“What shall we do if he comes here, Master?”
“We shall lay a little trap and catch him in our snare,” the Lord of Pelizon replied.
“Before he reaches the Tower?”
The master laughed. His voice dropped to a soft, silken purr:
“No, you fool. After he has stolen the Medusa and is leaving the Tower!”
The cunning in his voice delighted Vulkaar. The little Death Dwarf capered and leaped about the gloom-shrouded chamber, crowing with glee. And the harsh laughter of the Veiled One rose to fill the darkness of the stone room with ringing peals of demoniac mirth…
“I don’t like this, lad. I don’t like it one bit!” old Temujin puffed, toiling along behind Kirin and the girl. The grey cindery plain was rough underfoot, and the old Magician’s sandals kept sinking into the harsh crystals. Above the sky was dark and empty, filled with drifting vapors.
Kirin didn’t like it either. It was odd. He had been told the Death Dwarves guarded the lands about the Iron Tower with great care and cunning. Where, then, were they?
Kirin and his companions had broken out of the Interplenum in a distant orbit around the parent star of Pelizon world. They crept into the system with stealth, their ship carefully shielded against detection. The planet Pelizon lay beneath their keel, a dull grey sphere of wrinkled stone, whose barren shores were washed by dark and nameless seas. The daylight terminator cut across the bleak plateaus as they drifted down towards it on tiny bursts of power from the steering jets.
No patrols. No planet-based radar stations. Nothing.
It was more than strange, it was alarming.
They landed with great secrecy on the night side. Still no alarms. Stratosphere reconnaissance showed no camp-fires, no tribal towns, no gatherings. The Iron Tower was alone and unguarded on its bleak stony plateau under the mist-robed skies. Curious…
Warily they disembarked, to gain the base of the Tower on foot. Either their stealth and secrecy had eluded the attention of the Death Dwarves, or the Tower was not kept under as strict and close a system of surveillance as they had supposed…
Caola stifled a gasp and clutched Kirin’s arm, pointing wordlessly.
At that moment, the skies cleared.
The curtain of vapor was torn aside by cold winds. The icy glitter of the stars blazed down, and the lambent glory of the moons, bathing the barren stone in ashen light.
Ahead, the Iron Tower thrust against the naked heavens.
Kirin sucked in his breath and chewed on his lip, studying the fantastic structure intently.
It was not as tall as he had expected. The Earthling was not exactly sure what he had expected: some splendid, spidery, incredibly tall structure, perhaps. But he had been wrong.
The Tower was a ziggurat, a step-pyramid, built in nine levels. Low and squat and solid, it loomed ahead of them like a man-made mountain, thrusting up out of the severe flatness of the rocky plateau.
It was a grim, prison-like structure. It looked like a fortress, all harsh angles and blocky corners. In the pallid wash of moonfire that lay upon it, the Tower did not look as if it were sheathed in iron. It had not the gloss, the gleam, of metal. Instead it was raised from some porous, lava-like stone, grey and dense and rough-surfaced.
It lifted above the plain, level upon level, ascending into the night. Somehow it looked ominous. Sinister. A weird aura of menace clung about the ziggurat. It radiated a clammy feeling of fear!
They stood, the three of them, staring up at the thing that squatted there amidst the barren plain. There was an atmosphere of alienage about the stone building—something they could not explain. But it was somehow obvious that no human hands had built that looming structure, although none of them could have put into words exactly why they felt thus.
They stared at the Tower. Kirin with a narrowed, measuring gaze, his mouth twisted into an ironic half-smile; Caola, who clung to his arm, lifted her pale face to the Tower, and her features were haunted with a shadow of foreboding and fear; and as for the doctor, he goggled at it with open mouth.
“I say again, lad, I don’t like this—it’s too quiet, I smell a trap!” he hissed.
Kirin shrugged off the emotion of dread and awe that had fallen upon him since his first sight of the Tower.
“Forget it. Come on—and keep your eyes open, both of you!”
They continued forward. From time to time, Kirin glanced in a puzzled fashion at his left wrist. There a leather band was strapped to his arm. Dials glowed phosphorescently.
The miniature detector was very simple: it was heat-sensitive along a monodirectional beam, and delicate enough to register any warm-blooded lifeform larger than a cat. From time to time he swept the surrounding plain with the beam: it registered nothing. The Tower was unguarded.
Unguarded by living things, at least.
They plodded on. The nearer they came to the Tower, the vaster it became. At first sight it had seemed of no particular consequence, a low, squat structure like a citadel or a tomb. Now, as they drew nearer, the true size and proportions of the Tower dawned on them. It was colossal. The longer they moved towards it, the larger it seemed. At last, after almost an hour, they stood before the base of it, and could see the fortress in true perspective.
It was somewhat more than half a mile long, and almost half a mile high. It was the largest single building Kirin had ever seen or heard of; even the central citadel of Azeera’s city back on Zangrimar would have been dwarfed beside it, and that was not one building, but many linked together.
Truly, only a god could have built this thing, he thought, staring up at it.
The ultimate marvel was that it was not built in blocks of stone: it was all of one piece! As for the grey, rough, porous rock whereof it was fashioned, Kirin had never seen such stone before. He ran his palm over it. It seemed as dense and tough as metal. All of his strength could not dislodge a crumb of the rough surface.
It seemed to the eye to be fire-blasted. Terrific flames had poured over it once, aeons ago. The surface was roiled and pocked, like slag, like volcanic lava.
Had the god molded it all at once out of liquid stone?
A portal yawned blackly before them.
There were no guards. No alarm posts or signal-rays. Again he swept the area with his heat-detector. Nothing. It made him feel tense and wary. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. There should have been guards…
“I’m going in,” he grunted.
The girl caught his arm. “Do you think you should?”
“Sure. I’ve committed the charts to memory. I know every foot of the passage. And I’d better get going now, before the Death Dwarves show up. We seem to have caught them on their night off!” His lips twisted in a faint grin at the sickly jest. He did not feel very humorous, standing there at the black mouth of the passage, in the very shadow of the inhuman stone thing that was half as old as the Universe itself. In fact, he felt scared, but he throttled it down, crushed it. And he knew that the longer he stood here, the worse it would get. Better get inside now while he still had some nerve left.
Temujin plucked at his cloak.
“Lad… lad! Let’s forget it… to Chaos with the Medusa, and to Chaos with the high and holy plans of Trevelon! Let’s get away from here, while we’ve still got a whole skin and a sane mind, the three of us! Let’s get off this cursed world of shadows and brooding menace.”