In the House of the Worm

  At length, his matches all but exhausted, he went back to the wall of the grouns. Something was nagging at him, pulling at the back of his brain. He looked again at the last groun in the row, then at the tube. That was being held almost like a weapon, Annelyn decided. And it bore a theta. It might be useful. He took the metal shaft of the thing-that-was-almost-a-torch, and smashed at the thick glass with a series of sharp blows. It cracked and cracked and cracked some more, but did not shatter. Finally, when his arm had begun to ache, Annelyn ripped through with his hands, clawing aside splinters of not-quite-glass that still hung maddeningly together. He grabbed the groun’s tube, and began to play with its various bars and handles.

  A few minutes later, he discarded it with disgust. Useless, whatever it had been.

  Something still bothered him. He lit another match and considered the helmeted groun. A wrongness there . . . .

  It hit him. The helmet, the reddish window. But a groun had no eyes! Annelyn widened the gap he had made in the glasslike wall, and lifted the helmet from the dead groun’s head.

  This groun had eyes.

  He moved his match very close. Eyes, all right; small and black, sunk deep in moist sockets, but definitely eyes. Yet this groun was the only eyed groun in the wall; the next one down, a heavy female, was eyeless, as were all the rest.

  His match died. Annelyn tried on the helmet.

  Light was all around him.

  He shouted, whirled, bobbed his head up and down. He could see! He could see the whole room, in a glance! Without a match, or a torch! He could see!

  The walls were glowing, very faintly, smoky red. The metal pillars—eight of them, he saw now—were bright orange, though the other metallic shapes remained shadowed. The doors were dark, but yellowish light leaked around the edge of the one he had come through. It pulsed. The very air seemed to give a dim light, a ghostly glow that Annelyn found hard to pin down. The dead grouns and the worms opposite stood in rows like soot-gray statues, outlined by the illumination around them.

  Annelyn’s fingers found the theta on the crest of the helmet. He was wearing a rune of the Changemasters, clearly! But—but why had it been on a groun?

  He considered the question for an instant, then decided that it did not matter. All that mattered was the helmet. He picked up his metal shaft again, a cool gray stick in the smoldering reddish chamber. The glass at its end had been broken into jagged shards by his efforts to smash through the window. That was fine. It would make an excellent weapon. Almost jauntily, Annelyn turned toward the far door.

  The burrow beyond was dark, but it was a darkness he could deal with, a darkness he had dealt with every day of his life in the dimly lit tunnels of the yaga-la-hai; it was made of shadows and vague shapes and dust, not the total blackness he had wandered in since fleeing the Meatbringer. Of course, it was not really like that—once, hesitantly, he lifted the helmet and instantly went blind again—but he cared little, if he could see. And he could see. The cool stone walls were a faded red, the air faintly misty and alight, and the ducts he passed were orange-edged maws that spewed streams of reddish smoke out into the burrows, to curl and rise and dissipate.

  Annelyn walked down the empty tunnel, for once imagining no sights and hearing no noises. He came to branchings several times and each time chose his way arbitrarily. He found shadowed stairways and climbed them eagerly, as far up as they would take him. Twice he detoured uneasily around the man-sized, dimly radiant pits he recognized as wormholes; one other time, he glimpsed a live eaterworm—a sluggishly moving river of smoke-dark ice—crossing a junction up ahead of him. Annelyn’s own body, seen through the helmet, glowed a cheerful orange. The bits of fungus that still hung from his tattered clothing were like chunks of yellow fire.

  He had been walking for an hour when he first encountered a live groun. It was less bright than he himself, a six-limbed specter of deep red, a radiant wraith seen down a side burrow out of the corner of his eye. But soon Annelyn observed that it was following him. He began to walk closer to the wall, feeling his way as if he were blind, and the groun who ghosted him grew more bold. It was a large one, Annelyn observed, cloth hanging from it like a flapping second skin, a net trailing from one hand, a knife in the other. He wondered briefly if it could be the same groun he had met before.

  When he reached a stairway, a narrow spiral between two branching corridors, Annelyn paused, fumbled, and turned: The groun came straight on toward him, lifting its knife, padding very quietly on its soft feet. Oddly, Annelyn discovered that he was not afraid. He would smash in its head as soon as it crept close enough.

  He lifted his glass-edged club. The groun came nearer. Now he could kill it. Except, except—somehow he didn’t want to. “Stop, groun,” he said instead. He was not quite sure why.

  The groun froze, edged backward. It said something in a low guttural moan. Annelyn understood nothing of it. “I hear you,” he said, “and I see you, groun. I am wearing a rune of the Changemasters.” He pointed at the theta stitched in gold on his breast.

  The groun gibbered in terror, dropped its net, and began to run. Annelyn ruefully decided that he ought not to have drawn attention to his theta. On impulse, he decided to follow the groun; perhaps, in its fear, it would lead him to an exit. If not, he could always find his way back to the stair.

  He pursued it down three corridors, around two turns, before he lost sight of it entirely. The groun had been running very quickly, while Annelyn was still getting an occasional twinge from his ankle, making it difficult to keep up. Yet he continued on after the groun had vanished, hoping to pick up the trail again.

  Then the creature reappeared, running toward him. It saw him, stopped, glanced back over a shoulder. Then, seemingly determined, it resumed its headlong, four-legged gallop, one of its remaining limbs brandishing its knife.

  Annelyn flourished his club, but the groun did not slow. Then inspiration struck. He reached into his pocket, and produced his last match.

  The groun shrieked, and four long legs began to scrabble madly on the burrow floor as it skidded to a halt. But it was not the only one surprised. Annelyn himself, dazzled by the coruscating brilliance that seemed to stab into his brain, choked and staggered and dropped the match. Both of them stood blinking.

  But something else moved. A cold gray shadow was drifting down onto the groun, filling the tunnel like a wall of mist. The front of it rippled in and out, in and out, in and out.

  Annelyn shook his head, and the eaterworm loomed clear.

  Without thought, he jumped forward, swinging his club over the head of the groun. The blow glanced harmlessly off the worm’s leathery skin. Then Annelyn drew back, kicked the groun to get it moving, and thrust his glass-edged pole into the contracting mouth of the attacker.

  He was running then, the groun next to him, darting around narrow turns until he was certain that they’d lost the worm. They retraced their old footsteps, and the narrow stair appeared in their path.

  The groun stopped, and swung to face him. Annelyn stood with empty hands.

  The groun raised its knife, then cocked its head to one side. Annelyn matched the motion. That seemed to satisfy the creature. It sheathed the blade, squatted in the dust thick on the burrow floor, and began to sketch a map.

  The groun’s finger left glowing trails that lingered for a time, then faded rapidly. But the symbols it used meant nothing to Annelyn. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I cannot follow.”

  The groun looked up. Then it rose, gestured, and started up the stair, glancing back to see if Annelyn was behind it. He was.

  They climbed that stair and another, walked through a series of wide burrows, pulled themselves up rust-eaten ladders through narrow wells. Then came more tunnels, the groun looking back periodically, Annelyn following docilely. He was nervous, but he kept telling himself that the groun could have killed him before; surely if that had been what it intended, it would have done so by now.

  Other grouns moved through
the burrows. Annelyn saw one, a skeletal red shape with a long sword and one missing limb, and then two together with knives crouching near a junction. They gave him ominous eyeless looks. Later, they passed whole crowds of grouns, some of them in long garments that dragged on the floor and shone softly in many colors. All gave him a wide berth. He saw worm-holes, too, most dark and cold, others ringed by faint halos that sent chills up his spine.

  After more climbing and turning than Annelyn cared to remember, they came out into a large chamber. A dozen grouns sat over smoking bowls at long metal tables, shoveling food into their mouths. They regarded him impassively.

  Annelyn caught the scent of food—a fungus mush, torch-tenders’ food—and was suddenly, ravenously hungry. But no one offered him a bowl. His guide spoke to another groun seated near the center of the table, a grossly fat individual with an enormous, misshapen head. Finally the huge groun—he must have weighed more than Groff, Annelyn thought—shoved aside his bowl of steaming food, rose, and came over to Annelyn. His head moved up and down, up and down, as he inspected the intruder. Four soft hands began to pat him all over, and Annelyn gritted his teeth and tried not to flinch. It wasn’t as bad as he had expected. He found himself regarding the new groun almost like a person, instead of a thing.

  The fat groun cocked his bead to one side. Annelyn remembered and did the same. The groun joined four hands together in a huge fist, raised it, lowered it. Annelyn, with only two hands, did his best to mimic the gesture.

  Then the groun held up one finger, and jabbed at his own chest with another hand. Annelyn started to imitate him, but the groun restrained him. This was something more than a vision test. Annelyn was still.

  The groun held up two fingers on a hand of an upper limb, his two middle limbs went out to either side, and his great body shook. His opposing upper arm came up, and that hand flashed three fingers. The groun looked from one hand to the other and back again, then repeated the gesture. He looked at Annelyn, and was still.

  Annelyn glanced from the groun’s upper right hand—two fingers—to the upper left—three. The Meatbringer’s words returned to him. He raised his own hand, and spread three fingers.

  The groun lowered all his hands, and again the immense body quivered. He turned back to another of his kind, and they spoke together in their soft, mournful way. Annelyn could not follow their talk, but he hoped he had made himself understood.

  Finally the leader turned and walked back around the table, seated himself, and returned to his bowl of fungus. Annelyn’s erstwhile guide took him by the elbow, and beckoned him to follow. They went together from the chamber. The groun began leading him upward once more.

  As they walked on and on, climbing one ladder after another and ascending stairways only to descend others, wandering through long burrows full of grouns shuffling and muttering, Annelyn grew increasingly conscious of his exhaustion. Whatever magic had kept him functioning until now was rapidly wearing off—his ankle hurt, his thigh hurt, his hands hurt, he was starved and parched and filthy, and he badly needed rest and sleep. But the groun showed no mercy, and Annelyn could only strive to keep up with his rapid pace.

  Afterward, of all the burrows they passed through, only a few pictures lingered in his memory.

  One time, the two of them walked down a narrow passage that was frightfully, eerily cold; the gloom was thick enough to cut, and Annelyn saw pipes, intensely black and throbbing, along the low ceiling. Wisps of ebony fog curled around them, then fell like slow streamers to the floor; Annelyn and the groun walked boot deep in chilled black mist. Under the pipes, wicked metal hooks curved outward. Most of them were empty, but two held the carcasses of rope-thin worms of a kind Annelyn had never encountered. A third held poor fat Riess, naked and dead, an obscene carving of obsidian, with a hook in the back of his neck so he dangled grotesquely. Annelyn started to make the sign of the worm, stopped himself, and shuffled by. If he had held up two fingers instead of three, he suspected, he might now occupy the hook right next to his one-time friend.

  Two others chambers struck him forcefully, for both were among the largest open spaces he had ever seen. The first of these was so hot that sweat ran down his arms, while the orange glare of the air stung his eyes. It was a room so large he could barely see the far side. Pipes were everywhere, thick and thin, some strangely dark and others brilliant, like metal worms running over floor and walls and ceilings. The vast spaces above were filled by a web of thin bridges and ropes: up there, Annelyn glimpsed a thousand grouns, limber on six legs and born to the air, scampering up and down and around on the web, turning wheels and pushing bars, tending five immense shapes of metal that stood several levels high and burned with stabbing white light. His guide led him through the chamber on ground level, detouring through the maze of pipes, while the other grouns swung by and paid them little attention.

  The second chamber, three levels higher and long minutes later, was just as huge, but desolate. No light here, no shapes of metal, no ropes or bridges; and the only groun Annelyn saw here was a lone, armed hunter who stood like a tiny red bug in the far distance across the room, and watched them as they passed. The floor and the walls were stone, dusty and dry and melancholy, but in places they were lined by a metal paneling that shone faintly with lights of many different hues. When Annelyn and his guide walked near one of these, he saw that a picture was glowing on the panel. It was an intricate, la-bored depiction of sword-swinging grouns battling a giant whose eyes were thetas and whose fingers were worms. He had to look hard and long to make sense of the scene, however; as with the tapestries of the yaga-la-hai, here too the colors were dim and fading, and rust had eaten black, flaking holes in some of the panels. One more thing Annelyn noted about the great, abandoned chamber: wormholes. The floor was full of them.

  Afterward, they went straight for a long time. Annelyn noticed broken bronze fists on the walls then, and some of his weariness lifted. He was closer to home. The yaga-la-hai had lived here once.

  Abruptly, the groun stopped. Annelyn stopped too.

  They stood beside an air duct. It had no grill. Annelyn smiled wanly, leaned forward, and reached inside. His hand brushed rope.

  The groun made an odd sweeping gesture, turned, and set off back the way he had come, moving rapidly on four limbs. Soon Annelyn was alone. He reached into the warm shaft, gripped the rope, and started to climb. This time he could see where he was going. The metal sides around him were a friendly reddish color, the air faintly misty and moving steadily upward, past him. When he was between levels, he could look up and down, and in both directions see the shadowed squares of exits.

  He swung out one level up, and removed his helmet, cradling it under his arm. The great metal doors hung open. Annelyn stood in shadows, and let his eyes adjust to the pale, purple gloom. The fungus-encrusted globes still shone in the Chamber of the Changemasters, but the torches had been snuffed. Of the Meatbringer, he saw no sign. He waited until he was sure, then went inside.

  The first thing he took up was a weapon. His own rapier was there, on top of a pile of rusting blades, and he reclaimed it with satisfaction. He tested Groff’s great ax, lying up against the throne, but found it too heavy and awkward. Instead, he slid Vermyllar’s dagger into his belt, and Riess’s into a boot. If he were to blood the Meatbringer, it seemed appropriate to use those tools.

  Then he wandered around the chamber, picking at things, exploring, searching for food. He finally found a cache of meat, strips salted and hung. Plenty of good white groun-meat, and some other kind as well. But Annelyn found he could eat none of it. He settled for a bowl of spiced spiders and a plate of mushrooms.

  After eating, he rested on one of the wheeled beds, too tired to sleep, and too frightened. Instead, he scrutinized a book he had found lying open beside the throne. Its covers were heavy leather, impressed with the theta and a row of symbols, but the pages inside had not endured the long passage of time as well. Some were missing entirely, others were damp and overgro
wn by paper mold, and the few fragments still legible made no sense to Annelyn. The symbols were vaguely like the writing in the crumbling libraries kept by the Manworm; Annelyn had learned to read a little of it from Vermyllar, who in turn had learned the dark art from his grandfather. It did not help. He could puzzle out a word here, guess at one on the page following, and yet another, ten chapters on, but never two words together that made sense. Even the pictures were meaningless tangles of lines, depicting nothing that he recognized.

  Annelyn set the book aside. Noises were coming from the air duct. He stood, took his helmet and rapier, and went outside the chamber doors to wait.

  The Meatbringer emerged from the shaft, dressed in white grounskin with a colorless cloak. Ropes of spidersilk bound the body of a small male child to his back. The boy was of the yaga-la-hai.

  Annelyn stepped forward.

  The Meatbringer looked up, startled. He had begun to untie the knots that held his prey. Now his hand went to his knife. “So,” he said. “You.”

  “Me,” said Annelyn. His rapier was extended, his helmet cradled by his free hand.

  “I searched for you,” the Meatbringer said. “After I hung a new rope.”

  “I fled,” said Annelyn, “knowing that you would search.”

  “Yes,” the Meatbringer said, smiling. His knife came out, a whisper of metal on leather. “I feared you were lost. This is better. The grouns pay well for meat. Your friends, by the way, were delicious. Except for the knight. Unfortunately, he was quite tough.”