The Tower of the Worm

The ram crashed a final time against the gates of Magai, and the iron head split the oaken gates apart with a sound like thunder. The armies of Akor the Tyrant lifted up their spears and red swords and they cheered as the gates broke at last. The great wooden beams, scarred by the blows of swords and studded with broken arrows, fell inward, tearing free of the stone gate-towers as they collapsed. After nine days, the city was broken.

Stone rained down in a cascade, the defenders caught in it hurtling to their deaths, screaming as they were crushed by the fall. All around the ancient city the black legions of the tyrant intensified their assault. Catapults hammered at the stone walls, splashing the battlements with fire. Arrows scythed through the smoke-covered sky and cut down men wherever they showed themselves. Battle drums called forth with their voices, and the war-horns bellowed.

The Brothers of the Red Sword formed before the broken gate. A thousand men in red armor, faceless and deadly. As the gate crumbled into a heap of ruined stone and a tower of dust rose up into the sky, they followed their bloody standard into the city, voicing their terrible war-chant with every step.

Kalkus was among them, and his followers were close around him. He was a huge man, a head taller than the rest, a giant even among these titans of the battlefield. A mantle of scalps hung over his shoulders, and his crimson helm was scarred with a hundred battles. He was the greatest war-captain among them, and it was said he would lead the Brotherhood one day soon.

A line of defenders met them in the breached gate, and the lines crashed together in a press of armor and steel and flesh. The Brotherhood attacked with their shields locked close together, broad swords sweeping down to split armor and bone. The defenders fought with desperate fury, driving in with their spears, trying to stem the tide, but they were too few. They were not a match for the Tyrant’s elite, and the Brothers hewed them down and trod upon their bodies as they forced their way through the wreckage of the gate.

Then they were inside, in the smoke-filled streets choked with wounded and fleeing men. They hacked their way through. They were trained to be merciless, and they spared none who came under their swords. They painted the walls red, and dyed their swords with blood. Among them Kalkus was a giant, a storm of war. His sword was so long a lesser man would have needed both hands for it, but he wielded it in one great fist, smashing men down, rending their armor and crushing their bones. His shield was a wall before him, and no blow could breach it. Like a steel engine he smashed through the last defenders who tried to stand, and then there was no more resistance.

The war-drums thundered, and Kalkus almost felt the tide of the army moving behind him, flowing in toward the broken gate, into the city. Magai, the last of the northern cities, would be a burning ruin by dawn, inhabited only by the dead, and those who fed on them.

In the smoke and the twisted streets, no one saw as he turned from the path and led six of his men away down a narrow side street. When he looked up he saw his true goal. There, on an ancient hill within the oldest part of the city, stood the place he sought. The dark and twisted spire men called the Tower of the Worm.

o0o

The tower was dark, without a single light gleaming in a window or upon a parapet. The streets around it were silent and empty. Even in a city in its death throes, the place of the tower was deserted. The buildings were crumbled and abandoned, and it was plain that this corner of Magai was long shunned. Kalkus trod on refuse lying neglected in piles as he crossed the narrow plaza and stood before the steps that led up to the gate. A single shape stood there to bar him - and such were the legends of this place that his men hung back, and he advanced alone with his sword in hand.

Kalkus was not a man of words. He did not seek to parley with the guardian, he attacked. Great strides carried him up the narrow stair, his sword gleamed as he lifted it high, and then the tall, slender guardian leaped to meet him.

The man was gaunt, wrapped in cloth like the cerements of death. He smelled of something musky and rotten, and in his thin hands a long curved blade lashed like lightning. Steel rang on steel, and beyond the tower the sounds of war were like the crashing of sea-waves. Kalkus found his enemy quick and stronger than any mortal man. The curved blade was a flicker in the dark, all but impossible to see or counter.

But Kalkus was no man to trifle with. His shield was like a battlement, and the blows of the quick blade turned and glanced from it. His counter-strokes swept and slashed for his enemy, and the contest could not long endure. At last Kalkus smashed his shield against his enemy and battered him against the wall of the tower, and then his sword came down in a terrible stroke that clove the man from shoulder to spine. He crumpled, twitching and thrashing, blood gouting from the hideous death-wound.

Kalkus set his foot upon the head of the fallen man, and he looked down at his followers. “Come and see,” he said. “See the truth of the legends.”

As the men approached, a foul and segmented tendril lashed from beneath the cloth wrapped around the man’s skull. It flailed at Kalkus’ armored leg, and then at once the body ceased to twitch. Kalkus bore down, and the bone crushed beneath his boot. A disgusting gush of blackened fluids and dark blood flowed out and down the steps, and from the ruined skull a worm as long as a man’s arm crawled, squealing and groping its way across the stone.

Again Kalkus stomped down and pinned the thing in place. It bit ineffectually at his boot, and he scoffed as he sheared off the head with the tip of his sword, leaving the thing to twitch and die. He looked at his men. “Does any man now doubt?” he said, his voice a jagged scar. “The Slaves of the Worm are real. The tower is real.” He pointed his blooded sword at the dark spire. “Within lies the Elder of the Worm, and in his grasp, the Obsidian Stone itself. It is real, and I will claim it, before this city is wiped from the earth like a stain.”

He turned and braced himself, hurled his shoulder against the door and broke it open. The blackness within seemed to reach out, and he laughed in the face of it and entered into that unhallowed and unclean place, his men following behind him into the black.

o0o

They all stood for a moment within, amazed, for the tower itself was hollow. They looked up and saw it was nothing more than a shell, like an imitation of human masonry wrought as a jest – or a disguise. Instead of going up, the steps within the tower went downward. They saw a wide, shallow spiral stair, following the wall into the darkness below. The men held their torches high, and their flesh crept as they trod upon the steps. It did not seem they had been shaped by any human hand.

Kalkus strode downward without more hesitation, and most of his men followed him. Only two turned back, slipped out through the door and fled into the city. Kalkus noted their cowardice and sneered beneath his helm. Let them run. When the sun rose, he would be a tyrant greater than any other. That was his goal and his secret. Tonight he did not serve Akor; tonight he served himself, and no other.

Now at the head of only four men he followed the way down into the earth, scowling at the feral stench that rose up from below. He sought the one called the Elder of the Worm, the high priest of this ancient and abhorrent sect. The Slaves of the Worm had been driven from every civilized land long ago; this was the last place where their evil stained the earth. He would rip their ancient power from them, and make it his own.

They passed down into the earth, and there was only the slight sound of slithering – like sliding leather – and then something fell against his helm, and his men shouted. Kalkus reached up one armored fist and caught the hideous worm that clung to his helm. It writhed in his grip.

Another of his men gagged with loathing as he brushed off a worm of his own, and one man screamed as the blind, mandibled thing thrust into the faceplate of his helmet and began to bore into his flesh. Blood coursed down his breastplate, and the man thrashed and clawed at the thing, but could not stop it.

Kalkus crushed the worm in his fist and hurled it into the pit below, then struck a terrible blow with his sword, shattering the dying man’s face and the thing devouring it with one stroke. The limp body pitched away and plummeted into the deeps beneath them. Kalkus flicked blood and ichor from his blade. “The fewer men live, the greater the glory,” he said. Without another word, he turned and went deeper into the pit.

Now a light could be seen below, and Kalkus moved more carefully. His men were wary, watching the walls for any motion. Worms moved in their torchlight, and they cut them in two, crushed the pieces underfoot. Kalkus scoffed at them. This was child’s play. It was no mystery how the Slaves had been driven out of so many lands. They inspired fear, but they were weak.

Only the Obsidian Stone drove him on. He knew the shape of it from his study of lost ages. It was the great power of the Elder of the Worm, the black source of his magic. A man who touched it became immortal, and he would rise up and conquer a new empire, greater than the paltry kingdoms carved in blood and bone by a dozen petty war-lords. He saw the light below was not fire, for it did not flicker, it only pulsed, like a heartbeat.

He slowed, stepping deliberately, wary. It was warm in this place, and the air was wet and dank. He did not like the smell of it. He gripped his sword hard and stepped out onto the open floor at the root of the tower, the bottom of the pit, and he looked on a throne. Here the floor was stone worn smooth, and at the center stood a chair that looked as if it had melted half away. A figure sat on the throne, withered and hunched, with bony arms and a hairless skull.

All Kalkus cared for was what lay before the throne. On a small pedestal, no more than waist-high, was a black and gleaming orb. It was bigger than he had expected, much bigger, and he would need both hands to lift it, if he could lift it at all. It was big enough he doubted even his arms would span it. His breath quickened, for here, at last, was the Obsidian Stone. It lay smooth and featureless and untouched by dust, as if it had not lain here for untold years.

Kalkus stepped closer, and the figure on the throne moved. The bald head rose up, and he stared into hollow, lifeless eyes. He raised his sword and watched carefully, for here was the thing called the Elder, and he did not know what it was. He expected sorcery, and readied himself to strike.

The thing rose higher, and then lifted off its feet to hang in the air. Then Kalkus saw that there was a pulsating umbilical plunged into the back of the skull, and it rose up like a serpent, suspending the human form like a puppet.

“Who is this that comes to the heart of my power, to my nest?” The dangling, twitching body loomed closer. “You will not have what you seek.”

The walls burst open in a cascade of ancient dust and rotted stone, and then manlike shapes came rushing upon them. The slaves of the worm were dry and dead as mummies, their flesh shrunken away, their eyes blinded, but from each skull bulged the body of a worm that drove the form onward. They came rushing with swords held ready, and they screamed.

Kalkus and his men stood back to back and met them, and there the iron skill of the Brotherhood told in that dark place. Veterans of many battles, they locked their shields and they cut into the mass of the dead with their red-stained swords. Their blades hewed off arms and heads, and they trod the verminous skulls underfoot and crushed the unholy life from them. They spat and snarled into the storm of fury and flickering steel.

They scythed down the enemy and littered the floor with obscene ruins, and Kalkus laughed. He crushed bones under his boots, kicked away the worms that crawled among the wreckage. More and more of the fallen gave forth their worms, and they began to swarm.

Kalkus’ men began to scream, and he turned to see them crawling with worms. More of them came writhing for him, and he leaped back, turned to see the Elder coming closer, a spined tendril bursting from its mouth, reaching for him. His sword flashed, and the limb fell severed. He crushed worms underfoot as he sprang at the Elder, and with one sweep of his blade cut the hanging body in half.

The legs dropped, and then the tendril shook the body loose and whipped back into the darkness, and then he saw the bulk of the worm heave up and strike for him like a cobra, swift and terrible and hideous. The screams of his men as their souls were eaten rang on the walls of the chamber, as Kalkus met his enemy beneath the dark earth.

It was as big around as the body of a horse, scaled and pulsing with unguessable fluids. It struck his shield, and that oak-bound barrier saved his life even as it splintered apart. The blow hurled him to the ground, and then his men were upon him, worm-ridden and bleeding, their eyes mad with horror. They clawed at him, screaming. But Kalkus the Mighty was not to be destroyed so easily.

With a convulsion of his huge body, he hurled them off, and he caught up his sword. One blow sheared through armor and flesh, and then with a blow of his mailed fist he snapped another man’s neck. One of them sprang back on him, worms bursting from his mouth and his eyes, and Kalkus impaled him on the end of his blade, swung him high, and then hurled him against the Elder Worm as it came for him again. The armored body crashed against the flattened, misshapen head, and in that moment Kalkus struck.

No spell, no power could stay that blow. The edge of his sword cut through the membranous, plated flesh and spilled ichor upon the floor. The worm recoiled, and he pursued it, laughing as he did. His blade struck again, and again, until the great creature could only drag itself through the trail of its ruin. He struck at the hideous head again and again, crushing and rending, ripping his blade through, until the thing lay twitching and destroyed, a great stinking wreckage of monstrous flesh.

The lesser worms screeched as they scurried away, and Kalkus laughed again, spitting out the vile blood of the beast. The Cult of the Worm had terrorized men for a thousand years, and he had ended that reign with sharp steel and the power of will. He sneered at the generations of weaklings who had lived in fear of this thing. It was no god; it was only another abomination that could bleed, and die.

He stood alone for a moment, the floor washed in hideous entrails, his followers dead and cut apart, their bodied tunneled out by the things that slew them. Again, as he had on so many battlefields before, Kalkus stood alone, and unconquered. He turned until his gaze fell upon the Obsidian Stone, and he felt his heart quicken within him. At last.

He crossed the splattered floor until he stood close to it. He drove his sword into the floor and left it there while he ran his armored hands over the smooth surface of the stone. It was beautiful and mysterious, power hidden in the black depths. He pulled off his gauntlets so he might feel the stone unhindered, found it warm and thrumming with power. He laughed.

Kalkus gripped it, tried to lift it and found it lighter than he expected. It came free of the pedestal, and he lifted it up, triumphant, teeth bared in a snarl of triumph. Now every man would bow to him, and he would hammer out an empire that would stand a thousand years.

He felt the Orb move before he quite realized it. He looked up at it and saw the black surface shift and unfold. Plates of armor slid and opened, and then from a perfect sphere unfolded a many-jointed horror, a dozen legs splaying out. He saw the black armored head, and the red eyes that burned with a thousand years of will. For ages it had endured, growing from an egg, larger and larger still. Carried from one stronghold to another as enemies sought to destroy it. At last it came here, to this last remnant of a once-great order devoted to seeing it come to maturity. That other thing had not been the Elder Worm - this was. Now it was finished with its long gestation, and grown to maturity.

It fell on Kalkus before he could stop it. He screamed as the great mandibles crushed into his armor and tore it off. The legs like steel hooks rent his flesh. It burrowed inside him, flowed over him, fused its essence with his body as he shrieked in agony. It ripped out his brains and scattered them on the floor, and then it filled the space with its own black mind.

Then what stood in the hollow was not a man any longer. Kalkus was no more, his flesh covered in a black carapace, his face terrible and pale and dead. His eyes gleamed red with the power of the Worm, and it set unfamiliar feet upon the long stair, to begin its great conquest and slaughter of the world above.