Twenty two days after leaving Eastglade, Gallit's patrol arrived back at the great west road, and two days after that, they finally reached Fort Battleaxe itself. The guards on Farbank Castle roused themselves and tried to look smart when they saw them coming, hastily hiding the fishing poles and decks of cards they had been using, but not quickly enough that both Gallit and Drake missed seeing them. Both were disgusted by their sloppiness and laxness. The fact that they were local conscripts and not regular soldiers and that it was peacetime with no enemy threatening was irrelevant, and they both made a note to inform their respective commanders.

They crossed the wide bridge across the river Tarrow and climbed the ramp that led up to the great gates of the city itself. There was a brief pause while Gallit identified himself to the gatekeepers, regular Beltharans and much more professional and disciplined than the locals on Farbank Castle, and then they were inside and marching down the wide street towards the great tower at the city's centre, the tower around which the rest of the city had grown.

The tower was two thousand years old, having been built in the distant past when Agglemon had been a young and vigorous kingdom, surrounded by the collapsing remnants of even more ancient empires and threatened by hordes of barbarians from the west. Many strong fortresses had been built to protect Agglemon's borders, among which were the six great towers, each one six hundred feet high, five hundred feet wide at the base and three hundred feet wide at the top, where a crown of smaller towers stood around the entrance of the great shaft that housed the stables of the aerial cavalry.

Of the six, only this one was still intact and functional, the others having long since crumbled to rubble or even disappeared completely, and even this one looked its age. The beautiful and lovingly hand crafted decorative ornamentation that had originally covered it from top to bottom had long since been erased by the slow processes of erosion, leaving the tower completely smooth and unadorned, with only the defensive armoury scattered across its surface to break up its outline.

Nevertheless, it was still breathtakingly impressive, mainly due to its sheer size. There wasn't a single spot in the city where you couldn't see it looming down on you. Nowhere where you could hide from the gazes of the soldiers marching ceaselessly around its balconies, towers and battlements, looking down and out with their telescopes, seeing everything, missing nothing. You never got used to it, no matter how long you lived there. Even those who'd lived there all their lives and had grown up with it still found themselves glancing up at it now and then, as if unable to believe that such a huge thing could really exist. And yet, it was the pride of the city. Their Eiffel Tower, Tower Bridge, Statue of Liberty and Taj Mahal all rolled up into one. Without it, Fort Battleaxe would be nothing. Without it, the city wouldn't even exist.

Drake stared at it in awe as they approached, the road they were following leading straight for it. At the top, the tiny specks of griffins could be seen, carrying their riders to and from the surrounding countryside where they ceaselessly searched for any sign of approaching trouble. Lower down were the catapult turrets, their height giving them a greater range and destructive power than any others in the world, although it reduced their accuracy. They fired gravel and small stones rather than great boulders, the kinetic energy of their fall from such a great height making them fall like a shotgun blast among the attackers on the ground. Or at least they would if they were ever used. Since the city had grown up around the tower several centuries ago, no enemy had ever penetrated the city's walls to attack it directly, except from the air, so its impressive defensive armoury hadn't been used since the fall of Agglemon. These days, the tower was used only to house the city's garrison and store provisions in times of siege.

The patrol reached tower road, the road that encircled the tower and separated it from the rest of the city. Both sides of the wide road had a grass verge a dozen yards wide containing trees and flower beds, the only greenery in the city, and hundreds of scantily clad young people were stretched out on them sunbathing, making the most of the year's remaining good weather. A few of them were the children of army officers and city officials, but most were students from neighbouring towns and cities attending Brindown, Fort Battleaxe's famous military academy, taking advantage of a rare free moment in their busy routines.

"I have to go in there now, to report for debriefing," said Drake to Gallit, indicating the tower. "Will you excuse me, sergeant?"

"Of course," replied Gallit. "I've got to give a report too, and you can be sure that you'll figure very prominently in it."

Drake wasn't sure how to take that. "Thank you, sergeant." he said in an uncertain tone of voice. He nodded to them and the Sergeant gave him a nod back, and then Drake strode off towards the tower's single ground level entrance.

Gallit and Rivan stood and watched him for a few moments, then continued on, leading the men of their patrol back to their barracks in the city's innermost circle. "So," said Rivan, "what do you think of him?"

"He'll go far, that boy will" said the grizzled Sergeant, still staring straight ahead. "He'll make a bloody great priest of Samnos."

It sounded like a compliment, but something made the Corporal wonder whether that was how he'd meant it.

☆☆☆

Drake passed through the huge, solid steel doors of the tower's entrance, pausing only to identify himself to the senn guards on duty there and leave his spear and shield in the gate armoury. "Corporal Drake?" said the Captain of the guard. "Captain Resalintas left a message for you. You're to report to him in his private quarters at midday."

"In his private quarters?" said Drake puzzled. Very few people had ever seen the inside of his private rooms. The acolytes serving him and about three people he'd come to consider friends. "Something serious?"

The Captain just shrugged. None of his business, that shrug said. Drake nodded to himself and moved on.

He headed down the broad corridor towards the centre of the tower, glancing nervously up at the deadfall as he passed beneath it. There was a hundred tons of rock up there, ready to fall on the heads of any attackers who somehow managed to get this far, held up only by a few straps of rusty iron, controlled by a guard in a room above with his hand poised by a large, well oiled lever. If the mechanism failed and the rock fell... He breathed a sigh of relief as he left the deadfall behind and began passing the branching side corridors. This level of the tower, and the fifteen levels above it, were currently occupied by the city's five thousand strong nightshift, spread out luxuriously in a space that could easily have held twice that number. If all seventy five levels of the tower were packed to capacity, it could theoretically hold fifty thousand men, and the below ground levels could store enough food to last them well over a year, but the tower had never held that many people in its entire history. The Agglemonians had believed in designing for any eventuality, no matter how unlikely.

Getting to the top of a tower so tall was a real problem. A staircase that tall was considered out of the question (although much taller staircases did exist elsewhere in the world), so the original architects had prevailed upon the wizards of the time to provide a solution. The wizards had provided a dozen elevators, large wooden cabinets that moved up and down a shaft in the centre of the tower by levitation and that could be summoned to any level in minutes. This system had functioned splendidly for many centuries, with cabinets being replaced every few decades as the magic in them wore off, but when Agglemon went into decline the tower was neglected and the elevators failed one by one. When the last cabinet failed, access to the top of the tower became possible only by griffin and the tower was abandoned.

When the Ilandians moved in and Fort Battleaxe began to grow up around it, they looked for some way of getting the lift service going again. The only wizard who might have been able to create some new levitation cabinets had died a couple of years before, but fortunately he had left behind an iron slave, a kind of living statue made entirely of metal, which now served his ex-apprentice. The soldiers had approached the young wizard and, after a bit of haggling, persuaded him to sell it to them. With it to provide an unlimited supply of metallic muscle power, they constructed a winch system by which the iron slave, at the top of the tower, turned a handle in response to signals from below to move the cabinet up and down the shaft. This temporary solution had worked so well that it had been adopted permanently, and over the centuries five other iron slaves had been acquired, bringing the number of working elevators up to six.

Reaching the central shaft, Drake found one of the cabinets waiting for him and got in. He pulled a length of rope that ran all the way up to the slave chamber at the very top of the shaft, ringing a bell there and telling the iron slave to turn the huge wheel. When he reached the right level, he would ring the bell again, telling it to stop. This simple task strained the iron slave's intellectual capacity to its very limit, but what they lacked in brainpower they more than made up for in sheer strength.

The cabinet had no front, and the elevator shaft had only a simple metal gate made of three horizontal bars and one diagonal one to stop people falling down it, so Drake got a view of every level as he went past. Not that there was much to see. Just a few soldiers and civilian personnel wandering around as they went about their everyday business. A couple of them entered the cabinet to go to a level further up, not bothering to stop it at their level but just opening the gate and jumping in as it went past, and a few floors further up they left the same way.

Reaching the sixteenth level, the one containing the temple of Samnos, Drake got off and marched down the corridor to the bath room, where a large pool was full of rainwater gathered by the gutters that ringed the tower at intervals. Drake stripped off and got in while an acolyte, who would one day be a priest of Samnos himself if he survived the rigours of training, took away his travelstained robes to be washed and pressed. He replaced them with a fresh uniform that he hung on a clothes rack, then stripped and got in the pool with Drake to scrape his back.

As Drake scraped the grime from his arms, he thought fondly back to his own days as an acolyte, He had been the second oldest of the acolytes of the time, but one of the first to be accepted by Samnos as one of his own after which he'd been privileged to serve the great Resalintas himself. A niggling sense of anxiety crept over him as the grime from his body floated to the top of the water, to be later scooped off by another acolyte and discarded. What did he want with him? Had he done something wrong? Was he about to receive a dressing down from a man who could rout an army with a single stern glance?

With an effort of will, he pushed these thoughts to the back of his mind. Whatever it was that was in store for him, he would meet it like a priest of Samnos, with dignity and composure. He would make the Captain and his God proud of him, even if he was about to receive some terrible punishment. With this in mind, he jumped out of the pool as soon as he was decently clean, toweled himself off, dressed and marched off.

He was still a few minutes early, so he went to a meditation chamber first to pray and calm his mind. Then, when only two minutes remained until the exact moment of noon, as measured by the great clock in the tower of the town hall, he got up and went down the corridor that led to Resalintas's rooms. He knew that the great priest would be able to hear the chiming of the great bell as well as everyone else in the city, and he intended to be knocking on the door at the exact moment that the first chime rang out, that being the degree of punctuality Resalintas expected from those chosen to serve Samnos.

His timing was perfect, and as the great rolling notes echoed away into the distance a gruff voice told him to come in. He turned the doorhandle, and as he pushed open the door his nerves returned and he was surprised to find his hand trembling. He was feeling fear! He'd faced death countless times during his training. There had been a couple of times when he'd thought his death certain, and he'd felt nothing but a calm acceptance every time, but now, summoned without explanation to the private quarters of the legendary Resalintas himself, he was afraid! He had to call upon his training to bring himself back under control, to steady his hands and slow his heart, and only when he was sure he'd eliminated all visible sign of his fear did he enter the room.

Resalintas, standing inside and waiting for him, returned his salute, and his sharp eyes spotted the tiny signs of fear that the younger priest hadn't quite managed to hide. "Relax, Corporal," he said. "You're not in any trouble. I realise that I have acquired a certain reputation, perhaps deservedly, but you need not worry about it. Unless you have committed any sins that I don't know about, of course. Have you?"

"No priest is perfect," replied Drake nervously. "Myself least of all. I have fallen short of the standards our God demands time and again, but I have committed no deliberate sins. Nor will I ever."

"Well said," said Resalintas, and they stood there for a minute or two, each studying the other. Drake had seen the Captain many times since his ordination, but this was the first time he had been in his private quarters since his term as the older priest's personal acolyte had ended, and it suddenly seemed as though he was seeing him for the first time. In many ways the two men were very similar, and could almost have been father and son. Both were well over six feet tall and powerfully built, their large brawny hands hard and calloused from weapons training, and they both had a good number of scars all over their bodies, although Drake's were fewer and mostly acquired in training, having had fewer opportunities than his mentor to be scarred in genuine combat.

Both were dressed in flowing blood red robes over chain mail armour, the common uniform of all priests of Samnos everywhere. The uniform also included a steel helmet, but neither man was wearing his at the moment. Both had crew cut blonde hair, although the older priest's was beginning to grey at the temples. Both had grey eyes, but whereas Drake's were the grey of cast iron, Resalintas's eyes were the grey of the finest steel, and anyone caught in that gaze felt that they were burning a hole right through their bodies, baring their soul for critical inspection. There was even a tale that he had once outstared a basilisk, and Drake was almost able to believe it.

There, however, the similarity ended, or so Drake thought. The one great difference between them was that the Captain was surrounded by an almost palpable aura of authority and power. Even if he were to be dressed in the rags of a beggar, that aura of righteousness and terrible holiness would still be there, and woe betide anyone who aroused his displeasure. However, although Drake had no way of knowing it, and wouldn't have believed it if told, he was beginning to radiate the same kind of power and dignity himself, although to a much lesser extent as yet, due to his youth and relative inexperience. Gallit and all his men had sensed it, however. The shologs and goblins he had fought had sensed it, and Resalintas sensed it now, and was well pleased by it.

"You're probably wondering why I asked you to come here," he said at last, breaking the silence.

Asked, thought Drake wryly. He wondered briefly what would have happened if he'd sent the Captain a message explaining that he couldn't come right now, and asking whether tomorrow would be all right. "Yes, sir," he replied. "I am a little curious."

"Well you might be," said the Captain. "I have another mission for you, a difficult and important one. There's a job to be done that requires a priest of Samnos. I've spent a lot of time wondering who to send, and your name springs repeatedly to mind. How do you feel about that?"

Drake was astounded. "But I'm the most junior of our order in the city!" he exclaimed. "I was ordained less than a month ago! If it's an important mission, surely it would be better to send someone older and more experienced. You yourself might go." A thought suddenly occurred to him, and his heart missed a beat. "Unless it's a suicide mission, of course. I am, of course, willing to lay down my life if Our Lord requires it of me..."

"No, Corporal," interrupted Resalintas. "It's not a suicide mission, or at least we hope not, and as for my own going, I am. I am considering asking you to come with me."

Drake was dumbfounded. For anyone to be asked to accompany the legendary Resalintas on a mission was both a great honour and a terrible burden, since the Captain expected everyone else to live up to his own standards. For anyone as inexperienced as he, it was unheard of. "Why me?" he managed to ask.

"Because, young Drake, I've been keeping an eye on you for the past few years, and you've been showing great promise. There is a great potential in you. I believe you have it in you to become one of the greatest of our order, maybe even greater than I. Our Lord favours you, that is obvious, and I believe that it is His will that you be the one chosen for this mission. Your conduct during the patrol from which you have just returned confirms my judgement."

"But, how do you know what happened during the patrol, sir?" asked Drake in surprise. "We've only just got back, and the Sergeant hasn't had enough time to give his report yet."

"I have my means," said Resalintas. "But I would like you to confirm what I already know and give me a full report now."

Drake did so, and gave a clear and concise account of everything that had happened since they'd left the city. Since most of that time had been fairly uneventful, with only the occasional sighting of a forest dwelling humanoid, he was able to tell it quite quickly, spending most time on the Eastglade incident and giving a factual, impartial account of his own involvement, as if he was describing the actions of another person. The only time when his account faltered was when he reached the bit where he'd had to use Aspect of Might, and he searched the Captain's face for any sign of disapproval, but the rugged granite face remained flat and impassive.

When he reached the end, he fell silent, waiting for the Captain to respond, but Resalintas remained silent for several minutes, as if deep in thought. "You will put your report in writing, and let me have it first thing tomorrow," he said at last. "Your report confirms most of what I already knew, but you played down your part in the Eastglade incident considerably. In future, you will make your reports unbiased and factual. There is no place in the priesthood for modesty. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," said Drake, with a mouth suddenly gone dry. The slightest rebuke from Resalintas had the force of a severe flogging.

"Good," said the Captain in a softer voice. "And now, you want to know about this mission we're going on.

"Yes, sir," The younger priest replied.

Resalintas paced back and forth for a couple of moments, as if gathering his thoughts. Then he began to speak.