will but could not. It was like opposing a glacier with his bare hands. The thing was slow, certain, implacable, irresistible. Ghostly alien fingers riffled through his memories. It came to him then, that the creature had not been dead. It was not sleeping. It was in some state between the two conditions, perhaps like a bear hibernating through winter. Perhaps his presence had awoken it.

He saw again things he thought he had forgotten as a whirl of impressions flickered through his mind, to be assimilated and digested by the creature in the sarcophagus.

He was a small boy in Temple Orphanage confined to his quarters for being disrespectful to his elders. He was a teenage thief running through the streets of Sorrow with an irate stall-keeper in hot pursuit. In his hand, he held a stolen pear. Behind him the roar of the crowd, getting ready to chase down the interloper was in his ears.

He was a young man in the Old Witch’s chambers. They smelled of old woman and urine and strange incenses. There was a painting on the wall of the beautiful young woman she claimed once to have been. Behind it was the hidden cache containing the rest of her grimoires. He heard feet on the stairs, and hurried to replace the volume whose cryptic secrets he had failed to understand and climbed out through the window.

He raced across the roofs of Sorrow, hand in hand with Sabena. Her golden hair drifted in the wind. The red slates felt rough under his bare feet. The golden spire of the great Temple dominated the skyline ahead of them. He leaned against a warm chimneypot as he kissed her. Its warmth was greater even than that of her body on the spring evening. She broke away at last and said; “Antonio would kill us if he knew. Perhaps we should kill him first.”

He stood before the massive bulk of the Quartermaster and accepted the Queen’s crown, the coin feeling small and hard in his fist. He swore the oath and accepted the greatcoat and the boots and the rifle. The cold air of morning turned his breath to mist. Weasel and the Barbarian gave him the thumbs up. Small wizened Leon elbowed him in the ribs. “We’re soldiers now, Rik,” he said.

All around him were the smell of smoke, the screams of the dying and a mass of warm stinking bodies, exchanging blows, stabbing with bayonets, clubbing with rifle butts. Officers shouted orders. Bones cracked. Blood flowed down the narrow cobbled streets. The Clockmaker’s followers fought like fanatics, like men crazed by religious passion in the service of their atheist leader’s cause. A whey-faced man in the robes of a peddler raced at him, brandishing a rusty cutlass. Rik aimed his bayonet at the man’s stomach and thrust, burying it in warm flesh. The man looked at him with shocked, accusing eyes as if not quite believing that he had been stabbed. He flopped forward and Rik felt a strange mixture of exultation and revulsion at his first kill in the warm blood of battle.

He looked down from the ridgeline at the walled city of Legacy, the Clockmaker’s capital. Behind him bugles called to the troops. Overhead a flight of dragons arced down towards the burning city. Moments later they weaved through the towers of smoke, dropping exploding alchemical eggs that added to the blaze.

He stood in the cave at the entrance to Deep Achenar, looking at a dead magician’s books, certain that within them were secrets that could change his life, while nearby lay the corpse of a dead demon. Weasel and the Barbarian stood close, and he felt certain that they would murder him if he did not acquiesce to their plan.

Here for the first time he got some sense of response from the Serpent Man. He felt an odd flicker of emotion that seemed a combination of hunger, lust and interest. Perhaps it was only his mind’s feeble effort to interpret the alien emotion.

His memories reeled on, covering his first encounter with Asea, and the battle with Uran Ultar in the caverns beneath the unholy mountain. Once more he sensed that odd hunger/interest along with fear/anger/horror. He was not exactly sure why but he had a feeling that the inhuman observer was familiar with the Spider God and both feared and hated it.

Once again he tried to resist the probing. He had slightly more of a sense of how it worked now, and he wrestled with the intruder within his mind, trying to hide some of his most shameful memories, to direct its interest elsewhere. He sensed a cold amusement at this, and he realised for the first time that the creature was actually aware of him as a sentient being like itself. An odd symbol began to take shape in his mind, containing within it the idea of greetings and something else he was not sure he understood.

Slowly, images swirled and began to take form in his psyche.

The Nerghul smashed against another wall and tried to regain its balance. The moving walkways seemed determined to carry it away from its prey, although this entire area stank of it. Filled with inhuman determination it pulled itself to its feet once more and moved against the flow. It was only a matter of time before it found what it was looking for.

The symbols in Rik’s mind changed, flickered, became images that he felt he could almost understand although there was something about them that was very alien, then they wavered into incomprehensibility again before coming back into clear, sharp focus.

As if in a waking dream, pictures appeared before his mind’s eye. He was within a scene, seen through eyes set differently from his own, assaulted by a welter of taste-scents that he could not understand at all, and which served only to confuse him. Then, as if the Serpent Man understood his difficulties, the taste-scents were toned down and finally vanished, and a greater emphasis was placed on sight and sound. He began to understand.

He saw the arrival of the Serpent Men on Gaeia. The Towers had not been built by sorcery. They had arrived intact, dropping from the sky surrounded by coruscating haloes of incandescent air, settling down in pre-chosen locations across the continents. Once they made landfall, the doors in their sides opened, and the Serpent Men emerged to stride the soil of their new world. They were from some far place among the stars, refugees fleeing a cosmic struggle in which they had been on the losing side. They set to work building a home for themselves in a new world.

He saw this Tower as it had been in ancient days, standing atop its cliff. There was no sign of Morven, only concentric rings of raised earth walls and enormous barrows in which larger Serpent Men lived. Workers built corrals and herded beasts. A priestly caste of beings, who looked like the ones in this crypt, offered up sacrifices to strange extra-dimensional entities. Roads stretched off to the distance, to other Towers. Great green needles of a similar substance to the Tower, flashed across the horizons, carrying the Serpent Men about their business.

He saw the first encounter of humans with the Serpent Men, and their recruitment as servants and slaves and pupils. He saw his ancestors worship the Serpents as gods. He felt a surge of resentment. The Serpent Men in their own way were as bad as the Terrarchs. They used his people as slaves, as things little better than cattle.

A sense of contradiction, of amusement, of bafflement, of frustration flowed over the link he shared with the Serpent Priest. Rik could almost smell them. His view zoomed in on other scenes, of Serpent Men trying to teach humans, showing them diagrams, how to make implements. It became clear to him that the Serpent Man was trying to say there was more than a master/slave relationship, that the Serpent Men had been trying to help the humans, to teach them.

Once the creature sensed with certainty that he had understood this, Rik’s point of view became general again. It flickered back and forth across the surface of the world, revealed as a vast sphere, showing other civilisations, other nations.

He saw that the Serpent Men were not alone in their new world. Other alien races swam in its seas, burrowed beneath its surface, rode through the air in weird living machines. There was a sense of enormous activity, of the meeting of many civilisations, of trade and rivalry and growing tension and hatred. He saw that the Serpent Men were not alone in trying to recruit humans to help them.

He saw the buried cities of the Spider Folk, where many castes of strange arachnid beings scuttled through the dark. He saw humans with living weapons grafted to their flesh, and not just weapons. Men were hooked into massive things like monstrous scorpions, living machines that augmented their strength and allowed them to lift huge burdens in the modified pincers.

Enormous squid like creatures swam through the ocean, the motherships of the Quan, disgorging their smaller children into the seas to harvest fish and the resources of the deep, building huge pearl-domes beneath the waves, monuments to their sinister gods. He saw the largest mothership of all, a kraken-like creature vast as an island, its outline visible in the depths of the ocean, as if he were viewing it from one of those flying ships he had witnessed earlier.

He became aware that he was seeing an actual memory of the being with whom he was linked, and he sensed approval as it noticed his understanding. Slowly a sense of wonder grew within him. He was seeing the world as it had been aeons before the Terrarchs came, through the eyes of one who had actually been there.

He saw tensions mount between the races as they fought for resources and for slaves. He saw skirmishes lead to battles and battles lead to wars. He saw great engines of sorcery unleashed and mighty weapons deployed. He saw the Towers of the Serpent Men besieged by the spawn of Uran Ultar. Great armies did battle. Moth-like flyers assaulted the flying needles of the Serpent Men. Monstrous acid spewing beasts attacked the fortresses. Great mushroom clouds rose over massive explosions that turned fertile land to deserts of glass, and churned the boiling seas. Death rained down from the skies. Clouds of poison gas depopulated cities.

The Elder Races fell into barbarism. The thinking caste of the Ultari Spider Folk succumbed to madness and disease. The Ocean Queens of the Quan went insane or devolved back to being barely sentient. The Serpent Men retreated within their Towers, their sorcerer priests taking to their sarcophagi, determined to sleep until the world was healed. He saw this Tower being sealed, and then attacked with those awesome ancient weapons. He felt the damage to the Tower as agony within his body. He knew that the systems meant to protect the sleeping Serpent Priests had been damaged, perhaps irrevocably.

Blankness. Static. A sense of emptiness, of sleep filled with strange slow dreams. Suddenly the Tower was brought back to life when Ilmarec entered it and found this vault. He awakened this last surviving Serpent Priest, promised it aid; Ilmarec would help it rejoin its brethren and return to the stars. When he discovered the Serpent Priest’s true weakness, Ilmarec used spells to enslave it.

He felt the Serpent Man’s fury as he was bound by sorcery to Ilmarec’s will after an epic battle of mind and souls. The Serpent Man was awake now, but bound within its coffin, still linked to the Tower in strange ways, but unable to affect it. It could not move now from its crypt but it gave Ilmarec its talisman of command, taught him its secrets.

More scenes danced through Rik’s imagination, all of them views of the inside of the Tower, all of them from strange angles, as if the structure itself had eyes within it and he was looking through them. He saw Ilmarec performing experiments, finally learning how to partially heal the Tower, and communicate with its chained intelligence.

Rik saw recent events start to unfold.

He saw Jaderac come. He saw the Foragers and Asea and Sardec on their recent visit. He saw Kathea trapped in her chambers.

He saw himself as he appeared to the Serpent Man now, as he stood in the tomb. He knew he was seeing himself as the creature saw him. He sensed something else. To the Serpent Man he had a mind that could be barely touched or grappled with. He wondered if the truth was not that he was having difficulty understanding the Serpent Man because he was alien, but that the Serpent Man could barely touch his mind to communicate.

A wave of understanding passed between him and his captor then. It was trying to communicate with him. It needed him. He tried to listen, to receive, to empty his mind although he was not sure exactly what he was doing.

A sense of imminent danger grew within him. As it did so, he saw Ilmarec standing in the central chamber of the Tower performing some ritual. Awareness that the Tower itself was a quasi-living thing with its own senses, capable of perceiving things at hundreds of leagues away, flowed into him.

More images flickered into Rik’s mind along with more strange knowledge. He saw that Ilmarec had awakened something deep in the Tower’s heart, the trapped heart of a god, a thing that generated enough energy to hurtle the Tower into the sky and back through the cold gulf between stars.

He saw too what the Serpent Man knew and Ilmarec did not, or could not. The God’s heart was damaged. If Ilmarec continued to draw on its power, to use it to provide ever higher levels of magical energy, then the heart would break. It would explode and the unleashed energy of a million barrels of gunpowder would scorch the earth beneath it, destroying everything for hundreds of leagues around. Everyone and everything that fell beneath the shadow of the vast rising mushroom cloud would die.

Rik knew now what the Serpent Priest wanted. He wanted Ilmarec stopped and the Talisman of control returned to him. He was willing to offer alliance to Rik and his people, to aid them in getting rid of Ilmarec, and free the Princess.

Rik did not trust this creature. He was not sure he wanted it in charge of the Tower any more than he wanted Ilmarec to be.

More feelings flowed from it, of deep sadness mixed with calculation. The Serpent Man would not interfere in this war. The Tower was crippled. It wanted to repair it and depart to find its brethren among the stars.

Rik was adrift here. He was not Asea or Jaderac. He was in no position to bargain with the Serpent Priest as an equal. It was far older and possessed of far greater knowledge than he. He had only one advantage. If it allowed him to, he could move where it could not. It could do things he could not. He did not even know what it could offer him, other than his life, as its side of the bargain. As if responding to his confusion, it withdrew for a moment considering.

More images flickered into his mind. He saw the location of the Princess Kathea, and the way to get there. He saw the chambers in which Ilmarec waited. He saw all the sorcerous engines and defences and traps that lay between them. He saw how to overcome the old fail-safes. More and more knowledge, and alien thoughts flowed into him. He felt like screaming but within moments it was over, and he slumped forward, all contact broken with the Serpent Man.

He knew what he must do. At that moment, the whole Tower began to shake.

Sardec’s eyes were drawn to the Tower as if by some magnetic force. It seemed like a trapped sun burned there, and Sardec half-expected the green death to come raining down on Morven.

The mansion quivered beneath his feet, like the pre-shock of an earthquake. It was like being trapped in the belly of some great beast as it writhed in its death agonies. A smell of ozone filled the air. In the distance he heard things crashing down. Sardec offered up a prayer to the god of his childhood for his own safety and the safety of the others.

Above him the cliffs split. Great boulders tumbled down into the ruins, and then great chunks of the rock face sheared away and began to fall, taking those smooth glassy walls with it.

Wind rushed against his face, and the smell of ozone intensified. Bolts of magical energy crackled from the tower. Then slowly the Tower of the Serpent rose from the middle of the fortress, tons of earth shedding from its base. The whole bottom of the Tower glowed greenly as it flew upward, gathering speed as it went, the great green light of the Serpent’s Fang blinking oddly.

The Tower had taken flight, faster than any dragon. Awe clutched Sardec’s heart at the sight of the ancient enigmatic structure vanishing into night and storm. He knew now how Ilmarec intended to destroy Azaar’s army. He doubted any power in the world could stop it.