Slave of the Black Tower

Ashari dwelled in her gilded world of silken curtains and perfumed nights, looking at the stars in the black sky, watching them fall in trails of fire while she breathed dreaming smoke and brooded on her future. She walked the halls surrounded by her coterie of followers and sycophants by daylight, but when the red sun set she was alone, and glad for it. The harem was a beautiful cage, but a cage nonetheless. She had not felt the bars so keenly before, but now they seemed to close in upon her.

She had been the old emperor’s favorite, and had warmed his bed on many nights, using all her powers to please him, and in return her status within the palace was assured. No other girl could compare with her, nor would she ever bear the master a child. She was a perfect plaything, for her race were durable and long-lived, gifted in ways no human could match. She did not fear that age would steal her beauty.

But now the emperor was dead, and she felt a coldness in the air. Kurux was a new element, and thus far she had not been able to charm him as she had hoped to. He had not sent for her, nor for any of the women kept here for his pleasure. She had called to him with her dreams, as she was able to do, but he had not come. At court she wore her finery, all her jewels and silks, and paraded herself with her coppery flesh showing all she had to offer. She polished her horns and her hooves, painted her face, but nothing seemed to attract his eye.

Already some of the other lords of the court had made polite overtures, and she knew it was an accepted thing for past favorites to leave the harem and become concubines of lesser nobles, but she bristled at the prospect. She had enjoyed a place of prominence no other could match, and now it was gone, and she bitterly refused to simply relinquish it.

Only now she had done something unforgivable. Now, in a fit of anger at Kurux, she had freed his war-prize, the barbarian Shath, and she feared he would discover she had done it. She had watched as he sent guards pouring into the catacombs, seeking some sign of the escaped prisoner, and she had to wonder if someone had seen her that night, if someone would whisper her name.

She would not cower. She was a daughter of the Shedim, a race now almost extinguished, but who had once ruled their great southern empire with fire and blood. She had courage and strength no human could guess, and powers they only dreamed of. She would not be afraid.

Instead she left her chambers in the dark and went to seek the emperor’s presence. She gave no announcement, sent no word or request. Wrapped in dark silks, without ornament or anything that sparkled or shone, she slipped away from the harem and wended her way through the hallways of the palace. She knew the paths from years of wandering, and any guards who might see her she passed unnoticed, clouding their minds with the strength of her own. Her golden eyes saw clear in the dark, and her hooves could step silently when she wished.

The emperor’s chambers were guarded by fifty men and a ring of fire that sprang up blue and furious across every passageway that led within, but fire held no terror for Ashari. She was bent on seduction, on pressing her will upon the young emperor and ensnaring him with her powers. When she crossed the flames her dark silks caught fire and burned away, leaving her naked and glorious as she went to the door of his inner chambers. The guards saw only what she wished them to see when she walked between them, and so she entered the small, secret door she had always used when the old emperor summoned her to his pleasure.

She found it cold and dark within, contrasted to the old warmth and light she remembered. Slowly, with silent steps, she crept into the rooms she remembered and found them all but empty, stripped of the rich furnishings and the lush wall tapestries. The rooms were naked and chilled, and she wrapped her arms around herself, though the cold would not really harm her. There was more than a simple chill in the air; she felt a coldness deeper than that seeping from all around her.

Now she moved carefully, realizing something was at work here that she did not understand. She had thought to find the proud young emperor alone, unsure of himself, ready to be enmeshed in her practiced arts of seduction and prey to her powers. Now she did not sense him at all, found there was not so much as a single lantern lit, or even a bed to lie upon.

She did not see him, but she scented his low, metallic smell. Cautiously, she crossed the bare rooms, following the odor, seeking him. There had been rumors of his ascetic private life, of the strange chants the guards heard and the terrible powers he was said to possess through the practice of his alien religion. She had not really given them much weight, for palace gossip is as common as mold, and just as ephemeral. Ashari trusted what she could see.

The thin thread of scent led her to the base of the tower, and there she stood a moment and looked upward, listening, hearing only the dim sounds of wind outside. This single spire rose up above all the rest of the palace, and it was said that from the very top one could see all the way to the dead sea itself. She hesitated for a long moment, and then curiosity burned too sharply and she set her hooves upon the steps and began to climb. Up and up, turn upon turn, toward the darkened summit.

o0o

The tower seemed higher within than it looked from below, and Ashari found herself growing more uneasy the higher she climbed. The air was cold, and her breath turned to mist in front of her face. She still caught the emperor’s scent ahead of her, so she knew he was here, but she felt no other hint of another living thing, and she felt as though she walked alone in an empty place far larger than a mere palace.

There were faces carved into the walls, showing the past emperors worked in stone, a representation of the imperial lineage reaching back into the dimly remembered times after the fall of the Ancients. They were not images of kindly men or women, but hard, implacable faces set in grim lines, scowling upon her with downturned mouths and unfeeling eyes. Here and there she saw the marks of degeneracy or mutation in the slitted noses or missing eyes. Even the lines of kings were not immune to the poisons of the world.

She heard a sound, then, a slow sound like moving water, and she hesitated. It came to her that she was alone and naked in a place she had not been summoned to, and if she were found here, the consequences might be greater than she could manipulate her way out of, even with her gifts. She put a hand on the wall and felt the stone, looked up and saw she had come to the last of the line, and the face of the dead emperor looked down on her.

He had been her lover, or she his, and yet she hardly recognized his features. He looked harder and more grim than the man she remembered, and she reached up to touch his stone face. She had not loved him, or even close, but he had not been unkind to her. She had known him as a man, not as a figure craved from stone.

She had heard every story, every rumor, that Kurux had plotted his death, had accomplished his assassination so that it seemed a mere illness. She wondered, now, if there were any truth to it. She was surprised that the possibility made her angry.

A voice now came down from above, from the final chamber at the pinnacle of the tower, and she looked up the stair and the line of her mouth grew firm. The new emperor was doing something secret here in this place. She determined to at least see what it was. Slowly, on her careful hooves, she ascended the final turn of the stair.

The room at the peak of the tower was vast, with the high, domed roof overhead and a wide, smooth floor. At the center of the floor was a round pool, and reflections from it shimmered blue on the walls and the high ceiling. A light rose from the water, and so the form of Kurux where he knelt before it was cast long upon the floor, stretched and misshapen.

His voice rose and fell, rose and fell in a low, breathy chant, forming words that were either nonsense or in a language Ashari did not understand. He lifted his hands and gestured in a steady, ritualistic way, as though beckoning something, and she felt a chill inside that had little to do with the air. She took a step back and into shadow, ready to retreat down the steps, and then the pool began to move.

The liquid within it began to heave and ripple. What she had thought was water instead seemed to be some kind of silvery fluid, thicker than blood, that roiled and then began to rise. Kurux drew his hands up in a gesture of invocation, and then the liquid began to pour upward in defiance of gravity, forming streams and rivulets that flowed up and gathered and pooled in the cold air.

Some deep tone sounded through the tower, vibrating through the stone, and Ashari snatched her hand away from the wall as she felt it shudder. The silver liquid began to form a shape, as though it were dripping over something unseen, and it moved as though it were alive. She shrank back into the shadows, masking her mind as best she could when she felt a terrible presence flow outward into the chamber.

It did not form a shape that made sense to her eyes, but it seemed alive nonetheless, and there was a sense of something there – a mind, a will. Something that looked on the world and hated, even as it endured.

I answer your weak and puling call. I bend to your small will, fragile though it may be. Give adulation unto my form, and speak.

It was not a voice. Not one heard with ears or felt on the skin, but a sound that seemed beneath all other sounds, like the voice of the earth or the sea. It was huge and encompassing and she had to grit her teeth to keep from crying aloud at the horror of it. She drew back, but could not quite bring herself to flee, for all she knew she should. She had come this far to see what Kurux did when he was alone in this place. Now she would see.

“Your form is a thing of beauty unsurpassed,” Kurux said, his voice shaking and weak, as though he were exhausted. “Your will is power and it commands me. I supplicate. I plead.”

Speak then. Ask.

“The barbarian lord, Shath, has escaped me,” Kurux said, breathing heavily. “I must know how it was accomplished, and where he has gone.”

You must choose. I will not grant both. The voice seemed to grow stronger, and its presence shook the very stones of the tower. Ashari saw motes of dust rising from the floor, floating in the air as though weightless. The vibration seemed to ring in her skull, to distort everything around her.

“Tell me how,” Kurux said weakly, shaking all over from some unseen strain. “I must know who betrayed me.”

It was the one of the lost race. The old emperor’s concubine, who undid your triumph. The voice seemed to gloat. The creature that walks in a half-human shape. The shedim. Ashari.

She saw the half-formed shape twist and change in the cold air, and then she saw what might have been an eye open and look into her, and she felt the weight of an inhuman presence fall upon her mind, and for the first time in her long life, Ashari was afraid. She turned quick on her flashing hoof and fled down the long, dark stair, knowing she could not stop until she was far from this unhallowed place.

o0o

The harem was no shelter for her now; she had to leave the city, and she quailed at that thought. She had not dwelled beyond the gilded edges of that place for many years, and part of her wished for death rather than to give up her life of pleasures and ease. Then she imagined that perhaps death would not come swiftly, and that she might instead be given to whatever thing served the emperor as his dark councilor. Surely such a thing needed to be fed. That thought alone was enough to drive her onward.

She leaped down the stairs to the emperor’s cold, empty chambers, and then she burst from the secret door and into the place where the guards awaited. She forgot, in her fear, to wield the powers of her mind to be unseen, and so suddenly she heard shouts as men saw her emerge, naked and wild-eyed. They came after her but she did not slow. She ran, her long legs carrying her more swiftly than they could pursue.

Two closed from the sides and she did not see them until they were almost upon her. She danced aside and the first one clasped only empty air. The other one caught her by the arm and hooked her around the neck. She felt his weight drag at her, and the racing feet of the rest of them, and she was almost dragged down.

But Ashari was stronger than any of them could have guessed, and she possessed all the prowess of her race, though she had never had much need of it. She lifted the larger man off his feet and carried him with her, and even as he tried to choke off her breath she flung the two of them into the ring of fire that burned fierce under the falling stars. The flames wreathed them, and while her flesh might be immune to the scalding heat, his was not.

In a moment his armor turned red-hot and he screamed as his skin seared away within it. Convulsions broke his strength and she flung him away, burst free of the fire and ran on. The long corridors of the palace closed in on her, and she tried to remember the ways she might escape. In moments they would open the ring and then all the emperor’s guards would be at her heels, more of them when he emerged and called for her head. Soon the walls and passageways of the palace would seethe with men hunting her blood, and the Skylords would fly overhead, their blood-hungry eagles seeking with deadly, keen eyes.

She could not go north or west to the sea, nor would she go east into the ruins. Southward lay the Thran Kingdoms, and beyond that, the Slannu jungles. There she might be able to lose herself and escape, if she could survive in that hellish place. Somewhere in those trackless lands lay the remnants of her race, and if she was fortunate, she might find shelter there.

Ashari left the wide corridors of the palace and slipped into the shadowy passages used by the slaves and servants. She must be swift, or she would never see another dawn.

o0o

The horizon was glowing with the oncoming forge of dawn when she emerged from the palace and began to make her way through the slumped ruins of the old city. Here on the south side of the imperial bastion, the towers had long since fallen into wreckage, the streets filled with heaped rubble and yellowing bones. When the tides rose the ancient streets filled with dark waters and slithering predators, and the stones were stained by ages of flood.

Ashari wore a stolen robe wrapped around her body, a hood drawn up over her head to conceal her horns. Beneath it she had little else save a belt and a pair of knives she had taken. She had no food and carried only a small bottle of cleansed water, soon to be more precious than anything else she could have taken. Out in the hard world, clean water was rarer than jewels.

She picked her way cautiously, the ground still wet from the night tides, the smell heavy and feral. She watched for stranded sea-hunters trapped on land, starving and murderous. Here and there sting-tailed claws scuttled among the fallen stone, and she avoided them. If one of them tasted blood, dozens of them would swarm, and she would be stripped of her flesh before she could finish screaming.

She knew the guards would not be eager to hunt for her here. They would range over the walls and through the streets, kicking down doors and making threats, but they would have little stomach for venturing into this accursed place where poisoned water and hungry beasts awaited the unwary. Ashari knew if she could just get clear of the ruins, then she could slip into the broken lands to the south where she could hide, even from the eyes that watched from above.

Looking up, she saw a shadow pass over the stars, and she hugged close to a wall so she would not be seen. There were never very many Skylords, and so her chances of escaping were good, so long as she kept watch and was not seen. Her eyes were sharper than human eyes, and she could spot the hunters from a distance. Black silhouettes against the fading shroud of night.

She followed a sunken avenue, still ankle-deep with the salt-tide and green with waving weeds. Ahead of her lay the fallen gate that led outward into the winding maze of the forest beyond. She ducked under hanging moss and draped vines, and then shadows leaped at her from where they had lain concealed. She saw faces and the flicker of steel, and then she drew a knife and moved.

Ashari was swifter than any ordinary human, and she disemboweled the first man before he could bring his hooked sword to bear. She sprang back from the sudden gush of red and the other three closed on her. She saw the twisted features of their faces and their long arms, skin scaled and blistered. Mutants of an iron age, they lurked on the edges of civilization, hunting for whatever prey fell into their reach.

Their knives and saw-spiked clubs came for her, and she drew the second dagger from beneath her robe. She ducked beneath the swing of a club and came up, ramming the knifeblade in deep and ripping upward until it grated on bone and snapped in two. She leaped back and threw the broken hilt at the last two, and then they closed on her in a flicker of dagger blades and deadly intent.

Their slashes ripped her robe, and she struck back deadly as any serpent. One man fell with his throat cut, and then she grappled with the last one. He was strong, and he dragged her down until they rolled on the moss-covered stone, twisting and straining, each of them seeking to pull their weapon free and strike a killing blow.

She saw motion in the corner of her eye and a quick glance showed it was a sting-tail, crawling across the stone toward the smell of blood. With a heave she rolled over so her opponent crushed down on top of the thing, and he cried out as it latched those pincers deep in his flesh and began to sting murderously. His grip weakened and she tore free and leaped away from him. Even as she moved a wave of feasting vermin erupted from cracks in the stone and rushed over him in a wave, squeaking and stinging as he flailed in agony.

They came for her as well, and Ashari had to be quick to evade them. She snatched up the curved sword from where it lay in the shallow water, and then she ran, leaping from stone to stone on her sure hooves, leaving the sounds and scents of death behind.

She ducked beneath the dripping moss that hung from the ancient archway, and then she was in the open. A shadow blotted out the rising sun, and she heard the bellow of mighty wings. In despair she turned at bay, ready to flee or fight, and there she saw one of the great red eagles come to rest on the ancient gateway, black talons gouging the stone.

The rider looked down at her, his thunderlance in his right hand, and she saw the device upon his armor and knew it was Tathar, even though she could not see his face beneath the masking visor of his helm. The eagle snarled and snapped at the air, glaring down at her with golden eyes that boiled with barely-controlled fury. Tathar gripped the reins and looked down at her, flickers of lightning crawling along his dread weapon.

She knew in a moment he would lift his lance and send a bolt of fire arching into the sky, and that would be the signal to call down the hunters upon her. They would follow her on foot and in the sky until she was exhausted, and then it would be the end.

Slowly, he lifted his hand in what might have been a salute, and then he took the reins again and set his spurs to his steed, and the great creature rose shrieking into the air, the strokes of its vast wings scattering leaves and lesser birds like ashes before it. It circled over her once, and then she watched as it rose higher and flew away to the north. She watched him go, not knowing why he had spared her, but she would not waste the chance given to her.

She cleaned her bloodied dagger as best she could and sheathed it, and then with stolen sword in hand she made her way into the shadows of the dark-haunted forest that stretched away into a great, tangled marshland beyond. She had a chance, only that, but she swore to herself that if she lived, she would find her way to freedom.