Dark Crusade (9 page)

"Watch it!" Kane pulled rein, swerved as a small girl recklessly chased the rolling kickball across his path. The huge back stallion reared, pawed its deadly hooves. With a frightened squeal, the child darted away.

"That's General Kane!" breathed excited voices. "Now you've done it! Run!" The gang of children scattered like leaves.

The girl stood her ground--wanting her kickball, but not daring to approach while Kane calmed his stamping mount.

Liking her mettle, Kane leaned from his saddle, caught up the kickball by its matted hair. Casually he glanced at the battered features of the young woman's head, almost unrecognizable from dirt and clotted gore. The bare feet of the children had all but pulped this kickball in the course of their game.

Kane handed down the grisly object to the anxious girl--her blue eyes big with wonder at receiving attention from so important a man. "This one has about had it," he told her, and pointed to the row of impaled heads along the city wall. "You'd better put this back and get yourself another kickball."

Each morning the heads of persons suspected of disloyalty to Orted and hence to Sataki were put on display. The children of Shapeli were quick to find new sport with such grim trophies.

"Oh, no, sir," replied the girl, gravely accepting the battered head. "I want to keep this one. She's my mother."

Ingoldi lay beneath the veil of night, pierced by the stars that seemed too close and too bright in the tropic skies. It was yet an hour before the false dawn, and the streets were deserted. Houses were silent behind bolts and shutters, and even the Defenders of Sataki, the Prophet's special police corps, seemed to be asleep at this hour.

Hooves made a hollow echo along the empty streets. If any awoke at the sound, they waited without breathing for the hoofbeats to pass by. It was the hoofbeats of a great black stallion, and no man cared to encounter horse or rider at this lonely hour of the night.

Kane, sleepless on these nights, rode alone through the deserted city, wrapped in his thoughts. Such nocturnal rumblings were of little solace, for Kane hated Ingoldi.

The capital of the Satakis bore little resemblance to the city of two years ago. A good third of Ingoldi had been burned in the aftermath of rioting at the Guild Fair; most of what remained was razed by order of the Prophet. Magnificent temples and mansions of the wealthy were despoiled and carted away piecemeal by the Satakis.

As the Prophet's hordes streamed into his capital in the wake of his victories, houses and public buildings that had stood for centuries were demolished. From the blocks of barren rubble, ungainly dormitories and communal dwellings sprang up like huge and featureless fungi. The city's picturesque courts and narrow winding streets were swallowed up in the rebuilding, supplanted by broad avenues of geometric pattern--military thoroughfares for the marching horde. Outlying gardens and villas were trampled into the ashes and muck, and in their place arose a high wall to enclose the unlovely new city and its elbowing masses.

Two years ago, a sprawling and indolent city, shaped by centuries of dreamy transformation. Today it was a teeming and ugly military barracks, born of directed violence. It reminded Kane of some colossal anthill, flung together for no purpose other than to house the faceless units of the Prophet's killing machine.

Even Ceddi, ancient citadel of the priests of Sataki, had not escaped the transmutation. Its crumbling stone walls and angular towers--old when the city of Ingoldi sprang up in its shadow, eventually to encircle the sombre--were razed and cannibalized for building stone. Higher walls and grander fortifications arose from the ancient foundations. Blocky featureless halls and towers replaced the broken spires and antique edifices of ancient Ceddi. Only beneath the earth, in Ceddi's hidden cellars, were the Prophet's renovations without consequence.

Kane knew the city and its sinister fortress of old. It pained him to see the architectures of past ages smashed beneath the utilitarian juggernaut of the Dark Crusade. The sacrifice of untold human lives meant nothing to Kane. A stone wall, being a somewhat more enduring entity, impressed him the more deeply with its loss.

Kane suddenly sneered at his own melancholia. He had looked upon the passing of too many lives, too many walls of stone, to allow himself to brood upon it tonight.

He drew rein. There was one edifice where the ghosts of lost ages lay undisturbed. He stood before it now: the Tower of Yslsl.

The black stone tower had waited here long centuries ago, when the priests of Sataki first penetrated Shapeli to raise the log palisade of Ceddi. They came to burrow down to the buried fane of their deity, to restore the worship of the prehuman god or devil whose secrets had been revealed to their leaders. Of the tower and of what hands had raised it, their legends retained only nebulous hints. Of Yslsl, even less was remembered.

The walls of the tower rose as solid and foreboding in that distant age as they stood today. The builders of Ceddi incorporated the tower within their log palisade, as a redoubt against the attacks of the savage tribes within the great forest. While there seldom were specific incidents, the tower was center of countless dark rumors and unwholesome superstitions. It was never occupied or put to use for any length of time, and when stone walls replaced Ceddi's palisade, the Tower of Yslsl was not included within the enceinte. Nor was it within the Prophet's renovated line of fortifications.

There had been no attempt to cannibalize the tower for its building stone. At least, if such an attempt bad ever been made, it was not repeated.

In the shadow of the Prophet's citadel, engulfed by the featureless hives of his minions, the Tower of Yslsl nonetheless stood apart from these things, as it had stood apart from the older city, and before that from the untrod forest. Silent and sombre, the Tower of Yslsl brooded in this night as it had through nights before the dawn of man.

The tower regarded Kane, and Kane regarded the tower.

Restless yet, Kane dismounted. Angel snorted, shied fretfully away from the tower. Kane spoke soothingly, stroked the stallion's neck until he grew calmer. Surrounding the tower was a circle of desolation, a cleared area of rubble and broken walls. Kane left his mount untethered; Angel would wait for him there, and no one would dare approach Kane's stallion.

The tower was round and without apparent taper, rising somewhat over a hundred feet, and perhaps a quarter of that in diameter. It was built of massive blocks of black stone, resembling basalt, perfectly fitted in unmortared joints. Even after untold centuries, at no point had the joints eroded beyond the thickness of a sword blade. Except for its deepset doorway, the tower walls were unbroken by window or aperture of any sort.

There was a door, iron-bound, of timber blackened and iron-hard with age--fitted there in a previous century during one of the sporadic efforts to utilize the empty tower. The Satakis had replaced the iron bolts and cleared away the debris within, with the object of once again using the structure as a redoubt. Once the new fortifications were completed, the Tower of Yslsl was again abandoned to dust and shadows.

The door opened to Kane's hand, and he stepped inside. Within there was deeper night, but this did not greatly appear to inconvenience Kane.

Arising from the barren earth, a spiral stairway climbed the interior wall. Of curious design, each step was an unbroken intrusion of the wall at that point--jutting out into open space to a breadth where two men might pass with care. Efforts to erect floors at levels along the wall had been made at various times. Timbers had rotted and fallen in; the wall remained. The Satakis had removed most of the debris, so that, gazing upward, Kane had an unobstructed view of the tower interior.

The free-standing stairway rose in a precise spiral. If there was a taper to the interior wall, it was not discernible. The walls were some four feet at the doorway, a sheer face interrupted only by the stairway. A half-circle of starlight shimmered from high above.

Leisurely Kane climbed the stairway. He had climbed these same steps on a number of occasions, and he made his way with confidence.

At the summit, the stairway opened onto a semicircular ledge--a half-moon floor which appeared to be of one mammoth slab of stone. Above this, the tower walls continued another ten feet, then abruptly terminated. Over the centuries, various authorities had argued that the tower must have contained a roof and interior chambers at the time of its building--timber constructions that had rotted away with time, even as had latter day efforts at such embellishments. It must have been thus, for otherwise the tower could be of no comprehensible purpose. Explanations as to how its engineers raised that titanic half-circle of stone to the tower's hundred foot peak were less satisfactory.

There was yet another wondrous mystery to the tower. Set into the curving wall at the top of the stairway, there where a man might stand on the half-moon ledge and contemplate it, was a huge sunburst of jet.

The circular pattern extended from the ledge to the top of the tower wall, and resembled nothing more than a stylized representation of the sun. The sunburst was set flush with the stone of the wall, but was a lustrous rather than a dull black-obsidian, as opposed to basalt, atthough the resemblance here to either igneous mineral was superficial. Some suggested it was carved from a separate stone and cunningly set into the wall; others claimed it was instead the achievement of some lost process of annealing and polishing. Despite its age, the sunburst showed neither scratches nor chips.

It was popularly believed that Yslsl had been a sun god, that this was his temple, and that here was his symbolic portrayal. It was a convenient explanation, although sceptics argued that the symbolic sunrays were too suggestive of tentacles, and that such vague legends as did survive hinted that Yslsl was anything but a sun god.

Kane, had he cared to do so, might have given them more definite information. And he might have told them that this tower had an exact counterpart on the other side of the earth--in a land whose people made similarly foolish efforts to overlay the dark legends that still persisted. Of other such towers, Kane could only speculate.

Tonight when he reached the semicircular ledge, Kane saw that he was not alone.

Crouched beneath the jet sunburst, a slender girl stared wild-eyed at his approach. Kane looked at her curiously. She held a poniard as if she knew how to use it, but Kane made no move toward his own swordhilt.

"Put your sting away," he told her, not caring to deal with a terror-stricken girl on this narrow ledge.

"General Kane, is it?" hissed the girl, making no move. "Why do you follow me here?"

Kane laughed. "Why do you lie in wait for me?"

She thought a moment. "If you didn't follow me, then what business could you have here in the Tower of Yslsl?"

"If you aren't an assassin, what business could you possibly have in the Lair of Yslsl?" Kane countered.

"That's easily answered. I came up here to leap off."

"Then what should you care whether I followed you or not? Leap away and have done."

She laughed bitterly and returned her poniard to its sheath. The eyes beneath her jade fillet were haunted. "I don't have the nerve. I never do. Some night I'll miss a step in the dark, and that will serve as well."

Kane shrugged and stepped onto the stone floor. The girl drew away, watching him closely. She was pretty in a thin-but-not-fragile way. Kane ignored her after a casual glance. He had been seeking solitude, and the girl had broken in upon his mood.

"Why did you call this the Lair of Yslsl?" Kane studied her. "Do you really want to know?"

There was a note to his voice that brought her about. "Sure, tell me. I got over being terrified over a year ago in Gillera." She wished he'd turn his eyes from hers all the same.

Kane touched the black sunburst. It was unnaturally cold to his fingers. "This is a doorway, if you know how to open it. And beyond the doorway, Yslsl waits patiently as a spider in his lair."

"What is Yslsl?"

"A demon, of a sort," Kane replied vaguely. "There is no appropriate term in your language. Think of this world as but one chamber in a vast castle, and think of Yslsl as something old and evil who dwells in the next room--something cunning who has found a way to open a tiny doorway through the wall in between. Only he can't crawl through to you, so he has to wait in his lair for you to crawl through to him."

"But why would anyone ever try to do that?" she protested.

"Suppose you knew that leading out of the Lair of Yslsl were other doors, leading to other rooms--rooms filled with riches and wonders beyond your wildest dreams--and that you could enter these other rooms. If you got past Yslsl."

"But what if Yslsl caught you?"

"That," Kane said, "no one knows. No one has ever escaped the Lair of Yslsl."

She shivered, as much from the eerie wistfulness of Kane's voice as from his words. "Can you open the doorway?"

"I can."

She shivered again, staring thoughtfully at the black sun. "Then open it for me, Kane. I have nothing to live for."

"It would be infinitely better to step off this ledge, and die a quick, clean death below, than to step past this doorway. You'll find no refuge in the Lair of Yslsl."

The girl cursed him, deciding that Kane had only been playing with her with this fanciful tale. "Neither is there any refuge in death!"

"So I'm told," said Kane with harsh bitterness. "So I'm told."

Kane whirled, descended the stairs in a rush. She was still wondering over his sudden anger, after his hoofbeats had died away into the night.

"Get rid of him."

"Kane?"

"He'll destroy you."

"Nothing can destroy me."

"He'll destroy us all."

"Don't be fools."

"What do you know of Kane?"

"I know that Kane can lead my army to victory."

"Your army! It is Kane's army."