But the preacher lifted his staff as though it were a huge and heavy weight, his face swelling with ghost-stings and rage. “Hearken to me! Hearken to Skolax! Tear them! Rend them! They cannot stand against us! Break them—now!” And he lurched toward his victims with a roar.
Rod leaped forward, grabbing the staff, yanking it out of the preacher’s hands with a violent heave. But the whole crowd surged in after him, screaming and shouting. Fingers clawed at the witches; scythes swung…
Then light, blinding light, a sunburst, a nova—silent light, everywhere.
And silence, deep and sudden, and falling, falling, through blackness, total and unrelieved, all about them, and cold that drilled to their bones…
Chapter 2
And something struck his heels, throwing him back. Something hard, heels, hips, and shoulders, and he tucked his chin in from reflex.
And fire burned in the blackness.
A campfire, only it burned in a small iron cage, black bars slanting up to a point.
Rod’s eyes fastened on that cage for the simple reassurance of solid geometry in a world suddenly crazy. It was a tetrahedron, a fire burning inside a tetrahedron.
But what the hell was it doing here?
And for that matter, where was “here”?
Rephrase the question; because, obviously, the fire and cage belonged here. So…
What was Rod doing here?
Back to Question Number Two: Where was “here”?
Rod started noticing details. The floor was stone, square black basalt blocks, and the fire burned in a shallow circular well, surrounded by the basalt. The walls were distant, hard to see in the dim light from the fire; they seemed to be hung with velvet, some dark deep color, not black. Rod squinted—it looked to be a rich maroon.
The hell with the curtains. Gwen…
A sudden, numbing fear pervaded Rod. He was scarcely able to turn his head, was afraid to look, for fear she might not be there. Slowly, he forced his gaze around the darkened chamber, slowly…
A great black form lay about ten feet from him: Fess.
Rod knelt and felt for broken bones, taking things in easy stages. Satisfied that he didn’t have to be measured in fractions, he clambered carefully to his feet and went over to the horse.
Fess was lying very still, which wasn’t like him; but he was also very stiff, each joint locked, which was like him when he had had a seizure. Rod didn’t blame him; being confronted with that journey, he could do with a seizure himself—or at least a mild jolt; bourbon, for instance…
He groped under the saddlehorn and found the reset switch.
The black horse relaxed, then slowly stirred, and the great head lifted. The eyes opened, large, brown, and bleary. Not for the first time, Rod wondered if they could really be, as the eye-specs claimed, plastic.
Fess turned his head slowly, looking as puzzled as a horsehair-over-metal face can, then turned slowly back to Rod.
“Di-dye… chhhab a… zeizure, RRRRRodd?”
“A seizure? Of course not! You just decided you needed a lube job, so you dropped into the nearest grease station.” Rod tactfully refrained from mentioning just how Fess had “dropped in.”
“I… fffai-led you innn… duhhh… momenduv…”
Rod winced at the touch of self-contempt that coated the vodered words and interrupted. “You did all you could; and since you’ve saved my life five or six times before, I’m not going to gripe over the few times you’ve failed.” He patted Fess between the ears.
The robot hung his head for a moment, then surged to his feet, hooves clashing on the stone. His nostrils spread; and Rod had a strange notion his radar was operating, too.
“We arrre inna gread chall,” the robot murmured; at least when he had seizures, he made quick recoveries. “It is stone, hung with maroon velvet curtains; a fire burns in the center in a recessed well. It is surrounded by a metal, latticework tetrahedron. The metal is an alloy of iron containing, nickel and tungsten in the following percentages…”
“Never mind,” Rod said hastily. “I get the general idea.” He frowned suddenly, turning away, brooding. “I also get the idea that maybe my wife isn’t dead; if she was, her body would have been there. So they’ve kidnapped her?”
“I regret…”
“ ‘That the data is insufficient for…’ ” Rod recited with him. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. So how do we find her?”
“I regret…”
“Skip it. I’ve got to find her.” He struck his forehead with his fist. “Where is she?”
“In the next room,” boomed a deep, resonant voice. “She is unharmed and quite well, I assure thee. Agatha is there also.”
A tall old man with long white hair streaming down over his shoulders and a long white beard down his chest, in a long, dark-blue monk’s robe with the hood thrown back, stood by the fire. His robe was sprinkled with silver zodiac signs; his arms were folded, hands thrust up the wide, flaring sleeves. His eyes were surrounded by a network of fine wrinkles under white tufts of eyebrows; but the eyes themselves were clear and warm, gentle. He stood tall and square-shouldered near the fire, looking deep into Rod’s eyes as though he were searching for something.
“Whoever you are,” Rod said slowly, “I thank you for getting me out of a jam and, incidentally, for saving my life. Apparently I also owe you my wife’s life, and for that I thank you even more deeply.”
The old man smiled thinly. “You owe me nothing, Master Gallowglass. None owe me ought.”
“And,” Rod said slowly, “you owe nothing to anyone. Hm?”
The wizard’s head nodded, almost imperceptibly.
Rod chewed at the inside of his cheek and said, “You’re Galen. And this is the Dark Tower.”
Again the old man nodded.
Rod nodded too, chewing again. “How come you saved me? I thought you ignored the outside world.”
Galen shrugged. “I had an idle moment.”
“So,” said Rod judiciously, “you saved two witches, my horse, and my humble self, just to kill time.”
“Thou art quick to comprehend,” said Galen, hiding a smile deep in his beard. “I had no pressing researches at the moment.”
“Rod,” Fess’s voice murmured, “an analysis of vocal patterns indicates he is not telling the whole truth.”
“For this I need a computer?” Rod muttered dryly.
Galen tilted his head closer, with a slight frown. “Didst thou speak?”
“Oh, uh—just an idle comment about the physical aspects of thought.”
“Indeed.” The old wizard’s head lifted. “Dost thou, then, concern thyself with such problems?”
Rod started to answer, then remembered that he was talking to a wizard who had locked himself away for forty years and had gained power continually throughout that time—and it wasn’t because he’d been fermenting. “Well, nothing terribly deep, I’m afraid—just the practical side of it.”
“All knowledge is of value,” the wizard said, eyes glittering. “What bit of knowledge hast thou gained?”
“Well… I’ve just been getting some firsthand experience in the importance of the prefrontal lobes.” Rod tapped his forehead. “The front of the brain. I’ve just had a demonstration that it acts as a sort of tunnel.”
“Tunnel?” Galen’s brows knit. “How is that?”
Rod remembered that the original Galen had authored the first definitive anatomy text back at the dawn of the Terran Renaissance. Had to be coincidence—didn’t it? “There seems to be a sort of wall between concept and words. The presence of the concept can trigger a group of sounds—but that’s like someone tapping on one side of a wall and someone on the other side taking the tapping as a signal to, oh, let’s say… play a trumpet.”
Galen nodded. “That would not express the thought.”
“No, just let you know it was there. So this front part of the brain”—Rod tapped his forehead again—“sort of makes a hole in that wall and lets the thought emerge as words.”