You Stand Before the Black Tower – Swords & Sorcery Magazine

by Nathaniel Webb

in Issue 130, November 2022

You stand before the black tower.

You have pursued the Bat-Winged Sorcerer here: the blackhearted necromancer’s final refuge, his last place of power. Tonight, under a blood moon, your struggle will end, one way or the other. The Gibbet Queen’s dying prophecy rings in your memory: “Beware what waits above.”

The bailey gate hangs on iron hinges, black with rust, and a foot high. The gate itself is twice the height of a man, bearing an aura of ancient and impenetrable solidity. The walls of the bailey are, up close, simple heavy stone, but furred with an ebon moss from which rises a foul miasma rich with the sweet tang of poison. You taste death on your tongue and back away.

Eyes upon the looming gate, you comfort yourself with the ritual of checking your gear. The bright steel of your byrnie has dulled, but it is whole, ring on ring interlocking from throat to groin. Your trusted broadsword hangs at one hip, your blood-browned poniard at the other. The dust of the Searing Desert clings redly to your high leather boots and darkens their spurs.

You are ready.

You approach the gate and place a hand upon it. The stone is cold, and viscid with an unnatural frost. Tentatively, you push. The gate swings open with the whisper of a dying man’s final breath. Beyond stands a courtyard choked with gray, grasping weeds. You move in. Bones crunch beneath your feet. There are thousands here, millions, making a blanched and funereal carpet. Most are tiny, those of rats and mice and voles. Many look human. One, a cyclopean femur, is as long as you are tall.

Caution has no purpose here, for the Chiroptic One knows you are coming. You cross the courtyard, measuring your stride in footprints of pallid dust. Pricked by a thickening ambiance of dark sorcery, the hairs along your arms rise until they stand rigidly from your flesh.

You reach the tower unmolested.

Its infamous sable hue is innate, a property of the stone of its construction. It is black, true black. You peer into its dark face—and discover unexpected depths there…

As a child, you climbed down a well and were unable to free yourself. No one came. You sat, sobbing, hugging your knees to your chest as the sunlit sky faded first to red and then to black. Clouds moved in, hiding the stars. The circle of light that marked the mouth of the well faded. Disappeared. Then the blackness was infinite, and you felt as though you were falling, falling into the sky, forever. Your stomach tumbled and you vomited over your knees. You were hungry. You were still falling. The surface of the black tower is as deep and as dark as the starving starless sky at the bottom of a childhood nightmare.

With a shout, you jerk back from the stone. You are momentarily disoriented—had your face actually passed beyond that polished black surface? Did you draw your hands out from the tower as you would from a pool of water? Sickness rises in your throat.

You fight it down.

You draw your broadsword.

You stalk along the perimeter of the tower, seeking an entrance. At the far side, in the shadowed corner where the curving dark tower meets the moss-furred bailey wall, there is a simple door of iron-banded mahogany. It opens at your touch and you enter.

Mindful of the Gibbet Queen’s warning, you glance at the ceiling. It is rough stone, crudely hewn, gray, and bare. You lower your eyes. You stand in a corridor stretching directly away from you, lit by flickering smoky torches hung in black iron brackets along the wall. The passage extends beyond sight. The interior geography of the tower plainly bears no resemblance to its exterior, and your stomach turns at this sign of sorcery.

Seeing no alternatives, you set off down the corridor. You walk for some minutes, passing torches at regular intervals but otherwise finding nothing. There are no doors. An irrational notion intrudes upon your thoughts: if you were to turn around, head back the way you came, would the door you entered through still be there?

You tighten your grip on your broadsword and resist the urge to make sure.

Ahead, a half-raised portcullis looms beyond the torchlight like the gaping mouth of a giant snake. You approach warily, eyes again on the ceiling. You can spot no indication of a trap, so you turn your gaze to the floor. The gray paving stones are all different sizes, unevenly set without mortar, making a broken landscape like the foothills of a miniature mountain range. The perfect environment to hide a weighted trigger.

You reach out with your sword and press on a paving stone. Then another, and another. None moves. You take a few steps forward and test the next few. Slowly, cautiously, you traverse the corridor in this way until the portcullis is within arm’s reach.

There was no trap, only the slow wasting away of time as the Bat-Winged Sorcerer prepares for your coming.

You duck under the portcullis. It opens on a great circular chamber, its ceiling lost in shadow high above, its floor paved in smooth white marble stained with indelible brown blotches. Three archways, spaced evenly around the wall, yawn black and open; with the one at your back, they make four entrances at the four cardinal points of this room. The weight of time sits heavily over everything, and you wonder again just how old the black tower is. Legend places its creation in the apocalyptic era known as Year Zero. For the first time, you can believe it.

With a start, you comprehend the layout of the structure you are in. The dark priests of the demon Kronos are said to express his motif, the sinister hooked cross, in all they build. Four lines radiating from a central point—one of them curved, dangling, like a broken limb. Your flesh prickles. The small hairs rise anew, and with them, a growing sense of unease. “Beware what waits above,” the Gibbet Queen warned. Above you now is only empty space, the great central shaft of the black tower, rising into unplumbable heights like the unreachable disc of sky above the mouth of a well.

An unevenness beneath your boots draws your attention. A series of marks is carved into the marble floor, so worn down as to be almost invisible in the gloom. Runes—ancient—sorcerous—describing a spiral that runs tightly from the edge of the circular chamber to its center. The brown stains are like a painter’s wash, picking out the carvings in vague relief. Magic-sickness creeps into your guts.

But there’s no time for that. Above, a flapping, fluttering noise echoes in the shaft of the tower. You grip your sword and stare into the gloom. You can see nothing, but the sound clarifies as it grows louder—closer.

It is the sound of great leathery wings.

A beast twice your size comes diving headfirst from the shadows. The huge wings wrap tight around its frame as it plummets toward you, but you can discern the elongated, semihuman musculature of an ape. The face that glares down with flashing dark eyes and slavering fangs shows only a shred of intelligence, but it is distorted by hate.

With grim satisfaction, you recognize a servant of the Bat-Winged Sorcerer. You are close.

You gauge the speed of its drop, await your moment, and lash out with the broadsword—but the beast looses its wings and arrests its descent with a single shuddering flap that booms like a torn sail. Foul air buffets you and you stagger.

The thing roars. Corded muscles strain. You see its matted, lice-ridden fur, the clotted scars that striate its flesh.

It drops toward you, half-folded wings fluttering, stooping like a falcon with its taloned feet leading. This time you are prepared. You hold, feigning terrified paralysis, until the creature is committed to its dive. At the last heartbeat before its talons tear into your chest, you leap back, plant your feet, and raise your sword. The beast drives itself onto the blade. The tip spears through muscle, grinds along a rib, pierces the creature’s heart.

But the thing keeps coming, dragging down your blade until its hideous face is a handsbreadth from yours and its hot, stinking breath fills your nose.

It grips your shoulders with long-clawed hands. Agony sears your flesh and warm blood runs down your arms. You clench your jaw against the pain. Your left hand searches blindly. Your fingers touch hard steel—the pommel of your poniard. You draw it fumblingly from its sheath. Your heart thunders as you grasp the hilt in a reverse grip, brace yourself against the pain, raise your arm, and strike.

The poniard’s needle blade lances between the muscles of the beast’s neck. A hot wash of blood pulses over your face, then another. Spitting gore, you shoulder the creature free of your sword. It slumps to the floor, dead, leaking blood onto the shallow runes.

You laugh.

You have met what waits above, steel against sinew, and conquered. There is nothing more for you to fear in the black tower.

You feel a buzzing in the soles of your boots. Even as you look down, it grows into a shaking that forces you to steady yourself. The blood of the slain beast fills the necromantic symbols graven into the marble floor. The shaking mounts in force, and with each shudder of the room, the spiral of gore throbs with power.

You fall to your knees, trying to vomit, but nothing comes up.

Your hair lifts first, rising gently from your head as though lifted by a lover’s fingers. Then the steel links of your byrnie press against your chest and rise from your back. The empty sheaths of your sword and knife follow.

Beside you, the beast’s corpse shivers, jolts, and lifts off the floor. With startling speed, it ascends into the gloom of the tower shaft.

Now you begin screaming.

You claw for purchase at the smooth marble floor. Your fingernails tear, blood spatters, but you cannot keep hold of the soft, shallow runes. Your boots lift, then your knees. Now you are hanging upside-down and only your bloody fingertips touch the floor.

You rise. Fast. Faster. The circle of the marble chamber below shrinks to a dinner plate, then a distant moon, then a tiny white coin, as you plummet up the long, long shaft of the black tower. You are falling up a well. You are falling into a starless sky, hungry and eternal.

The ceiling rushes towards you. You see it in snatches as you tumble head over feet through the black air. There are spikes fixed to it, simple spikes of rust-pitted iron.

You hit the spikes. They rip through byrnie, flesh, fat, and muscle, driving split steel rings deep into your heart and guts. You try to scream but your lungs are shredded.

You hear, far away, the rustle of a bat’s wings.

You are dead.

Nathaniel Webb is a writer and musician from Portland, Maine. He’s published four novels and one music biography. His short fiction has appeared in Whetstone, A Book of Blades, MYTHIC, and elsewhere. He edits the magazines Rakehell and Wyngraf, and helped put together New Edge Sword & Sorcery. This is his first appearance in Swords & Sorcery Magazine.