The Wyrmling Horde (12 page)

The tormentors had been ordered to strip certain prisoners of various body parts, until Fallion imagined himself to be only a stump of a person.

Let him thank me then, Despair thought, a small smile forming on his lips.

“Why are you smiling?” Fallion asked Rhianna in his dream. The stupefied boy's head had begun to reel, and he imagined that the wine was dulling his pain.

“I smile because I love you so,” Rhianna said softly. “Now, my love,” she whispered, “about the binding of worlds. You promised, remember? You promised to tell me how it was done?”

Of course no such promise had been tendered, but the unconscious mind does not track such things well. Besides, Fallion's head was reeling, and Lord Despair was counting upon Fallion's stupor to aid in the deception.

“What?” Fallion cried, still wincing and shaking from unseen ailments.

“The binding of worlds? How did you do it?”

“It's . . . it's easy,” Fallion said. “So easy, once you see it.”

That shocked Despair right out of the dream.

It was
easy
to bind the worlds?

Despair had always imagined that it was complex, that it
would require great cunning, followed by lengthy preparation and exhaustive steps—major magical routines that were broken into dozens of subroutines. He had tried every easy solution, but the truth was that the Seals of Creation baffled him in their complexity.

He dove back into the dream.

“Yes, yes,” Rhianna said. “I know that it's easy for you. You've said that before. But you're wiser than you give yourself credit for—much wiser.

“Come,” Rhianna begged, “to the Seal. Come show me how it is done.”

And in the way of dreams, she took his hand in the darkness and led him outside the front door of his father's cabin.

There in the yard, in the clear spot where the chickens scratched in the grass by day, beneath a white gum tree, the Seal of the Inferno lay upon the ground, a great circle of ghostly green flames dancing upon the lawn.

Blinking in surprise, Fallion stared at it.

Fallion swallowed, opened his mouth, and started to speak.

Despair leaned forward, straining to hear, lest he miss a single syllable.

“I . . . something's wrong. There's something wrong here.” He peered at the Seal as if studying it.

Despair had made the Seal the way that he remembered it. But in his dream, Fallion stumbled around the thing, peering at flames, listening to the hiss and roar that they created, as if baffled.

“Things are out of place,” he said, confused.

“Perhaps a few,” Rhianna said. “Show me how to bind the world.”

Fallion stammered, “You just—you . . .”

He wetted his tongue, then frowned in concentration for an instant—an instant too long. He whirled and peered at Rhianna, the light of dancing fires shining in his eyes, and peered not at the girl, but into her soul.

So powerful was Fallion's gift that Lord Despair was laid naked.

* *  *

Suddenly Fallion's eyes flew open and he peered at Despair, his glazed eyes focusing on him, and shouted, “No!”

I almost had him, Despair realized. For a moment, I had him. But the opportunity had passed.

Despair turned and nodded to Vulgnash; the Knight Eternal stretched forth his hand, drawing the heat from the room until Fallion curled up again in a fetal position, his teeth chattering and every muscle trembling from cold, as he plummeted into a deep, deep slumber.

 

Somewhere in the recesses of his mind, Areth Sul Urstone watched the whole scene unfold, sickened and horrified at what Despair was plotting.

  5  

Every soul, from the greatest warrior to the smallest child, has immense worth in the sight of the Great Wyrm. The Great Wyrm has made us stewards over each other, and that is why we must never let our fellows escape.

 

—From the Wyrmling Catechism

Cullossax had felt anxious throughout the evening. He'd known that he would be missed, and that eventually his fellow tormentors would come looking for him.

Often he had to fight the impulse during the day to flee out into the light.

At last, when the shadows grew long enough to indicate that the day was almost gone, Cullossax bade farewell to the
lowly guards, took an iron javelin, and ran after the girl, giving chase.

Her path was easy to follow.

The girl had headed into the forest, witless with terror and blinded by light. With every step her heels had gouged into the thick humus that lay like a blanket under the pines.

Cullossax had seldom been outside the fortress, but he had been taught a bit about tracking, for it was a skill that tormentors were called upon to use even within the labyrinth.

The air was fresh, and soon the forest filled with night sounds—the scurrying of mice among the remains of leaves, the buzz of insects, the querulous peeps of birds, the songs of crickets and cicadas.

The air smelled sweet. Cullossax could not recall the last time he'd tasted fresh air.

The stars came out, blinding points of light so silver-bright that they left an afterimage when he squinted up at them.

Soon, he knew, he would have hunters on his trail, but Cullossax felt resigned to his fate, happy. He was no stranger to death. He'd dealt it out time and time again, and had always known that his turn would come.

With a light heart, Cullossax ran, chasing after a girl, heading for a land that might be no more than a child's dream. . . .

After long hours, Cullossax still plunged through the pine forest, lost in the chase. His heart pounded a steady rhythm as his legs stretched wide. Greasy sweat streamed down his forehead and face, and stained his tunic with a V down his back. His thirst made him wish for pools of water.

But his mind barely registered these things, for his eyes followed the torn sod in the starlight where his quarry had run.

Unthinking, he leapt over a fallen fir tree, and ducked beneath the boughs of another. In the brush to his right, he
heard the snort of a stag. He stood for a moment, heart racing, as he wondered what the sound might portend. He had been outside the fortress only twice in his life, and then not for more than a night. He knew little about wild creatures. Then the stag went bounding away, and he saw it between the trees.

His stomach growled at the thought of fresh flesh.

He could not let himself be distracted. With every long stride, he knew that he drew closer to the girl. She was young and small, and would not be able to keep up this pace forever.

But in the back of his mind, Cullossax worried. He was hunting, but by now he would also be hunted. He should have checked in with his master hours ago. He would be missed, and eventually the story of what had happened would unravel.

The best of his own kind would hound him. No one could exact vengeance like a tormentor of the Bloody Fist. The punishment exercised upon one of their own kind, one who had shamed them and brought their reputation into question, would be harsh indeed.

In Rugassa, torture was not just a science, it was an art. Cullossax pondered long and hard, but was certain that he could not imagine what they would do to him.

They would torture him in public, of course, and the tormentors would vie for the honor of inflicting the most horrific insults upon his body.

In time they would let him die. That at least was certain. It was not a question of how long Cullossax would live, but a question of how long he would suffer before they let him die.

He wondered which of the torturers would come after him, and that gave him pause. There were stories of a new kind of magic in Rugassa. The emperor's elite troops had been drawing attributes from the lowest of the slaves—strength, speed, bloodlust. These new warriors could run faster than a common man, and longer.

Cullossax wondered what he would do if he had to face such a warrior.

And then there was Vulgnash himself. Cullossax had taken food from a Knight Eternal.

That kind of insult was unheard of.

Cullossax only hoped that Vulgnash could not be spared to lead the chase.

For most of the night Cullossax ran through hills, through a land of seemingly endless forests. Sometimes he had scrambled up hills where aspen trees spread their white branches in the moonlight, gleaming like bones, and other times he descended into vales filled with oak and ash.

But always there was the forest, and Cullossax hoped that if Vulgnash gave chase, the trees might hide him from above.

The midsummer's air hardly cooled during the night, and as Cullossax neared a stream, he finally found the girl.

She was lying in the ferns and moss beside the water's edge, curled in a fetal position. When she heard Cullossax draw near, she yelped in panic, then began crawling toward the brook, shaking so badly from fear that she could not stand.

Cullossax ran to her. The iron javelin was heavy in his hand, and he could have pierced her if that had been his intent.

“No, please!” she whimpered. “Let me go.”

Cullossax laughed, not because he enjoyed her fear but because there was something so odd about her. She had a softness that was pure and innocent and completely unlike anything he had seen. No wyrmling had such a soft heart.

As he laughed, the girl struck. She suddenly leapt up and lunged, aiming a sharp stick at his heart.

Cullossax grabbed her arm and wrestled the weapon away. It was not hard. She was young, and the long chase coupled with her own fear had weakened her. A simple head butt made her swoon.

“I have not come to kill you,” Cullossax said. “I've come to help you.”

“I—don't understand.”

“I could have fed you to Vulgnash,” he said. “I should have. And for my audacity, I may yet die. But I chose to let you live.” He nodded south. “How far to this Inkarra?”

“Beyond the Great Spine,” she said.

Cullossax bit his lower lip. Three hundred miles at least, maybe four. A warrior, running, might make it in three nights. But Cullossax was a tormentor, and was not used to such exertion. Neither was the girl.

“Can you run?” he demanded.

The girl dropped her head. No.

Some primal instinct warned him to hurry. He grunted, grabbed the girl, and threw her over a shoulder. “Then rest.”

He jumped into the brook and splashed downstream. His wyrmling brothers had strong noses, he knew, and he hoped to throw them off of his track. After a few hundred yards, he turned back the way that he had come, and then began a zigzag path heading east.

The land in that direction was dropping away, and as it neared dawn the sound of morning birdsong began to fill the air. Larks twittered and jays ratcheted.

He found himself on a small hill, peering down into a meadow. Miles away, he could see a line of alders. The stars had all faded from the sky, and the sun would be up soon. Bits of cloud on the horizon were bloody red.

The girl stared toward the sky, a curious look on her face.

“What do you see?” Cullossax asked, worried that she had spotted a sign of their enemies.

“The sunrise, it's beautiful this morning,” she said. “There are colors in the clouds—faintest blue along the edges, and palest gold in the sky.”

Blue
and
gold
were words that he had never heard before. She had to use Inkarran words to describe these colors.

“You see colors,” he asked, “like the humans do?”

“Yes,” she admitted, “ever since the joining of the worlds. That is how I know that this is not all just some simple madness.”

By now, his shoulder ached and his legs were failing. “Can you run yet?” he asked the girl.

“Yes,” she said.

He set her down and pointed east. “We must reach those trees before sunrise. It will be a race. Can you make it?”

She grunted, the wyrmling sound for yes, and they were off. They sprinted through the tall grass. Rabbits bounded away from their trail and finches flew up out of the thistles.