Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, Areth Sul Urstone watched the whole scene unfold, sickened and horrified at what Despair was plotting.
5
* * *
THE HUNTERS
Every soul, from the greatest warrior to the smallest child, has immense worth in the sight of the Great Wyrm. The Great Wyrm has made us stewards over each other, and that is why we must never let our fellows escape.
—From the Wyrmling Catechism
Cullossax had felt anxious throughout the evening. He’d known that he would be missed, and that eventually his fellow tormentors would come looking for him.
Often he had to fight the impulse during the day to flee out into the light.
At last, when the shadows grew long enough to indicate that the day was almost gone, Cullossax bade farewell to the lowly guards, took an iron javelin, and ran after the girl, giving chase.
Her path was easy to follow.
The girl had headed into the forest, witless with terror and blinded by light. With every step her heels had gouged into the thick humus that lay like a blanket under the pines.
Cullossax had seldom been outside the fortress, but he had been taught a bit about tracking, for it was a skill that tormentors were called upon to use even within the labyrinth.
The air was fresh, and soon the forest filled with night sounds—the scurrying of mice among the remains of leaves, the buzz of insects, the querulous peeps of birds, the songs of crickets and cicadas.
The air smelled sweet. Cullossax could not recall the last time he’d tasted fresh air.
The stars came out, blinding points of light so silver-bright that they left an afterimage when he squinted up at them.
Soon, he knew, he would have hunters on his trail, but Cullossax felt resigned to his fate, happy. He was no stranger to death. He’d dealt it out time and time again, and had always known that his turn would come.
With a light heart, Cullossax ran, chasing after a girl, heading for a land that might be no more than a child’s dream. . . .
After long hours, Cullossax still plunged through the pine forest, lost in the chase. His heart pounded a steady rhythm as his legs stretched wide. Greasy sweat streamed down his forehead and face, and stained his tunic with a V down his back. His thirst made him wish for pools of water.
But his mind barely registered these things, for his eyes followed the torn sod in the starlight where his quarry had run.
Unthinking, he leapt over a fallen fir tree, and ducked beneath the boughs of another. In the brush to his right, he heard the snort of a stag. He stood for a moment, heart racing, as he wondered what the sound might portend. He had been outside the fortress only twice in his life, and then not for more than a night. He knew little about wild creatures. Then the stag went bounding away, and he saw it between the trees.
His stomach growled at the thought of fresh flesh.
He could not let himself be distracted. With every long stride, he knew that he drew closer to the girl. She was young and small, and would not be able to keep up this pace forever.
But in the back of his mind, Cullossax worried. He was hunting, but by now he would also be hunted. He should have checked in with his master hours ago. He would be missed, and eventually the story of what had happened would unravel.
The best of his own kind would hound him. No one could exact vengeance like a tormentor of the Bloody Fist. The punishment exercised upon one of their own kind, one who had shamed them and brought their reputation into question, would be harsh indeed.
In Rugassa, torture was not just a science, it was an art. Cullossax pondered long and hard, but was certain that he could not imagine what they would do to him.
They would torture him in public, of course, and the tormentors would vie for the honor of inflicting the most horrific insults upon his body.
In time they would let him die. That at least was certain. It was not a question of how long Cullossax would live, but a question of how long he would suffer before they let him die.
He wondered which of the torturers would come after him, and that gave him pause. There were stories of a new kind of magic in Rugassa. The emperor’s elite troops had been drawing attributes from the lowest of the slaves—strength, speed, bloodlust. These new warriors could run faster than a common man, and longer.
Cullossax wondered what he would do if he had to face such a warrior.
And then there was Vulgnash himself. Cullossax had taken food from a Knight Eternal.
That kind of insult was unheard of.
Cullossax only hoped that Vulgnash could not be spared to lead the chase.
For most of the night Cullossax ran through hills, through a land of seemingly endless forests. Sometimes he had scrambled up hills where aspen trees spread their white branches in the moonlight, gleaming like bones, and other times he descended into vales filled with oak and ash.
But always there was the forest, and Cullossax hoped that if Vulgnash gave chase, the trees might hide him from above.
The midsummer’s air hardly cooled during the night, and as Cullossax neared a stream, he finally found the girl.
She was lying in the ferns and moss beside the water’s edge, curled in a fetal position. When she heard Cullossax draw near, she yelped in panic, then began crawling toward the brook, shaking so badly from fear that she could not stand.
Cullossax ran to her. The iron javelin was heavy in his hand, and he could have pierced her if that had been his intent.
“No, please!” she whimpered. “Let me go.”
Cullossax laughed, not because he enjoyed her fear but because there was something so odd about her. She had a softness that was pure and innocent and completely unlike anything he had seen. No wyrmling had such a soft heart.
As he laughed, the girl struck. She suddenly leapt up and lunged, aiming a sharp stick at his heart.
Cullossax grabbed her arm and wrestled the weapon away. It was not hard. She was young, and the long chase coupled with her own fear had weakened her. A simple head butt made her swoon.
“I have not come to kill you,” Cullossax said. “I’ve come to help you.”
“I—don’t understand.”
“I could have fed you to Vulgnash,” he said. “I should have. And for my audacity, I may yet die. But I chose to let you live.” He nodded south. “How far to this Inkarra?”
“Beyond the Great Spine,” she said.
Cullossax bit his lower lip. Three hundred miles at least, maybe four. A warrior, running, might make it in three nights. But Cullossax was a tormentor, and was not used to such exertion. Neither was the girl.
“Can you run?” he demanded.
The girl dropped her head. No.
Some primal instinct warned him to hurry. He grunted, grabbed the girl, and threw her over a shoulder. “Then rest.”
He jumped into the brook and splashed downstream. His wyrmling brothers had strong noses, he knew, and he hoped to throw them off of his track. After a few hundred yards, he turned back the way that he had come, and then began a zigzag path heading east.
The land in that direction was dropping away, and as it neared dawn the sound of morning birdsong began to fill the air. Larks twittered and jays ratcheted.
He found himself on a small hill, peering down into a meadow. Miles away, he could see a line of alders. The stars had all faded from the sky, and the sun would be up soon. Bits of cloud on the horizon were bloody red.
The girl stared toward the sky, a curious look on her face.
“What do you see?” Cullossax asked, worried that she had spotted a sign of their enemies.
“The sunrise, it’s beautiful this morning,” she said. “There are colors in the clouds—faintest blue along the edges, and palest gold in the sky.”
Blue and gold were words that he had never heard before. She had to use Inkarran words to describe these colors.
“You see colors,” he asked, “like the humans do?”
“Yes,”
she admitted, “ever since the joining of the worlds. That is how I know that this is not all just some simple madness.”
By now, his shoulder ached and his legs were failing. “Can you run yet?” he asked the girl.
“Yes,” she said.
He set her down and pointed east. “We must reach those trees before sunrise. It will be a race. Can you make it?”
She grunted, the wyrmling sound for yes, and they were off. They sprinted through the tall grass. Rabbits bounded away from their trail and finches flew up out of the thistles.
The sun began to crest the horizon, a cruel red light looming upon the edge of the world. The sight of it brought tears of pain to Cullossax’s eyes.
But the tree line was just ahead, promising shade and protection from the sun.
Cullossax ran until he felt as if his heart would burst, and the girl began to fall behind. He grabbed her wrist and pulled, urging her to greater speed.
The sun was a blinding orb ahead of them, and Cullossax averted his eyes, threw an arm across his face, and tried to ignore the pain.
At last he staggered into the cool shadows of the woods. The girl threw herself to the ground well inside the tree line, and Cullossax stood for a moment, grabbing his knees, as he hunched in pain, gasping for breath.
He glanced back along the trail that they’d taken, saw how the bent blades of summer wheat betrayed their path. In the distance, two miles back, three wyrmling warriors gave chase, loping down out of the hills.
Cullossax halted for an instant, studied them. They were running with incredible swiftness.
Speed, he realized. They’ve taken attributes of speed. He did some mental calculations. It would have taken an hour or two for anyone to notice that he’d gone missing, another hour to figure out where he’d gone.
I should have had a great lead on them.
But these men moved faster than normal wyrmlings, twice as fast, perhaps three times. They’d taken endowments of speed, and probably of strength and stamina as well.
I cannot outrun them, Cullossax realized. And I cannot hope to slay all three of them.
Yet as they raced down from the hills and reached the edge of the distant field, the rising sun smote them. They peered along the trail. They could not see him here, hidden in the shadows. They threw their hands up, trying to shelter their eyes.
At last, in defeat, they turned away and trudged back up into the hills, into the trees, to find some shadows deep enough where they could hide from the sun for the day.
It was with just such a hope that Cullossax had run to the east. No wyrmling could withstand such burning light.
He hid there in the shelter of the woods, and sat for a long moment, thinking. The girl lay gasping for breath.
“Do you have a name?” he asked. It was not an idle question. Many young wyrmlings of the lower castes were not permitted names. They had to be earned.
“Ki-rissa,” she said. “Kirissa Mentarn.”
“That is not your wyrmling name. It is an Inkarran name?”
She nodded. Cullossax frowned at the odd gesture, and she grunted yes, to appease him.
“Kirissa,” he said. “There are soldiers on our trail. They’ve been granted strength and speed by the new magic. Have you heard of it?”
“The rune magic? I know of it. It came from the other world.”
This admission made Cullossax wonder what other helpful things she might recall.
“The soldiers trailing us are fast. We won’t be able to outrun them. So we must outsmart them.”
“All right,” she said. She put on a studious face.
“They know which way we’re running,” he said. “So we must change directions. Instead of going south, we should go east or west. And we must take time to cover our trail, and hide our scent. We must hide it perfectly. To do less, is to die.”
“All right,” Kirissa agreed.
Nearby a squirrel began to give a warning chatter. Cullossax halted for a moment, listening, but realized that the squirrel was warning others away from him.
“One last thing,” he said. “We must leave now. We can’t afford to rest through the day. Those who hunt us are moving too fast. But the days are long, and the nights are short. It may be that if we can get far enough ahead of the Bloody Fist, they will lose our trail in the dark, and we will be safe.”
“We will go sunblind,” Kirissa argued, her face paling from fear.
“Close your eyes and hold on to my hand, if you must,” Cullossax said. “I will watch for the both of us.”
He did not say it, but if he tried to walk in the open sun for long, he was the one who would go sunblind. At that point, she would have to leave him.
Kirissa stared for a long moment and finally asked, “Why are you doing this? You were supposed to be my tormentor.”
Cullossax wanted to answer, but when he opened his mouth, he could think of nothing to say.
He had no dreams. It wasn’t as if he’d secretly longed for escape his whole life.
Nor did it have to do with her. Kirissa was not quite old enough to mate. He had no lust for her, no desire to possess her. Even now, he imagined that he could strangle her if he wanted.
Yet he admired those who fought against their own executions. How had her Earth King put it, “The time will come when the small folk of the world must stand against the large”?
Certainly, in attacking him, Kirissa had fulfilled her Earth King’s prophecy.
Cullossax wondered if he had spared her through idle curiosity. He wondered if he had spared her only because he had spent his whole life in the labyrinth, and secretly he yearned to see what life was like outside.
As a child he had played a game. The world was a harsh place, and instinct told him that he also had to be cruel in order to survive. But he had once heard a lord say that such instincts were bred into the wyrmlings. A man’s chances to breed were tied to his ranking, and a man’s ranking rose in proportion to his capacity for cruelty.
If that was true, he had considered, then would it not be possible to engineer a different kind of world, one that was less cruel?
He had not been able to imagine such a world. But Kirissa claimed to come from one. And so he was curious.
But that was not it, either. He’d never been a man of great curiosity.
No, Cullossax felt inside himself, and knew only that something was broken, something more vital than bone—his very soul. He had grown sick of his life in the labyrinth. Life there seemed like no life at all, as if it was a walking death, and he had only been waiting for the day when he no longer breathed.
At last he answered, “I came with you because I am weary of living. I thought maybe that in another world, my life would have been better.”
“You can’t be weary of life,” Kirissa said. She reached up and stroked Cullossax’s face, a gesture that he found to be odd and discomfiting; it felt as if a bug were crawling on him. “Among the wyrmlings,” she said, “no one is really alive.”
6
* * *
TASTES OF THE NETHERWORLD
Despair created the earth, the moon, and the stars. Despair owns them all—every world that spins about even the dimmest sun.
That is why, when you look into the heavens at night, you feel so small and desolate. It is your heart bearing witness to your own insignificance, and to the overwhelming power of Despair.
—From the Wyrmling Catechism
The first full taste of a meadow in the netherworld was something that Talon would never forget.
The aroma staggered her senses: sweet grass, rich loam, and the perfume of tens of thousands of flowers—from deep beds of clover to vines of honeysuckle and stalks of wild mint. There were wood roses in the meadow, and flowers for which Talon had no name.
And all around, birdsong rose from the thickets, curiously complex in its music, as if by nature birds were meant to compose arias and had only somehow forgotten this upon Talon’s world.
When th
e company was all gathered upon the netherworld, Daylan Hammer returned to the Door of Air, and with the Wizard Sisel’s staff, drew another rune. In an instant there was a thundering boom, like lightning striking, and the door collapsed.
Daylan turned to the company.
“Remember my warnings. Touch nothing. Drink from no stream. We will head east, but must find shelter before nightfall.”
“Why is that?” someone called.
“Because things come out at night,” Daylan answered.
And he was off, striding across the glade. A trail ran through it, a winding trail like a rabbit run.
Daylan walked along it carefully, as if treading across a fallen log.
“Stay on the trail,” he called. “We walk single-file.”
The folks began forming a line, and soon they were winding down the hill, looking like a great serpent slowly slithering through the grass.
Talon strode along behind the emir. They gave up on their language lessons, and walked silently. No one talked. As well as they could, the forty thousand complied with Daylan’s wishes. Babes cried, and occasionally someone yelped as they tripped, but overall, the journey was a remarkably sober one.
They had not gone for half an hour before a child screamed, not a dozen paces ahead of Talon. She peered around the emir and saw a girl, perhaps six or seven, drop a huge posy, its pink flower falling to the ground.
She screamed and held up her hand. “Help!” she cried. “A bee stung me!”
“Help yourself,” her mother whispered impatiently. “You’ve been stung by bees before. Pull the stinger out—or let me do it.”
But the child held her hand up and studied it in shock, then let out a bloodcurdling cry. “I’m on fire! Help. I’m burning!”
To Talon it did indeed seem that the child was burning. Her hand was turning a vivid red, a color that Talon had never seen in a human limb, and near the sting it had begun to swell terribly. The girl screamed and fell to the ground, writhing in pain.
The Wyrmling Horde Page 9