The Black Tower (28 page)

Dane dangled there at the edge of oblivion, hanging over the void.  Gelid wind pushed against his tender wounds and made him wince with pain.  Cries echoed from far below, faded and tortured voices.  The utter darkness of the tower pressed in on him. 

This can’t be happening.

Dane maintained his grip even though his limbs were exhausted.  He was trapped in a nightmare.  Any minute he’d wake up next to Ijanna in some saner place, on some saner day.

No.  There will be none of that for you.  This is what you drove yourself towards – a hell darker than any you’ve ever known.

He’d so wanted to save her.  To help the one who’d lived, the only one who’d escaped all of that madness and suffering in the mountains.  And now the only way to save her was to kill her.

Azander Dane hung in the darkness, recalled the shattered dreams of his youth and listened to the echoing screams of those he’d killed, and wept.

It was down, then, since up had proved pointless. 

The air turned dark red, the hue of frozen blood.  Dane’s body was wracked with exhaustion, but eventually he resigned himself to the fact that there would be no up, not for him.  He wasn’t sure what waited for him down there – Ijanna, maybe, or Argus, or whatever dismal and corrupt force was in control of the Tower – but making the decision to climb down and face it filled him with a strange sense of calm.  He wondered, idly, what time of day it was, since he was deep underground and had a feeling he would never see daylight again. 

He slowly climbed down the sharp and tangled waterfall of chains.  A part of him was ready to just let go, and allow his body to plummet.  He wondered what he’d miss the most once he was gone.  Oddly, nothing came to mind.

I won’t miss the world, and it won’t miss me.

The Veil was with him, surrounding him as if he’d summoned it.  Its gelid presence held him in an icy grip.

The space below was utterly black, the walls finished to smooth.  The climb was painful but not difficult.  He drowned in darkness with every rattling step.

A magnetic quality drew him from below.  Whatever his fate was, it waited down there.  His descent into the depths of Chul Gaerog had been ordained from the start.

Is this what I’m meant to do?
he asked Corvinia, not sure if she could even hear him in this dismal and forbidden place. 
Is it my lot to kill people who don’t deserve to die?

Dane descended the shifting chains, his arms and legs weak and oozing blood and puss, his eyes weary with fatigue.  He’d spent so much time sweating and swinging in the darkness he felt like a shadow himself, like he’d grown into the walls, just another part of the nightmare.  The chains narrowed as he made his way down and his stomach lurched at the imagined height, though for all he knew the ground was only twenty paces below.  He could smell the inside of a mountain now, could sense how deep underground he was with the scents of iron, sulfur and dampness.  His mouth was dry.

It was suicide, and nothing more.  The chains would drop him into an endless pit or into a nest of trolls or even the lair of a dragon, and that would be it. 

Dane didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to live.  Not with all he’d done. 

He realized he was baring his teeth like a wolf.  Madness was there below, hidden in the black. 

Kill me. 

All die.

No,
he told himself. 
That’s not how the story will end.  I have to believe that. 

It had been many years since he’d believed in anything.  The last hope he’d felt was when he’d learned who Ijanna was, and that he might be able to save her.  As things turned out that wasn’t an option, and never really had been. 

There has to be another way.  There has to be.

He imagined himself falling, and laughed bitterly.  He imagined his life continuing and saw nothing but a bitter and empty shell.  No one he cared about, no one he loved.  Not until Ijanna, a woman he didn’t know, a woman whose son he’d murdered, whose friends he’d helped butcher, who’d proved over the course of a few blood-soaked days what little there was that separated man from beast.  He hadn’t needed Targo’s serum to make him a wolf, because he’d been one all along.

What point is a life with no one to care for? 

He was nothing.  A shadow, hiding in the darkness.  Maybe that was why he’d survived, why the One Goddess had allowed him to come this far: whatever waited for him down there was pure darkness, devoid of a soul, of life.

Just like me.  You sent one shadow to do battle with another.

Dane held himself ready, took a shuddering breath, and let go.

He fell, into darkness so deep it swallowed him. 

He closed his eyes and felt the rush of wind.  Behind his lids he saw splotches of darkness like blood in the water. 

He became liquid, his weight dropping down, and felt nothing, no longer sensed the height that had so terrified him before.  It was as if he plummeted into a dank and oily sea.  Time folded back, repeated. 

The inside of the tower was utterly dark.  Frozen fingers danced across his flesh.  Everything slowed.  He actually felt the shadows fill his lungs like black water, so deep and cold it was as if he’d fallen into a glacier. 

His body turned end over end.  He convulsed and folded in on himself, tried to scream, but the darkness had stolen his voice.  He was a fly frozen in amber, but for all that he still descended. 

Falling, without end, drawn down towards an unforgiving force. 

The air was hewn from dust and shadow.  He tasted life, and magic, and history, heard the screams of both of Ijanna’s voices, and the voices of many more – souls lost through history, beaten and twisted like hammered metal, melted down and torn apart.  Chill traveled inward towards his heart like a dull and merciless blade. 

Dane heard himself cry out at last.  Gravity returned.  The sensation of falling rushed in on him, so fast and brutal it made him scream.  Wind lanced across his flesh like icy knives.  He felt the ground approaching, opened his eyes just long enough to glimpse walls of mountain rock and blood-red crystals lighting his descent. 

Goddess.  Forgive me.

He balled up, closed his eyes, and waited for the impact.

He was no longer falling.

The sensation had stopped suddenly, without warning: one moment he was plunging to his doom, the next he stood still, like he’d just woken from a dream.  He tried to steady himself, but he was shaking all over.  Icy sweat poured down his brow. 

He felt ground beneath his boots, sensed that he stood in an enclosed space.  The voices slithered around him.  His heart hammered so painfully he thought his ribs would crack.

This is the hell you asked for.

He opened his eyes.

The chamber he stood in was small and cold, carved from black quartz threaded with gold.  Touching the floor was like touching ice.  Dane felt his skin cleave to it even through his boots, felt the chill slice through his muscles and grip his heart like a frozen fist.  Patches of darkness deepened, holes within the black. 

There was only one way out of the chamber, a narrow staircase cutting down from a gap in the wall, not even a true doorway but some sort of flaw, a cleft in the mountain rock.  Arctic steam released from the bottom of that gap, billowing up through the air and numbing his flesh as he passed through it. 

Dane had no weapon, and though the Veil permeated the atmosphere it was beyond his reach.  He glanced at himself, saw the tears in his armor, his many wounds.  It was a wonder he’d survived.

You’re meant to be here.

He wasn’t sure if the voice was his or Ijanna’s or some other force.  It didn’t matter – there was nowhere to go but forward.

The stairs descended steeply, lit only by the igneous blood-red glow of some molten substance that flowed thick down the walls, cold and gelled like iced blood lit by fire.  The steps twisted and seemed to go on forever, undoubtedly carved but by some creature that wasn’t human, for they were too narrow and sloped down, like they’d been smelted.  Dane had heard stories of dragon lairs from the times before the Empires, a thousand years ago when the great lizards had ruled the world from below, and he wondered if this subterranean aspect beneath Chul Gaerog hadn’t once been one of them.  The dragons had been dead for almost a millennium, vanquished by The Nine when they stole the land back from the creature that would later be known as the Heartfang. 

There’s one down here.  That would be just my luck.

He emerged from the narrow corridor, passed through another cleft in the rock like a sliver cut away from the edge of the mountain, and stepped into something far less sane.

The cavern at the bottom of the steps was enormous, a field of hedged black rock and cleaved limestone, unspeakably vast and hollow.  There was no ceiling, just a void filled with pockets of crimson steam and rancid cold shadows, and the stench of burning stone was overpowering.  Distant walls bled oozing water, and shattered crystals dotted the floor, glowing faintly like fallen stars.  The ground buckled as he walked, as if it were made of wet wood rather than stone.

The tree stood before him.  Massive, mighty, impossibly tall and wide.  Its roots bore into the vagueness of the ceiling, whorls of shadow and clouds of rot.  The black limbs were dead and gnarled like an old man’s withered arms, the branches like claws that tried to touch the ground even though they fell a full twenty paces short.  The twisted plant was a hundred times bigger than any tree he’d ever seen, and its presence filled the air with a miasma, a stain of degeneration and decay.  Every breath he drew in its presence filled his mouth with the taste of burning souls.

The Janus Tree.  The tree of the Veil.  It was an apocryphal tale, a fable made up by those few naysayers of the Church, back in the days when it wasn’t a capital offense to be such.  Those stories said that the tree grew from where Corvinia’s blood had fallen, that it had grown with the Veil, had maybe even become its source over time.

It was all but impossible to determine where the tree ended and the ceiling began.  Shadows oozed down like tentacles, and on the dark stone floor some thick substance gathered and coalesced, sludge-like sap with the consistency of tar.

He heard singing.  A distant and mad whisper cut through the dark.

There is no chance.

Dane stepped carefully, not wanting to get too close but knowing he didn’t really have a choice.  The Janus Tree was somehow the center of it all, the nexus, and if he was to help Ijanna

There is no fate.

he knew it had to start there. 

Cracks in the ground spilled the iron-rich scent of another world.  All of the shadows and patches of blackness in the vast and hollow chamber seemed to clamor in on him and gather where he stood. Dane smelled the cold breezes of hell. 

He drew closer.  What he took to be vines crossing the ground were instead black veins pulsing with sickly fluid.  A deep roar sounded from far off, not a beast but certainly not human.

Only the careful work of hate.

Who are you?
the voice said.  The sound of it crashed through his body.  It was Ijanna’s voice, not her voice.  The voice of the Veil.

“I’m Azander Dane.”

Names are nothing.  Who
are
you?

He stopped, his heart pounding.  The liquid of the tree hissed as it fell and struck the ground.  He felt himself shaking.  Suddenly he wanted very much to live.

“I’ve taken Calladar’s place,” he said.

For a moment he thought he’d said something right.  He heard bark shift, as if the tree was twisting, the same sound a ship made at sea.  The stench of forest rot was so strong he nearly gagged on it.  Magic surrounded him, drowned him with its terrible cold odor.

When the tree spoke again the sound in his skull was like flesh being torn.

You are not welcome here
, it said, and he heard something shake in the distance, up near those inverted roots, the sound of organic limbs as they snapped away from their moorings.

“I will protect Ijanna,” he said.

I will protect her
, the tree said. 
She brought you here, not I. 

Dane pictured those limbs reaching down and lashing at him, snapping his body like a twig.  He backed away and sensed motion just out of sight, a dozen shadows darker than the surrounding chamber, things so black they burned the eyes. 

Dra’aalthakmar.  Shit
.

A figure emerged from the dark, moving at the head of the black horde.  Blood-red armor and pale skin, white-blonde hair carried by a phantom breeze.  She walked slow, as if unsure of her surroundings.  Shadow-blooded demons were at her back, clawing the ground where she’d walked.

“Ijanna!” Dane shouted.  She looked at him like she’d never seen him before, and a spike of cold shot through him.  “Ijanna, why did you bring me here?”  He knew the answer, but he wanted to be wrong, wanted the truth to be different.  “Ijanna?!”

Dane
, she said to his mind, but the voice of the tree seemed to have heard her.

No
, it said, and weight pressed against Dane’s skull and made it pulse with hurt. 
Die
, it said.  He swallowed his own blood as time spooled, twisted away.  He felt the life being forced from his body. 
All die...

Dane tried to back away, and he stumbled over a female corpse, or what was left of it.  The dark veins of the horrid tree had seethed over and into the flesh, penetrating the skin and taking root.  Black fluid flowed through the body like spilled ink.  Dane glimpsed the dark-skinned woman’s short blade, still held in a sheath on her back.

The
dra’aalthakmar
moved closer.  The air bristled with tension, and he tasted their desire to rip him apart.  He crouched low, barely able to keep his eyes open, his body aching with hurt and fatigue.  Hulking and multi-armed forms leaked from the darkness of the cavern, muscled obsidian silhouettes made of fangs and claws.  Frozen breath wafted in at him.