The Black Tower (21 page)

They were everywhere, a tide of darkness.  Fon’s claws dripped black blood as she slashed into the horde, and her fanged mouth released a ferocious battle-cry.  Argus’s chest froze as he sent a bolt of blue fire tearing through a dozen of the monsters, casting them back and incinerating them down to the bones. 

There were more.  Argus stared into a sea of claws and many-armed horrors.

Brutus cleaved through black bodies and spattered greasy blood onto the walls.  They jumped on him and raked him with their claws, and his wounds smoked and burned black smoke.  The echo of hollow and animal-like growls grated through the chamber.

Argus kept them back with blue flames and black lightning, bursts of caustic energies which scraped his soul raw.  Each creature felled collapsed into dust. 

His senses overloaded.  Adrenaline raced through his veins.  He felt like he swam through dark tides as the ravenous monsters leaped over one another, a swarm of teeth and darkness.

Razel sliced through the beasts with a Veilcrafted sabre of razor ice and exploding azure light.  Her eyes shone cobalt and her body was aflame, a silhouette of arctic fire. 

Slayne hacked through the monsters one at a time, too fast to be pinned down.  Dark blood soaked him through, and as he rolled or ducked away from each crumbling demonic corpse another came at him.  Jab, step, duck, a machine of flesh and blades, a shadow of dark-cloaked murder.

Argus lost track of Malei and Fon in the tide of monstrous bodies.  Noise exploded around him, roars and blades, panicked cries.  His torso burned with exhaustion.  Fear blazed in his stomach like an exploding star.

He backed away.  Flames sprayed from his fingers and burned into the demons.  He stumbled, fell to his knees, shouted out in rage as he blasted through a wall of ebon flesh.  Blood burned and skin sizzled.  He found himself in one of the halls, blocked off from the others by the waves of demonic skin.  He waited for something to come at him from behind, another horror from deeper down the hall. 

He couldn’t maintain the effort.  The strength was draining from his body.  Argus was deep in the hall, sealed of by a horde of gangly killers, lupine-reptile shadows that swarmed over one another in their desperate attempts to reach him.  He fanned the mass of creatures with green flames, and they shrieked and fell back as they burned.  Argus seized the moment, turned and ran.

Azander...

He floated in a sea of red pain.  Her voice was soothing.  Tendrils of light reached for him from out of the dark. 

Kill.

My Love.

He woke.  She lay with him in the bed, their glistening and naked bodies still entwined.  The dark sheets were slick with sweat, the white walls stained with blood.  She was asleep, her blonde hair pasted to the side of her face.  He ran his hand down her scarred back. 

He felt her voice, even as she slept, a presence which loomed in the back of his mind. 

Dane sat up.  His head was thick with dizziness, and he felt as if he hadn’t slept for days.  The room was filled with the pungent odor of bodies and sex. 

Azander.

Kill.

The voice was hard to make out, like it came from the end of some far removed and echoing corridor.  For a moment it seemed as if there were two voices, but they both belonged to her – his love, his master. 

The voice pulled at him.  He didn’t realize he’d stood until his feet pressed against the cold white stone, the only chamber in all of Chul Gaerog that wasn’t carved from jagged black rock.  The walls and ceiling were curved, and if not for the bloodstains – much of that blood was his – it would have been difficult to even discern the dimensions of the room. 

He turned and watched her sleep.

Do it.

Azander.  Help me.

His fists balled, and he clenched his fingers so tight the nails drove into his skin.  He shook with violence.  Blood dripped from his hands and fell to the floor.  He felt the urge – the
need
– to lash out at something, to kill. 

Someone was there to hurt Ijanna.  Intruders.

Dane blinked.  He lost time.  Something had shifted, the light, the room.  He was still there, but things had changed.  No longer naked, he wore the black-and-gold Dawn Knight’s armor.  The golden helmet sat on his head, and sweat gathered on his brow.  Dane sensed the comforting and familiar weight of a
vra’taar
slung across his back.  For a moment he was young again, back on the fields outside of Ral Tanneth, riding off to do the Empress’ will.

Back before I knew about the lies.  Before my soul had died.

He hesitated, unsure what to do.  It felt as if two different beings battled over him, and he wasn’t one of them.

His eyes fell back to Ijanna, and his heart burned with passion.  He wanted to go to her, to love her.  She hadn’t stirred, just laid there, content that her champion would keep her safe. 

Dane drew a deep breath and felt the Veil burn cold around his body.  Muscles tensed and teeth clenched, he turned and left the chamber, intent on finding those who’d harm his love so he could destroy them.

The wolves.

They bay louder than before, and their voices are as sharp and cold as a night wind.  He hears them, feels them.  They’re close.

The chorus of slavering voices echoes through the darkness of the Black Tower.  He feels hunger build in his loins and fingers, tensed and sharp.  His breaths quicken, his eyes focus.  The rage that has swelled inside him for days is finally ready to be released.  Chills run down his spine and he revels in the sweet touch, in the rush of adrenaline as it spikes through his body. 

He needs blood.  And he needs it now.

Jar’rod floated across the familiar blue desert landscape, a cold and ice-colored realm of darkness and smoke.  For as many times as he’d been there some aspect of the dreamscape always caught him off guard and reminded him of just how unfathomably vast that world truly was.

Yet for all of the times he’d been there, never before had it seemed so utterly alien and unfamiliar.  The black sky was deep and menacing, almost like the shadow of a creature loomed over him, and the wind took on a particularly dreary chill. 

The dry landscape rolled by below.  He passed frozen pools and deep clefts in the earth, jagged rips which led to gulleys of shadow.  Distant trees exploded and shrank, rocks split and fell away into dust.  The land rebuilt itself, folded in and collapsed, alien topography reinvented at the whims of the minds connected to it.  Black clouds choked the atmosphere with walls of charcoal fog.  Thick fumes billowed into the sky, and in the distance lightning storms crackled in silence, bright flashes of ice white and silver that gave the desert a skeletal pallor. 

Even at its worse he’d always found the dreamscape a mystical place, full of unbidden opportunity and possibility.  Even in his youth, when the notion of stepping into a realm so unbound by rules was intimidating, Jar’rod had always felt at peace there, and when using
dae’vone
he possessed a sense of control and confidence he never felt anywhere else.  He’d always possessed the talent to enter the dreamscape even though he lacked the magical abilities possessed by even novice Veilwardens, and no one, not even he, could explain why.  Unlike others who practiced
dae’vone
, Jar’rod didn’t need to Touch the Veil to open the borders between his mind and the hunting grounds of the subconscious – he could reach it naturally.  He’d always held the ability, and his sudden fear of that altered world filled him with despair. 

It was hard to say why, but something about the dreamscape was
tainted
, somehow...altered and unwholesome, like the very substance of the false atmosphere and the billowing storms of dust and electricity were filled with sickness, a deep-seated rot that slowly tore the dream reality apart.

Jar’rod would never deny the sense of power it gave him to hold such mastery over that realm, to be able to bend and warp it to his own purpose when few others even realized it existed, in spite of the fact that the amorphous landscape only took form because of human beings, whose subconscious minds pooled and crafted the strange reality without their even realizing it.  The dreamscape molded according to the mind of the visitor – their subconscious desires, their crimes and passions – but to shape it willingly, to sculpt it, took a force of will few possessed.  The dreamscape was many realities made one, conjoined and fractured worlds tied together, different countries on the dreaming continent. 

Jar’rod sculpted his personal realm within the dreamscape to match his idealized visions of his home: a cool desert, peaceful, with smooth dunes dotting an otherwise open landscape.  It reminded him of his childhood spent on pilgrimages from Den’nar to Tarek Non, where his priest father attended heated discussions on the affairs of the religious states of the Empires.  His youth had been spent on the desert streets outside that city, the same region he visited still. 

He always found himself drawn from his own dreamscape to the demi-realities crafted by others, pockets of temporary reality which ebbed like the ocean tides.  Those chaotic bursts of dream energy were a power all their own, and over the course of his life Jar’rod had learned to manipulate them. 

He’d spent so much of his life learning to alter and control dreams he could no longer enter such a state without using
dae’vone,
but he’d honed his craft to such a fine edge he could crack the hardiest of minds and mold the subconscious of even the most powerful creatures.  He studied the effects his talents had on others, changed the dreamscape to see how the dreamers would react, not out of cruelty or spite but out of genuine curiosity.  He was the master of this world, even if no one knew it – no one, not even the Dream Witch, had such complete control over the dreamscape as he did.  He knew the bounds of that realm better than he’d known his own father.

Oh, the secrets he’d learned.  The dreams of mortals extended to nearly every corner of the world.  He’d uncovered hidden thoughts locked away, forbidden places conscious minds had forgotten.  He saw the aether lines connecting lives that otherwise seemed entirely unrelated, studied webs of causality, the links between individuals which transcended physical boundaries.  There were few places on Malzaria the dreamscape didn’t reach, which was why Jar’rod was so shaken now: in all his years he’d never seen the realm so desolate and cold.  So dead.  He was in uncharted territory, a graveyard of broken thoughts, a place where the lines didn’t reach.  He’d found a dark island in the sea of dreams, and it terrified him.

The deeper Jar’rod ventured into the realm the more broken and torn it became.  Large patches of dark fluid slithered and expanded across the desert, and what at first he’d taken for pools of oil were actually festering rivers of rot.  Trees twisted and blackened like they’d been put to an invisible flame, and the sky split like a seam, allowing darkness to seep down in turgid black drops.

The dreamscape is reacting to
me
. 
Not since he’d been a child had Jar’rod felt like an intruder in the realm.  The air soiled around his body, and every breath he drew felt poisoned.  He sensed violence in the atmosphere, a coiled tension like a snake ready to strike. 

Jar’rod kept moving.  Somewhere in that demi-realm he’d find Ijanna Taivorkan, and that was the only chance any of them had of getting out of Chul Gaerog alive. 

Argus acts like he’s ready to martyr himself.  I’m not.

The earth grew brittle.  The cool blue sand gradually changed to crusted stone broken and pulled apart by tentacle-like vines.  The seam in the sky continued to widen, an inverted canyon hanging far overhead.  The mountains in the distance became less distinct, and heavy clouds of dark steam oozed from the wounded earth. 

Warily, Jar’rod altered his form, allowed himself to spread as a free-roaming vapor which blanketed the ground.  His consciousness spread through the shifting dark realm.  Tendrils of his soul dripped and seeped into the cracks.  He moved through the clefts in that black reality so he could detect subtle fluctuations and flaws, breaks in the false atmosphere which could only be created by sleeping minds. 

He found nothing.  This dream was stagnant, a lingering illusion cast long ago and left to crumble.  Jar’rod was all alone in Chul Gaerog’s private dreamscape, and for the first time in his life the utter vastness of his surroundings threatened to swallow him whole. 

Wait.

He sensed something at last, just the barest inkling of a presence, and then he sensed another.  They were buried deep beneath layers of dream reality that had been piled on top of one another like armor plates.  He had to pull his scattered consciousness together so he could bore through the defensive layers, and as he solidified and focused he realized one of those presences was an intruder, just like himself.  It was that intruder who’d devastated the atmosphere and ruptured the dream, staining the air like rancid ink with its very presence.

Jar’rod pressed deeper, spread the tangents of his soul to try and learn more about this bizarre presence.  He wanted to know if the intruder was Ijanna Taivorkan, as lost and moribund as he himself was.  Plumes of black smoke and oil-dark fog took on the semblance of walls, shifting iron vapors flattened to resemble the Black Tower, with its bladed parapets and clawed bridges, its sunken chambers and spire-bound walkways. 

Focus
, he told himself. 
Find the truth.

He pressed on, willed himself past bitter waves of smog, twisted down forming passageways and pressed through the shadows.  Darkness weighed down on him like a black tide.  He felt the presences, not as distinct now, separate but conjoined, as if bound together.

Not bound.  The same.

He’d detected two aspects of the same creature, and he doubted even the dreamer knew it.  One slept, the other would not...or could not.  The first could not awaken, the other didn’t sleep, and never would.  It was a conglomerate mind, a unified yet splintered telepathic monument, and it was what gave Chul Gaerog’s dreamscape its uniquely chaotic and dangerous form. 

He’d never heard of a being so powerful, except perhaps the Blood Queen herself.  Dream form or no, Jar’rod felt his body chill with fear.

He couldn’t go back, not now – even with as far as he’d come he still had little notion of where in the physical world she was, or where he was himself, but if he followed the dream presence back to the physical source he could emerge from the dream with a mental lock on her location.  He honed in on the dreamer.

Jar’rod entered dark clouds of brittle glass and collapsing towers of ebon smoke.  The ground cracked under his feet like burnished crystal.  The scent of cold iron was strong, undercut by a heady scent, animal musk and droppings.  He tasted blood in the air, as if the fortress wept.  He felt pressure all around him, the touch of a cold and icy wind, and he knew that at any moment something would lash out at him. 

He had had never felt so powerless.  This place grew more tangible and real by the moment, and if he lingered too long he’d forget he was dreaming.

Jar’rod crept down corridors of solid fog.  His skin was freezing.  He wanted to dream up a weapon for himself, but it was pointless – his most potent armament in this place was his own mastery of the dreamscape.  If that failed him, nothing else would matter.

The presence appeared again, a whisper of a voice, softly calling from the dark. 

It was Ijanna.  Even though he sensed she wasn’t in control of her own actions, the formidable Veil energies inside of her were trying to shield her and keep her safe.  Once he latched onto the signature Jar’rod could leave the smoking fortress and follow her: she was a shining star in the darkness, a gelid glare in the otherwise impenetrable pitch black landscape.

The air stiffened.  Claws of shadow curled in and nearly crushed him.  Pulsing waves of dark matter retreated as he hammered them with diamond light.  His body lifted on the phantom breeze, and he moved out of reach.  It took every shred of his power to maintain his form, his sense of self.  He was just another vapor in the shadows – it wouldn’t take much for him to be swept away, shredded from his identity. 

You
, she said.  They’d met before in a dream, when Ijanna had spied on Kala, and Jar’rod had nearly captured them both, but Ijanna’s ability to wrest herself from his control had ruined his opportunity. 
What do you want?

To stop you
, he replied.  Already he’d traced the lines of aether racing back through the dream reality to her sleeping self.  He found her physical form and knew that when he dropped from the subconscious reality he’d have her in his sights, and wouldn’t lose her again. 

You can’t
, she said. 
Only
he
can stop me.

He?  Who?

Something stirred: that other presence, a black and soiled apparition that wore her skin and soul.

I can’t
, she said, but her voice grew more distant and dream like.  She was losing what little control she had. 
This is what I am.

The walls of smoke vanished, carried away by a dank wind filled with disease.  The desert was all but gone, nothing but a black void under a blacker sky, no end to either, a terrible cold hollow.  Jar’rod tried to retreat, but felt himself slipping away.  Bits of his self flaked off in the black breeze. 

Nothing should have been able to do that to him, not there, not where his skills were unparalleled. 

What is this...?

Ijanna screamed.  He witnessed a manifestation of ebon power, a roiling mountain of shadow.  Lumbering and massive, vaguely humanoid but grotesque and formless, more a tower of darkness with boiling red eyes.  The sky shifted with it.  It became the landscape, a shard of dream sawed away and made animate.  Its hulking form became the soiled background. 

This was the intruder, the presence that held control over Ijanna.

Nothing is more powerful here than I am
, he thought angrily.  He should have shifted away from the dream at that moment, should have returned to his body and used the information he’d gleaned to lead Argus and the others to Ijanna so they could kill her, but something compelled him. 
This is what I am...
who
I am.  I am the master of dreams.  No one is my better, not here.

All his life Jar’rod had been extraordinary at just one thing.  He wasn’t about to run from some bastard nightmare colossus that was likely just a figment of Ijanna’s shattered imagination.  And if by some chance it
was
truly as powerful as it seemed, he wanted its secrets.  He would be second best to no one, not in this, not in
dae’vone,
not in dreams.

Jar’rod focused his mind.  His dream body transformed, bled to razor smoke that funneled into a vaporous blade.  His form collided in on itself, exploding smoke and charcoal dust, a spear of darkness.  The effort made him reel but he felt the magic build inside him, glacial pressure and cold rage, energies primordial and raw.