by Mike Maddox
The Worm That Wasn't
Frozen to the ladder, they heard the sounds of voices coming nearer. They both peered upwards, expecting to see the face of Krillan or one of his guards at any moment.
Two eyes appeared at the top of the well. Two bright green eyes. Gim shrieked and dropped to the floor.
It was the worm. The worm was slithering down towards them, no doubt moving away from Krillan and his men.
Leah jumped down to him.
"They've spooked it. Come on, move it!"
The two of them ran blindly now, trying not to hit their heads on the roof of the tunnel.
Behind them, in the dark, the worm cast a rueful eye upward at the sky above it, thwarted by the soldiers. But smelling their scent, it licked the walls and floor and, with a crafty, purposeful slither, it followed Leah and Gim down the tunnel.
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First published in 2008 by Abaddon BooksTM, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.
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ISBN (.epub format): 978-1-84997-009-9
ISBN (.mobi format): 978-1-84997-031-0
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
THE WORM THAT WASN'T
Mike Maddox
Prologue
The last days of the Great War
The sunset had been glorious.
From yellow to gold to deep red, the sun had sunk slowly behind the hills, casting a rich amber glow over the fields and woods. It had been a warm day, and the sudden drop in temperature only made it all the more beautiful. The smells of the land changed as the heat left the fields. Subtler scents now overshadowed by the richer smells of earth.
The sky turned from a deep summer blue, to dark blue, to darker blue. The final rays of the sun turned the clouds on the horizon into bright red fields of colour. After the heat of the day, night was a relief. It caressed all the senses at once as the final glow vanished.
It was then that the screaming started.
The military attack ships dropped in from high altitude. They fell through the tracer fire like cherry blossoms blown on the wind, bringing death in their wake. There was something beautifully serious about them. Like thoughts of murder and suffering given physical form, they fell with a sound like razor wire on sheet metal.
Gold Company had dug in well, but had been expecting the attack to come from the expanse of no mans land that lay in front of them. The aircraft had come from their exposed left flank, taking them off guard.
The soldiers trained their guns on the enemy craft, struggling with their bulky armour. The aircraft were brutal and inelegant in design and packed with magical defences, making them hard to focus on. Looking at one was like trying to remember a dream, or trying to understand a complicated idea; all this while people around you were shooting or dying.
Captain Niaal ducked as one of the ships whistled overhead, showering the ground with silver darts. The trench had shelters, but they were a hundred yards down the line. The soldiers would be dead before they could get there. Pressing himself into the side of the trench Niaal pulled his night vision goggles down fast, feeling the familiar sense of déjà vu and fear as the night sky burned into visible red.
"How many sir? I count three." his Lieutenant, Carleaf, said, weapon pushed hard to his shoulder, scanning the dark skies. "Bloody things. We should have had warning. What the ninth hell is early warning up to anyway?"
Niaal's brow furrowed. "Four. Three ahead, one behind. Looks a different design to others. Possibly a freighter."
Carleaf pointed up. "There, sir. Directly overhead. It's hovering. Listing to starboard, looks like it's in trouble."
Niaal knew this might be their best chance. The attack ships were too fast to draw a bead on anyway, but a lumbering freighter caught from beneath was a target they could hope to hit. "Carleaf! Bolt gun party! At the double!"
Three men came puffing down the trench, bringing the heavy weapon with them. "Straight up lads, we'll only get one shot at this."
The soldiers fell to the job like cogs in a machine. It was the thing they had trained for over and over again, until they could do it with their eyes closed. Until they could do it in their sleep if need be. Most of all they could do it quietly, quickly and with no messing about. As soon as the base plate was slapped down, the legs were in place and the gun slotted in position. The hell with regulations, they pulled their gloves off with their teeth to spin the flywheels and locking nuts into place. Dropping to their knees, they aimed the gun straight up to where the ship bobbed uncertainly in the breeze.
"Captain! The attack ships, they're coming back!"
"Covering fire! They'll be trying to defend the freighter. Hold them off until we can bring the gun to bear!
"Sir. Squad, front, covering fire!"
Niaal looked up. The freighter was moving away. Another minute and it would be beyond their range. "Come on lads, hurry it up!"
The gunner eyed the target, pausing to wipe the sweat from his eyes. "Almost there sir." He stroked the safety catch on the trigger mechanism, feeling the embossed sigils glow with anticipation. His number two slapped him on the shoulder, signalling that the charge was in place. "Gun loaded, awaiting orders to fire!"
There was an explosion fifty feet to the left. The three incoming attack craft had opened fire on their position. The men responded with tracer, dissecting the night with streaks of magnesium coated death.
"Fire!" shouted Niaal. The gun kicked, and spat a flower of destruction into the air. The freighter was caught direct amidships and dissolved into plasma and magic. Indistinct shapes blossomed outwards, as ideas and men rained down. "Direct hit! Well done, boys."
Turning his gaze from the freighter, Niaal now concentrated on the three attack ships, which had turned tail and were now heading for the hills at full speed. Which was strange. The loss of the freighter was a blow to them. Presumably they had been its escort, here to protect it. With the freighter destroyed there was probably no need for them to risk themselves further. But Niaal's men were still sitting targets, and should have been easy enough prey for three ships in formation. Why were they running? It didn't make sense.
"Lieutenant, get a trace on those ships would you?" Carleaf stroked the air in front of him, calling up thought forms showing the field of battle. Three triangular shapes were bobbing away towards the north. "What are they doing?"
"They're running for it, sir. We must have scared them off."
"No. No, that's extremely unlikely. They can see how thin on the ground we are. They would have
been safe enough as long as they kept out of the way of the bolt gun."
"Well something's spooked them, sir."
Niaal stood up, looking at the debris that had fallen from the freighter. Slops of plasma sank into the soil from the wreckage of the ship. Pieces of machinery and the bodies of the crew were scattered across their trench. Looking up, Niaal saw what looked like a fine mist falling gently from the sky. At first he thought it was snow, but that was impossible. A piece landed on his sleeve. It was a fibre, a thread the thickness of a fingernail. "That's odd," he said, suddenly alarmed.
"What is, sir?"
"It moved. Look, it's moving." He peered closer. Now Carleaf was leaning in too, to see the strange stuff drifting down around them.
"Perhaps that's what scared the fighters off sir" laughed Carleaf. "Perhaps they're scared of worms. Pilots are soft like that"
"Maybe they were. Maybe they should be."
Niaal pulled his water bottle from his belt, emptied it, and flicked the tiny creature inside with his gloved finger. "But maybe they had very good cause to be. It's probably nothing, but we should take no chances. Sergeant? Tell the men masks down, I want the area sterilised."
"Masks down, we're cooking up. Link in squares and brace for impact!"
The men dropped their visors and instantly sat in circles of eight; arms linked together, heads down, bodies braced. Niaal swung his backpack round, and opened it, withdrawing a blue metal cylinder the size of a water jug. "Ready?" He turned to Carleaf.
"Ready sir."
"Five seconds, four, three -" The two of them linked arms and dropped to the ground, heads down, visors sealed.
For three miles in every direction everything went white. It was suddenly daylight. Every living thing in the air or in the soil tensed and died. Only the soldiers, safe in their suits survived, holding on to one another, eyes screwed tight against the migraine intense pain that briefly shot through them.
They had survived. They had seen them off.
The war was nearly over; the great powers of Inan had seen that the end was in sight and were even now jostling to make sure that each nation came out of the conflict as best they could. In the northern hemisphere, small independent nation states were splintering off from the political giant known as the continent of Bethel. Lesser wizards and generals had risen up, some daring to challenge the might of the great powers of Inan. The Allesh Free State, to whom Niaal and Griggo owed their allegiance, was one such small country. However, they differed from many of the fledgling countries in that they were rallied around a Mage, an incredibly powerful wizard, more usually associated with one of the larger countries. The sheer threat of his power looked almost certain to guarantee that Allesh's enemies would leave them well alone.
Niaal was first back on his toes. "Squad, on your feet. We don't want to get caught like that again. Eyes open, mouths shut, weapons on safety. Sergeant, lead the way."
Niall felt a strange movement under his glove. A sort of tickle. Pulling off his glove he saw that the fingernail of the digit he had flicked the tiny worm with was long, in need of cutting. This would not be a point to be noticed, except that Niaal had cut his nails only that very morning. And yet the nail was now showing a week's growth.
Deciding against clipping his water bottle back on to his belt, he wrapped it in magically reflective material and dropped it into his backpack. If the creature was magical then it made sense to insulate the bottle until he had a better chance to examine it. Setting off, Niaal was at that moment unaware that he had potentially doomed thousands of people to certain death. Safe in the bottle the tiny creature squirmed and wriggled. It knew nothing but blackness.
Blackness and hunger.
The three aircraft regrouped fifty miles north in secure airspace. The mission specialist passengers checked their readings and consulted with headquarters. Three hundred thousand individual worm specimens had been released when the enemy missile struck the decoy freighter. The passengers on board the aircraft opened their minds, allowing themselves to be used as conduits by the fierce, terrible intelligence they worshipped as their master, the Warlord of Varn. They felt him flow through them, felt a thrill of excitement as he brushed aside every memory and every experience they had accumulated over a whole lifetime of service to him, as if they were insects on his robes. The pilots flushed with a terrible dark pride that they were being used so casually.
As their minds reached out and joined with their master, they felt their own consciousnesses expanding. They were able to track the path of individual beads of sweat running down the brows of their enemies below. If they had so wished, they could have mapped the surface of raindrops as one might oceans across some undiscovered continent.
They scoured the battlefield behind them, searching the air, the mud, and the dust. The mind, when they found it, was so tiny it could hardly be called a mind at all. It was animal, obviously, but so primitive, so wild. It had only one thought right now. To feed. To feed and stop the hunger that consumed it.
The joined minds felt their own elation matched and swamped by that of their master.
Despite the sterilisation device, the readings confirmed their hopes. Against all the odds, the mission had succeeded. One specimen had been picked up by the enemy and was even now being transported safely into the very heart of their enemy's territory. Now they need only wait for the worm to do its work, and let the province of Allesh, and all Bethel along with it, starve itself to death.
Pleased with the way the day had gone, the great mind withdrew from his hosts roughly. They slumped in their seats, spent, eyes vacant. It would take several months of intense therapy before they would even be able to control their own bowels again, let alone speak of their experience. But as they lay there in the hospital wards, speechless, unable to even feed themselves, they would be revered as heroes. Nurses back in Varn would wash their faces with grateful tears; men would name their baby sons after them, for what they had done today.
They had won a great victory. If they ever recovered, their lives would be full of honour and gratitude. Far away, their master felt a twitch at the edge of his dreaming, like a sleeping man disturbed by a breeze, and he knew their scheme had prospered. He turned his gaze elsewhere, satisfied that his pawns had done well, like clever ants in a maze. It would be morning soon, the start of a new day, and the start of a new world.
And the end of the old one.
CHAPTER ONE
Fifteen Years Later
There was something wrong with the sky that morning. The colour of the sun, the way the windows of the Castle reflected the dim, cold red light; it was all wrong.
Leah Carleaf stood on the balcony, plaiting her auburn hair, a ribbon held in her mouth. She wasn't sure what it was exactly that was wrong with the sky. Something about the colours, the shape of the clouds. She couldn't point to it, but it was there in front of her, a niggling annoyance to early morning eyes, bleary and still far more asleep than awake.
"Leah!" A clear musical voice cut through her daydream. Saran, her mother, called from the kitchen below. "Your breakfast is going cold! You'll be late for work again."
"I'll be right down." Leah called back.
Like all workers in the Garden, Leah wore the simple peasant dress of country folk, albeit with a synthetic fabric that repelled the dirt and dust. Just one of the many blessings from the Mage.
Sliding her feet into her slippers she peered down at the street below, which was now starting to fill with market traders setting up their stalls and trades-people hurrying by on their way to work. Some of them were talking and bidding each other a good morning, others silent, still munching food as they hurried along deep in thought.
Her father had never been late for work.
The thought of him caught her unawares, a sudden dull pain inside. He had always been the first out of bed; the first to get the fire going in the kitchen, bringing her hot honey drinks in the winter, or playing with her in the warm early summer morning
s before school.
Leah's father, Griggo Carleaf, was a hero of the last Great War. The conflict had lasted five hundred years, and had all but destroyed the world of Inan. Entire generations grew knowing nothing but fire and violence. Griggo had fought for the army that followed the wizard known as the Mage Pillian, creating the new independent nation of Allesh. The war over, he had returned to his academic studies as head botanist in the Garden, the magical powerhouse of the Protectorate.
But the Mage had no appetite for government, and had built himself a castle, a magical construct where he could lose himself in meditation and study. He created the role of Sages, lesser magic users and scientists, whom he chose to rule the lands in his name. The Sages in turn surrounded themselves with Chemical Warriors, troops well versed in magic, who would serve them in all things.
Although the Mages of Inan possessed the power to create magical weapons of mass destruction, Pillian had been a minor player in the great game of war and empire. Above all else, he loved plants, and the magical properties they possessed. And so it was he created the Gardens of Allesh, in the hope that in studying nature, he might find a way to heal the planet, which had been so violated by war.
"Leah! Breakfast!" It was her mother's voice again, louder, more insistent. Leah threw her warmest cloak over her shoulders and ran down the narrow staircase, following the smell all the way to the kitchen table.
"Do my hair for me?" she asked as she sat down.
Saran sighed. "Honestly, you must learn to go to bed earlier, this is getting ridiculous. You'll be losing your job if you carry on like this," she said, twisting Leah's hair into braids. "And we need the money."
"But if I don't study then I'll be stuck in this same position forever!" blurted Leah, her mouth full of bread. "And if I don't study then there's no point even taking my exams, is there?"