The War Of The Black Tower (Book 3) (8 page)

“Listen to me, Father,” he said.
“There is no way you can win out against the Dark One.”

“Craven!”

“I’ve seen his resources, and
they’re beyond anything you or the Union can
summon. He’s grown strong in his time sealed off from the world, free to breed
his minions at will. There’s more. He’s brought his own demons over from the
Second Hell. He’s built a huge tower, Father, a doorway to Illistriv. Flee,
Father. Break through this rabble of Ungier’s and take your subjects north—far
north. Take them to
Wethelion
and the Tower of the
Sun. Assemble there with your allies and prepare a defense. If I should die,
remember that.”

“You would have me run away like a
coward!”

“I am your
son
!”

The king sneered. “I have no doubt
of that.
 
Oh, I know it’s you, Baleron.
Only
you
could make such an awful
mess of things.”

Baleron looked about at the
assembly of soldiers and mages, and they glared back. None spoke now. All was silent
as a tomb.

“How do you propose we get out of
this?” Baleron asked in his father’s ear.

“I propose
we
don’t.”

He acted fast. One of his hands
reached up over his shoulder and clawed at Baleron’s eyes so that the prince
reflexively released his hold on his father’s throat; at the same time Albrech
gripped the naked blade with his bare hand and shoved it away. Rubbing his
throat, he stumbled aside, giving the archers an open shot.

They took it.

A score of arrows split the air.
Baleron had time to curse, but that was it.

Yet suddenly all the arrows stopped
in mid-air, paused, and fell to the floor. Stunned, Baleron stared at them.

“Leave him be,” said a strained
voice, and the press parted to reveal Logran, bleeding and dying on the marble
floor, his voice frothy. A faint smile tinged his lips. Apropos of everyone’s
confusion, he said, “You heard the king. That’s Baleron—the real Baleron. A
werewolf would be chewing Albrech’s corpse by now.”

With that, he slumped to the floor
and was still.

The sorcerer that had knelt over
him looked up and said, “Come, brethren. I think there’s still time.”

The mages gathered in a circle
about the Archmage, aimed their staffs at him, focusing their power, and the
circle glowed a bright, morning yellow, tinged with orange.

King Albrech, still rubbing his
throat, turned to Baleron and said in a growl, “Welcome home, son. Guards, take
him away!”

Chapter
5

Rolenya sang, pouring her heart and soul into her song,
driving back the darkness that encircled her.

Dressed in white, a white light
seemed to glow from within her, suffusing her, and she was the only light in
the
neverending
blackness, which was full of a
seething tension. She stood at the edge of the high platform that jutted out
into what Baleron had called the Black
Temple, that vast space
at the core of Krogbur where the Shadow’s presence was the strongest.

Somewhere in the enormity of all
that blackness,
he
was there,
listening, watching. She tried not to think about it, about him, tried solely
to focus on her song. It was difficult. She was alone with Gilgaroth, more at
his mercy now than at any time since she’d been freed from Illistriv.

She sang on. Every night since
Baleron’s
leaving,
Gilgaroth had asked her to sing for
him.

Now below her yawned a black abyss
that seemed endless and might very well be; this temple, this well, could run
all the way through the roots of Krogbur and beyond, into the very bowels of
the earth, or into some strange netherworld, for all she knew. She stood in the
very place where Baleron had lopped off his own hand; his blood likely still
stained the ground, if she could but see it. She hated this place. Its evil
almost suffocated her. The very air vibrated with malignant passions, and made
her feel unclean.

Yet this is where Gilgaroth had
brought her every day for the last week. She would sing, and he would listen,
spellbound, for hours. She found it hard to believe that such a terrible being
could appreciate what meager elements of Light and Grace she could offer in her
voice, and it made her wonder if Gilgaroth might not have some of those same
qualities after all. If so, he was an even more pitiable creature than she’d
imagined.

On this day, after she’d been
singing for over an hour, two flaming slits opened in the dark well of the temple,
above her and before her, suspended over an abyss that made her shiver just to
contemplate.

The eyes of fire widened.

“
Beautiful
,”
breathed
Gilgaroth. His voice sounded like flames licking stone, and she didn’t know if
he were referring to her or her voice.

She refused to look at those
burning eyes, refused to be sucked into his mesmerizing stare. She sang on,
loudly and with all the force she could muster.

“You
are my treasure,”
spoke the Tempter of Man, watching her with what appeared
to be genuine fondness.
“It’s been too
long since I’ve listened to the silver song of a daughter of the Light.”

The eyes dimmed and closed. The
Shadow, subdued by her voice, relaxed . . . and drifted.

She sang on.

Should
I?
she
thought.
Should I do it now?

She paused, fearful, and her heart
trembled.

She almost did it—almost—but her
courage failed her, and she continued to sing, until at last, she thought
again,
Now
! I must do it now!
But still she was
afraid.

It was a mad idea.
A mad, impossible plan.
But what else could she do? She’d
thought about it all this last week, but so far she couldn’t bring herself to
do it. Growing up in Havensrike, she’d often read tales of Elvish princesses
that could stop the heart of a thing of darkness with their song, and such
stories had been among her favorites. Those princesses could weave spells with
their songs. They could entrance a listener and bind the listener to them—they
were spells of love, some of them, but some were spells of power.

Now that she knew she was Elvish,
she’d
began
to wonder if she could do this, if she
could sing such a song. After all, her mother, her true mother, was said to be
able to call entire forest-gardens into being with just her song.

Come!
What do I have to lose?

But
what if he finds me out?
What then?

She steeled herself. Reaching deep
within, she searched out the well of Light she knew to be inside her.

There! Slowly, very slowly, she
began to weave strands of Light from that well into her voice.

Gilgaroth’s eyes remained closed.

She sang on. Could it be done
without schooling? Could it be done on instinct alone, fueled by sheer
desperation?

Give
me courage, beings of the
Light
,
she thought.
Give me strength.

She sang on, faster and
faster
, as loudly as she could, but now she injected
something new into the song. She tried to weave a spell, a web—tried to lay a
foundation for ensnaring the listener. She could feel the tools to do this
with, could feel how it might be done, and it was far more complicated than she
would have thought. How had those fairytale princesses done it? How had her
mother?

Against her will, her thoughts
turned to Baleron, but she forced these thoughts aside. She had to concentrate,
had to dredge up those latent abilities of binding and unbinding.

The Shadow’s eyes sprang open, and
Rolenya almost screamed. She’d been found out!

“A
visitor comes,”
he said.

She relaxed, breathless, then
caught the sound of air being split by something large. She wheeled about, her
song forgotten, as the huge black multi-legged mass of the Mogra rose up from
the shaft, ascending under her own power, drew abreast of the platform, then
leapt on the stage directly behind Rolenya.

Eyes wide, Rolenya stared up at the
horror that was the Goddess of Mists and Sacrifice and stifled a scream.

“Lovely,” said Mogra.
“A golden voice in a lightless gloom.”

“My
songbird,”
said Gilgaroth, his terrible mouth a gash of flickering red in
the darkness. Fires from his throat bathed his sharp teeth in a lurid red glow.

““I hope that singing is
all
she’s done for you, my Lord. Now go
along, little pigeon,” said Mogra, “for Lord Gilgaroth and I shall make our own
sweet music now.”

Caught between these two implacable
forces, Rolenya froze. Should she go around Mogra, or under her, threading her
way through the forest of huge spider legs? The thought petrified her.

Mogra made the decision for her.
The Spider Goddess coiled her many-jointed limbs and leapt straight over
Rolenya’s head and disappeared into the blackness where Gilgaroth waited. The
Dark One and the Shadow-Weaver wrapped each other in an unholy embrace within
a darkness
so deep even Rolenya’s elvish eyes could not
penetrate it.

“
Go
,”
commanded
Gilgaroth. His fires were no longer visible.

There seemed a great movement in
the dark—restless and wild, full of need and desire and ancient wrath. Shadow
swelled and swayed and pulsed. A great power throbbed in the blackness.

“Go!” bade Mogra.

Rolenya turned her face from the
unholy union and descended the endless stairs without another word, glad to be
away. As she went, she emitted her own radiance—
an ability
granted by her heritage and transferred with her soul, not her flesh. This was
fortunate, as there was no other light to be had. Her white light revealed one
stained black stair at a time, her pale bare feet touching down one after the
other.

She wondered why Mogra had come.
Perhaps the Shadow-Weaver had heard rumor of her songs and in jealousy had
decided to visit the Black
Tower? Rolenya doubted
it.

She wondered if her spell-song had
begun to work on Gilgaroth before Mogra’s arrival, and if she should try it
again next time. The thought terrified her.

As she descended the spiraled
stairs that wound along the temple walls,
terrible noises
chased her from behind, roars and screams and howls
and grunts—an unholy
din as though Hell itself had been unleashed, and perhaps it had. She did not
look back.

It seemed he spent half his life imprisoned, Baleron mused
as he languished in the palace dungeon, which had been converted from the
Husran
catacombs. In fact, the room he now occupied was not
a prison cell—not originally—but a crypt. Oddly appropriate, he thought.

It was a comfortable enough cell,
though, dry and warm, very much unlike the pits of Krogbur. He was becoming a
connoisseur of prisons. Sadly, it meant that though he traveled between
different peoples, he existed outside any one country, any one family. He was
utterly an outsider, treated as hostile by all sides.

He would be glad when this was
over. Then perhaps he could find a place where he belonged, even if it was only
a place for his spirit. He didn’t expect to come out of this war alive. He
would die, he knew, and his spirit would spend the rest of eternity dwelling on
his mistakes; he had to minimize those mistakes now, or he’d be one woeful spirit.

But it seemed that any decision he
made was the wrong one. Every choice he faced led to some unendurable
consequence, whether it
be
the fall of the Crescent or
the misuse of the woman he loved.

And what did it matter, really?
Rauglir had made the choice for him. Ironically, Gilgaroth’s backup plan
(Baleron now realized that that’s precisely what Rauglir was) had landed him
here, where Rauglir’s targets were safe from him. Baleron only hoped his father
and Logran stayed far away. He didn’t want to rot in prison, but it was far
better than the alternative.

When his first visitor came, he’d
been stuck in the crypt for two days without food or water, and he was sorely
in need of a drink, his throat parched and his stomach gnawing at itself like a
weasel in its den. His dreams continued to haunt him, and he could feel Rauglir
like a shadow inside him. An iron collar about Baleron’s neck weighed him down,
and chains sprouting from it rooted him to the floor. Iron rings to either side
of the collar bound his hands.

They must think he was some wild,
ravening beast that needed to be forcibly restrained, he thought. The worst
part was they might be right.

His visitor was Logran.

“You’re alive!” Baleron said. He
rose to his feet, the chains clinking around him. He took a step forward, all
the chains would allow him, and two members of the prison guard brandished
their swords at him.

“Don’t try any of your tricks,”
warned the senior officer.

“Please, captain,” Logran said,
“don’t poke any holes in him for the time being. Agent of the Dark One or not,
he
is
the Heir.”

The soldiers lowered their blades
uncertainly.

“The Heir?”
Baleron said. If he was the
Heir, that
could only mean
. . .

“We’ll get to that,” the sorcerer
promised.

“But how?
How are you here?
I felt your spine sever
.”

“Yes,” Logran admitted. “That is
not my fondest memory of you. And it nearly did for me, true enough. But
somehow my brethren managed to put me back together again. Our art has come far
in the last few years, I really must say.
Though I must give
credit where it belongs, to Elethris and his Flower.
They’re what really
saved me.”

Soberly, Baleron said, “It’s good
to see you again.”

“Likewise.”
Logran looked about at the guards. “Why don’t you leave us alone for a moment?
I promise to keep both eyes on him at all times.”

The captain nodded reluctantly.
“We’ll be right outside if you need us.” The soldiers withdrew, the captain
throwing one last scowl at the prince and saying, “You’d better not try
anything or it’s me you’ll have to face.”

Despite himself, Baleron laughed.
After all the horrors he’d been through, this pudgy, squinty-eyed little man
thought he could intimidate him?

Logran had water. As Baleron drank
greedily, he noted that the sorcerer seemed hale and hardy, much improved from
when he’d resided at Grothgar
Castle; Baleron now
supposed that then the sorcerer had been wasting away in grief over Elethris
and Celievsti, but purpose had rejuvenated him.

Logran smiled, and Baleron frowned.
It was good to know he hadn’t killed the old man, but it was annoying to find
the sorcerer in such good humor.

“What did you mean, I’m the Heir?”

Logran’s
good humor fled. “Prince
Jered
was cut down this
morning upon the walls of Clevaris. He was battling a powerful Grudremorqen,
one of Grudremorq’s oldest and most powerful sons.”

Baleron let out a breath. After
he’d found out that he and
Jered
suffered a like
affliction, their Dooms, he’d often wondered what it might be like to consult
with his brother—to compare notes, as it were. Now he’d never get that chance.

“And
Kenbrig
?”

“Also fallen.
Killed shortly after your departure by . . .
that thing.”

“Rauglir.”

“Yes. I had the satisfaction of
destroying him myself, at least.”

Baleron gritted his teeth. Rauglir
mocked his every move. Baleron didn’t know the nature of his left hand, not
exactly, but he had suspicions.

“What ails you?” the Archmage
asked, perhaps seeing his expression.

“Rauglir . . .” Baleron stared at
his scarred left hand and tried to waggle his fingers. Almost to his surprise,
they waggled.

“Rauglir is loose,” he muttered.

“What was that?”

“You should’ve trapped him.”

“What do you mean?”