William King - The Serpent Tower

A sense of terrible expectancy filled the air. Something very bad was about to happen.

Rik felt the presence of another mind. It seemed, quite obscenely, to be slithering into his very consciousness. It was as if a link of energy flowed between the creature’s eyes and his own, and tendrils of thought passed down that link.

He tried to oppose the creature’s will but could not. It was like opposing a glacier with his bare hands. The thing was slow, certain, implacable, irresistible. Ghostly alien fingers riffled through his memories. It came to him then, that the creature had not been dead. It was not sleeping. It was in some state between the two conditions, perhaps like a bear hibernating through winter. Perhaps his presence had awoken it.

He saw again things he thought he had forgotten as a whirl of impressions flickered through his mind, to be assimilated and digested by the creature in the sarcophagus.

He was a small boy in Temple Orphanage confined to his quarters for being disrespectful to his elders. He was a teenage thief running through the streets of Sorrow with an irate stall-keeper in hot pursuit. In his hand, he held a stolen pear. Behind him the roar of the crowd, getting ready to chase down the interloper was in his ears.

He was a young man in the Old Witch’s chambers. They smelled of old woman and urine and strange incenses. There was a painting on the wall of the beautiful young woman she claimed once to have been. Behind it was the hidden cache containing the rest of her grimoires. He heard feet on the stairs, and hurried to replace the volume whose cryptic secrets he had failed to understand and climbed out through the window.

He raced across the roofs of Sorrow, hand in hand with Sabena. Her golden hair drifted in the wind. The red slates felt rough under his bare feet. The golden spire of the great Temple dominated the skyline ahead of them. He leaned against a warm chimneypot as he kissed her. Its warmth was greater even than that of her body on the spring evening. She broke away at last and said; “Antonio would kill us if he knew. Perhaps we should kill him first.”

He stood before the massive bulk of the Quartermaster and accepted the Queen’s crown, the coin feeling small and hard in his fist. He swore the oath and accepted the greatcoat and the boots and the rifle. The cold air of morning turned his breath to mist. Weasel and the Barbarian gave him the thumbs up. Small wizened Leon elbowed him in the ribs. “We’re soldiers now, Rik,” he said.

All around him were the smell of smoke, the screams of the dying and a mass of warm stinking bodies, exchanging blows, stabbing with bayonets, clubbing with rifle butts. Officers shouted orders. Bones cracked. Blood flowed down the narrow cobbled streets. The Clockmaker’s followers fought like fanatics, like men crazed by religious passion in the service of their atheist leader’s cause. A whey-faced man in the robes of a peddler raced at him, brandishing a rusty cutlass. Rik aimed his bayonet at the man’s stomach and thrust, burying it in warm flesh. The man looked at him with shocked, accusing eyes as if not quite believing that he had been stabbed. He flopped forward and Rik felt a strange mixture of exultation and revulsion at his first kill in the warm blood of battle.

He looked down from the ridgeline at the walled city of Legacy, the Clockmaker’s capital. Behind him bugles called to the troops. Overhead a flight of dragons arced down towards the burning city. Moments later they weaved through the towers of smoke, dropping exploding alchemical eggs that added to the blaze.

He stood in the cave at the entrance to Deep Achenar, looking at a dead magician’s books, certain that within them were secrets that could change his life, while nearby lay the corpse of a dead demon. Weasel and the Barbarian stood close, and he felt certain that they would murder him if he did not acquiesce to their plan.

Here for the first time he got some sense of response from the Serpent Man. He felt an odd flicker of emotion that seemed a combination of hunger, lust and interest. Perhaps it was only his mind’s feeble effort to interpret the alien emotion.

His memories reeled on, covering his first encounter with Asea, and the battle with Uran Ultar in the caverns beneath the unholy mountain. Once more he sensed that odd hunger/interest along with fear/anger/horror. He was not exactly sure why but he had a feeling that the inhuman observer was familiar with the Spider God and both feared and hated it.

Once again he tried to resist the probing. He had slightly more of a sense of how it worked now, and he wrestled with the intruder within his mind, trying to hide some of his most shameful memories, to direct its interest elsewhere. He sensed a cold amusement at this, and he realised for the first time that the creature was actually aware of him as a sentient being like itself. An odd symbol began to take shape in his mind, containing within it the idea of greetings and something else he was not sure he understood.

Slowly, images swirled and began to take form in his psyche.

The Nerghul smashed against another wall and tried to regain its balance. The moving walkways seemed determined to carry it away from its prey, although this entire area stank of it. Filled with inhuman determination it pulled itself to its feet once more and moved against the flow. It was only a matter of time before it found what it was looking for.

The symbols in Rik’s mind changed, flickered, became images that he felt he could almost understand although there was something about them that was very alien, then they wavered into incomprehensibility again before coming back into clear, sharp focus.

As if in a waking dream, pictures appeared before his mind’s eye. He was within a scene, seen through eyes set differently from his own, assaulted by a welter of taste-scents that he could not understand at all, and which served only to confuse him. Then, as if the Serpent Man understood his difficulties, the taste-scents were toned down and finally vanished, and a greater emphasis was placed on sight and sound. He began to understand.

He saw the arrival of the Serpent Men on Gaeia. The Towers had not been built by sorcery. They had arrived intact, dropping from the sky surrounded by coruscating haloes of incandescent air, settling down in pre-chosen locations across the continents. Once they made landfall, the doors in their sides opened, and the Serpent Men emerged to stride the soil of their new world. They were from some far place among the stars, refugees fleeing a cosmic struggle in which they had been on the losing side. They set to work building a home for themselves in a new world.

He saw this Tower as it had been in ancient days, standing atop its cliff. There was no sign of Morven, only concentric rings of raised earth walls and enormous barrows in which larger Serpent Men lived. Workers built corrals and herded beasts. A priestly caste of beings, who looked like the ones in this crypt, offered up sacrifices to strange extra-dimensional entities. Roads stretched off to the distance, to other Towers. Great green needles of a similar substance to the Tower, flashed across the horizons, carrying the Serpent Men about their business.

He saw the first encounter of humans with the Serpent Men, and their recruitment as servants and slaves and pupils. He saw his ancestors worship the Serpents as gods. He felt a surge of resentment. The Serpent Men in their own way were as bad as the Terrarchs. They used his people as slaves, as things little better than cattle.

A sense of contradiction, of amusement, of bafflement, of frustration flowed over the link he shared with the Serpent Priest. Rik could almost smell them. His view zoomed in on other scenes, of Serpent Men trying to teach humans, showing them diagrams, how to make implements. It became clear to him that the Serpent Man was trying to say there was more than a master/slave relationship, that the Serpent Men had been trying to help the humans, to teach them.