The Worldwound Gambit

by Robin D. Laws

  A batlike creature, its furred body shaped like a man's, descends on an armored, sword-swinging warrior. It twists the man's head around. A cacophony of screams drowns out the crack of the snapping neck, but Gad thinks he hears it all the same. The dead man's head stares out between chainmailed shoulders. The bat-demon seizes it in long, clawed fingers. Jerking, pulsing animation returns to the murdered warrior's body. He is instantly transfigured. His eyes shrink to red, glowing dots. A gray-blue coloration suffuses his flesh, as if he's been stained by ink from the inside out. He throws off his helmet to make room for sharpened, elongated ears. Hands become claws. With shocking power, the dead man bounds into a blacksmith's shop. He grabs a young blond apprentice, pulling his neck to his mouth. The gums sprout rows of sharpened teeth. They rake into the boy's throat, ripping it into a red, coursing pulp. Blood gouts across the dead man's once-glittering chainmail. His ghoulish corpse keens with primal joy.

  A demon with the body of a maggot, the wings of a fly, and the face of a hag spits green bile onto a wagon where half a dozen townsmen tremble. Their flesh liquefies and drains from their bones.

  Mantis demons land in the market square, impaling trapped vendors with hooked appendages.

  A tornado of shadow beheads a servant girl as she dashes from a tavern. More of the shadow things are inside the mead hall already.

  A bald, tattooed wizard hurls projectiles of arcane force at a fly-demon. A beetle-demon lands behind him and wreathes him in devouring flame.

  Gad tears himself from the window, involuntary tears rushing down his cheeks. He's thinking. Does the brothel have a cellar? Would a cellar be safe?

  A third thump. Flaming shards of wood spray down into the room. A burning beetle-creature with innumerable eyes pokes its head through a gaping hole in the roof. It clicks its mandibles at them.

  Deeper in the brothel, the girls sob and wail. Drawn by their fear, the beetle-thing hops down into the room. The bodyguard, Abotur, tries to bar its way. With a segmented, insectoid leg the demon reaches for a smoking chunk of rafter, splintered to a sharp point. Abotur brings a scimitar fruitlessly down on its bubbling carapace.

  The demon widens its mandibles. An unlikely voice gurgles from deep in its throat. "Yath!" it exults. "Yath is!" It aims the tip of the rafter shard at Abotur's breastbone. Abotur turns and ducks forward. The demon misses his heart. The shard punctures his abdomen instead. Ribs crack. Viscera spills. The demon leaves Abotur pinned to the wall and tears the doorway open as if parting a curtain. In a blink, the hole is large enough to drag its bulk through. The demon plunges on, attracted by the terror of the defenseless prostitutes.

  Abotur's skin pales as blood gushes from his wound. "Help me," he says.

  Gad bolts from his crouch to Abotur's side. He helplessly regards the impaling chunk of rafter.

  "Gad," Abotur says, "I'm sorry. I never thought—"

  Dalemir squirms on the floor. Damp patches on his crotch and an acrid smell show that he has soiled himself. He reddens with indignation. Anger revives him. "Gad? Why do you call him Gad?"

  "Shut up," hisses Gad. "Before you bring it back."

  A wet crunching sound issues from the brothel's front parlor.

  Dalemir shakes. He speaks in a whispering hiss. "Your name is Ellano. Why does he call you Gad?"

  Gad gives Dalemir his back. He turns to Abotur. "Hang on, now. We'll get you healed."

  Abotur pats his hand. "Thank you for lying to me, Gad."

  Gad wrenches away. "That wasn't a lie." He seizes his pack.

  Dalemir stands at the shattered doorway, perched ridiculously on one foot, looking for the demon. Crunching has given way to silence.

  From his pack, Gad seizes a clay bottle. He pops off the cork that stoppers it shut. "Healing potion," he tells Abotur.

  The bodyguard's skin is now nearly white as salt. "Not enough," he gasps.

  Gad pours the liquid into the man's mouth. It is amber-colored, the consistency of molasses. Gad holds his lips open. Abotur chokes as the potion goes in.

  The potion's magic courses through Abotur's frame. It finds the wound. The torn flesh around the impaling chunk of rafter sizzles.

  Mortal voices explode into the parlor. Spells singe the air. Swords clatter against demonic hides and carapaces. The town's crusaders have rallied to mount a rescue.

  "Hear that?" Gad tells Abotur. "Just hang on."

  Abotur's skin tries to heal itself around the charcoaled wood. A fresh spatter of blood slicks the floor.

  "I hope you both die," Dalemir hisses. "You were trying to cheat me."

  "Shut up," says Gad.

  Dalemir's resentment overcomes his caution. He jabs a pointy digit at his bodyguard. "And you, Abotur, if that's the name your mother gave you."

  Abotur's eyes flutter shut. Gad hits his cheek with a series of rapid taps. Abotur blinks.

  "You spent a year at my side," Dalemir exclaims. "A year to win my trust. All so this man could steal my tapestry!"

  "It is a very valuable tapestry," says Gad.

  A smile flickers on Abotur's lips. His head slumps down. Gad tests his carotid for a pulse. Abotur is dead.

  Dalemir draws a dagger from his belt. "Scoundrel! Mountebank!" He advances on Gad.

  "Bad idea," Gad says.

  The merchant stops to think.

  The interior wall vanishes in a cloud of flame. Gad tumbles back into the room. The building teeters. On the other side of the hole, bloodied knights and clerics square off against the beetle-demon. Gad can't tell whether the wall was destroyed by the Abyss-spawn or by the crusaders. It doesn't matter. It was a load-bearing wall. The remaining rafters creak and shift.

  The roof implodes. Gad dives through tumbling timbers. Struck on the shoulder, he falls. He gets up. Not hurting yet, but he will soon. Dust obscures his vision. Blindly, he stumbles on. He stops short; the flooring has come to an end.

  He's standing on the street outside the ruined pleasure house. Smoke and dust rise from its remains. Crusaders struggle out from beneath shingles and boards. The beetle-demon is either slain or playing dead.

  Gad sees without seeing: a retreating bat-demon carrying a lithe, elven arm in its talons. An old man's face, lying in the road, torn from the skull. Crusaders dispatching a pink-skinned demon, entirely human-seeming save for its translucent wings and compound eyes. Eggs hatching from the corpse of a centipede-thing, becoming a swarm of baby demons. Rushing for the forest's edge.

  Dalemir sprints to his cart. In a stupid and arbitrary miracle, his horse survives. It has escaped the ravaged stables and waits by the cart. From the back of the cart protrudes the tapestry, wrapped in protective muslin.

  Even now, Gad thinks of ways to get the tapestry. He hurts too much to simply overpower Dalemir. There's no talking him out of the tapestry, not now. He could claim that they already switched it for a fake, but there's no logic to back it up.

  The value of the tapestry, if taken and sold in Cheliax, rattles through Gad's mind as the merchant climbs into his cart to ride away.

  He can still get it. Dalemir will return to Nerosyan. Gad is blown, but he can recruit help. Dalemir won't trust anyone who wants the tapestry. That can be the key to it: Use that against him. A double game. Have one team transparently trying to steal the tapestry ...yes, yes, let Dalemir discover that Gad is in Nerosyan and still wants it. Then send in a second team to offer to protect it from him. A fictitious group with a fictitious grudge. Then the protectors steal the tapestry.

  Gad flashes through the entire rip. Whom he'll recruit. The equipment they'll need. The timetable. He can still have the tapestry. To move on to another scheme would be to dishonor Abotur's memory. Yes. He'll do it for Abotur.

  Smoke, black as crow feathers, plumes from the burning stable. The dragon-winged demon bearing a whip of flame emerges from
it. The monstrosity hurtles through the sky, lashing at a formation of victorious crusaders gathered in the market square. They scatter. A knight in scorched plate armor collapses to her knees, her backplate sliced and smoking. The demon turns, dragging its flamewhip across the remaining unscathed structures. Wood shingles spark and ignite. As it dives up into the sky, it makes one last fillip with the whip. The weapon burns through the cart, the tapestry, the horse, and Dalemir. Flames consume the cart and tapestry. Dalemir's bisected gut sputters. His fat is cooking.

  Gad zigzags backward, looking for cover. There is none; Krega burns. He does not expect a renewed attack but leaves town anyway. His horse is dead, and so is Abotur's.

  So he walks.

  Chapter Two

  The Muscle

  Gad wanders alone through muddy scrubland. His shoulder throbs. Soon he'll need water. And food. For the moment, he has to think. He will assemble a different team. Not the team he'd have needed to separate Dalemir from his tapestry. This will be for a bigger gambit.

  He is two miles from Krega when it occurs to him that he should have done something about Abotur's body. He stops and sits on a rock for a while. In the end he convinces himself not to head back. When his own corpse breathes its last, Gad expects no fuss made. Life is for living. The body is meat. Many in his line of work feel this way. He never talked about it with Abotur. It is not a fit subject of conversation. All thieves court death; to dwell on it is to invite it.

  Abotur wouldn't want him to tarry over his corpse, Gad decides. He would want him to act. To take something from the demons they'll always miss.

  Gad gets up off the rock and resumes his walk. His first stop will be Dubrov. He has already revised his list. Each rip demands its own roster.

  Nothing matters now except these demons. They're bad for business. Gad loves Mendev—it is, as Dalemir said, a haven for scoundrels. As a scoundrel, Gad values this. Demons can't be allowed to overrun the place. They're worse even than lawmen. A lawman you can talk to, trick, inveigle. All demons want is to corrupt and destroy. They place no value on money, on wit or style or pleasure itself, except for the sadistic thrills of torture and killing. They don't deserve a place in this honeyed land.

  Gad is no expert on demons. As day turns to night and the night turns colder, he struggles to recall the history of the Worldwound. In history you find the rules. Before a man can break them properly, he has to learn what they are.

  Like everything these days, it all goes back to that one moment a hundred years ago. In a distant land, a god named Aroden died. Aroden was once a man, and then became immortal, but that's a story for preachers and saints, and of no import to the gaffle.

  When Aroden died, a wound in the world opened. The earth suppurated, and a piece of the Abyss seeped in. That happened in the nation next door to Mendev, a nation that doesn't exist anymore, because the demonlands came through and ate it. (Gad doesn't remember the name of the nation, but he'll find someone who does, in case it matters. Iobaria, maybe? No, that's not quite it.) A black crack in the earth became a crevice, became a sinkhole, became a canyon. Not just a canyon, but a gateway to the Abyss. A portal giving demons free rein to pour into this world. They reduced the kingdom of Whatever to ruins, then came for the lands it bordered. They came for Mendev.

  Crusaders signed up from all over to fight them. So many great heroes flocked here that the rest of the world suffered a shortage of them. In their absence, empires fell. It doesn't matter, because if the demons get a foothold the whole world is lost.

  At some point the crusaders figured out how to keep the demons out. Gad can't recall when that happened. Should it become relevant, he'll find someone who can tell him the dates of all four crusades. He has a name already in mind.

  Gad shivers. Night has fully fallen, but the stars are bright, so he keeps walking and running through the facts as he knows them. A few flakes of snow filter from the sky. They sting his cheeks and remind him he's thirsty. He hears a stream and heads toward it.

  At the stream the sounds change, introducing a clanking noise he doesn't like. He melts behind a rocky outcrop and waits. The clanking draws closer. There's a softer sound, of whimpering. An inhuman voice chills his marrow, and Gad freezes.

  Down where he filled his waterskin, he sees a spindly figure dragging a prisoner on a chain. He guesses that the former is six feet tall, but so thin that it's hard to see when it stands sideways. It's difficult to tell by starlight, but its flesh seems to be red, like it's coated in blood. On a closer look, the liquid covering its body is a slime of some sort. Droplets of it fall onto the rocks of the shoreline, where they steam and hiss. The creature's head is disproportionately large, a detail emphasized by its pointed ears. Its left hand holds the chain. The right carries a polearm, topped by a massive, serrated blade.

  Its voice sounds like bones breaking. "You want to drink?" it asks its prisoner.

  The woman shakes her head. She is perhaps thirty years old. Her face is bruised, hair tangled. Her dirtied peasant gown falls in shreds from her battered body. Mucus trails from her nostrils.

  "You want to live, don't you?" asks the demon. It caresses her cheek with the backs of its clawed fingers. The corrosive slime burns a welt into her face.

  Gad considers his short sword. He's a talker first and a fighter second. He's exhausted and sore. On his best day, he wouldn't tackle this thing alone.

  The woman shakes her head.

  "You don't want to live?" the demon asks.

  Again, she shakes her head.

  Gad sees that three of her fingers are missing. He wonders what else the demon has done to her.

  The demon stoops to place its eyes inches from hers. "All you mortals want to live. Hurting you reminds you how badly you want to survive. Doesn't it?"

  Gad recognizes the technique. When you're running a game on someone, you make a statement and button a question on the end of it. You keep asking until they agree to something. Get them to agree to something, and soon they'll be agreeing to everything.

  Ashamed, the woman tightly nods.

  "Are you saying yes?" the demon asks. "Are you saying you want to survive?" It lets its acid slime drip onto the bare skin beneath her torn garment. The pain sends her reeling back. With a clattering yank the demon tightens the leash.

  "Yes," the woman gasps.

  "Say it louder."

  "Yes."

  Gad can't stand to watch. He surveys the terrain, judges his chance of slinking away without the demon catching his scent. It is distracted. He calculates his odds at seventy-thirty, in his favor.

  He can't do it. Lacking power to interfere, he must at least bear witness.

  "Then you will serve us," the demon says. "You will prostrate yourself before the demon gods. Through the power of Yath, the gateway and the tower, you grant your soul to our lords, as fair exchange for your survival."

  "Don't hurt me any more."

  "Agree to serve."

  It's useless to think it, but Gad can't help imagining what he'd do if he had a team here. A pair of snipers, one at his position, one prone in that stand of dead weeds opposite. Closer in, heavily armored muscle to intercept the demon when he tries to close. Two would be better, but one would do. A runner, to grab the hostage and sweep her away. If needed, he'd stick his own neck out, distract the demon with a counterproposal while they assume their positions.

  The demon thrusts out its crimson, slimy paw. "Kiss it," it demands.

  The woman falters. Slime droplets scar the rocks below the demon's feet.

  "Kiss it!" repeats the demon.

  She brushes her lips against the back of the demon's hand. Her skin becomes momentarily translucent as inky darkness rushes through her briefly visible veins and arteries. A cicatrix rises on her forehead: within a ragged circle appears the image of an undulating, segmented
tower. It fumes and roasts, then fades. Along with it go the other symptoms of the demon kiss: the transparent skin, the inky blood vessels. The burn on her face melts away. New skin crawls across the raw, infected stumps of her severed fingers, sealing itself tight. The prisoner clutches her stomach and curls into a ball.

  "You will be ill at first," the demon says. "You'll puke out your love, your fear of disapproval, your concern for others. All that makes you weak. Let the writhing truth of chaos enter you fully. Draw strength from it." Using a blackened fingernail as a key, it unlocks the metal collar. It wraps the chain around its chest and shoulders, like a bandolier. With a sudden lunge it leaps across the stream.

  The woman convulses. "That's it? You're letting me go?"

  A laugh oozes from the demon's cadaverous lips. "Hardly. A tighter chain now binds you. Return to your village. Wait until Yath requires you."

  "Requires me? For what?"

  "You will know Yath's voice as a buzzing in your head."

  The demon bounds away and within instants is out of sight. Vomit sprays from the woman's mouth.

  Gad could, as she shudders helplessly a few yards away from him, draw his dagger, step quietly behind her, and slit her throat.

  He moves toward her. "I saw what happened," he says.

  "Who are you?" she asks, eyes still panicked.

  "A traveler."

  "Are you going to help me?"

  "All I can do is tell you something you need to know. The demon conned you."

  She throws up.

  He waits until it stops. "The demon conned you," he repeats. "The agreement is not enforceable."

  "What? Who are you?"

  "Someone who knows a little about contracts. And trickery. He told you he's taken your soul, but he hasn't yet. Do you understand?"

  "No."

  "It's cosmic law. I'm neither priest nor magician, but I know that much. Your soul isn't his until you make a choice."