BLOOD RAN DOWN the length of Robor’s broadsword. Like grains of sand flowing through an hourglass, it fell drop by drop to the alleyway’s earthen floor, landing between Robor and the prostrate form of a maimed cut-throat gurgling out his final breaths. Perhaps it had been arrogance which, mere moments prior, led the scoundrel to select a towering, thick-muscled outlander as his next victim, or perhaps it had simply been the sight of the man’s purse. Glutted with coinage, the leather pouch sagged low on his belt, but beside it hung the outlander’s sword: a yard of ice-edged steel which no Septentrion tribesman was ever without.
The blade had served Robor well many times before, defending his life in exotic locales ranging from dark Cymrian caverns and the vine-choked jungles of torrid Bhaarat to wave-tossed galleys upon the open Cerulean Sea. It had tasted the blood of legendary generals, infamous pirates, and ferocious beasts, and smote unnatural things for which men have no names. Through these adventures, Robor was so amply practiced in the art of swordsmanship that despite being ambushed in one of Chorsthaan’s many twisting alleys, he’d struck down the cut-throat before the man’s concealed dirk ever touched his skin.
In a previous era, the iron-thewed champion would have let out a mirthful bellow or perhaps a gloating taunt as his assailant’s life ebbed away, but no words of mockery left his lips this evening. He merely sighed. The bards and their songs remembered his great deeds far better than he could. To him, the countless foes he’d slain and lovers he’d bedded had become nothing more than an endless line of bodies whose faces he could no longer recall and whose names he never learned. These things departed his head long ago, but his heart knew a longing it would never forget: a thirst for adventure an entire ocean of blood could not quench.
He lamented this fact as he gazed into the crimson pool at his feet, only to become abruptly aware of another presence. A shadow was closing in on him from where the alley debouched into the thoroughfare leading to the Grand Mall. As it drew nearer, it took the shape of a person, but this was no ordinary silhouette. Rather than a shadow made by a man, this was a man made from shadow, a three-dimensional outline projected onto thin air! In all his travels, Robor had never seen such magic, and it sparked something deep within his soul which he had not felt in countless melancholic years: wonder.
Awestruck, he nearly fell to the ground when the Shadow-man began to speak. Or at least he seemed to speak, but Robor could not be certain. Normal sounds would have echoed off the alley’s rammed earth walls, but the Shadow-man’s message arrived in Robor’s mind unaffected by their surroundings. It was as though he were placing his thoughts directly inside the Septentrion’s own head.
Robor, he began, I know you seek adventure, and the adventure of a lifetime now lies before you. There will be a new star in the western sky tonight. Pursue it. Traverse the vast Haarash Desert until day and night become indistinguishable, and it will lead you to the land of the Black Tower. There we will have our ultimate confrontation. Defeat me, and you shall learn such arcane secrets to warp reality to your very will, but do not fail in this quest; you will be trapped within the Tower’s confines for all eternity!
With his message delivered, the spectral entity stretched and moved from his position to the horizon like a twilight shadow, and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.
Robor stood there for a moment, too stunned to move as he attempted to process what he’d just seen and what it told him. He had heard of the Black Tower; rare was the rogue who hadn’t. It was a kind of bogeyman which haunted superstitious whispers in shadowy taverns. Legend claimed the land of the Black Tower was a crater formed where a star fell to the earth, and a cabal of sorcerers constructed an iron tower with the sundered pieces of its heart. That was the legend, because no one knew the truth. If any had ever been there, none returned to tell the tale, yet all knew it to be a place of unearthly terror.
Why had the Shadow-man summoned him there, Robor wondered, but the answer hardly mattered to him. Part of him questioned the Black Tower’s very existence, but another part feared the fabled place. In between these two, where the rational mind met the untamed primal spirit, lay the Septentrion’s heart, and it pounded in his chest with perverse thrill. A moment ago, he felt he’d been there and done that for every place and deed, but magic was something new. He’d never seen sorcery like this, and the idea of doing it himself was irresistible.
Thus, despite knowing almost nothing about the Black Tower and even less about the shadowy figure directing him to it, Robor could not wait to discover more. He would not wait. Whatever challenges lay ahead of him, he was sure they’d be unlike any he’d faced before, and he would meet them without hesitation. A handful of silver coins bought supplies for his journey and the life of a nameless horse, and before the light of dusk had faded from the evening sky, Robor had already put the gates of Chorsthaan to his back.
Robor was already deep amongst the Haarash Desert’s rolling dunes when the sun rose the following morning. The cacti towering skyward reminded him of the gigantean menhirs which marked the hills of his homeland five thousand leagues away. Not only did he know this distance in his mind; he felt it in his soul, and it wounded him more deeply than any blade ever had. Solitude was a cruel ache. Here his only companions were his weary mount and the rat-sized scorpions which scurried across the scorching sands. In the harsh desert sunlight, their black bodies were featureless silhouettes from all angles, and whenever one reached the sanctuary of a cactus’ shadow, it melted instantly from sight, becoming one with the darkness.
To distract himself from his solitude and pass the time as he travelled, Robor again pondered why the Shadow-man might have summoned him to the Black Tower. Perhaps, like Robor, he simply craved the challenge of a good fight. Perhaps he’d chosen Robor to be his sorcerous successor, provided the Septentrion could best him in combat, or perhaps he had some other, more insidious plan in which Robor was naught but an unwitting pawn. Whatever the Shadow-man’s motives might have been, they would remain unknown to Robor until he confronted him, and so he travelled.
As the sun neared its apogee, Robor reined his sable nag to a halt and raised his simple shelter against the oppressive midday heat. In this environment devoid of terrestrial landmarks, he was wholly reliant on celestial bodies to navigate. When the sun was once again low in the sky, he calculated his bearing by its position on the horizon, and when it sank beyond his vision, he consulted the stars above, following the newest among them. He could ask for no better guide than this novel lodestar and no greater map than that which filled the expansive canopy of the night sky.
A shiver passed through him as he scanned the dunes by the waning moon’s pale light, and he cursed the desert beneath his breath for its inhospitality. At midday, it was too hot to move, but at night it was far too cold not to. When the sun departed the sky, it took its warmth with it and plunged the barren landscape into commensurate frigidity. Remaining in constant motion was his only means of keeping warm.
That was the way things went. When the light of day faded, Robor pursued the setting sun on the western horizon, then ventured through the night by starlight, and when dawn arrived, he chased his own shadow. Days became nights and nights became days until he was no longer sure how many had elapsed.
Eventually the fabled land of the Black Tower came into view. True to the stories, it was an enormous crater. It was so large, in fact, the rim marking its border seemed to extend infinitely to either side with no perceptible curvature. Robor had not ventured this far to see only the rim, however. He dismounted from his weary steed and scrambled on all fours up the sloped wall of boulders until he crested the haphazard barrier. Then, gazing over the top, he saw a natural plinth at the crater’s centre, and rising up from it, gaunt and skeletal, stood the Black Tower. It was darker than shadow, darker than the night, as black and featureless as darkness itself.
He savoured this first, long-awaited view of his destination, but as he did, a maelstrom of emotions swirled within his breast. He’d finally reached the infamous place of legend, a place which if any had visited before, they had never departed. This thought sent a chill of fear through him, yet he could not pry his eyes from the tower; the horrible thing seemed to beckon to him like a siren. The very sight of it filled him with awe and fear and wonder and the dreadful thrill of adventure.
This chaotic whirlwind of emotions could only be felt, defying rational thought, but it suited Robor. Don’t think; act. That was the Septentrion way of life. More than a philosophy, it was the only way to stay alive in the barbaric wilderness. When a ravenous beast was within pouncing distance or prey selected for the dinner-pot was ready to bolt, thinking took time which wasn’t there. A man had to act on instinct to survive. Planning would get him killed. Thus, giving the matter no further thought, Robor descended the steep slope from the ridge into the yawning basin below.
The ground inside the crater was flat and featureless, nothing more than a vast expanse of sandy soil and myriads of shattered stones. Just as its perimeter wall had seemed to stretch on forever, so too did this interior depression, but this did not deter Robor, and he continued his trek. How far did he have to walk? He couldn’t tell; if distance had been difficult to judge in the desert, it was impossible to reckon in this barren wasteland where the only point of reference was the far-off tower itself. The stalwart Septentrion simply knew he was not yet at his destination, and so he walked.
Although his determination was unwavering, after some time it became tinged with impatience. The Black Tower appeared to be no nearer despite his long walk. How long had it truly been, he wondered. The passage of time was no easier to calculate than distance, so reckoning how far he’d travelled and how long it had taken to do so proved impossible. He told himself he’d spent too much time in the desert. The rising heat must have warped his sense of time like it could warp remote images, making the tower’s deceptive distance an illusion no more implausible than a shimmering lake where none existed. That’s what he told himself.
Unwilling to be deceived by the illusive space, he continued to march, but now he focused on what few measures of distance and time he possessed: the number of steps he’d taken and breaths he’d drawn. After travelling a further five hundred paces, he knew the Black Tower should have been noticeably closer. It should have been, but it wasn’t. If anything, it seemed to be further away. It was almost as though for every step forward he took, the tower moved two steps back.
This made him pause for thought. What if the Black Tower truly was withdrawing from his approach? The idea of a retreating tower defied the known laws of reality, but was the Black Tower not said to be a magical place of dark sorcery divorced from such mundane notions? Had he not been summoned to it by a man made of shadows and sorcery? If his fantastic suspicions were true, then the tower must have been moving in the direction he was facing. Perhaps then, if he faced away from the tower and walked backwards, it would fly toward him at triple speed.
Robor attempted to test this theory, but a new problem arose. When he turned his back on the tower, he spied it rising up from the ground in the direction from which he’d approached! Spinning back around in surprise, he saw it continued to stand where it had been just the moment before, still as huge and black as a desert shadow. Now he looked in a third direction, and once again the iron behemoth was visible in the distance. No matter where he looked, there it was.
Keeping his eyes locked on it, he rotated his head little by little, one tiny increment at a time. The tower stayed put. He continued turning his head until it was just at the edge of his vision, and it finally seemed fixed in place. When his gaze snapped forward and the tower disappeared from his periphery, however, it was directly ahead of him again, as if it had always been there.
Robor howled in frustration. He no longer knew where the tower had first stood, nor which way he was facing. He searched for the sun to take his bearings, but it was too low in the sky to be visible over the ridge. Still, some portion of the horizon should have been more vividly lit, but as he scanned the full circle of the crater’s edge, the lambent glow was omnipresent, surrounding him equally on all sides. He considered waiting. The sun would have to rise eventually, he told himself, but he couldn’t recall if it had been rising or setting when he arrived, nor was he certain how long he’d been walking. Time passed strangely in this alien place.
With the tower seemingly no more fixed in place than a candlelight shadow, and bereft of other landmarks by which to orient himself, Robor chose to improvise and drew his sword. It felt reassuringly solid and familiar in his grasp. The alternating stripes of its pattern-welded blade looked duller in the landscape’s hazy glow, but its edge was still keen. Three quick slashes at the rocky soil gouged an arrow pointing to the tower. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and something was infinitely more than nothing.
Staring solely at this new landmark rather than the tower, he slowly circled around until it pointed at his chest. In this position, he knew the Black Tower was behind him, no matter what else his eyes might claim. Then, without daring to glance up or even blink, he ran backward as fast he could, keeping his marker fixed in his vision and the tower’s location fixed in his mind.
He came to an abrupt halt when his back slammed into something hard and flat—something which shouldn’t have been there in the crater’s desolate landscape. Shocked and bewildered, he whirled around as his hand reflexively hefted his sword, but the obstruction was the tower itself!
How he managed to reach it so quickly after so much struggle stymied him, but time was no longer passing with any perceivable regularity. It felt like he’d been travelling for an eternity, and yet it also felt as though no time had passed. Not wishing to dwell on this mystery, he focused instead on the tower which finally stood before him.
It was black and ominous, stretching forever skyward until it disappeared from sight. It did not terminate; it simply vanished into the luminiferous haze which hung above the crater like a shroud. Robor knew that things in the far distance looked small and seemed to grow larger when approached, but this explanation felt insufficient to justify the degree to which the iron colossus had increased in size. It now loomed tall in the sky, huge and foreboding.
Contributing to its unwelcoming aura was an apparent lack of windows, despite ample space for them along its immeasurable height. There was also no sign of a door, nor entryway of any kind. Venturing to the rear of the tower, Robor hunted for a way in, but finding none, he circled back around to the front. It made no sense. Why would anyone construct a building with no access? The notion was so ridiculous he concluded the fault must be his own, but how could he have failed to find the entrance? He’d checked the entire perimeter, hadn’t he?
He decided to make certain. Estimating the structure’s base to be roughly thirty paces across, he tripled this value, then added a bit more which was somehow always necessary to make the numbers work, and finally rounded the total up to one hundred. Two more quick slashes of his sword gouged another mark into the ground, and he resumed his search.
Skirting the tower’s base, he counted his steps as he went, but when he reached a hundred, there was no mark in sight. He continued for fifty more, then another one hundred and fifty after that. Still he found no trace of his mark. Turning around, he circled back the way he came, and after three hundred paces, he found his mark right where he’d left it.
It beggared belief, but the results were undeniable. Somehow, the tower’s circumference was many times greater than its diameter should have allowed. This was one possibility, Robor believed, but maybe the truth was less fantastic. Maybe he’d simply misjudged the tower’s overall width, falling victim to forced perspective. He weighed these possibilities for a moment but dismissed the entire matter as irrelevant; he was a Septentrion, and Septentrions were men of action.
With his sword still trailing from his hand, Robor repeated his race around the tower. He soon felt as though he must have circled it numerous times, but he was no longer counting his paces to measure. Instead, he directed his full attention to his surroundings, keeping his eyes peeled for either his mark or a means of ingress. He discovered the latter first.
As he rounded the tower’s perpetual curve, Robor spied a tall, open window roughly five fathoms above him. If he truly had circled the entire tower as he suspected, this opening now appeared where he knew none had existed before. A quick glance at the ground revealed his mark was nowhere in sight, but this did not surprise him. Looking back up at the window, he judged it to be large enough to pass through, if only he could reach it.
Then, as if summoned by this thought, a thick rope descended from the opening and came to rest within his arm’s reach. A sharp tug tested its strength. It felt adequately strong and firmly anchored at the opposite end, so he began his ascent.
Any city-dweller would have decried the sheer wall of the Black Tower as unscalable, even with a rope, but Robor was no city-dweller. He had sounded the labyrinthine depths of stygian caverns and climbed his way back out again. No niche or crevice which could act as a foothold escaped his keen eye. By digging his toes into these nigh-imperceptible chinks in the wall’s rough exterior and climbing the rope with his arms, he ascended the tower, hand over hand and step by careful step.
Although he’d initially estimated the distance to the window as no more than five or six fathoms, the ascent seemed to last for ages, with each step proving more difficult than the last. It felt as if an invisible chain trailed from him to the ground, so that any small gain in elevation added more heavy links to his growing load, and every move which brought him closer to his goal also made the next more difficult. Drums pounded in his head and his limbs screamed out in protest as fire pumped through their veins, but he silenced this torturous cacophony and forced himself to focus solely on his destination. Through this steely resolve, Robor eventually brought the casement within his grasp. Reaching up, he clamped a calloused hand upon the sill and hoisted himself to the ledge, then peered inside.
The horrid sight which met his gaze nearly sent him reeling; he was face to face with a leering monster! He surely would have plummeted to the ground in shock had his other hand not reflexively caught the window frame to stabilize himself. The frightful creature before him possessed a ghastly visage, but once the initial surprise had passed, he saw the terrifying thing was nothing more than a stone statue, a fabrication crouched upon a pedestal in the centre of the room. Robor let out a chuckle of relief, then hopped over the windowsill into the circular chamber. At once, a sense of achievement filled his heart. He had done it; he had entered the Black Tower!
Surveying the room, he saw he was the only person inside. So who had lowered the rope to him? Had it been the Shadow-man? The sorcerous figure undeniably wanted him here, although his motivation for summoning Robor remained unknown. As Robor’s footsteps echoed on the flagstones, the Shadow-man’s words echoed in his head: fail in this quest and you will be trapped within the Tower’s confines for all eternity! Robor knew that having finally gotten in, he had to defeat this shadowy figure before he could get back out, but first he had to find him.
He looked again at the statue. It was hideously lifelike. The carved membranes of its bat-like wings were thinned to translucency, while thick cords of muscle bulged from its stout haunches. Its tail coiled like some huge, loathsome serpent around the pedestal and curled up to the monster’s face, where its tip was clenched between rows of jagged teeth. Its lips were pulled back, exposing the full horror of its jaws, and its nostrils were flared wide while its brow was tightly pinched, setting its entire face in a fearsome rictus.
Despite its repellent appearance, Robor found himself oddly attracted to the perverse imp. There was something indescribable about its awful mien, an irresistible unloveliness which beckoned him closer. It was as though an invisible thread were tied to his very soul, pulling him in.
As he drew near, he spotted something clutched in the statue’s hooked talons. Stepping even closer, he saw it was a stone, but it was unlike any stone he’d ever seen before. In shape, it was lumpy and pitted, but no texture of its surface could be discerned. The thing was too dark. It was as black as the shadows behind stars, and coruscating points of silvery light glittered on its surface like miniature constellations. The object did not resemble any mundane rock so much as a piece of the heavens themselves which had fallen to the ground.
Maybe it was the natural rapaciousness of the barbarian which compelled Robor to seize the stone, or maybe it was some other force external to his person. Even Robor himself couldn’t say why he reached for it, only that he did. No sooner had he touched it, however, than he regretted this action. If an invisible thread had pulled him toward the stone, a stout chain now yanked him away again, jerking him sharply to one side and down to the rough-hewn floor the instant he laid his hand upon the rock.
Returning to his feet, he decided not to try again. It felt as though touching the object had momentarily redirected gravity’s pull. Robor considered this to be sorcery, and although he had come here to learn the arcane arts, he knew better than to trifle with such things so carelessly. He also knew he had to defeat the Shadow-man first; experimenting with the alien object would have to wait.
Next, he turned his acquisitive eye to the base of the pedestal, where the rope was hitched. It was wisest, he believed, to leave the mysterious stone in situ, but abandoning a sturdy rope would be downright foolish. He’d learned through his travels that such things are worth their weight in gold.
Coiling his new treasure neatly over his shoulder, he surveyed the room for an exit. A broad door in the wall opposite the window was the only other means of egress to be found. As he strode toward it, however, he noticed something slightly unsettling. The grimacing statue in the centre of the room continued to face him. Although he moved in an arcing path around it, he could only see it from that single angle, regardless of where he stood. He’d previously seen paintings whose eyes appeared to follow him around a room, but never before had he seen a sculpture move its entire body to face him.
He considered the possibility that the entire statue was rotating on its base. Perhaps, he told himself, some cleverly concealed mechanism caused the thing to revolve. If this were true, the contraption must have been so finely constructed its motion was completely noiseless, undetectable apart from the eerie effect it produced. Examination of where the pedestal met the floor gave no indication of any mechanism, however, so Robor returned his attention to the door.
The thing was massive. A solid slab of raw ore cut to fit and jammed into place couldn’t have been more ponderous, and part of Robor suspected this was what had been done. Two thick iron hinges secured it to the frame, but there was no handle on which to pull. He pushed it instead. When it refused to budge, he pushed harder, but to no avail. It was like trying to move a colossal menhir singlehanded. Even the greatest of fools knew such a task was impossible, but Robor was no fool. He knew something else. He knew determination moved mountains.
Setting one muscular shoulder against the barrier and planting his feet firmly on the flagstones, he concentrated his full force on escape. He set not just his body to the task, but also his will. He told himself that the absence of a door didn’t prevent him from entering the room, so the presence of one couldn’t bar him from leaving it. The effort was exhausting. Beads of sweat gathered on his brow. His legs trembled, and his toes curled in a futile search for better purchase, but as the wearying aeons passed, the obstacle slowly yielded to his will. Through great strain, Robor created his exit.
As soon as he departed the room, the door swung forcefully shut once more, leaving him standing on a landing midway up a spiral staircase. Based on its curvature, he judged it to follow the tower’s exterior wall, encircling the chamber, and he was faced with a choice: should he travel up or down? The decision was not difficult.
In his own considerable experience, whatever he sought was invariably in the highest chamber of a tall tower, whether it was a wicked sorcerer, a fair maiden, or glittering treasure. If the Shadow-man was not in the Black Tower’s uppermost chamber, Robor could continue his search by working his way back down to the base. Content with this plan, he turned to the left and began his ascent.
As he climbed, Robor noticed something unusual about this stairwell: it twisted in the wrong direction. He’d trod many spiral stairways throughout his adventures, and all had curved upward to the right. The design was, he’d been told, intended to thwart invaders. The people defending the tower would have an easier time swinging the swords in their right hands, while the attackers’ motions would be hindered by the newel post. It made some sense, so why did these stairs curve to the left? Wasn’t their architect worried about invaders? Or were they built to thwart escapees? Robor paid the matter little heed. Until he encountered another person in this tower, the only thing he’d be fighting on these steps was gravity, but with their height, that would be enough.
He should have counted his paces when he raced around the tower’s outer perimeter, Robor chided himself as he mounted the steps, cursing his prior absentmindedness. If only he’d counted his paces before, he would now have a better sense of how high this interminable climb was taking him. He was sure he must have circled the tower several times already, but had he not thought the same thing when searching for the entrance? Bereft of perspective, he continued the tortuous climb as his sense of time continued to dwindle, while the spiral stair seemed—against all reason—to ascend without end.
By the time he reached the next door, the first he’d encountered since departing the room, his impatience superseded any plan to begin at the absolute top. He tried the door, but wearied by the countless steps he’d just climbed, he could only lean languidly against it, and it was just as reluctant to budge as the previous one.
Turning his remaining physical strength and willpower to the task, he eventually forced the barrier to swing inward, revealing the room beyond. Just as this door was identical to the previous one, so too was the room which it guarded. An identical circular chamber contained an identical arched window and an identical leering grotesque, which once again faced Robor as he stood in the doorway, stunned by the sight of it all.
As he marvelled at the uncanny similarity, three possible explanations came to mind. First and simplest was the idea that there existed two separate rooms with matching furnishings. His only cause to doubt this was the existence of the window, which would be the second he’d seen from inside despite having only spotted one on the outside. On the other hand, he only glimpsed a fraction of the tower’s exterior before it disappeared into the gloaming haze, and surely he’d climbed enough stairs to have surpassed that point, hadn’t he?
The second possibility was he’d gained no elevation at all, contrary to the trembling in his knees. He might have fallen victim to another perspective trick, travelling in a single level circle and returning to where he’d started, but it would have to be vast. His intuition told him such a circle’s circumference would be manifold greater than the tower’s perimeter, but he was unsure if he ever completed a full lap of the structure. Furthermore, the concept of a flat ring of stairs felt like an architectural impossibility, but not nearly so much as the third explanation.
The final idea—which frightened him the most—was the murky notion that the staircase looped around in more ways than one, reaching the top, then reconnecting back at the bottom. He knew neither the true height of the tower nor how far he had climbed; was it possible he had somehow ascended the staircase all the way?
If the two rooms he’d seen so far were in fact one and the same, then Robor had again fallen prey to architectural trickery. To be sure, he employed a trick of his own. Dim sparks leapt from the floor as his blade bit into its flagstones, leaving a thin, jagged mark in its wake. Re-sheathing his weapon, Robor turned around and headed back down the stairs, being sure to count the steps this time.
He eventually lost track, but he surpassed a thousand before returning to the previous door. Once more laying his weight against it, he forced it to swing inward and reveal the same circular room—the same arched window, the same leering statue on the same pedestal, and the same fresh scratch upon the floor!
Now he knew there was but a single room to which he’d returned twice, and he strongly suspected he’d trod far too many stairs to have completed only one lap of the tower. In defiance of known reality, the stairwell in which he now stood was an endless loop, forever spiralling back on itself into eternity!
There must have been something special about this room and its paradoxically repulsive occupant, Robor reasoned. The grotesque imp seemed to be the avatar of the Black Tower itself, and the alien rock was its hate-filled heart. It was as though the petrified thing was metaphysically drawing him to it while simultaneously pushing him away and calling him back again. He couldn’t go anywhere in the tower without eventually finding himself standing before the imp’s wretched gaze. He hadn’t come to face the miserable imp though. He’d come to fight the Shadow-man. He was determined to search every room in the tower until he found him, but the Black Tower seemed to have a will of its own and it battled with Robor’s, bending even space itself to do so.
Robor continued on the stairs heading downward. Going up any further had proven impossible, and if the journey was just going to take him back to where he’d started from anyhow, he would at least save energy by not fighting gravity the entire way. Perhaps this was why the next thousand steps passed more swiftly, and his spirit was buoyed with the discovery of the next door.
Although visually self-same to the one encountered thrice before, this one was located in the wall to Robor’s left, the concavity of which indicated it was the exterior wall. Had he finally found the elusive front door? If so, why did the stairwell continue further downward? Perhaps the Black Tower also had untold subterranean passageways, or perhaps this was the point where the bottom and the top connected. He could have stood there speculating for an eternity, but there was only one way to know what was on the other side of the door.
Drawing a deep breath and planting his feet, Robor mentally prepared himself for yet another struggle, but when he threw his shoulder against the door, it swung aside as easily as a silken curtain, sending him toppling into the room. Reflexively, he braced for impact with the flagstones—all he could manage in his unbalanced state—but rather than crash to the floor, he found himself tumbling through the air to the groinings above! Or were they now below him? He didn’t have long to wonder.
With a force that made his spine crunch and his teeth crack, Robor slammed into the vaulted surface. Whether it should still be considered the ceiling or now, the floor eluded him, but some abnormal force held him there regardless, so he rose slowly to his feet. The impact had left him woozy, but even more so wary; with no guarantee gravity wouldn’t spontaneously reverse a second time, caution checked his movements while he checked his surroundings.
He was disappointed but not surprised to see that, apart from being upside-down, this room was the same as all before, with the same window, the same scratch, and the same grotesque statue staring down at him. He decided to leave by the same door, but he immediately discovered a problem: it was now five fathoms above him. Even with his prodigious strength, he had no hope of climbing the smooth interior walls, nor leaping many times his own height.
Undeterred, he told himself that if he could not find a way, he would make one. He still had his rope, but a rope without an anchor was as useless to him as a blade without a hilt. He could not make it stand erect like a cobra and climb it, as legend claimed the mystics of torrid Bhaarat could do. If he could loop it over a sturdy projection above, he might be able to pull himself to the top, but where could such a mooring be found? He threw his head back in dismay to let out a bellow of frustration, but the cry caught in his throat. The solution was staring him in the face, just as it always did whenever he was in the chamber.
With a wide swing of his arm and a cunning flick of his wrist, Robor cast his snare toward the grotesque imp, attempting to lasso its misshapen head, but the rope fell short. Calculating the distance and angle required proved difficult, as his target defied conventional wisdom on both subjects. Even now, as he stood directly below it, the statue still faced him at the same angle as always. Imagining how this could be possible would strain the mind, so he elected not to. He simply threw his lasso more forcefully and with a sharper flick of the wrist. This time, the rope found its mark, and as the noose tightened around the bulging tendons of the neck, Robor began his ascent.
The adventurous Septentrion was no stranger to climbing ropes. He knew only a great fool would lift his weight with his arms, but the thousands of steps had sapped much of the strength from his legs, forcing him to shimmy his way up the rope and place more weight on his arms than he knew to be wise. He soon suffered the consequences of this approach. Each heave felt twice as strenuous as the one before. He was barely halfway up before he found himself contemplating a brief hiatus, just to rest his aching arms, but no! If he spent any longer on the rope than absolutely necessary, it would only make him more tired, not less. He thus banished all thought of rest from his mind and pushed himself onward and upward.
After much labour, he reached the top, but here he was faced with a new conundrum. Although he’d achieved the correct elevation, the door was still half a room away. The statue was in the middle of the chamber, and the flagstones now above him were too smooth to offer any hope of grip. Even if they’d been perfectly contoured handles, brachiation was beyond Robor. Climbing the rope to this point had expended all strength from his forearms. His hands would no longer support his weight.
He looked down. The floor was a long distance away. He couldn’t imagine escaping uninjured if he fell from this height a second time, so it would be safest to make a controlled descent. He could easily slide down the rope, but he had spent so much energy climbing up it. Not only would it be a painful waste to undo his progress, but he knew he’d be unable to repeat the feat with what little strength remained. If he wanted to reach the exit, he would have to stay at his current height, but how?
Robor could feel the last of his stamina fading fast. He couldn’t hold on to the rope much longer, but what else could he grab? There was nothing but the statue and the queer stone in its clutches, and the last time he’d touched that… A thought dawned on him. It was born of desperation and imprudence and waning strength, but it was all he had.
Robor wound the rope around his left arm and leg to secure himself, then placed his right hand upon the stone. Then he set both feet on the floor. And it was the floor. In an instant, gravity reverted, and although its slantindicular pull continued to warp and sway, he was prepared for it. He’d lived, worked, and fought on the pitching decks of ships traversing roiling seas. He knew he could keep his footing here on a sturdy stone floor. As he focused on keeping his balance, he felt the wavering pull begin to calm. He thought harder about a steady footing, maintaining his hold on the stone, and soon the mundane pull of gravity was fully restored. He’d done it! Robor had conquered that which had previously beguiled him. He threw back his head and let out a triumphant bellow, but as its echo faded from the room, a new sound met his ear, one originating from outside.
When he approached the window to investigate, Robor realized just how dark it was inside the Black Tower. Neither candles nor lanterns were present in the chamber, nor had he seen any in the stairwell. The only apparent source of illumination was the window, and the meagre light it admitted temporarily blinded him with its relative brilliance. He was so acclimated to the omnipresent gloom, all sights beyond were a phosphene-limned blur. He could only discern shapeless motion at the base of the tower, and he assumed this to be the source of the noise.
Once his eyes had readjusted, he recognized the motion as a running person, but they swiftly passed out of sight around the curvature of the tower. When they circled back into view from the other side, his sight had cleared further, and he recognized the runner as a tall man of athletic build. The man also seemed to be holding something. It looked like a sword, but he again passed out of sight too quickly to ascertain further detail. Robor waited another moment, and his vision fully returned. When the man came into view a third time, the Septentrion saw the object was indeed a sword, but another aspect of the man shook Robor to his core. The runner circling the base of the tower was him!
The sight was impossible to explain, but here Robor couldn’t rely on his usual reaction to the inexplicable; this was also too unbelievable to ignore. It was no mirage. It might have been some fantastic simulacrum, but that didn’t feel correct either. Various weak explanations flew through his mind, but he rejected them all save for one. He could not shake the impression he was somehow gazing into the past. If this was true, it would only be a matter of time before Robor—past Robor—discovered the window, at which point he would climb up the rope and…
The rope! It was still looped around the statue where Robor—current Robor—had lassoed it, seemingly waiting to fulfil its purpose. With panicked haste, he tossed the unsecured end out the window, fearing that if he didn’t provide his past self with the rope, no one else would, and he couldn’t begin to fathom the potential consequences for his current self if his past self failed to gain entry. Time travel was an alien concept to the Septentrion, but he understood Fate well. Any attempt to defy it and break the link between cause and effect could have unforeseeable and disastrous consequences. He also had no idea what he’d say to himself when they met, or if they should even meet at all, so he hastily departed, leaving the rope where it was.
Robor hadn’t come here to face himself; he’d come to face the Shadow-man, yet he was no closer to finding him than when he first arrived! Why was his foe eluding him? It made no sense to summon Robor just to hide from him. Perhaps the Shadow-man couldn’t come to Robor. Perhaps he was restrained, held here like a prisoner. Perhaps that was why he had called upon Robor: not to fight him, but to free him. Robor wouldn’t know until he found the Shadow-man.
With an embittered growl, he turned to his left and resumed trekking down the stairs. Three steps later, he froze in his tracks. It was so subtle he had nearly missed it, but there was no denying something had changed. After a moment’s consideration, he realized what: previously, the stairs had curved downward to the right, but now they curved to the left. Were these counter-spiralling stairs truly descending? He’d begun his exploration of the tower by going up, then down and down again, but after encountering the inverted chamber, he was no longer sure which direction was which. Had the reflection of gravity somehow mirrored the entire structure of the tower?
Completely lost now within the Black Tower’s convoluted architecture, Robor traipsed the steps aimlessly, checking doors at random wherever he found them. Many more he tried, but each time the result was the same. Whether he went upstairs or down, no matter what door he opened, they all led to the same ghoul-guarded chamber. This endless searching was no longer merely infuriating; it was driving him to madness in every sense of the word!
It was there, teetering on the edge of insanity, the dreadful truth became clear to Robor. The Black Tower was no mere artifice; it was an iron stake pinning extra dimensions to his own. Shreds of space and time were torn and tangled around the queer fastness like fishing line caught on a dead branch beneath the surface of murky water. No element of reality behaved the way it ought to, here in the land of the Black Tower. Distances doubled when they should have decreased. Structures were bigger on the inside. Stairs spiralled endlessly in both directions, just to rejoin themselves, and all doors were the same door to the same room. Damn that wretched chamber and the inimical fiend within it!
Robor froze. Epiphany washed over him like the soft light of a new dawn. The dark veil of ignorance lifted, and the mystery was solved. He finally knew where to find the Shadow-man. He raced down the stairs until he reached the next door, and holding the image of his stygian quarry in his mind’s eye, he threw open the hinged slab. There, in the middle of the room, loomed the Shadow-man, just as dark and terrible as Robor remembered—as dark and terrible as the Black Tower itself.
Wasting not an instant, the darksome foe threw his arms wide, and all of the dormant shadows of the room began to grow. It was as though the chamber were only weakly illuminated by the rapidly waning firelight of a dying hearth. As the shadows spread further, they joined together, and the Shadow-man joined with them, increasing many times in size as darkness swallowed the room. Robor tensed as the massive door slammed shut behind him, denying him retreat as the Shadow-man drew closer. His impenetrable wall of darkness sped forward now like a crashing black wave, moving with the haste of a man who has waited a thousand lifetimes for a single moment.
Robor was not saved by quick thinking; he was saved by quick acting. As fast as a flash of lightning, the Septentrion’s hand leapt to his sword, and the blade licked through the space before him in a bright arc of forfending steel. Its gleaming edge sliced effortlessly through the advancing darkness, and his target offered no more resistance than a formless shadow to the tigerish slash. In the blink of an eye, the Shadow-man melted away into oblivion.
And just like that, it was over. Robor had done it, but what had he done? Dispel a shadow? This effortless victory offered no more of the excitement he craved than would have the sweep of a lantern. Abandoning any hope of a thrilling battle, he returned his woefully bloodless blade to its scabbard. Disappointment weighed heavy in his heart, but a curious sense of relief seemed to fill the chamber. The alleviation was almost palpable, but where did it come from? Robor stood alone in the room. It thus became clear he would not learn magic from the Shadow-man after all, and so he resolved to quit this execrable place once and for all.
Robor turned around and braced his shoulder against the door, preparing to throw it open to the stairwell, but paused. Once on the stairs, where would he follow them to? In his past adventures, vanquishing the threat in the tall tower was always followed by descending the stairs to ground level and emerging as the victor, but the stairs of this twisted madhouse never led anywhere but the room he was already in. He turned around to reexamine it. The awful statue continued staring at him, and although its expression remained unchanged, the grimace seemed to have taken on a new, sadistic element of knowing delight. Robor snarled at the wretched thing, then moved past it to the window.
Standing at its ledge, he peered out. The distance to the ground made his head spin. He reached to his shoulder for his rope, planning to rappel down, but his hand only grasped his sleeve. Then he remembered; he’d left the rope behind for his past self, who then took it with him and left it behind in this room, and then… Robor stopped thinking about it. Attempting to deduce what happened to the rope was making him reel worse than the dizzying height.
He poked his head out the window again and cautiously estimated the distance. It was five fathoms, quite a drop. He reminded himself he’d survived other precipitous plummets in the past, but he still didn’t relish the thought of doing so again. Unfortunately, no other solutions presented themselves, so he set his jaw and concluded there was nothing for it; he simply had to leap from the window to the coarse sand and try to cushion his landing as best he could.
Stepping onto the sill, he braced himself. He squeezed his eyes shut and exhaled slowly, then leapt from his perch. Almost instantly, his feet made contact with a hard, flat surface. He opened his eyes and saw it was the flagstones of the tower, for he was once more standing in the chamber, again face to face with that damned grinning statue! Attempting the jump a second time achieved the same result. He decided a third try would be madness and abandoned the endeavour to search for an alternate means of escape.
With the window defying reality to deny him freedom, he turned his attention to the door. As always, it led to the stairwell, and the stairs always led back to the door. It was a constant, unchanging cycle, no matter how many flights of stairs he trekked or how many doors he tried.
And he did try. He tried tirelessly and without rest. Like a dog tethered to a stake, he circled around and around the inescapable chamber on its twisted staircase for hours on end. Hours faded into days. Days became decades, and months became millennia. Ten thousand years passed, and Robor gradually faded away until nothing remained of the man but a shadow.
No exit was ever found, but he never stopped longing for an escape—any escape; even death would be a welcome release from the torment of this otherworldly prison. When freedom felt impossible, he turned his attention inward to the strange, alien rock at the heart of the Black Tower. It’d made impossible things happen already, so he devised a plan to use it to miraculous effect again. At first, its mysteries seemed impenetrable, but the Black Tower itself had also initially seemed impenetrable and he had nonetheless found a way in. Now he sought a way back out. He knew if he could penetrate the impenetrable, he could escape the inescapable.
As the aeons whirled by, he studied the eldritch stone, and it gradually surrendered its secrets to him. Little by little, this shadow of a man began to learn its tricks and practiced them himself. In a scant few centuries, he mastered them. Through the warping and twisting of space, he could stretch, shrink, grow, and contort himself in countless ways unimaginable to a sane mind. Once the distortion of space was second nature to him, he turned this sorcery against the fabric of time itself. Not daring to defy Fate, he instead sought to accelerate it. After a thousand lifetimes of practice, he was at last able to enact his plan.
Although he could not leave the Black Tower, he’d discovered he could stretch himself outward from it. By channelling all of the dark power of the stone, he extended his incorporeal presence far across the desert to Chorsthaan. He snaked across its Grand Mall and down a thoroughfare into a darkling alleyway, where an iron-thewed Septentrion stood triumphant over the body of a maimed cut-throat. |
