like that of a god lay at the Tower’s core ready to be unleashed. If he failed to control it now, everyone within the Tower and for leagues around would be destroyed.
Under the deepest compulsions, the Old One had been most insistent on this when it warned him of the consequences of any mistake in the ritual. He gave his fullest concentration to invoking the magical symbols it had taught him. He would not fail. He must not fail.
Eventually, Rik saw that the moving ramp ended inside a cavernous chamber. Along each wall were enormous sarcophagi. In the middle of the chamber was an altar. The dim greenish glow still illuminated everything. He stepped out into what looked like an ancient tomb. He had a sense that what was buried there was not entirely dead.
Slowly, reluctantly, he pressed forward to inspect the nearest sarcophagus. It was long and low and he could see that the lid was made of translucent green crystal. Inside was a skeleton of a creature long dead. It has not been even remotely human. It has a strangely shaped ribcage and a long neck and a skull like that of a giant serpent. A small gem had been set right in the middle of its forehead. Tatters of scaly skin still clung to its bones. Long snakes of cable emerged from the walls of its coffin and led into its flesh. What ritual significance might they have had, he wondered.
He checked another sarcophagus and found something similar. When he looked closely he saw the serpent- like cables led out of the coffin and into the wall. Glancing around he saw that something was different about the sarcophagus across the chamber. Its inhabitant appeared better preserved.
As he moved closer a sense of dread grew within him but he was compelled against his will to approach the thing, and he feared what he would find when he got there.
Looking down into this crystal lidded sarcophagus, he saw a robed figure. It was a Serpent Man, clearly one of a different caste from the ones in the other coffins. It was slimmer and lighter and full fleshed. The preservation was perfect. It could almost still have been alive.
Its scales were finer, and the patterns on them more intricate, as if its skin had been tattooed in intricate dizzying patterns of sorcerous significance. As he looked on them the patterns he had seen flickering in the walls above came to mind. There were echoes of them here, and perhaps links to them.
The Serpent Man’s neck was long and thick and muscular like the body of a constricting snake. Its head was large and reptilian, the jaw outward jutting, the forehead bulging. The eyes were lidless. The creature’s irises were golden and as Rik glanced into them he sensed intelligence there, something cold, swift and dangerous. It came to him that he should not have met the thing’s gaze but it was too late, contact of some sort had been made. He tried to look away and found he could not. He stood transfixed, like a small bird before a large venomous serpent.
“I fear something has gone very wrong,” said Asea. Sardec did not have to ask her for explanations. The rain fell harder smashing against the window panes with all the force of the storm, but it could not obscure the Tower. Glowing light enveloped it now. Sheets of green lightning leapt up from the Serpent’s Fang to light the lower bellies of the bloated clouds.
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
