Empire of the Worm

by Conner, Jack

  The priests opened their own eyes. “Lord Davril. Welcome to the Temple of—”

  “How goes the war?”

  They glanced at each other nervously. “We have washed you, cleaned your wounds, prepared your sister for proper entombment—”

  “How goes the war?”

  The shorter one cleared his throat. “Not well, Your Majesty. The Aesinis have whelmed the North Wall and seized the Gate of Winter. Now their hordes pour in unchecked. The White Quarter has been abandoned.”

  “And General Hastus?”

  “As far as we know, he lives. He has assumed rule of the city—and the realm, we suppose. Though of course no one outside the City will recognize it.”

  Davril took a deep breath. Let it out. He tried to tell himself everything would work out, but somehow he’d lost his taste for lying. In a low voice, he said, “You should’ve let me die.”

  “We could not, in good conscience,” came a new voice, and Davril glanced up to see a beautiful woman of perhaps forty years, with high cheekbones and long black hair just beginning to show traces of silver. She was dressed in swatches of blue silk and she smelled of honey.

  “Lady,” he said, bowing his head as was custom, even for an emperor. The last time he had seen the Lady of the Tower had been at his crowning ceremony.

  “Emperor.” She bowed back, smiling, seeming to mock these niceties. As well she should. He was no longer emperor. Perhaps he had never been.

  “Why couldn’t you let me die?” he asked. “I have no purpose, no reason to be. Everyone I loved is dead.” Except one. His voice sounded calm, cold. But suddenly heat coursed through him. “The only thing I have left to live for is vengeance.” He clenched a fist, and it trembled. “I swear to all the gods of earth and fire that I will kill General Hastus and his whore of a daughter, if I take my last breath in the doing.”

  “Now now,” the Lady said, stepping forward. The priests scuttled out of her way as she sat beside Davril, laying a soft-skinned hand on his bare shoulder. She smelled not just of honey, but lavender and lilacs, and her calm, gentle eyes looked deeply into his. “Vengeance will get you nowhere, not against the General. Besides, he only did what he thought right.”

  “He slew my sister. My infant son! He’s a bastard, and I will kill him, as slowly as I can devise.”

  She didn’t answer, and for a while he just lay there and seethed.

  When at last his mind calmed, he said, “You said he did what he thought right. Does that mean that you think otherwise?” He dared not let himself feel hope.

  “We would not have saved you had we thought otherwise.”

  Instead of relief, bitterness rose in him. “Then why couldn’t you have saved Sareth? Or perhaps only her? That would have been a blessing.”

  The Lady lowered her eyes, which were a clear, dark shade of blue. “We wanted to. We wanted to, very much. We gathered at the Baths, hoping for a chance. But the General’s men were too many, and the crowd would have stopped us. So we waited, thinking that at the least we could bear witness to your deaths and prepare your bodies afterward in the way of your faith. Then the alarms came, and we saw that we had a chance. We took it. I wish it had come in time to save your sister, but, alas . . .” She looked back up. “I am sorry, my lord.”

  He rose from his bed, impatient and irritated. The sheets fell away, revealing his nakedness. He didn’t care. He limped away from the Lady, from the priests, through a whitewashed archway and onto a terrace overlooking the city. From here one could see the Palace rising from its mountain to the east, all red and orange, a fiery confusion of towers and walls and bulwarks. Off to the west, the sea glittering blue and vast. And to the north, the black columns of smoke as fire devoured the White Quarter, also known as the Ice Quarter. The people that lived there were called the Wintermen. Now the barbarians had it—the Aesinis. And that would only be the beginning.

  The Lady moved to stand behind him.

  “We’re lost, aren’t we?” he said.

  “All we can do is pray,” she said.

  “Prayers! Gods! You can have them. My family satisfied our god for long enough. No more. I refuse to play their games.” The anger drained out of him. He thought of Subn-ongath and the other Masters, as his father had called them—the other creatures that comprised the traitorous Circle of Uulos—and shuddered. He may hate them, but he would play their games, he admitted to himself, if only they would let him.

  “The god of your family is Asqrit, is it not?” she asked. “The Great Phoenix, God of the Sun, he who dies every day at sunset but bursts into new life every day at dawn.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said, turning to her. “That’s the lie my family maintained—for a thousand and more years, they maintained it. But no more. The truth is out. My family worshipped a dark thing, a god, I don’t know. A thing called Subn-ongath.” At this revelation, she gasped. “And it was but one of an order of like creatures that had once been a circle of devotees to none other than the Worm himself.”

  “Impossible!”

  “It’s the truth. They betrayed Him and imprisoned him. But now, because of my rashness, they’ve moved on from this world, and without them to stop him He’s returning. This war we’re seeing—it’s only the merest tip of the iceberg that rises to greet us. When He arrives, I have it on good authority the world as we know it will end.”

  She braced herself on the railing. For a long time, she just stood there, wearing a contemplative look. The wind hissed and sighed. Davril stared out over the city, watching flames scorch it.

  At last the Lady said, “Yes. There have been portents, omens of disaster. We of the Order of Behara have been discussing it for the past two years. Two-headed lions being born, and a sickness that can blacken a person’s insides, burn them from the inside out, and sinister clouds and fiery stars, not to mention the red mists and tremors and . . . well. Those high in our order have certain gifts. Those gifts are blocked now, as if something powerful obscures them. So yes, some of our order have maintained that the prophesied time of Uulos’s return was at hand, but I had not thought—I mean to say, there are always those that preach the Apocalypse.” She shook her head. “There must be something that can be done.”

  He regarded her seriously. “Is there truly such a thing as Behara? I’ve come to believe in gods. Some of them, anyway. Perhaps He can help.”

  She smiled sadly. “He is gone, far from this world. He weaves new skies for new worlds now. He has left us His wisdom, His Light, but that is all. That is why I’m here, to await His Return, should He ever do so. I keep this sanctuary ready for Him. I keep it clean, I prepare Him meals, I warm His bed.”

  And that of the priests, if the rumors are true, Davril thought. “His Light?” he echoed. His father had called Uulos the god of all darkness.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But . . . perhaps . . . no, it doesn’t matter.” He shook his head. It was all too big for him, too hard for him to believe. Even if there was truly such a being as Uulos, how could one mortal hope to combat It? The very concept was madness. With a sigh, he looked out over the city again, at the flames, the smoke, and imagined the screams as Aesinis raped his women, tortured his men. The Aesinis were said to delight in torture. They took pieces of their victims for trophies and painted their bodies in their victims’ blood. They were savage, blood-mad dogs. And they were only the beginning.

  “Tell me of Uulos,” he said. “All I know of Him is that he was a great, dark thing—a god, according to Father Elimhas—that ruled the world when the earth was dark and molten. I know He ruled from his great city of Sagrahab until some calamity befell Him—now I know it was the betrayal of His Circle—and He was forced to relocate, to establish the great island nation of Nagradin. It was powerful and mighty, but at last it sank beneath the waves. Maybe if I know more I can stop Him.”

  “Almost all religions make note of him,” the Lady said, “by one name or another. Even you A
sqrites. Asqrit is the God of the Sun, and his Adversary is the God of Night. Yferl. He who slays Asqrit every dusk but is defeated every dawn.”

  “You’re saying that Yferl is another name for Uulos? But that means . . . that means Uulos is already free! If he can war with Asqrit every day . . .”

  She smiled. “There is no Asqrit. Nor Yferl. Yet there is a parallel to him in my own faith. Mustrug, the Worm—as Uulos is popularly known even beyond my faith—he who dwells beneath the earth and mocks Behara by being out of his power. Mustrug constantly tempts the people of the land with vice, tries to lure them to their souls’ forfeiture deep in his halls of mud and stone. But in some languages, in some of our texts, Mustrug is not Mustrug at all. He is Uulos.”

  Davril nodded slowly. He’d been soaked in the myths of a thousand cults all his life, but he’d paid scant heed to most of them.

  “What about the Illyrians?” he said. “Do they believe in Uulos?”

  “Oh, yes. Sigmoor, the Devourer of Stars. The Sky-Serpent.”

  “But these are all so simplistic—light and dark, good and bad.”

  “We are known as the sects of the Light—that is, the faiths of Behara, Illyria, Asqrit and Tiat-sumat. Also known as the sects of the Flame.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “Beliefs to prop people up so that they don’t fall into despair, so that they don’t see past the lies to the darkness beyond, at the end of all things. The thing I saw below the Palace was quite real, not some symbol. Are any of these gods real?”

  “Behara is quite real, my lord. Mine is one of the most ancient faiths of the Light—or Flame, if you prefer.”

  “One of the most? What is the most?”

  “If you must know, the only sect of the Light more ancient is the worship of Tiat-sumat, the Fire-Bringer.”

  Davril lifted his eyebrows. “The Fire-Bringer?”

  “What? What is it?”

  The smoke of the distant flames swung toward the Tower, carried on a gust of wind, and it stung his eyes, even as high as he was. The sun was dropping to the west, bathing the ocean in blood. Soon night would fall.

  “What?” she pressed. “Have you thought of something?”

  He laughed bitterly. “Maybe, but it can amount to nothing. Surely . . . if this Uulos does exist . . . surely one man can’t stop him.”

  “Can I or the Brotherhood help?”

  He stared toward the shore, to the fire that burned atop the House of Light. “If indeed light or flame can hurt the Worm, there it is,” he said. “Light itself.”

  “The Jewel of the Sun . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest. I do know that the ancient Tiat-sumatians built their religion around it, and all the sects of the Light that have come since at one point used its existence as a cornerstone of their belief. We of Behara call it the Eye of the Sky and believe it is our touchstone to Behara Himself, proof of his continued presence in our world. The Asqrites believe it’s Asqrit in the flesh as it were, the very egg of the Phoenix.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I must have it. The problem is that Father Elimhas refused to even let me look on it last time I was there. He said the Jewel was useless against the Worm. That his order had lost certain knowledge that could make it a weapon.”

  She looked thoughtful. “According to what I’ve been taught, the Jewel originally belonged, if that is the word—perhaps better to say in the custody of—the Church of Tiat-sumat. The Asqrites, when their numbers began to swell, stole the Jewel from the Tiat-sumatians to increase their power. When they did that, they also took certain holy books in which were written the rites necessary to maintain the Jewel’s hold on this world, possibly even to magnify its power. I don’t know if the Tiat-sumatians wrote those books or found them when they found the Jewel—or were given the Jewel, according to some, by an ancient, pre-human race. Anyway, some of those rites were written in a primeval tongue, one my own order doesn’t know, and it’s possible the Asqrites don’t know it either.”

  “But the Tiat-sumatians did?”

  “They must have.”

  “You think they still do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And those rites could turn the Jewel into a weapon?”

  She shook her head. “I really don’t know, Davril. Perhaps.”

  “Then I must go to the House of Light for answers.”

  “I will go with you.”

  Chaos consumed the city with riots, looting, and desperate religious ceremonies. The members of the thousand cults were at their devotions, and each temple stirred with singing or shouting. Rapine, suicide and general anarchy ruled the day. Davril, the Lady, and one of her priests made their way through it carefully, slowing when they reached the ill-named Boulevard of Summer. In the shadow of the wall that surrounded the Avestine Quarter, it was located in a maze of narrow, winding streets, right in the heart of the ghettos of Sedremere. Catching glimpses of the wall that encircled the Avestine Quarter as he went, Davril felt uneasy. Evidently the Lady noticed.

  “The Avestines won’t recognize you,” she said.

  “They’d better not,” he said.

  The Avestines hated the Husans, whom they considered to be their oppressors for untold generations. Still, was he so far removed from his old self that they wouldn’t even know him if he rode right past them? He sat straighter in the camel’s saddle.

  “I suppose they’ll be leaving their quarter soon,” the Lady was saying. “Now that order is breaking down in the City, there won’t be soldiers enough to man the gates.”

  “They don’t need gates,” Davril said. The Lady looked at him quizzically, but he didn’t expand. Only a few in the highest levels of government knew about the miles of tunnels the Avestines had carved under their quarter—and some said beyond—during the hundreds of years of their confinement.

  Davril fingered the dagger stuck through the back of his waistband. The Lady had retrieved it for him, and he was grateful. It was his only link to his father, to his past. And, according to the dead emperor, it might prove a help against the Worm.

  They passed a harem mansion where mounted soldiers were trying to break up a riot of red-faced men. The men, fearing the end had come, had evidently decided to storm the harem and take the women before the invaders put them to the sword, but now the soldiers were doing that for them. The gathered men screamed and fought back, several pulling down an armored soldier and beating him with stones.

  Davril rode up and knocked the men away, cracking several on their heads. Cursing him, they converged on his camel, perhaps meaning to pull him down, too. The Lady and her fellow priest Wesrai rode up and scattered them. The soldier, bloody but alive, rose from the dusty cobblestones and thanked Davril, then remounted his horse and rejoined his brother-in-arms. Up above, the harem girls, clad in colorful swatches of silk if clad at all, watched the fight fearfully from the mansion’s terraces.

  Davril passed through the Arch of Midnight, skirted the Ziggurat of Niard, was engulfed by the Plaza of Dreams with its topiaries and elaborately-sculpted hedges, and finally the golden towers of the Temple of the Sun materialized ahead, rising from beyond the shop fronts and residential apartments where drying clothes, strung from one terrace to another, fluttered in the wind. The Light-House rose highest and proudest of all, right from the center of the Asqrit compound. A more ancient structure, grim and dark and hulking, it did not match the gilded domes and towers of the Asqrites. From here Davril could smell the sea and just vaguely hear the pound of the surf.

  The Arch of the Sun stopped him. It was the only entrance to the grounds surrounding the compound of the Temple of the Sun. High above, in the top chamber of the Light-House, a bright red-orange glow shone out from the highest chamber. Just what was the Jewel of the Sun?

  Doors sealed the Gate. Soldiers, mercenaries employed by the Asqrit priesthood, the Brotherhood of the Golden Plumage, thronged the walls surrounding the temple grounds, and their golden armo
r flashed brilliantly as the Gatekeeper, on the wall near the gate, shouted down, “Who goes there?”

  “The better question is why the gates are closed,” Davril shouted back. “Aren’t they supposed to be open—always? So that any may worship at any time?”

  “These are not normal times. The priesthood has ordered the Temple sealed to prevent looting and despoiling. Now be off. We’ve disbursed several crowds already and will not shrink from disbursing you.” The soldiers near him raised their javelins meaningfully.

  Davril glanced down at the cobblestones and saw fresh blood stains. Flies buzzed about, and there came an acrid odor, even over the salty stench. The pounding of waves against the shore broke louder in the background.

  Davril hesitated. If he revealed his identity, the soldiers might slay him. On the other hand, they were not loyal to General Hastus but to the priesthood, and the priesthood had very close ties to the imperial family. It was the emperors that had made the worship of Asqrit the most popular faith in the Empire, after all, and the emperor and the High Priest of Asqrit historically had many private dealings. What’s more, Davril really had very little choice.

  “I am Lord Davril Husan,” he declared, using his most lordly voice, “Emperor of Qazradan! And you will obey me!”

  “Don’t try my patience,” the Gatekeeper said.

  Davril rode forward so that he was directly beneath the Gatekeeper. “I am Davril Husan,” he said. “If you disbelieve me, and I can understand if you do, then summon Father Elimhas. He will recognize me.”

  “You want me to disturb the High Priest at a time like this?”

  In his most commanding voice, Davril said, “Fetch him now!”

  The Gatekeeper swallowed, then, as if hardly believing himself, barked a quiet order to one of his soldiers. The man slipped away. Minutes later an aged, portly figure mounted the stairs that led to the top of the wall and stared down at Davril. Elimhas shaded his eyes with a hand and looked Davril over slowly. His look of annoyance gave way to surprise.