The War Of The Black Tower (Book 3) (2 page)

He could not answer that. His
dreams lately had been too painful, and this might be the most painful yet. He
shot a challenging glare at Gilgaroth.

“Prove it,” he said.

Gilgaroth regarded him levelly.
Smoke drifted between them.

“
How
?”

Looking down to the image of his
sister, he said, “Sing.”

For a long moment, there was
silence. Not a Borchstog in the assembly stirred. Torches crackled, but that
was all. Not even a wolf could be heard yowling, or a shoe scraping. All was as
a tomb.

Then, finally, Gilgaroth inclined
his crowned head. His fiery eyes flickered downwards to the slim pale figure
bound to the stake below.

“Sing,
Rolenya
,”
he bade her.
“
Sing
.”

Baleron’s heart caught in his
throat. Could she do it? Would she do it?

To his astonishment, she nodded.
Then she lifted her head, stared Baleron directly in the eye, took a deep
breath—her chest straining against the ropes—and let out one long, crystal-clear
note.

Baleron reeled backward, gasping.
Could it be?

Her eyes closed, and tears leaked
out, rolling over her high round cheeks and gathering under her jaw. Her voice
rolled on.

Suddenly Baleron could not catch
his breath.

She sang on, the notes changing,
high, then low, then even higher than before. He knew that the words were in
the language of the Elves in a far northern land that she favored in song. They
were foreign to him but all the more beautiful for that; he could not
understand them, but he could feel their grandeur, their greatness. He
remembered tales he’d heard as a child, fairytales of elvish princesses who
could weave spells with their voice, and recalled that Rolenya’s mother was said
to have raised entire forest-gardens with her song.

He couldn’t believe his ears.
Rolenya’s voice was filled with Grace—true Grace. No demon sent by Gilgaroth
could sing like this. It was Rolenya.
It
was Rolenya.
His chest burned.
After all this time . . .

Her clear, smooth voice cut like a
hot, righteous knife through the gloom of the Feasting Hall, lancing the
darkness like a beam. Baleron half—expected the ceiling to crack and the walls
to shake under the barrage of her purity, her goodness. It was with such a
voice that Queen
Vilana
her mother had raised entire forest-gardens
to her liking. She had walked along bare hills, singing, and grass and trees
had grown at her feet.

The Borchstogs sat back,
thunderstruck.

Even the Dark One seemed to sit
back and listen in admiration, spellbound by her voice.

Baleron, himself enchanted, wished
the song to go on forever, but at last it ended, and again Rolenya opened her
eyes—her clear, beautiful eyes. They gazed openly up at him, happily, sadly,
full of feeling and despair.

“Rolenya,” he said softly,
acknowledging her.

“Baleron,” she whispered.

The Dark One’s eyes blazed.
“Quite touching
,” he said.
“Quite . . . moving.”
Then he barked out,
“
Thorg
!”

Instantly, the great wolf to his
left rose and leapt down into the arena. It pawed the ground with an outthrust
claw and snorted. Steam issued forth.

Rolenya screamed.

Chapter
3

Of course
, thought
Baleron as he watched it happen. A sickening feeling grew in his gut.
I should’ve known
.

Throgmar had said it himself:
Gilgaroth’s true talent lay with inflicting pain. He had given Baleron back
Rolenya only now to take her away again—raising the prince’s hopes only so that
he’d have something to dash.

Her wide, panicked blue eyes shot
from her brother to the black beast that shared the arena with her. Its lips
lifted back from long, dripping fangs. Its awful, intelligent eyes narrowed to
cruel slits.

The Borchstogs, for once, did not
cheer for it; they were still too moved by Rolenya’s song to root for her
bloody demise.

Baleron watched on helplessly.

The cuerdrig,
Thorg
,
stalked arrogantly over to the princess, weaving through the mounds of wrecked
bodies and body parts strewn by previous fights. He stuck his black face up
close to her small pale one and sprayed her with his steaming breath. She shook
in fear and wrenched her head away.

Outraged, Baleron screamed, “
Nooo
!” and attempted to rise. A Borchstog cuffed him and he
sank back down, still bound to the chair.

Below, the great black wolf began
circling Rolenya. Tearful, she shook her head, denying the reality of it all.

Gilgaroth issued a sound that may
have been a laugh.

“No!” Baleron shouted again.

“Ah,
but yes,”
said Gilgaroth.
“
I
want you to see her rent to pieces. My pet can go as slow as I wish.”

“Don’t kill her! Put me in her
place.”

The Dark One said simply,
“No.”

“Fine,” Baleron growled. “Then give
me a sword! You want sport? I’ll give you sport!”

“I
do not want sport.”

“What do you want?”

The Dark One leaned forward.
“I want you to do my bidding, and you are
now too aware of your Doom for it to act without your consent.”

Baleron began to sweat. His left
hand throbbed painfully. Sound began to drift in and out of his hearing, and
the world began to tilt.

“I will
not
serve you,” he shouted. “I am not your Savior. I will
never be
your Savior.”

“
Serve me and have purpose. Serve me and save . . . Rolenya.”

“No,” Baleron said, half to
himself
, shaking his head wretchedly. “No. I can’t.”

Lord Gilgaroth raised an armored
hand as if clutching something invisible, as if summoning something, and once
more, Rolenya screamed. At her feet, the ground cracked and huge serpent
unwound from the earth, thick and
spined
and hissing.
It coiled about her bound body, squeezing, caressing, winding slowly, almost
lovingly, about her—then began to constrict.

She tried to cry out but could not
draw breath. It would mash her into boneless jelly.

“NOW
what do you say?”
asked
Gilgaroth.

Baleron glared at him.
Said nothing.

The Shadow raised his other hand
high, as if grasping something far above, and then yanked it down dramatically.
A horde of shadow-wraiths dropped from the smoke-wreathed ceiling. Some had the
forms of demons and beasts. Some were hooded and cloaked. Still more had no
real form at all. But one and all fell like a wrathful cloud from the heights
and swarmed about Rolenya, their mouths opening, if they had mouths, and a
terrible, unholy din pouring out. Covering their ears, Borchstogs screamed in
fear.

“
I COMMAND THE HOSTS OF HELL
,” Gilgaroth roared, and it was no
boast.
“I can summon horrors upon your
beloved that you would weep to see—and I will, lest you submit.”

Haunted by the wraiths’ screams,
Baleron could only see Rolenya here and there through breaks in the swarm of
shadows. He could not tolerate them touching her. They were unholy things,
unclean things, and their mad screams drove him past his limits of endurance.

“Release her!” Baleron shouted.

“ARE YOU MY CREATURE?”

Baleron hung his head.

With a wave of the Dark One’s hand,
the wraiths ended their assault and ascended past the layer of smoke once more
and were lost to sight. The snake, its shining coils about Rolenya, its
colorful scales rasping her smooth skin, uncoiled itself and retreated below
ground once more. At its departure, the hole closed up behind it.

Rolenya could breathe again.

Baleron lowered his gaze, too
ashamed to think straight. How could he do this?

Below, Rolenya called out to him:
“Don’t give in, Baleron. So I die . . . I’ve died before.”

She was right, of course. He
thought of Larenthi, and Havensrike, and all the people he’d led to their
deaths for his Doom. Even for Rolenya’s sake, how could he betray any more? He
would not be the Dark One’s spider. He
would
not
.

Thorg
continued to circle the arena, his circles drawing closer and closer to
Rolenya, until finally he was almost touching her.

Gilgaroth must have seen Baleron’s
indecision, for he said,
“Decide,
Baleron. You don’t have long.
Thorg
looks . . . hungry.”

Thorg
stuck his steaming snout in Rolenya’s face, and his drool dripped on her
breasts. His sharp teeth pressed against her cheek. She trembled and closed her
eyes, turning her head aside. She was preparing herself for the end, Baleron
could
telll
. How could he let this happen? There had
to be something he could do.

The black wolf’s teeth left red
impressions in her skin. She quivered in fear.

Thorg
grazed her arm with one of his fangs, slashing open her tender
flesh,
and she flinched and let out an involuntary gasp.

“Stop it!” Baleron shouted.
“Stop!”

“You
will serve me?”
asked
Gilgaroth.

Baleron said nothing. Rolenya
opened her eyes. When he glanced at her, she shook her head mutely, too scared
of
Thorg
to say anything. The terrible beast pawed
the ground before her.

“You smell delicious,”
Thorg
told her in his black, unnatural voice. The
cuerdrig’s
red tongue probed her wound, licking at the
blood. “You
are
,” he added.

The Dark One said,
“Cut her again.”

Thorg
bit
her, and again. With each surgical slash of his fangs, she cried out, and
Baleron strained against the Borchstogs that held him down.

“
Decide
,”
said
Gilgaroth.

“I’ll never do your bidding again!”
Baleron said. “Torture me how you like, that will not change.”

Silently, Gilgaroth inclined his
head to
Thorg
, who bowed and drew back from Rolenya a
few paces, then turned to face her, his mouth open and steaming. He was one
great, lethal furnace of pride and fury, and he was aimed straight at Baleron’s
once-sister, once-lover, forever beloved. All Baleron had to do to save her was
betray his kind and kin and all they stood for, and doom the world entire.

He said nothing.

Fire licked from
Thorg’s
maw.

“Baleron!”
Rolenya shouted in terror.

“Rolenya!” he called back.

It was the last thing she could
have heard.

The great black wolf opened his
mouth, and a column of fire issued from his awful jaws, burning Rolenya alive.

This time, when Baleron closed his
eyes, no one stabbed him with a fork.

That night, they did not return him to the relative comforts
of
Olfrig
and the hospital wing but cast him down
into a pit again—a different one than before. They did not want him getting
cozy. He sobbed in the darkness as scorpions and other vermin stung and bit
him. He felt that he might as well be in a hell—the First, Second or otherwise
did not much matter to him, save that Rolenya would be in the Second. He ached
for her. She had suffered so much because of him.

Why did Gilgaroth torment them like
this? Was it because the Dark One enjoyed it, or because he wanted to squeeze
just a little bit more out of his favorite pawn? What more could Baleron
do
for him, anyway?

Baleron didn’t think he could take
any more.

Several hours after the events in
the arena, Borchstogs under
Ghrozm’s
command hauled
him up from the bottom of the pit in a rusty cage and led him off to a torture
chamber, where they tied him up again and brought out the whips and blades and
pliers and needles and white-hot pokers. Savagely,
Ghrozm
and his apprentices whittled away at him.

“You should have given Master what
he desired,”
Ghrozm
said, jaw clenched tightly.

Baleron endured it all stoically.
His mind was far, far away. In a way, the torture was almost a relief.

Eventually they dragged him back to
the pit and lowered him down it. He crawled out of the cage, bleeding and
empty, and curled up on the dank stone floor. Worn out, he fell asleep
instantly as things crawled over his inert form and stung him mercilessly, and
the cage ascended, creaking, above. He dreamt of Rauglir again, and the
laughter of the werewolf mocked him as he ran through an endless aviary,
dizzied by the bright colors of the frantic birds. Somewhere his mother called
to him, and he ran on, blinded by the birds.

The voice changed to another’s.
Someone
else
called him now, rocking
him, and summoning him from slumber.

He opened his eyes, and started.

For Rolenya—dear, sweet Rolenya!—was
cradling his bloody head in her lap, stroking his sweaty hair.

“How—?” he gasped. “What—?”

She gazed down at him with such
sadness and love that it broke his heart to see. She had to be a ghost born of
his weakening sanity, he thought. But then he realized it:
none of his ghosts had touched him before
.

“
Rolly
!”
he choked and sat up. The effort made him grimace.

Somewhere high above a torch burned
in the upper chamber, but its illumination was scant indeed. He could see only
the orange glow reflecting off the side of her face, the swell of her
cheekbone, the sweep of her black hair, the shine in her blue eye. He could see
but one eye, as the other side lay in shadow.

“Baleron,” she said, and hugged him
tightly.

He drowned in her warmth, in her
loving embrace. He gripped her and squeezed her to him, and she felt small and
frail in his arms, in need of protection. Her breasts pressed against his
chest, and he tried not to notice.

They rocked in each other’s arms,
crying in relief and despair. At last he pulled himself away. “But I saw you
die! How’s this possible?”

She lowered her eyes. “He forged me
another body,
Bal
, and slipped me—my soul—into it.”
She looked glum about it.

“To what
purpose?”

“I . . . don’t want to know.”

They looked at each other for a
long moment.

He stroked her soft cheek. “When I
saw you die—” He shook his head, unable to finish the thought. Instead, foolishly,
he asked, “Did it hurt?”

Tears ran openly down her cheeks
and dropped off her jaw as she nodded, and scorpions scattered as the tears
splashed the floor, not wanting the liquid to touch them.

“That’s twice now I’ve died,” she
said. “I can tell you, death doesn’t get easier with practice.”

“But why are you here? I don’t
understand.”

“Neither do
I
.
I was just funneled into this body, and they brought me here.”

Suddenly, unexpectedly, he smiled.
It was the first time he’d been alone with his sister in a long, long time. A
thought occurred to him, and he hesitated. Finally, he forced himself to say, “
Rolly
, I . . . do you know that we’re . . . well, I mean
that you’re
an
. . .” He stopped.

The sweet ghost of a smile graced
her face. She reached out and brushed a strand of hair from his cheek. “I know.
In Illistriv . . . someone told me. You and I . . . we’re not what we thought
we were.”

“No.”

“No.” She looked at him steadily.
“But maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

That gave him hope, but he said
nothing about it.

For some time, they didn’t talk
much, just held each other, and to him it felt somehow
right
. He felt they were meant to be together. But, then, didn’t
every lovelorn fool think the same thing? He didn’t want to talk about it. Why
ruin things? Yet, the longer she was near, the more he longed for her and the
harder it was not to look at her and touch her as he’d grown accustomed to in
Havensrike.

Eventually, he asked softly, “The
Second Hell . . . is it terrible?”

She made a face. “That depends on
where he places you. At first he put me in a safe place, a place of gardens and
streams—it was nice, though I was scared, and there was an awful forest near—but
after you refused him he was wroth and threw me into a sea of fire where his
Warders . . . savaged me.” The memory, so near the surface, broke free, and she
sobbed and flung herself against him. He stroked her hair and cooed in her ear.

“It’ll be all right,” he said.
“It’ll be all right.”

He held her all night, and it
seemed strange to him that Gilgaroth would allow him this, this one moment of
happiness. Her heart beat against his chest, and he spoke of happier times.
That seemed to comfort her somewhat.

After awhile, she whispered, “You
always could make me feel better,
Bal
. I’ve missed
you.”