The Serpent Tower

  “I am not what you are talking about. I know nothing of these things.”

  “I made other inquiries when I was in Sorrow. My agents went to some very dark places, and talked to some very desperate people. There was once a very successful thief in Sorrow, a very prince among burglars, they called the Halfbreed. He had a friend called Leon. They were said once to have been in Temple Orphanage together.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “This half-breed stole from the mansions of the rich. Places protected by wards and all manner of mystical defences. Some of his victims hired diviners to hunt him down. The goods were sometimes found but he never was.”

  Rik had not known that. It seemed that many of his escapes in Sorrow had been closer than he had ever suspected. “Most of those magicians are charlatans.”

  “Some of them were not.”

  “I don’t see that it proves anything.”

  “No but the absence of something can provide corroboration as much as its presence. The Shadowblood were assassins, bred by magic, immune to scrying. They showed up on no tests save when they wanted to. They killed the Desecrator’s enemies in secret during his rise to power. They were perhaps the deadliest killers in a world that was not short of deadly killers.”

  “I have told you I am not one of them.”

  “One must have survived Azaar’s attack on their secret Temple, which is only logical. Some of them must have been performing missions when the attack came.”

  “Temple?”

  “In the Mountains of Madness. Azaar found it after a search of decades. There were those who believed it to be nothing more than a legend, but he was driven, for the Shadowblood killed his wife and children, and tried to kill him many times. For him, it was a war unto the death. Azaar has only ever lost one war, and that was unwinnable by anyone.

  “I feared there had been survivors but for decades after the Temple was razed there were no attacks, and we allowed ourselves to believe we had won… then the End Times were on us and there were more important things to worry about.”

  Rik did not know what to say. Asea seemed locked away in a world of her own, looking back into the past. He tried to sort through what she had said, and the explanation came. “You are saying my father was one of these Shadowbloods. That somehow he survived and he is here, in this world.”

  “Precisely.”

  “I cannot be held responsible for what my father might have done.”

  Her laughter held no mirth. “Believe me you can. The Old Queen’s edict states quite clearly that all of the Shadowblood are to be killed as soon as they are found.”

  He considered this. “That does not seem fair.”

  “They were not fair times, Rik. The Shadowblood terrified many powerful people. They had strange gifts - it was said they could make themselves invisible, travel instantly through shadows, cloud the minds of those who saw them. They were too dangerous to be allowed to live.”

  “But to kill someone just because they were born seems monstrous.” He was speaking only of his own case but as the words came out of his mouth, he realised they were true in all cases. He would have felt the same way even if he had no personal stake in the matter.

  “A lot of monstrous deeds were done back then, Rik. The Dark Sun was rising. We did not understand who the enemy were or who was killing us. We only knew something had to be done, and I fear it made us as bad as our enemies- which was surely their intention.”

  Rik had a sudden inkling of the murkiness of the past from Asea and the whole Terrarch race had emerged. Theirs had not been the world of light of which the Testaments spoke. It had been like this one, perhaps worse.

  “Why are you telling me this- do you intend to kill me?”

  “The Old Queen would have killed you. Others would kill you even now if they knew. Azaar, for one.”

  “But you will not?” Another thing occurred to Rik now. He had no idea of knowing whether this was true, and no way of checking it. If this was a way of manipulating him, of keeping him dependent on her, it was a very good one. “Why?”

  She sighed. The smile she gave him held an odd mixture of defiance and sadness and complicity and self-pity. “Because, like you, I do not believe anyone is born evil. I have made many mistakes in my life, Rik, sometimes catastrophic ones, and I have learned that doing things quickly for no reason other than fear has often led to the worst of them.”

  “Are you sure you have no other reasons?” He could not keep the fear or the anger out of his voice. He felt an urge to lash out.

  “There are other reasons, Rik. You have great gifts in you, and they need not be put to evil use.”

  “You mean they can be put to your use.” She smiled.

  “Just so. If your talents can be developed as I think they can, you could be a great asset to us in the coming war.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “There’s no need to sound so sullen, boy. Such talents as I suspect you possess will gain you great riches and power in the long run, if you live.”

  “You think it a good idea to have your own pet Shadowblood assassin,” he said. Already he was turning the possibilities over in his mind. If he could develop the talents she claimed the Shadowblood had, he could be an all but unstoppable thief.

  “Not an assassin, perhaps, but an agent for myself, and the Queen.”

  “Would the Queen know about what you just told me, about the Shadowblood?”

  “For the moment, no one but you and I will know about it, and if you are wise you will mention this to no one. I am in no way exaggerating- should the Inquisition hear about this, it is a death sentence. And bear something else in mind, Rik; I value your life but I value my own more.”

  Rik’s mind raced. He turned the options and the possibilities over in his mind. An agent of the Queen. A high road to riches. A death sentence hanging perpetually over his head. To be eternally in thrall to this ancient, beautiful and frightening woman. He felt as if he stood on the threshold of a world he had not even known existed, and which was reaching out now to entangle him.

  “How can you train me? You are not a Shadowblood? Are you?”

  “There are certain disciplines I can teach you, things that should bring out your latent powers eventually. And Karim knows many of the arts that are useful to someone like you. He will tutor you in them.”

  “I am a soldier. How will I find the time?”

  “I have had you and your friends assigned to my service as personal guards. It is work they seem admirably suited for. We will find the time to train you, never fear.”

  “What if people find out what we are doing?”

  “We shall just have to see that they do not.”

  Another image entered his mind and he was not sure why- of the mother he had never known, who had died so horribly, quite possibly at the hands of his father. He felt an emptiness and a longing and a sense of loss so strong it was strange, because it was for something and someone he had never known.

  Perhaps some day he would be in a position to do something about that. If he lived long enough.

  Chapter Ten

  The Foragers marched beneath the white banner of truce. It flew alongside the bat-winged angel on a black background that marked them as being part of the Seventh Infantry regiment. Sardec rode beside Lady Asea. She was the only person mounted aside from himself and it made him feel very conspicuous. There was no reason to be nervous, he told himself. Ilmarec would not harm an ambassador.

  Sardec’s mouth was dry. Pain came from where his hand once had been. Before it had happened to him, he would never have believed a hook could hurt. There were times when he woke and thought he could still feel his fingers, that the loss of his hand had all been a dream. Of course, it was the phantom hand that was a dream. He had heard that sorcerers used mystical techniques to shape reality around them, imagining things so strongly they became true. He wondered if a sorcerer could imagine himself a severed hand so str
ongly that it became real. He mentioned it to Lady Asea. She seemed grateful for the distraction.

  “On Al’Terra, I knew mages who could manipulate objects with hands they created by pure concentration. I doubt there is enough ambient magical energy to recreate that feat here.”

  “What about growing new limbs? I had heard that was possible too.”

  “With sufficient power you can stimulate the body in such a way that it repairs itself, like a Serpent Man growing a new tail.” Asea seemed sympathetic. She obviously understood his interest. She looked a little odd this morning as well.

  Perhaps she had taken a new lover as camp gossip suggested. The half-breed had spent a long time in her tent last night. Sardec doubted they had been just talking. There was a time when he would have condemned her for it. He still felt the urge, but given his own actions with the girl Rena yesterday evening, he was in no position to throw stones. He felt a faint thrill at the memory of the previous night.

  “That’s not an attractive image,” he said, wondering if he were talking about a hand growing like a Serpent Man’s tail or the picture of Asea and the half-breed writhing in passion that passed through his mind.

  “There are less attractive ones,” she said. “Some sorcerers used to saw off the hands from the living and attach them to stumps of lost limbs.”

  “It worked?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes the limb rotted. Sometimes the recipient died. No one was sure why. The practise never became popular for that reason.”

  “My father claimed the Princes of Shadow took limbs from the dead.”

  “He was right. Necromancers could reanimate them, and make them work, but there would be no sensation. They were like the limbs of lepers. Some of the Desecrator’s Lieutenants did that, and worse things.”

  “You mean Moghrag and his armour of flesh?”

  “Just so.” The infamous Moghrag had built a suit of armour from reanimated corpses turned inside out. The bones were fused on the outside to form an exo-skeleton, while clumps of necromantically-animated muscles on the inside amplified his strength. He was said to have been able to rip a man’s head from his shoulders with his bare hands.

  Asea said; “Moghrag was always a sick one, even as a child. He was fond of dissecting things. I think he got that idea cutting up lizards and stitching them together.”

  It was sometimes hard for Sardec to grasp that to one of the First, people like Moghrag were not simply the names of ogres from the Testaments, but living breathing individuals they had once had the acquaintance of. Asea had known Moghrag before the Exile, so had Azaar, so had Ilmarec for that matter.

  “Azaar killed him, did he not?”

  “He did. Azaar was First Blade of the Realm then. No one could match him with a sword, not even Moghrag with his strange armour and the stolen strength of a dozen warriors.”

  Silence fell between them. When he had read the tales as a child, it was sometimes hard to understand why anyone would have sided with the Princes of Shadow, but there was a dark strain in the Terrarch psyche, and now he could imagine reasons.

  He remembered the odd look in Rena's eyes when the cold metal of his hook had touched her naked flesh. He wanted to be whole again. He wanted to be handsome once more. He wanted to be able to think that women did not look at him with horror. There had been times when he had thought that dark sorcery might be the answer; it tempted him, particularly at night when he lay in bed alone with his thoughts. Under the sun, he could see it was madness. He had no desire to bear the stolen limb of another or to have the parts of an animated corpse grafted to his body. That was no solution to his problem.

  “Could you work the healing magic?” he asked. The words just suddenly blurted out. They came from the deepest well of his being, and he had not expected to say them at all. Asea looked at him with something like pity on her face, and that was the worst part of it.

  “In the right place, at the right time, possibly, yes,” she said. “On Al’Terra, where the flows of power were stable, strong and far more predictable than here it was difficult sorcery. Here on Gaeia, it would be even more complex.”

  “Why is such sorcery difficult? You can summon demons from the Pit. Surely healing cannot be all that difficult in comparison.” She smiled as she might have done at a child who expected her to be able to reach up into the sky and pull down the sun.

  “They are different types of magic,” she said. “Sometimes it is easier to do the big things than the little ones, just as it is easier to hack off a limb than to sew it on again so that it works. If you stimulate the body to repair itself you must do it exactly right. Otherwise it re-grows too much. Cancers come, or the limb becomes monstrous and malformed and useless, and you must amputate and begin the whole process again. That too is a risky procedure.”

  “You do not make it sound easy.”

  “No sorcery is ever easy. There is a cost for the sorcerer as well as the person ensorcelled. All magic puts enormous strain on the body and on the mind. Some think that this is why magic has so many ill effects on humans. They do not have the vitality or the mental capacity for it.”

  Another thought occurred to Sardec. “Why can the Serpent Men re-grow limbs when we cannot?”

  “I do not know. Their bodies are built differently from ours. They grow their entire lives, some of the Eldest are huge, almost the size of dragons. They are thousands of years old.”

  “They must be an awesome sight.”

  “They are. When I was in Xulander I visited several of the nest cities. Once I was shown into one of the sleeping chambers where the Eldest dream.”

  “You never talked to one?”

  “No- they are all asleep now. In hibernation I would guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do our own dragons spend most of their time asleep these days? It is a sign of the times, perhaps.”

  “I have heard it said that the Serpent Men are cruel to their humans.”

  “I have heard it said we are cruel to our humans.” She spoke in the High Tongue so the soldiers would not understand. He responded in kind.

  “In the Dark Empire we are.”

  “Some would say it’s not just in the Dark Empire.”

  He shrugged not wanting to argue with her. He knew that politically they would never see eye to eye. She was too old and too radical. She had, after all, been a founder of the Scarlet faction.

  “Do you think it’s true that the Serpent Men came from the stars?” he asked, to change the subject.

  “So their Watcher Priests claim, and I see no reason to doubt them. It is said that many of the Elder Races did.”

  “To cross the gulf between stars- that is a mighty sorcery.”

  “To be sure, but no mightier than to cross between the worlds as our people did, when we came here.”

  “Did they use gateways like we did?”

  “You are in a curious mood this morning, Lieutenant Sardec.”

  “I find it helps relax me when I may be riding into the teeth of Elder World weaponry. I fear I have the urge to learn something of the force that might destroy me.”

  She laughed, a clear, ringing sound. “An admirable attitude but I think we are safe. I doubt Ilmarec will feel threatened enough by our force to unleash the horrors of the Ancients upon us.”

  Sardec glanced back at the Foragers. They were a sadly depleted force. Perhaps thirty of the original company he had led into Achenar were present. The rest were either dead or recovering from their wounds. There were plenty of new faces, recruits posted from other companies to fill the roster. He hoped they had the skills of the men they were replacing. They were supposed to, but you never knew.

  “My father fought in the sea battle at Ssaharoc. He said it was dreadful. The great towers guarding the harbour emitted beams of green light and our fleet just burned or exploded. Do you think Ilmarec has learned the secret of that light?”

  “That seems as good a guess as any.”

  “My father always
said that if the Serpent Men could make the weapons on their Towers mobile, they could conquer the world.”

  “Perhaps they can. Perhaps they simply have no desire for conquest. They are a strange people: alien and incomprehensible and I think to our mind very slothful. Perhaps they prefer inertia.”

  “Then we had best hope that no one else learns their secrets.”

  “All the Elder Races had mighty weapons, Lieutenant. They used them in their wars. That is why so much of the eastern half of this continent is devastated.”

  A thought occurred to Sardec. “With such weapons we could have defeated the Princes of Shadow.”

  “Perhaps, for a time.”

  “You do not sound hopeful.”

  “I think perhaps we could have defeated their armies, but the Princes themselves would have just done what they always did, and retreated into hiding until they had mastered the secrets themselves, and then they would have returned stronger than ever.”

  “You do not think we will ever reclaim the Homeworld then?”

  “It is a dream. Only a dream.” Sardec could not help but think that if they reclaimed Al’Terra, he might be able to regain his hand. He smiled sadly. It was a stupid petty reason to want to conquer a world, but he supposed such things had happened for lesser reasons.

  The road passed over a ridge and suddenly, stunningly, Morven lay before them. Sardec barely noticed the walled townships on the islands in the river, or the sprawl of houses around the base of the great cliffs that rose above the river. He hardly saw the vast ruins that covered the land on one side of the tributary. What he noticed was the great stone spur rising above the town and the structure that perched atop it. Of course, he had seen the spire from a distance but the hills had blocked out the full view on their approach. This was the first time he had seen it in its entirety.