Goddess Worldweaver
( Seven circles - 3 )
Douglas Niles
Goddess Worldweaver
Troy Denning
Shout the names of God,
Hail the gods of fame;
Cry the yell of war,
And mute the call of blame.
Heed the ancient creed,
Scorn the one falls lame,
Raise the warrior’s sword,
To slay begets the same.
From the Tapestry of the Worldweaver, Bloom of Entropy
Prologue
T here was a thing he hated most, hated more than the machine guns and the gas and the stink and the death; that thing he hated was the mud. He felt as though he had become a being made of soft, wet dirt. At first the mud had been like a layer of skin, heavy and cloaking and smothering, but by now it had seemed to seep into the very center of himself, so that his heart was a muscle of clotted clay, his lungs and limbs and head mere shapes of thick, viscous soil.
For the first weeks he had kept track of the days, and for the first months he had made an effort to distinguish individual weeks. Now that the years stretched into the third hot, humid summer, the months had blended into an indistinguishable morass, vaguely broken into seasons: in winter, the mud was cold. In summer, it was not so cold.
Intermittently, when the generals ordered the colonels to order the sergeants to lead the men out of the trenches, life in the mud was enlivened by the opportunity to die. Of course he went forward with the rest of them: his own regiment, drawn from the dairy-greened countryside of the south; and all the rest, boys and young men from London and Liverpool, Glasgow and Bristol, from Wales and Ireland and the craggy Highlands of the north. They rose in a mass, cheering and charging, rifles held before them, metal helmets like inverted dinner plates on their heads.
These brave men sallied from their muddy holes in a great rush, like a tide sweeping across a beach. They slogged across sticky ground, pressing through coils of barbed wire. They ran into the streaming fire of machine guns, the water-cooled darlings of Maxim, guns that stitched the air with streams of whistling lead, weaving a pattern of deadly intricacy. The bullets were tiny and seemingly insignificant things when compared to the mass and complexity of a man, but they flew very fast, and when they encountered flesh they still flew very fast and left the flesh and the vessels and the bodies torn and bleeding from their passage.
He knew the ways of bullets. Over the course of 1914 and 1915 he had charged into that tapestry of death on many occasions, and he had seen many of the boys from Kent torn by the lethal weavers. Some of them had been his friends, and more than one had died in his arms. During those years he had looked upon fields of carnage such as he could never have imagined. He had smelled the deadly whiff of phosgene gas, heard the rumbling growl of engines as aircraft snarled over the battlefields. He made new friends to replace those who were slain, but he kept these at a distance, and when they died it was not so painful… for him, at least. He knew there would always be the tears, shed in the cottages of the verdant countryside. But on the dark battlefield he had moved beyond any awareness of grief.
There was only the mud.
He lost count of the dead comrades, just as he lost count of the days and weeks and months during which he had lived this nightmare. A part of him was conscious of the horror, but he always told himself that it would get better, that it would-it must-soon come to an end. The greatest nations in Europe had been bashing each other bloody for two years by now; surely they were running out of will, out of steel and powder. At least they must be exhausting their supplies of young men.
His regiment came into the lines along the Somme during a time when the mud was not so cold; his colonel would have told him that it was late June, in the Year of our Lord, 1916. His captain was fond of the Lord and never failed to take advantage of an opportunity to remind his men that He was with them, with them in the trenches, with them when they rose from the dirt to scramble again into the bloody loom of the machine-gunning-weavers, with them as their flesh was torn and their blood scattered across the field, wet and slick to make a very precious kind of mud.
And the colonel proclaimed with great certainty that the Lord was with them after that, as well.
A period of a week or so passed while he lay in the trenches at the Somme. Guns pounded incessantly, a massive bombardment that continued for a very long time. Any of the officers could have told him that the barrage lasted for seven days, but he was beyond caring about such details. He merely lay in the mud with his comrades and waited.
Finally the big guns fell silent, and the order came to the men along many miles of trenches, the men of the British Third and Fourth Armies. In unison and in bravery they rose from the mud, crawled from their trenches, and hurled themselves against the German weavers who waited with machine guns ready, prepared as ever to sew their deadly fabric.
Of course, the brave men of England never had a chance. Courage and fortitude and comradeship and resolve meant nothing to those little bits of lead hurtling just above the ground. The enemy gunners were patient and skilled, and the friendly generals had no concept of any other way to make war. They could only send their men, the future and the promise-the very lifeblood-of their country, forward to perish in the hail.
In that storm he saw his sergeant fall, legs torn from that stocky wrestler’s body by the ripping scythe of a water-cooled machine gun. More bullets flew, a tempest as engulfing as any winter storm. Blood splashed his skin as the man beside him died, and then he stumbled on the sticky ground, feeling the weight of age and war and mud drag him down, not knowing that his burden was heightened by the bits of metal that had already ripped through his flesh. He tumbled onto his face, and still he did not know that he had been shot, that each pulse of his heart sent precious blood spurting from the great gash in his side.
He lifted his head, saw a vista of wire and smoke… and then his face again lay in the mud. It was soft, now… really, it had at last become a part of him… his flesh was this dirt and this dirt was his flesh. He thought of the Lord, that great friend of his colonel, and wondered if he would meet Him as his soul broke free to rise like smoke from the battlefield, borne in concert with the souls of twenty thousand Englishmen-twenty thousand on that day, in this place, alone.
But neither he nor any of the rest of them went to Heaven nor to Hell nor to any place that their captains or their mothers or their priests had described.
Instead, he found himself upon a death ship, sailing on the Worldsea, preparing for another war.
1
Armada
Tide of looming darkness,
Smoke and oil and blood,
Surging forth, engulfing,
Comes the lethal flood.
From Days of Worldfall by Sirien Saramayd
The bastion loomed high on the culmination of a world. Three great mountain ranges, jagged ridgelines that dominated their realm of shadow and chill, encircled the fortress like walls on a cosmic scale.
Great plains that had once teemed with ghost armies were still now, the hordes long ago marched off to war. Cliffs loomed silent and forbidding, while ramparts and towers stood empty and dark. Even the stony gargoyle, the bestial giant poised atop one of the loftiest crests, guardian of the great citadel itself, seemed as lifeless as a statue, a mere image carved from rock.
Deep harbors, sheltered by wall and tower, guarded by lofty fortress and shallow boom, had once contained the hulls of countless warships. Those ships were gone, formed into a fleet that had sortied more than fifty years earlier, embarked on the invasion of an entirely different world.
But though the warriors were gone, their ruler Karlath-Fayd,
called the Deathlord, remained. He sat in his great throne, the stone blasted from the very bedrock of his great mountain, and he remained as immobile as that stone.
His very self was invisible, his flesh a transparent veil. Only his eyes were there, glowing like embers, burning from the deep fire within.
Those mighty eyes remained open, the pupils fixed and staring from their perch at the far end of the cosmos. There were those upon the Fourth Circle, druids with their Tapestry and sages with their scrying globes and other magic, who looked upon the Deathlord, studied him for signs of movement and burgeoning danger. Those eyes, hellishly bright, were all that they could see. But still, they feared him.
For the Deathlord was waiting, and all knew that his patience was beyond measure.
T HEY spread across the Worldsea in a legion of darkness, black ranks of sails and masts covering the ocean’s surface to the far limits of the horizon. Shadows shifted and danced across the decks of the death ships, ghosts of past violence seething impatiently, anxious to reach the shore, to draw warmth and sustenance from a living, fertile world.
The cold hulls sliced the waters of the vast ocean, and wakes trailed behind each transom. These were not the frothy whitecaps that chased every normal ship, however. Instead, the track of a death ship was marked by a spreading V of toxic black, smeared like oil over the surface of the sea. Fish died in great numbers and floated to the surface, forming rafts of rotting, scaly flesh. Seabirds were emboldened by the plenty, but as they dipped and slashed at the wasting meat, they convulsed and fell from the sky, adding their own feathered carcasses to the vast swath of decay.
The ships seemed without number, viewed from the sky like blades of grass in a meadow. The vanguard was ten miles wide, a hundred ships with lofty sails and smoky pennants of shrouded black. Behind them came rank upon rank upon rank of additional fleets, each wider than the last, sweeping across the horizon in a seemingly endless progression.
They were watched from the sky by a pair of observers, one sitting astride and borne by the other. The mount was massive, scaly, and serpentine: a monstrous dragon with a wingspan long enough to encompass a playing field. The rider was a man perched at the base of the great wyrm’s neck, his long black hair bound into a tail, his bronze skin smooth and stern. He wore a leather shirt and gloves, with a slender sword at his waist. Together they soared above the vast armada, looking at the long lines of ships, wondering at the assemblage of black-hulled vessels.
The dragon flew with relaxed grace, riding the sea winds with little effort of his mighty wings. The pair had made this reconnaissance countless times over the last five decades. At least once every interval, Natac and Regillix Avatar had flown forth to watch the ships of the armada in their seemingly endless progression around the world of Nayve. Their target seemed to be that realm at the center of the Worldsea, the nexus of all the Seven Circles, of everything, but for such a long time the ships had made no move toward shore.
So the watchers watched, and they waited. Long ago Natac had given up trying to count the ships. The pattern of lines was deceptively irregular, and even in the early years he had never been certain if his count was accurate. As time passed, and more and more black ships sailed from the Deathland to join the armada, he formed an impression only of numberless vastness. He carried this impression back to the Fourth Circle when his draconic steed, after a week or ten days of constant flight, was forced to return to land.
“As always, it seems there are more of them than ever before,” said Regillix Avatar, turning his crocodilian head to regard his rider with one slitted, yellow green eye.
“Many more,” Natac agreed. “Their numbers are swelling with fresh blood… Miradel told me that twenty thousand men were slain in the first day of yet another great battle in the Seventh Circle.”
“Surely they have enough strength to attack,” the dragon snorted in exasperation. “Do they expect to bore us to death? Fifty-one years of waiting for a war!”
“I have a feeling we don’t have much longer to wait,” replied the man. “In fact, I’ve seen enough here. What do you say we get back and make our report?”
“I was going to suggest the same,” said the dragon. “The course of the vanguard is still circular, but I detect a shift, as if they are moving toward shore.”
Natac had noticed it, too, as if the fleet was preparing for a great change of course, the lines of the armada dressing themselves in preparation for a turn toward the coast of Nayve. They had waited for this maneuver for decades, but he knew that, when the death ships turned, the attack would follow swiftly.
“Let’s go, then.”
The dragon banked steeply, the man resting without fear in the deep niche between two of the serpent’s neck plates. Long wing strokes bore them through the sky. Soon the air felt brighter, cleaner, as they passed beyond the fringe of the dark armada. A thin line of green marked landfall before them, and with a look at the sky, where the sun was just beginning to ascend toward Darken, they knew that they would reach the shoreline by full night.
Before them, the world of Nayve awaited.
T WO figures slipped through the night, gliding past rocks that jutted like sentries from the mountainside. Steep, craggy summits rose on all sides, a fanged horizon clearly visible against the starlit sky. One of the shadowy forms dashed from a gully to crouch beside a looming boulder while the other remained still, watching and waiting. Fifty feet down the steep slope a stream washed through a rock-walled draw, silky and shimmering in the faint light.
Waiting for Juliay to join him, Jubal paused to watch a constellation move like a formation of geese, curling through the cosmos in the direction that was neither metal nor wood. The stars danced and hovered, then dropped from view behind the shoulder of a huge, pyramid-shaped mountain.
Even now, after five decades in the Fourth Circle, Jubal allowed himself to be surprised when he saw the stars moving around. More of the twinkling lights popped into view, a cluster rising in an equilateral triangle before speeding apart, evenly dispersed into the three directions. He was reminded of the fireworks that he had watched every Fourth of July when he was growing up in Virginia.
The memory was jarring and anachronistic. That world was gone… had been gone even before Jubal had fallen, pierced by Yankee bayonets above the banks of Appomattox Creek. Now, as a man who had spent sixty years in Nayve, time had passed with no failure of his joints, none of the withering of strength that inevitably accompanied mortal aging. He couldn’t imagine what the world of short-lived humankind had come to.
Unlike Natac, who regularly examined every aspect of Earth’s ongoing history and had been doing so for more than four hundred years, Jubal made little effort to remain familiar with the world of his birth. Of course, Juliay and the other druids saw the Seventh Circle with the Wool of Time, and they had told him of the great war that now raged, threatening to consume all of Europe. It irritated him that mankind seemed to have learned nothing from the monstrously destructive American war that had claimed Jubal’s life-his first life, in any event-some fifty years ago.
The fact irritated him, but it didn’t surprise him. From what Jubal had learned, it seemed that the British and French and German generals were making the same crude and unimaginative attempts at battle that had characterized so much of the conflict he had known as the War for Southern Independence. These obtuse leaders expended their men in fruitless charges, and the spirits of the dead only served to expand the enemy’s fleet. At least Grant had learned his lesson at Cold Harbor. Would the same ever be said of the brutes who were methodically sending the young manhood of their respective nations into the meat grinder of trenches, machine guns, barbed wire?
It made him tired just thinking about it, and he couldn’t afford fatigue. Now, here, he had important work to do.
Juliay joined him, moccasins silent as the shadow in which they both sought concealment. He felt her hand in his, and he was heartened again, ready for the task at hand.
“There is one Delver behind us, another pair across the river right here,” she said, barely voicing the words, pointing to indicate location.
He nodded, saw the two dwarves, dark metal armor seeming to absorb the little starlight penetrating the narrow valley. Knowing the preternaturally keen hearing of his enemies, Jubal carefully shrugged the small crossbow from its sling across his shoulder, pointed to his quarry, and started to carefully move down the slope toward the stream. Juliay, in the meantime, backtracked toward the lone Delver on their side of the water.
Finding a boulder with a relatively flat top, Jubal stretched out on the crude platform and leveled his crossbow, the razor-edged dart of steel homed on the breastplate of the nearest dwarf. The water was near, no more than fifteen feet below, but still it slipped past with an eerie, nearly soundless rush. Over that faint hiss he heard a grunt, then a jarring clatter as of an armored body rolling down the hill; he knew that Juliay had done her job.
The two Delvers heard the noise, too, stiffening, then crouching in the shelter of a rocky outcrop. Julbal winced; he had lost his shot.
He remained steady, holding his bead on the place where the dwarves had vanished. In a few moments a light flared down the valley, Juliay setting off her coolfyre torch. Not wanting to impair his night vision, Jubal avoided even a glance at the source of the illumination, knowing that Juliay would likewise keep her eyes away from the night-bursting brilliance.
The diversion was enough to draw the two dwarves forward. Jubal could see the blank helmet plates, completely covering the eyeless faces as featureless as shadows. He was not fooled; bitter experience had proved that, since coming to Nayve, these dark-dwelling dwarves had somehow learned to see. How they did so remained a mystery. For this mission it was enough to know that they could be distracted and alarmed by a sudden light. Now, the duo of Delvers crept along the steep trail, each armed with a pair of multiple-bladed knives, attempting to sneak up on whoever was making this brightness.
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