Wyrms

by Orson Scott Card

  He gasped in agony and dropped the dagger. Some assassin, she thought with contempt. Did Oruc think that such an oaf could kill the daughter of Lord Peace? It was not even a struggle. She left the dagger in his right eye.

  Only when the bailiff lay on the floor with the dagger sticking up like a jaunty decoration did she realize that this was the first time she had ever acted against the will of the King. It was surprisingly easy, and she enjoyed thwarting him even more than she had enjoyed serving him. King Oruc, you have made a foolish mistake by not trying to use me in my father's place. I have a certain flair for government work. And now it will work against you.

  Then she reminded herself that she was still not Oruc's enemy, even if he had chosen to be hers. She was the servant of the King's House, and she would do nothing to weaken his reign unless she knew it would bring about a greater good.

  She went to the door and opened it at once. There would be soldiers all around, of course, but it was likely that they did not know she was supposed to be killed.

  There was too much lingering support for the ancient bloodline. So as long as she seemed calm, she could probably get by. No, not calm. Grief-stricken.

  She wept as she left the house. It was the cry that Father had insisted she learn, the soft, feminine sobbing I that roused the pity of men and made them feel strong and protective.

  "Damned shame," one of the soldiers whispered as she passed.

  And she knew that all of them were thinking: She should be Heptarch. She should be in Heptagon House,; and now they won't even let her stay in King's Hill. But she was thinking that she would be lucky to live till morning.

  Angel had told her to go to Admiralty Row at once, as soon as they tried to kill her. They had developed three separate escape plans. But she did not intend to use any of them. After all, she knew at least as much about the ways in and out of King's Hill as he did. As a child, permanently trapped within the walls of the King's quarter, she had been free to explore as she liked, and she knew ways over and under walls, through hidden passages in buildings, and though she had grown too large to fit through some of them now, she could still get from here to there in many different ways. And she was not going to leave King's Hill until she had spoken to her father's head. He had been so distant, so subtle in his life, but she would get some secrets from him now. He would talk to her now as he had never talked to her in life. It was a simple matter to dodge into the well-tended gardens of King's Wood. The ground was soft, taking footprints easily, but she was soon clambering from limb to limb among the trees. These giants had been old trees when her great-grandfather ruled in Heptagon House and the Fourteen Families had offered their heads to him forever. Now their leaves concealed her and their branches were her highway to the south wall of the garden. They could not follow her footsteps in the air.

  She paused once in a safe cluster of branches to strip off her women's clothing. Underneath it she wore the short breeches and long shirt of a common boy. She was almost too large now to play the part, since boys took to long pants or professional gowns as soon as they could these days. At least her breasts were not too large yet, and Father had been gracious enough not to die when it was her time of month. She smudged her face, pulled off her wig, and tousled her short hair. She decided to keep the wig-it was a perfect match for her hair, and she'd be hard put to find another. She stuffed it into her bag.

  The dress she jammed into the crook of a branch. It was black, of course, and it wouldn't be easy to see it from the ground.

  It was already dusk when she got to the wall and dropped to the ground on Granary Row. No one saw her.

  She appropriated one of the drawcarts and pulled it by its rope to Larder Row. After years of practice with Angel, her boyish stride was utterly convincing. No one took a second look at her. She had no trouble leaving her cart and walking, as so many servants did, to pay her respects to the dead in Slaves' Hall. If those who saw her had thought to examine her face, they might have known her-the daughter of Lord Peace had the best-known face in King's Hill. But the essence of disguise, Angel had always said, is to avoid close examination. The clothing, the walk, the dirt, the coarseness kept them from noticing her at all.

  The doorkeeper wasn't there. He rarely was, and would have caused her no problem if he had been. He was almost blind.

  She wandered among the shelves of living heads. She had spent many hours here, and knew most of the faces, had talked to many of them. Long-dead ministers of long-dead kings, they had once wielded vast power or influenced monarchs or served as the King's voice in hundreds of foreign courts. As usual, most of the eyes were closed, since few of the dead took much pleasure in living company. Instead they dreamed and remembered, remembered and dreamed, calling up with perfect clarity all that they had ever seen and felt in their lives. Only a few of them watched her pass; even if one of them had been able to muster up some curiosity, he could not have turned his head to see where she would go.

  Father would not be here, of course, not upstairs among the favorites. It would be too soon for that-his head had to be trained and broken to the King's will first. So Patience made her way to the place under the stairs where a wooden louver in the heating vent was missing.

  The weather was warm enough that none of the ovens was alight; the air was cool in the stone passageway. She climbed downward into the darkness. At the bottom she turned-left?-yes, left, and crawled until she came to a wooden grating on the floor. It was dark under her. They had not yet started on Father, then.

  So she lay near the grating, absolutely still, listening to the sounds that tunneled through the heating system.

  There were places all over Slaves' Hall where conversations could be heard distinctly in these passages. A good part of Patience's self-education in politics had taken place here, as she listened to the cleverest ministers and ambassadors pry for information from the dead or conspire for power with the living.

  To her surprise, they did come to Slaves' Hall looking for her-she heard the soldiers ask the gatekeeper and search the public floors. But they were searching in a desultory way, not because they expected to find her here but because they had been told to search everywhere.

  Good. They had lost her in King's Wood and had no idea where she had gone from there.

  Later, the headkeeper came into the cellar room, lit the bright oil lamps, and began to work on her father.

  She had heard and seen the process often enough before. It took less than an hour to link the headworms with the nerves in her father's spine. She watched coldly as her father's face sometimes writhed in agony, for most nerves caused pain when they were awakened by the headworms. Finally, though, the headkeeper dismissed his apprentices. The physical process was finished.

  His neck bones were attached to a rack, his windpipe was attached to the breath bladder, and his neck was just touching the gel that sustained the headworms that clung to his nerves and the gools that sent tendrils through his blood vessels. They would keep his head alive, his memories intact, for the next thousand years-or until a King grew tired of him and had his head thrown out.

  The headkeeper talked to him then, asking him questions.

  He taught the headworms by dripping certain chemicals into the canister when Lord Peace's answers were forthright, and other chemicals when he hesitated or seemed agitated. The headworms quickly learned which of the head's nerves caused pleasure and which caused suffering.

  In a short time they were ready, and needed no more stimulation from the headkeeper. Now the headworms would be agitated by the increased tension of resistance, of lying. Then they in turn would stimulate other nerves, so the head felt extremes of urgent needs-the bowel or bladder full, the belly famished, the throat dry with thirst, the nerves of sexual pleasure on the edge of orgasm but never quite there. When the head answered truthfully, it got some measure of relief. When it lied, the longings increased until they were agony. Isolated from their bodies, heads never had much stamina, and their will was us
ually broken in a single night, however much they might resist.

  Patience calmed herself, prepared herself to listen to her father endure much before the worms broke him.

  And at first it seemed his resistance might be long and painful. Then to her surprise he began to whine. It was a sound she had never heard before, and she thought she knew all his voices.

  "No matter what I do," he said. "You can always make it worse and worse."

  "That's right," said the headkeeper. "The worms will find the things you most long for, and you'll never be satisfied until you learn to speak the truth."

  "Ask me again. Ask me anything."

  They did, and he told them. No resistance at all.

  Intimate things, terrible things, secrets of state, secrets of his own body. Patience listened in disgust. She had been prepared for her father's pain, but not for his quick capitulation.

  They thought he was resisting them when he said he didn't know where Patience was. But Patience knew that he had held nothing back. Perhaps he had known he would break this easily-perhaps that's why he had prepared so well for her escape. He must have known his own weakness, though he concealed it from everyone else until now.

  "I knew that you'd ask me, and so I made sure I didn't know. I told Angel a year ago to make plans with her, and tell me nothing of them. Then when I felt death was coming on, I sent Angel away-I knew they'd kill her bodyguard first. Patience is on her own until she can meet him. But Angel and I trained my daughter carefully, gentlemen. She speaks every language that I speak, she is a more accomplished assassin than Angel himself, and she is cleverer by far than any adviser to the king.

  You will never catch her. She's probably gone already."

  The headkeeper finally believed him. "We'll tell the King you're ready now."

  "Will he come and talk to me?" asked the head.

  "If he wants to. But no one else ever will. With the things you know, there's no chance he'll put you in a public room. Who knows? Maybe he'll install you in his private chambers." The headkeeper laughed. "You can watch every intimate moment of the King's life, and he can get your advice whenever he wants it. There is precedent, you know. Your grandfather-"

  "My grandfather was a twisted wreck. King Omc is not."

  "You hope," said the headkeeper.

  "King Oruc is a great Heptarch."

  The headkeeper looked at him suspiciously. Then he smiled. "You really do mean it. And all this time everyone thought you served Oruc because your daughter was a hostage. Turns out you really were loyal. A weakling."

  The headkeeper slapped him lightly on the cheek. "You were nothing, and now you're less than nothing."

  He doused the lights and left.

  As soon as he was gone and the brass key turned in the lock. Patience lifted the grating and dropped into the room.

  "Hullo, Father," she said. She fumbled in the darkness until she found his breath bladder. Then she pumped air so he could speak.

  "Go away," he said. "I already taught you everything I know."

  "I know," she said. "Now I want you to tell me everything you fear."

  "I don't fear anything now," he said. "Right now I'm voiding my bladder, which I haven't done without pain in three years. Go away."

  "You have neither bladder nor urine. Father. It's just an illusion."

  "The only reality a human being ever knows, my darling girl, is what his nerves tell him, and mine are telling me that-oh, you vicious and ungrateful worm of a girl, the headworms are torturing me again because I'm resisting you."

  "Then don't resist me, Father."

  "I'm not your father, I'm a piece of dead brain tissue kept alive by the probing tendrils of the gools and stimulated by trained worms."

  "You never were my father." Was that a catch in his throat? A tiny gasp of surprise? "You always made speeches to me, for the servants to overhear. Angel was the only father I had."

  "Don't waste your time trying to hurt me. I'm past hurting."

  "Did you ever love me?"

  "I don't remember. If I did, I certainly don't love you anymore. The only thing I desire now is to urinate forever.

  I would gladly trade a daughter for a decent prostate."

  She found the matches where the headkeepers had set them down, and lit a single lamp. Her father's eyes blinked in the light. She smiled at him. "You're going to tell Oruc everything, but you're going to tell me first. All my life you've been able to keep secrets from me. But not anymore."

  "You don't need to know any of the secrets. I saw to it you knew everything. I thought you were intelligent enough to know that every word Angel spoke to you came originally from my lips."

  "He told me that you would willingly let me die if it would serve the best interests of the King's House."

  "What would you rather? That I tell you that I thought your life was more important than the whole world?

  What sort of egomaniacal monster are you?"

  "A human being," she said.

  "The worst kind of monster," he said. "We're all monsters, living in utter isolation, sending out words like ambassadors that beg for tribute, for worship. Love me, love me. And then when the words come back, 'I love you, I worship you, you are great and good,' these monsters doubt, these monsters know that it's a lie.

  'Prove it,' they say. 'Obey me, give me power.' And when they are obeyed, the monster grows hungrier. 'How do I know you aren't manipulating me?' cries the monster.

  'If you love me, die for me, kill for me, give all to me and leave nothing for yourself!' "

  "If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?"

  "Because they are beautiful monsters," he whispered.

  "And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

  "That's as mystical as what the priests babble about."

  "It is what the priests babble about."

  "You have sacrificed the possibility of power, you have made us strangers all these years, and all for some invisible, nonexistent connection between human beings you've never even met?" She tried to put as much contempt as possible into her voice.

  "You're fifteen. You know nothing. Go away."

  "I know your life has been a deception and a disguise."

  "And when I dropped the disguise and told you what I have lived for, you mocked me. The babble of the priests!

  Do you think that because something is invisible, it doesn't exist? There is nothing but empty space between the infinitesimal pieces of matter; the only thing connecting them is their behavior, their influence on each other, and yet out of those empty, invisible connections is built all that exists in the universe. Most of it empty, the web insensible. Yet if for a single moment the web broke down, everything would flash out of existence. Do you think it's any different for us? Do you think that you exist independent of your connections with other people?

  Do you think that you can ever serve your own interest without also serving theirs? Then I should have killed you in the cradle, because you aren't fit to be Heptarch."

  She saw in his face the same fervency she had seen in Prekeptor. Father, too, was a believer. But she could not believe that this was a belief that anyone could sacrifice for. "Was this the secret you hid from me all these years? Was this what you would have said to me if for one single moment we could have been alone and honest with each other? Was this what I yearned for all my life?" He had taught her how to show devastating contempt, as a diplomatic tool. She used it now: "I could have learned as much from any teacher in the School."

  His face went slack again, went back to the neutral expression that he cultivated when he wished to show nothing. "If you don't get out of here at once, before Oruc or his men get here, you're quite likely to be with me in loving proximity for the next t
housand years, getting sucked out by gools in a bowl of soup. I don't like you well enough to want your company. I used to think you were a well-behaved child, but now I see you're a selfish, inconsiderate brat."

  "No," she said. "There are things I need to know.

  Practical things, that I can use to survive."

  "Survival I taught you from infancy. You'll survive.

  Go away."

  "What was it that you feared the most?"

  His face took on a mockingly devoted expression.

  "That you would die. I did all that I did to keep you alive. Why else do you think I served the Usurper's Son so faithfully? He had you hostage here."

  He wanted her to believe, that he was lying. But she could also see that the headworms were not tormenting him. He had told her the truth. He simply didn't want her to know it was the truth. So she was asking the questions that would give her the answers she wanted. "Why were you afraid of my death?"

  "Because I loved you. Back when I was alive. I remember it dimly."

  But this was a lie. She could see the trembling around his lips; the headworms were in control of his nerves, and tortured him in unconcealable ways when he resisted.

  So it wasn't love. It was something else. And thinking of that took her back to a time in her early childhood, to the night that most haunted her nightmares.

  There was something in his face now that reminded her of his face that night. "You lied to me that night," she said. "I realize now, you lied about something."

  "What night?" he asked.

  "What was it you didn't tell me, Father, the night they brought you Mother's body in seven sacks?"

  "You remember that?"