She paused. “There was a moment when it could have taken me,” she said. “I was stunned and defenceless. It did not attack me. It sniffed the air as if looking for prey.”
“You are saying my blood protected me again,” said Rik.
“Perhaps it did, but that is not what I am saying.” Rik considered her words for a moment, looking for the implications. Suddenly, they struck him.
“You are saying it was looking for me,” he said.
“Yes, Rik, I am.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Somehow it has your scent.”
Another terrifying thought occurred to him. Was Asea looking at him with suspicion? That could be as fatal to him as the Nerghul.
“How could it have that? I have not been consorting with any sorcerers.”
“I don’t know. A clipping of your hair, a drachm of your blood. Some article intimately associated with you. There are lots of things that could give it your spoor.”
Rik thought about his evening with Tamara. The shock he felt must have been written on his face.
“What, Rik?” Asea said. Now did not seem like a good time to tell her about what had been said during that particular adventure.
“Nothing,” he said. “I am simply not too thrilled by the thought that such a thing could be hunting me.”
“You should not be, Rik. It will never stop until you are dead.”
“What harm can it do me now?” he asked. “We almost killed it tonight.”
“It is a creature of sorcery, Rik. It will heal very quickly and it will learn from its mistakes. Next time, you might not be so lucky.”
“Next time?”
“There will be a next time, Rik, make no mistake about it.”
Rik nodded. “I had better study these plans,” he said. “Being inside the Serpent Tower is starting to look better than being outside it.”
“It’s nothing to joke about, Rik.”
“Who says I am joking?”
Chapter Nineteen
Rik lay on his pallet in the barracks and stared at the ceiling. He was not able to concentrate on the maps he had memorised. He had been restless all night; his sleep constantly interrupted by images of what he had seen when the Nerghul had been cut open. It had been like slicing an apple and seeing worms and rot inside. The thing had looked human but it was not, and it was one of those things that made him wonder. He sometimes had the sense that reality was but a thin skin over the horrible truth of the universe. This night's encounter reinforced that idea.
He had always thought himself human, or at least half-human in every sense that mattered, but if what Asea had told him was true, that was not the case. He, too, was something that looked human but was not. He was a killer descended from a race of killers.
The worst of it was that he did not have any trouble believing it was so. He had always felt different from those around him, had always known he was colder and more calculating. Now it seemed that there might have been a reason for that. He was different. He was intended to be so, to be something monstrous.
He told himself that he was just trying to distract himself from deeper worries. He could so easily have been killed last night. His bruised ribs told him so. Other people had died, and if he had been just a fraction slower, he might have joined them in death. Asea could have died. His friends could have died too.
And the thing that had done the killing was still at large. It would come back looking for him soon. Perhaps it was waiting out there now. No. Asea had told him that by daylight he was safe; such creatures could not bear the light of the sun. After nightfall, though, it would be a different matter.
What sort of person would make a creature like the Nerghul, he wondered? Who could have stood aside and watched such a thing come into being. Who would deliberately set out to create one?
In a way, the answer was obvious; the sorcerers of the Dark Empire. But it was one thing to think such a thing; it was another entirely to encounter such deadly evidence of it at first hand. Nerghuls really existed. They were not figments of a diseased imagination or inhabitants of some cheap chapbook story. They walked this earth.
And somewhere out there was the person who had created the creature, and used it to try and kill Asea and himself and the other people he knew. He had his suspicions that Tamara was involved. He did not like to believe that he was so stupid that he could have been taken in by a pretty face a third time- but why not? Sabena had made an idiot out of him. Rena had made a fool of him. Tamara could easily be the third in a set of three. At least Rena had not conspired to have him killed, as the other two had done.
His head spun when he thought about it. Tamara had told him Asea was a traitor to her people. She had asked him to kill Asea. Asea had said that Tamara was a deadly enemy of the kingdom where he had grown up, and oppressor to all his kind. She had wanted him to kill Tamara.
Somewhere in all their words was perhaps a kernel of truth, or perhaps it was all a lie. The question he had to answer for himself was not who to believe, for he believed they were all lying to him, but what he was going to do about it. He needed to get to a place where he had some control over his life, and that was going to be as difficult as scaling the slippery walls of the Tower of the Serpent.
It appeared that Tamara may have wanted him dead all along. Why? It did not make sense. If she had wanted him dead she could have managed it back in the Snake’s Head. He supposed there would have been witnesses. She might have got caught. He might have been able to stop her. This way there was no risk to her.
As so often with him, anger flared alongside the fear. He felt the urge to seek out the sorcerer and kill him before he could strike again. He told himself that his thoughts were insane, that such a course of action would lead to his own destruction, but he could not help his feelings or prevent the idea from entering his mind that perhaps, in some ways, he was not sane. Perhaps a murderous insanity had been bred into his bones.
What a world it was, he thought. What kind of god would create a place like this? Certainly not the god he had been taught to believe in at the orphanage. That stern, just, loving god would not have made this strange sick place his creation. The thought made him angry. He had been lied to all his life, starting back before he was in any position to realise it. He was being lied to still, by people who had their own good reasons for wanting to keep him from the truth.
Perhaps, after all, the best thing he could do was desert, slip away into the night, and get as far from this place as he could. But then again, the Nerghul would be waiting for him, and that was not something he wanted to face on his own. With the whole company and Lady Asea around him he had only just survived. He would have had no chance on his own. Staying looked like his only option but staying meant doing what Asea wanted and sneaking into the Serpent Tower.
He laughed cynically. Under the circumstances it really might just be the best place for him. At least the Nerghul would not be able to get him there. Such was his horror of the thing, that the thought seemed almost sensible. Almost he would prefer certain death in the Tower to facing the Nerghul again.
There were other things to consider. Stealing into the Tower and doing what Asea asked there might — just might — bring him an enormous reward. It was a gamble against very long odds, but it was one he found himself increasingly willing to take.
What use was his life to anybody, least of all himself? All he had to look forward to as a soldier was a short career that would most likely end with him as a crippled beggar. If he ran and became a thief, the chances were that eventually he would end up the same way at best, and dangling from the end of a rope at worst. There was no one who would miss him for longer than it took to drink the toast at his wake. He was getting self-pitying, he knew, which he hated so he pushed those thoughts aside.
He considered the Tower. It was a challenge to his skill, one that would most likely prove beyond it, but that
