Andrew Offutt - The Tower of Death

Doffing their cloaks, five men piled them in a corner.

Peering out, Cormac saw Wulfhere standing out well offshore and his men still pulling their oars. Zarabdas was just visible, standing where on yesterday Cormac had sat. Though now their gazes met, he and the Gael exchanged no sign. Cormac turned back to his men. They went again through his plan, assuming that there would happen that which he expected.

They waited.

Well out on the water, Raven waited. A stout rope ran taut over either side to trail down into the dark water, bound to the huge stone serving as sea-anchor. They waited.

The sky went pink and lavender and grey. Orange suffused the horizon, and darkened. The sun crouched, was halved by world’s edge, and sank from sight. They waited. A breeze stirred. Looking out and below, Cormac watched the formation of sea-clouds: creeping, shifting fog, white shading to pearly grey. It seemed to finger out from the shore, reaching for Raven . Gradually it enshrouded the base of the tower, though to no great height.

The sun was gone. Cormac and Hugi lit the beacon. And they waited.

“My eyes see only grey,” Cormac said, turning from the beacon-window. His pupils were huge from his staring attempts to see aught amiss out there in the fog. “Hakon?”

Hakon took up the watch, and they waited. “See ye nothing, Hakon?”

“The fog shifts and shifts, unfortunately. Only that. Stars twinkle. The moon comes.” Hakon squeezed his eyes shut and knuckled them. “Ah that I had the eyes of Heimdallr!”

“Gudfred,” Cormac said. “Your watch.”

Gudfred took Hakon’s place and they waited, and he watched, and heartbeats thumped away minute after minute.

“We should have brought a game-board,” Edric said, in his voice that was so oddly high for all his burliness.

Outside, the breeze stiffened. It murmured, now. Far off, thunder sounded in a long rumble.

“Listen to Sleipnir gallop!” Edric said, and at the window Gudfred looked up as if to see Odin’s eight-legged mount. Cormac remembered Wulfhere’s boding ham.

“I am thinking of a thing,” Hugi said, beginning a game, “and it is blue and grey.”

“A gull,” Hakon guessed.

“It comes,” Gudfred said.

His voice quivered, and no man thought he meant a gull. The game was stillborn. Bored men came to life. They scrambled.

Like weird slender serpents rising from the sea, all twitching and dripping, that unnatural seaweed came. They saw it slither across the wet rocks in a way to make strong men shudder. Coming, coming to the attack. It appeared and disappeared amid tenuous wisps of fog that was never still. The door below was secured. They waited, while the unearthly kelp explored.

Then, like the natural process of climbing ivy or runner-beans, save that this climbing was incredibly swift, the seaweed came up the side of the tower. It was coming for them, and they crowded together to watch. It clung and ascended by means of its many sucking orifices, while they stood tight-jawed with prickling napes, and listened to its wet vinaceous rustle.

Up the wall came the vampire seaweed, unfazed by the wind that blew now harder.

“It is here,” Cormac said, backing, and then all of them saw the first greenish-brown tendrils, waving at the windowsill like the antennae of some huge insect.

Hugi jerked open the door. Each man of them caught up a bag of quicklime and descended the steps at a trot. At the lower door Hugi set aside his sack and his Roman spatha slipped from its oiled sheath without a sound. Sword ready, he opened the door.

Like a sentry, a runner of finger-thick seaweed lay there on the great flat-cut stone. It reared as if to glare eyelessly at them, and started within.

Though his nostrils quivered and his hair prickled beneath his helm, Hugi pounced over it, curveting like a high-spirited horse. From behind thus, he hewed three feet of kelp from its main trunk. Only sap oozed. Hugi stood with sword ready to do battle for them while his four companions emerged with their burdens. They hurried around the tower to where the eerily mobile seaweed rose up from the ocean and slithered up the stones. Every man squinted against wind and sea-spray.

They poured quicklime all about the base of the tower and over the trembling plant runners there.

The wet kelp sizzled and twitched trembling, then trembled more violently as the quicklime burned, and burned. Fumes rose to ride the fog, and men backpaced. The plant withered, darkening, while Cormac and his men stood well back. They stared, forced to believe the unbelievable.

The kelp fell back from the tower, rustling, and sought refuge in its own habitat. Constantly burning, it plunged back into the water. The wind whistled. The sea lapped high against the rocks and was churned the more by the sorcerous algae, which lashed violently about like spitted serpents.

With ugly little smiles that stemmed from nothing humorous, Cormac and the four Danes re-entered the tower. Hugi paused to empty his bag of quicklime all over the flat stone that formed an outside threshold. Then he followed his companions inside. They closed the thick door of cross-braced oak, and barred it. Back up and up the steps they went, victors without laughter or cheering, though Hakon did bound as he led the way. Cormac made for the beacon and Hakon was there before him, peering forth into the night.

“Ah, surely this is the night of Loki the treacherous,” Hakon said in a small voice. “Wolf: it comes again.”

Cormac shouldered in while the others pressed close. They stared down, blinking and squinting, for the wind was well up and the sky rumbled so that Thor was surely abroad, exercising the brace of goats that drew his chariot.

The quicklime had been diluted and dissipated in the brine. Perhaps, too, algal reinforcements had been called up. The weed did indeed come again from the foaming sea.

This time Cormac waited until it was but an arm’s length below before he opened a bag of quicklime. Squeezing shut both eyes whiles he held his breath, he dumped the bag out the window. He let it go when it was nigh empty, and swung from the window lest the wet wind blow the volatile stuff into his face. They heard only the banshee wind and the thunder, which was closer. The suffering algae did not scream as any natural foe would have done, assailed by searing quicklime.

When Edric looked, he reported that the weed had again withdrawn.

It came a third time. Again they dumped quicklime down upon it, with Cormac cursing the wind and high sea below that swept their volatile armament off the quay.

When the kelp tried to climb in at them for the fourth time, they used nearly the last of the quicklime.

It was then that they heard the terrible creaking and groaning of wood, and the wailing cry of tortured metal…

“ Hinges! The door below!”

They whipped open the upper door to peer down the steps-just as the lower door, amid a terrible creaking and splintering, brast from its hinges. The demon-plant had crept under it, forced itself up into cracks that hardly existed, and crawled and grown, swelling. Malignant stems and runners had crushed and splintered the door as the roots of trees split stones-though in an uncanny speeding up of the time required for any such zoological feat.

A herbaceous slithering rustle ascended the stairs.

Cormac snatched up the last bag, only partially filled with quicklime, and flung it. The sack struck the stairwell wall and showered its contents over the enemy. It sizzled on the wet creepers and fumes rose in the narrow stairwell. The kelp lashed and churned so that some tendrils struck the stone walls with the sound of whip-cracks.

The men waited in chill dread, squinting, trying not to breathe because of the pungent, caustic fumes. The seaweed was no longer coming…