Andrew Offutt - The Tower of Death

“I’ve a smoother way,” h said. “Are ye after bringing the grapnel and line, Knud?”

“Aye.”

The Gael took it, whirled it, and tossed the grapnel neatly through one of the slitted windows above their heads. The rope paid out, running up; the prongs caught and held.

“They designed their embrasures ill,” was his comment. “It ought not to be so simple. Tcha, well. It’s not meant for a fortress this tower was.”

Mac Art swarmed up the rope with a sailor’s agility, mail, sword, and all; their weight was part of him, of long accustoming. A lithe bend and twist took him through the window.

Standing in a reeky dimness, he waited while his sight adapted. Little there was to see; stucco walls, rafters, a door leaning drunkenly from its hinges, and a deal of dust. Crmac frowned. The latter had been laid by a curious, bad-smelling dampness with no taint of age or mildew. Recent for sure , he mused. A rainstorm in the past day or so?

Yet never had rain combined with dust in an old house smelled quite this way… Not even this near the sea. For a moment his teeth were in his lip, whilt he considered.

With a shrug he made his way down the angled flights of stairs and opened the door. Wulfhere Skull-splitter’s armoured bulk filled the space instanter.

“You cannot come in,” the Gael said sardonically. “The place is a mess.”

Wulfhere disputed him. Cormac argued and cursed with the ability of long practice. At length he pursuaded his blood-brother to remain outside, whiles he made search with the three men he had chosen. Not happily, Wulfhere made way for Knud and Hrolf, and Knut.

Ascending, the four found that little that Cormac had not seen previously, save ruined furniture. The stench of brine and kelp pervaded, and was somehow wrong . Cormac saw Knud and Hrolf wrinkle their noses, though he made no comment.

They reached the topmost storey of the great edifice. Here was merely a hollow shaft of whitewashed brick, with a stair spiralling around it internally. They climbed, fighting dizziness.

“Mayhap those Romans sought to reach the sky, and gave up a ladder’s length short,” Knud suggested.

They reached the top. Pulleys and ropes were there, and a heavy capstan, for the raising of supplies; lamp-oil chiefly, Cormac hazarded. The big lamp the Romans had used was fifty years missing though, as were the mirrors employed to magnify its light and reflect it many miles seaward. Now there was a large iron brazier, and faggots of oil-soaked wood.

The tower’s human occupants were present as well.

They numbered four, and all were dead.

“CORMA-A-A-AC!” Wulfhere’s bellow.

Save the mark , Cormac thought. Worse this is than being married.

He trod to the circling balcony and leaned on the balustraded verge. “Damn your bull-roar mouth!” he shouted through cupped hands. “No danger is here, though something befell during the night. It’s four corpses we’re looking at.”

“And them unmarked,” Knud the Swift added; he was examining the bodies. “Save for old scars. These were weapon-men, or I know not the breed, and equipped for action. Now why should such be manning a lighthouse?”

“We be looking at another, down here!” Wulfhere thundered. “Found him tangled in kelp at the water’s edge. Smashed out of shape till his mother couldn’t know him. Hurled from the tower, he must have been. An he’d simply fallen, he’d be nearer the base.”

“Or else he… jumped,” Cormac muttered, half to himself.

Thoughtful, and thorough as always, he made examination of the beacon chamber. Lastly he looked at the corpses. Two gripped bare weapons with the tenacious rigor of death, yet they were unblooded.

Hrut Bear-slayer, huge, looming and rarely with a word to say, showed no comprehension of events. He waited, like an outsized hunting hound ready to track and slay on command. The blow that had left him with a grisly great dent in his forehead-and that by all reasonable chances should have left him stark dead-had rendered him ever silent and presumably thoughtless. His bulk and weapon-skills he had retained, however. Not even Wulfhere was stronger.

“Cormac,” Hrolf Halfgarsson said. “This one clutches something.”

The third corpse did. It was naught uncommon, save that they were a few hundred feet in the air; merely a length of dark brown seaweed. Its round, flexible stem sprouted long leaves like wrinkled streamers. These erupted bulges like air-bladders, or what appeared to be such. Each swelling was the size of a fat acorn.

Or grapes , Cormac mused, for they were tight-skinned as the latter in a vineyard of Gaul.

Interested, the Gael bent to touch the sea-plant.

With a coil and rustle it whipped about his forearm in serpentine constriction. Something round and sucking gripped the pale inner skin like a leech’s mouth. Cormac, with a longtime horror of snakes or aught that resembled them, tore the thing away. He hurled it down and stamped upon it.

Two of the bladders burst like erupting seedpods-

– and spurted streamers of scarlet over the floor.

“Blood,” Hrut said unbelievingly, and it was.

Comprehension of a sort came into that high chamber, and with it entered too the sombre spectre of the unnatural, the preternatural. The pervading odour of kelp, which had assaulted their nostrils all along, seemed to grow stronger. Now, in seconds, that smell had taken on sinister meaning.

The four men living looked at each other in silence. The four dead men stared on.

After a moment, a frowning Cormac thought to examine the beacon itself.

Its fire had been smothered out by what appeared to be a mass of kelp, though it was so completely charred to ash that he could not be certain. Buried beneath the ash was the beacon’s legitimate fuel, choked and smothered by wet seaweed ere it could be consumed naturally. Yet he saw that first it had burned for some time. Now it was absolutely cold. He turned, still frowning in thought.

“This cannot be the fire we beheld on yester-night,” Cormac said. “Else it were warm yet. That other fire burned too bright and it was too late; this was dead by then. Seaweed did this,” and his voice indicated disbelief of his own words, gruesome and horrendous in their full implication. And-impossible.

With a jerk of his head as if to clear it of foreboding, he got on with what had to be said. “Some overwhelming mass of kelp with power of movement… and… hunger for blood? Aye. Be we mad, would ye be saying? Kelp smothered and soaked out the beaconlight. Kelp destroyed four strong men… by sucking… draining them pale and bloodless… and the fifth mindlessly sought escape by hurling himself from this window. And can any tell me how such things can be?”

They had no answers, but after a time Hrolf had another question.

“What was the luring fire we saw then?”

“I cannot say. Yet and well for us that we ignored it, for it’s not from this tower that light glowed!”

The four men of Raven stood suspended betwixt sky, and sea, and with them lurked the glooming preternatural, and all was unreal.

As the four men of Raven stood in that tower of the impossible and the unreal that was real, Knud broke the benumbed silence.

“Horsemen, Cormac! A goodly troop of them, leaving the city and coming down the quayside. Men of arms. They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

Cormac joined Knud at the tower’s rim, looked, and saw that the Dane was correct. Too, he saw that his four were without hope of descending to the ground again ere the troop of horse-soldiers arrived. Be it so; they must meet the strangers openly, then. Cormac considered, he who’d earned a name for guile.