by Peter David
“Yes, all right? Yes,” she said so impatiently that I naturally had no idea whether she was telling the truth or not. “Is that all you care about, Apropos? Riches?”
“And survival, yes. That more or less covers it.”
She made an annoyed sound of dismissal and started walking. I fell into step behind her.
We walked.
And we walked.
Always I cast brief glances behind me, certain our pursuers would be there. Always I had to fight my fear of the vast emptiness. I literally had to concentrate every waking minute lest my resolve falter.
And still we walked.
Night into day, and we huddled under our cloaks, and back into night. On and on, and there was just no end to the Tragic Waste.
And the mountains …
… came …
… no …
… closer.
Miles we walked, and stumbled, and staggered, and dragged our carcasses with their dwindling reserves, and still the mountains and the cities which supposedly lay on the far side of them remained not only out of reach, but the exact same distance as they had the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that. Insane as it sounded, I felt as if someone were hauling the mountains away from us. That they were actually just a monstrous joke, a towering apparition that we would never arrive at.
It might have been the fifth day, or perhaps the sixth. That was the day that the water ran out. The food supplies were wearing thin as well, but it was the end of the water that I knew would spell the end of us as well. The notion that Death was spying upon us had returned with full force to my fevered mind. I could swear I felt his hot breath down the back of my neck. When I slept it was with his flaming eyes blazing into my brain. When I awoke it was with full awareness that he was calmly waiting for that final moment of collapse. Time was entirely on his side. He did not have to do any work, fight any duels, engage us in a battle of wits or contest of physical strength. He needed but wait. He did not have to come to us; we were, step after agonizing step, coming to him.
And to make matters worse, the wounds that we had sustained from the arrows were flaring up. It may well have been that the antitoxins which Sharee had prepared for us had saved us from immediate death … but there was still some sort of infection now lurking within us, eating away at what few shreds of resolve and determination we might have left. Simply put, my ass hurt like hell. I wasn’t sitting all that much, so that wasn’t the problem. However, there was a constant burning sensation that had at first been localized to my backside, but had been radiating outward over the past few days. It had reached a point where every movement of my hips was agonizing.
Sharee wasn’t in much better shape. The limp she had developed was even more pronounced than mine. But she said nothing. She didn’t even acknowledge that there was a problem. Every so often I would see her dealing with the pain in her own way, taking in deep breaths and letting them out slowly, her eyes almost closed. It was as if she was trying to wish away the pain, or at the very least isolate it to some other part of her brain where she could then ignore it. But sometimes the pain would be too much, and I would hear her gasp if she came down too hard on her leg. Then she would compose herself and draw that inscrutable air about her once again.
But she couldn’t fool me. She was dying.
We both were.
The sun rose on whatever the hell day it was, and we just sat there, staring at each other bleakly. There were no japes, no jibes at one another, no philosophical discussions. Just the looks of two people who were wondering which one was going to get to watch the other die before succumbing himself or herself. My tongue felt swollen to three times its normal size. My lips were so brittle that they would have been bleeding, had I had enough moisture in my body to allow blood to flow. The ache from the wound I’d taken in my backside had consumed the entirety of my body from the waist down; I strongly suspected that I was no longer capable of any sort of locomotion, and didn’t have the energy to test my theory. My eyes were dry and aching. Even my hair hurt. I think we both understood that we had gone as far as we were going to go, and the mountains were no closer. Yes, that more or less confirmed my original guess; they were a cruel joke. Much like my life.
“I saw faces,” I croaked out while the sun reached its zenith. She looked at me curiously, having no idea what I was talking about. For that matter, I had no idea why I was telling her. I simply felt like I wanted to say something. “In the waves. When they were crashing around us. I thought … faces. Watching us.”
She spoke, and at first I didn’t understand what she said because the voice coming out of her mouth didn’t sound like anything human. I shook my head, indicating that I hadn’t comprehended. She repeated herself, and this time I barely made it out.
“Gods?” I asked. “Did you say—?”
I have no idea what the voice of someone from beyond the grave would sound like, but it probably would have borne a strong resemblance to what I was hearing emerging from her tortured face just then. “Gods,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Water gods. Might have been …”
“Why?” I demanded. Perhaps demanded is too strong a term, for there were corpses with more energy than I possessed at that moment. “Why … ?”
She made a movement that I think might have been a shrug, except she didn’t have the strength to fully accomplish it. “The gods … might have taken … notice of you …”
“Wonderful,” I said with a grunt. “Noticed by the gods. Now I know … why I’m so completely fucked …”
She actually smiled at that, even though that simple gesture seemed to be painful to her. And those were the last words that passed between us there in the Tragic Waste. We did not move a muscle for the rest of the day, and as night approached I tried to stand. It took a massive effort of will, and even though I exerted every ounce of strength left to me, I only got halfway to standing before collapsing face first into the sand.
I wanted to sob in frustration, I wanted to pound the sand in fury as it worked its way between my broken and bleeding lips. I had strength for neither. I felt a pain in my chest and thought I was having a heart attack, and then realized it was the gem pushing against me, a silent reminder of the utter futility of dreaming of riches.
Now that Death had come for me, it seemed almost anticlimactic. What an utterly stupid way to die, I thought. There was one thing I knew, though, and that was that I didn’t want to expire facedown in the sand. It may seem absurd to spend one’s last dregs of strength in the simple act of turning over, but that’s what I did. My mind went blank with the exertion, and then I was on my back and staring up at the night sky. The stars were absolutely, perfectly bright against the blackness above, and a full moon was staring down at us like one great Cyclopean eye.
I thought of all the people whom I had known. All the people who were better or more heroic or more noble than I. And the fact that I had managed to outlive them all … except for Entipy and her family, whom I still thought about every now and again when I was really of a mind to put myself in a foul mood. I wondered if they ever thought about me, and tried to decide whether I would be happier if they did or didn’t, and realized shortly thereafter that I might well have lost the capacity for being happy long ago.
I wondered if the stars were more of those gods looking down upon me. I hoped that they had derived sufficient amusement for one day, watching a cripple’s dying moments.
“I hope you all die,” I growled to them, and then I spiraled away into darkness.
Book Two
The Conqueror Worm Turns
Chapter 1
Strange Awakening
I woke up dead.
Not only dead … but in Hell.
I had always been somewhat sketchy on what the afterlife—were there actually such a thing—would be like for one such as I. From all accounts and all my imaginings, I figured it would be one of two things. Either I would be surrounded by great, burning masses that were e
ndlessly immolating souls in torment … or else I would find myself trapped within my own mind as a helpless bystander, condemned to watching me live out my life over and over again and powerless to do anything to change any of it. When idle speculation prompted me to dwell on these two options, I would find myself drawn invariably to the former, since the latter was just too hideous to contemplate.
It appeared that I had been granted my wish, because the smell of burning was so overpowering that I thought I was going to vomit. I felt my gorge rising …
… and then came to a surprising realization. In order to feel a desire to vomit, one actually had to have something resembling food in one’s stomach. Such was the case here. Something was surging in my innards, and from the taste leaping into my mouth—even befouled as it was—it was some sort of mutton. And wine. I’d eaten recently, eaten rather heartily. This awareness brought me up so short that the nausea went away due to lack of attention.
Nevertheless, there was still that overwhelming burning smell pervading the air. Surely I was in some sort of hellish afterlife … ? Moreover, I could hear distant screaming. The voices of men, women, and even children, crying out over some sort of horrible misfortune that had befallen them. They sounded very far away, and their wailing blended into one single lamentation that would have struck me to the heart, were I of sound enough mind at that moment to comprehend what was going on. I was almost afraid to open my eyes, because once I did, I would know one way or the other. Perhaps I could have just lain there forever. Perhaps I was supposed to. Perhaps that was my true condemnation: to simply reside in hell with my eyes closed, afraid of opening them lest matters deteriorate even further than they already had. This, in turn, made me dwell on the fact that every time I had believed things couldn’t get worse, they promptly had done so with almost gleeful enthusiasm.
Unable to tolerate the indecision any longer, I slowly opened my eyes.
I was on my back, just as I had last remembered myself being. My arms and legs were splayed, and I was staring up at the night sky. Except …
… the stars had shifted.
I’m no astronomer, understand, no stargazer, but even I comprehend the shifting of those sparkling orbs as the seasons passed. And not only that … but they were just barely visible against a sky that was moving from darkness to day once more. It was not a standard transition from night to day, however. Instead it was as if a great, black shadow had covered the sun. As if evil were having the audacity to make an assault on the purity of light.
I recalled tales that were supposedly told by men in far northern climes, of how the sun was pursued by a great wolf, and that when the End of All Days arrived, the wolf would catch and devour the sun. For an instant I wondered if they had in fact been correct, and that somehow I had been salvaged from death just so I could witness the end of existence. Or maybe I had indeed died, and death had simply been nothingness (for I certainly didn’t remember anything of the event) only to be recalled from oblivion specifically to see the world meet its termination. Why such a thing would transpire, I hadn’t the faintest idea.
All of these musings about the world’s end came to a halt, however, when I realized that the light from the sun was, in fact, increasing. The premature and unnatural nighttime was being chased back into its proper place by the power of the sun. I squinted against the intensity of the rays as the sun resumed its proper place in the sky, and finally turned my face to one side.
What greeted my eyes was no less astounding than the sight that I had beheld in the sky.
There was a city burning less than a mile away. It seemed that, once upon a time, it had been filled with proud structures. Towers protruded above a mighty wall that surrounded it for protection … but clearly the protection had been insufficient. Great portals which had guarded the main entrance had been smashed down, and through the newly created gap I could see the buildings in flames. I caught brief glimpses of people running back and forth. It was easy to tell who the conquered were: They were the ones who were ablaze as well, sometimes rolling to smother the flames, or else wildly beating at themselves to try and extinguish the fire. There were other shadows as well, swaggering men raising swords over their heads and shouting triumphant battle cries. But those battle cries kept being drowned out by suffering and lamentations. At that moment one of the burning towers toppled over out of sight behind the wall, and there came a swell in the howls and cries, presumably by people upon whom the structure had fallen.
The unnatural night continued to give way to the proper day, and the sight of so much death and destruction, and a deep revulsion for the kind of barbaric mind that would inflict so much torment upon the helpless, prompted me to turn my head in the other direction. I was still flat upon my back, but at least I didn’t have to keep looking at the horrific sight of that obviously conquered city.
What I saw looking away from it was no less bemusing.
My staff was lying a couple of feet away. It was exactly as I remembered it … except for one difference. There was a series of notches in the lower half. They were small, and not deep enough to cause any sort of weakening of the wood, but they were most definitely there. At least a half dozen, maybe more. It was not the staff, however, that really captured my attention. No, it was the man lying just beyond that.
I had known my share of powerfully built individuals in my time. King Meander, the mad wandering monarch who might or might not have slain my mother. Sir Coreolis and Sir Granitz of the court of King Runcible had been rather formidable physically. Even my one-time fellow squire, Mace Morningstar, had been a daunting fellow. And then there was my most recent acquaintance, Lord Beliquose, wide as an oak and twice as thick. But they paled in comparison to the monster who was lying there now. A mountain of a man, all beard and hair upon arms so massively muscled that he could have picked me up and thrown me halfway back to Isteria without any strain. I thought he was wearing an extremely furry shirt before I realized that he was bare-chested. His mouth was drawn back in a rictus of frozen hatred, exposing teeth that were sharpened to a point, and there was blood still bubbling out from between his lips, indicating that his death—for dead he most definitely was—was a very recent occurrence.
Of the greatest interest to me, under the circumstances, was that my sword was buried deep within his chest.
“What in hell—?” I whispered, and discovered that my voice was normal, bereft of the increasing raspiness that had befallen it in my increasingly parched state. I wondered if my exclamation of surprise was geographically accurate, but I was starting to think that it wasn’t the case. I didn’t know what death felt like, but somehow I couldn’t help but suspect that it didn’t feel identical to being alive. And that was how I felt: very much alive, if utterly befuddled.
Slowly I staggered to my feet, and then I looked down at myself. Not only was I not wearing what I’d been before, but it was clothes that I had never seen before. I was clothed in a leather tunic of bloodred, with black leggings of similar material. My tunic was trimmed with green, scaled edging around the shoulders and collar that might have been snake skin, although I couldn’t be sure. There was a thick leather band across my chest, attached presumably to a scabbard across my back. I had black bands that reached from my wrist to my elbow; otherwise my arms were bare. And for that matter, I hardly recognized my arms. There was marked muscle definition where there had been none before, and when I experimentally poked my flexed biceps and triceps, I was astounded to discover that they were iron hard. I was no Heracles, but neither was I what I had been. As for the armbands, I couldn’t help but notice an odd array of scratches in them. They were uniform in number and pattern: Four and four, separated from each other by a fairly small distance. They were predominantly on the left armband.
I coughed several times, and my eyes stung from the smoke and ash that was drifting through the air. Very tentatively I made my way over to the gargantuan corpse that was wearing my sword through its chest and looked at it cautiously.
I glanced around to see if there might be the body of another combatant around, because all I could think of was that someone else had grabbed my sword and used it to cut this brute down. But there was no one else. The ground was not sandy, like the desert, but instead thick and gravely, so it was easy to see the nature of the battle that had occurred there. There was the tread of the behemoth, the oversize footprints unmistakable. There was only one other set of prints, maneuvering about on the treacherous ground. A set of prints with a firmly planted left foot, and a right foot treading very lightly as if it had some sort of infirmity. Very gingerly, disbelievingly, I placed my own foot inside the print. It fit exactly.
My footprints and mine alone. The conclusion to be drawn was inescapable. I’d killed him. We had fought, and I had killed him. It was incomprehensible. How could I possibly have allowed myself to be drawn into a battle with someone who could likely slay me with his breath alone? It was far more typical of me to talk my way out of such a confrontation. And once having been pulled in … how could I have killed him? I was more muscled than I had been, true, but there was simply no way that I could have slain the creature before he cut me to shreds.
Struck by a horrible thought, I glanced behind me to see if my body was lying there and I was simply a shade that had arisen from a newly made corpse. But no, there was just me. Well … me and my new dead friend.
That was when I felt the ground rumbling beneath my feet in a manner that I knew all too well. There were horseman drawing near, thundering toward me. At first I had no idea where they were coming from, for even though there was now full sunlight, the sun was being obscured by the increasingly thick clouds of smoke that were billowing everywhere. It served to disorient me even further. I wanted to run, but I had no idea which way to go.