Empire of the Worm

by Conner, Jack

  “So that’s their trick. I’d always assumed they used some necromancy.”

  “Just tunnels. Miles and miles of tunnels. All underground. With plenty of room for us, so I believe. Of course, we will need to be on our guard. As has been pointed out, they bear no love for us or our gods, and they are a strange and mysterious people besides. But I really see very little choice—save to sit here and wait for the end to come, which if we sit and wait it most surely will.”

  Silently, they digested this. Then, slowly, they began to discuss it amongst themselves. They did not speak in an angry clamor this time, but slowly, methodically, intelligently. Davril waited.

  Suddenly, a priest from outside screamed.

  Davril bounded up and out of the room, using his Uuloson staff. The others followed, joining the priest that had alerted them and staring down at the base of the Tower, where a line of dark-robed figures streamed through the Gates and marched up the long, winding stairs.

  “Lerumites!” Davril hissed. “They must have waited for the sun to set before launching their attack.” Part of him wondered if they had come for him or the Beharans, or perhaps merely for the Beharan altar, but it didn’t really matter.

  The priests of the Light made sounds of despair. A great gathering of blue-robed men and women formed, accompanied by a smaller crowd of yellow-robed figures and various others.

  The Lady turned to Davril. This was symbolic, her granting authority to him.

  Calmly, almost too calmly, she said, “What shall we do?”

  He did not hesitate. “Gather all your blessed objects, all those you can carry, and follow me. We’ll go down the inner stairs.” The Lerumites used the outer stairs, winding round and round the Tower. Only the priesthood had access to the inner set. With any luck, the Lerumites wouldn’t even know about it; Davril only knew of them because of his frequent visits to the Tower. “And hurry! The fish-priests are moving swiftly.”

  Chapter 10

  “You’re mad.”

  “No,” Davril said, matching the other’s growl. “I am not.”

  They eyed each other tensely. The other was Patriarch Jeselri Montral, the secular head of the Avestines. They stood within the squarish main hall of the burnished red Ziggurat of Dusk, often considered the oldest of Sedremere’s many ziggurats. Alyssa, Father Trisdan, the Lady of Behara and other priests and followers of the Light waited in an antechamber.

  Jeselri crossed his lean arms over his chest. He was a tall man of perhaps sixty, bald, clean-shaven and hawkish, yet remarkably fit and healthy for his age. Behind him stood rows of ancient Avestine artifacts—sculptures, pottery, fragments of paintings, tapestries and mosaics, even a few crumbling scrolls. Visiting Avestine families would (in times of peace) come to this place and visit the artifacts, the children learning of the rich history of the Avestines. And it was a rich history, Davril had to admit. The Avestines had possessed a high civilization back when his own ancestors had been little more than savages not too dissimilar from the Aesinis.

  “Yes,” Jeselri replied. “You are. We cannot possibly accommodate you.”

  “Play no games with me, Patriarch. Remember who I am.”

  A twisted smile crossed Jeselri’s lean, dark face. “I am painfully aware of it . . . my lord.” He sort of smirked. He had large dark eyes that rarely blinked, and a great, curved nose jutted knife-like from his swarthy face.

  Davril let the comment pass. “You have plenty of room for us.”

  “Eh.” Jeselri’s features assumed a facial shrug, the corners of his wide, thin lips turning down. “What are your problems to us?”

  “Our problems are yours. There are greater forces at work here than the besieging armies. Surely your people have felt it, too. Surely your priests’ abilities have lessened of late.”

  “As a matter of fact, they have not. They have swollen. Why, have not yours?”

  That was interesting, Davril thought, and a bit unnerving. Just what sort of people was he dealing with that would swell with power at the coming of Uulos?

  “Never mind,” he said. “The important thing is that there’s a malevolent power rising, and it will turn its gaze on you before long if it hasn’t already. I happen to have information that could harm that power, and I’m willing to share it with you, but first you must aid me. I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Ha! You are penniless, a vagabond.” This obviously pleased Jeselri greatly.

  “Yet if you help me and we restore order to the realm, I will regain my throne and have access to my rightful wealth. And if you aid me—and I am not asking for much, just a few rooms out of the way, and a few attendants from time to time—then I will be very generous.”

  “Money, wealth—these are things that mean little to me and mine.”

  So . . . he wants to haggle, Davril mused, and accordingly narrowed his eyes. It was important not to appear too willing to bend.

  “Just what does mean something to you?” he asked.

  Jeselri paused, making sure he had Davril’s attention, and said, simply, “Respect.”

  Davril waited.

  “Respect,” Jeselri repeated, warming to the subject. “For too long have you Niardans treated us as third-class citizens, as filth to be shunted aside and confined to our Quarter. It is we who built this city.” His dark eyes blazed. “It is our city, ours by blood and toil. How can you treat us like this?”

  Davril could have reminded Jeselri that after the Niardans had seized the city they’d permitted the Avestines their freedom as long as they acknowledged the laws and rule of the Niardans—including the injunction against human sacrifice. The Avestines had pretended at obeisance, but almost immediately the disappearances had began. The killings. The mutilations. A campaign of violence and secrecy had been waged by the Avestines against the Niardans until finally the Emperor had confined them to their quarter and monitored their comings and goings closely. A hundred years later an emperor had granted them greater freedoms, but with the same result. And so it went. Every few hundred years an emperor would give the Avestines another chance, and every time they betrayed that trust.

  Davril simply ground his teeth. “So you want your restrictions abolished.”

  “That is only the beginning, as we have managed to slip around your net for some time now—as, perhaps, you shall see. No, I want my people to have a voice in the Empire. I want there to be Avestine governors and mayors and senators. I want us to enjoy every right of a citizen of Qazradan.”

  Davril needed him, but still he could not resist saying, “And do you swear to honor that trust?”

  Jeselri’s brow lowered. In a deceptively mild voice, he said, “We are an honorable people.”

  Davril checked himself. “Very well. I’ll do all that you’ve asked, if you help me now.”

  The Patriarch studied Davril. Davril could see the gleam of pride and ambition in his eyes, could see that Jeselri had fixed upon his dream and saw that it was within his grasp, and so it did not come as a surprise when Jeselri finally nodded.

  “Very well. Let it be so.” He bowed to Davril, and Davril bowed back. “I will take you down, where we will find a place for you and yours.”

  Davril let out a breath. “Thank you. You will not regret this.”

  “Oh, I know I will not. I will hold you to our bargain.”

  Jeselri waited while Davril gathered the Beharans and Tiat-sumatians and others. Meanwhile Jeselri conferred with his subordinates. Finally the Patriarch led his new charges down through the ziggurat and into its musty catacombs, where the high members of ancient Avestine society had been laid to rest eons ago. He triggered a hidden panel and darkness gaped from a secret tunnel.

  Davril smiled. He remembered his father speaking of the Avestines and their rat-tunnels and of how he would like to see them. He wondered where his father was now. Did the old emperor and his sons still linger in the shadows of the Palace?

  “This way,” Jeselri said. He and his attendants lit their tor
ches and marched off into the gloom, Jeselri in the lead, Davril immediately after.

  The square tunnel led on indefinitely, and Davril saw the black mouths of many cross-tunnels, with occasional vague hints of stairwells going both up and down catching his attention. Everything was made of stone and built to last. For how long had the Avestines been using this network? The Avestines moved in eerie silence, their dark faces locked in brooding scowls. Theirs was a gloomy people, given to age-long feuds and swift violence. Still, Davril knew that their celebrations were filled with wild abandon and were often considered debauched even by the more colorful cults of the city.

  As he passed one particularly large stairwell, Davril could not help but ask, “Just how deep do your tunnels go?”

  Jeselri shot him an odd look. “Deep,” he said. “Very deep.”

  He did not elaborate.

  As they went, Davril saw more and more people, Avestines all, coming and going through the tunnels, some emerging from depths below, some down from the streets and shops of the Avestine Quarter, or from all sides. They regarded Davril and his people with open surprise, even hostility.

  “It is well,” Jeselri would reassure the Avestines. “They’re under my protection. I will give a meeting about it tonight in the Great Hall. At midnight. Spread the word.” The Avestines would nod and move off, obviously both bothered and intrigued.

  Jeselri showed Davril and his people down a flight of stairs, and then another, then sideways for a stretch. They passed areas where everything was built of stone, then through long stretches where it was all shored-up dirt, then through bubbles of more stone.

  In the stone areas, there were rooms on all sides with apparent occupants, their doorways covered in curtains of colorful beads. Davril smelled incense and hashish, and roasting fowl, and heard children playing and adults conversing. Somewhere lovers grunted. There was the jingle of bells, and the wail of an Avestic accordion. The accordion-player, a bandy-legged man with a riotous beard, danced about while a long, sinuous form curled around his limbs in time to the music, its black fur rasping against his coarse clothes. Children and adults, huddling in the background, pointed at the great hypnotized worm and marveled.

  Davril was surprised. He had expected to find a few Avestines living below ground, but not in such numbers and density. How could people truly live down here in this musty darkness? And if indeed many did live here then the estimates Davril had of the Avestine population (roughly two hundred thousand) were surely wrong. Perhaps quite wrong.

  Alyssa came up to him. “I don’t know about this,” she whispered. “I don’t want to go any deeper.”

  “Neither do I,” he admitted. “We have no choice.”

  Hearing this, Jeselri turned to Alyssa. “As to going any deeper, have no fear, my dear. We’re almost there.”

  Sure enough, in only another few minutes had Jeselri led them down a certain hall, through a bright curtain of multi-colored beads, into a warren of musty, stone-walled rooms with a few pieces of dilapidated furniture and said, “Here we are.”

  Davril looked around at the slime-mold-covered walls flickering in the torch-light, at the stained urns and cracked pillars, wrinkling his nose at the stench of rot and time. At least the air was not as stale as it could have been. The Avestines had built air shafts throughout their tunnels, and that helped tremendously.

  He forced himself to stand straight and nod judiciously. “It will do,” he said.

  “Excellent. I will leave you now and let my men see to your specific needs. Javrol is authorized to act on my behalf.”

  He bowed, and Davril returned the gesture. The Patriarch spoke a few quick words to his underlings, turned and vanished into the darkness of the tunnel. His underlings stayed. Davril, the Beharans and the Tiat-sumatians spent some time conferring with them, working out the basics—food, water, furniture and other accommodations—and one left to arrange things while the other four Avestines stayed. Davril noticed that all wore curved sabers at their hips.

  “You can go,” he told them. “We’ll be fine on our own.”

  They retreated from the rooms, taking up station at the end of the hall just past the curtain of beads.

  Davril went to them. “Truly, we have no need of your services,” he said. “It will be all right for you to go about your normal duties.”

  The senior one, who must be Javrol—strong-armed and black-eyed, with gold rings in his equally black beard—stared at him coldly.

  “We are not leaving,” Javrol said.

  “Are you here to guard us, or to guard against us?”

  Javrol’s face betrayed no emotion. “We’re to keep our eyes on you, that is all. You are our guests. It would not do to let you go without.”

  “What if we were to, for example, leave our rooms? Would one or more of you go with us to ensure our continued well-being?”

  Javrol sort of smiled. “Just so. And we would steer you on your way. We would not want you getting lost. And there are certain areas where you should not go.”

  Ah, thought Davril. “Where are these areas?”

  Javrol shrugged. “There are more than one, but principally . . . down. This is as deep as it is . . . prudent for you to venture. If you were to go below this level, you would, I fear, not return.” This was a genuine threat, Davril was certain; if by chance or design he or one of his people strayed below, the Avestines would see to it they did not come back up. Thoughts of what the Avestines had to hide intrigued him, and worried him.

  Javrol tipped his head, a sort of bow, indicating that the conversation was over. Davril returned the gesture and limped back through the bead curtain to the warren of rooms he and the others would share.

  These are my people now, he told himself, looking around them as they settled in, reclining on stone benches and grouping around cracked tables. Where before my people consisted of an entire empire, now I have only a straggle of priests and worshippers. How was he to build an effective resistance against Uulos with such a lot? He thought of Sareth, and Hariban, and the ache within him flared. It was as if some place deep within him had been carved out, ripped violently from his body with dull instruments, and where he had been full before he was hollow, hollow and sore from the extraction. He knew he could not restore what had been there—it was gone forever—but he could fill that hollow space.

  He could fill it with fire.

  “Davril,” Alyssa said, approaching.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t want to see you.” He turned his face away so that she could not see his anger.

  For a moment she appeared ready to turn and go, but from somewhere she rallied. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  If it would get rid of her, fine. “Take me to it.”

  She brought him through high, thick columns toward a bench along a wall where, judging by the blankets given to her by Javrols’ people, she had evidently decided to make her home. Davril noted the huge black blocks that made up the walls, very different from the bricks that the Ziggurat of Dusk was composed of. But, of course, the Avestines were very ancient and would have experimented with many architectural styles. And it was likely that the engineers who had built these tunnels required different techniques entirely.

  “Here,” she said, motioning toward the wall near her bench.

  At first he didn’t see it. The wall was so old and worn away by time . . . But then he saw a section where three of the ebon blocks fit together so that an empty triangular shape was formed, a shape filled in with a smooth adobe patch.

  “Strange,” he said. “But I don’t see—”

  “It’s a window.”

  He smiled indulgently. “A window?”

  She nodded, earnest. “Yes, don’t you see? But it’s been filled in with mud bricks.”

  That was certainly what it looked like, a filled-in triangular window. He shook his head. “Why would the Avestines build a wall with a window—underground?”

  “That,” she said, “is an excellent q
uestion.”

  That night he dreamt he trod the dark halls of the Palace’s lower catacombs. He passed beyond the Door and through the strange netherworld before the Altar of Subn-ongath. He dreamt he passed the Altar and kept going, and at last he came into a place of eerie wonder, of great glowing towers and strange people, of all different shapes and sizes, some barely human if human at all, and many played fantastic musical instruments. The whole city—and yes, he saw, it was a city—seethed and hummed with joyous, thunderous life. He passed marvelous palaces and temples wherein bizarre beings croaked and gibbered, and he understood that these were the places of the Great Ones, those who belonged to the Circle of Subn-ongath. And the people and non-people here were the people of the Circle, and they sang and danced and made merry, all in worship and love of the Great Ones.

  They called to him. “Come to us, Davril,” they said, lissome arms outstretched to him. “Come and join us. We have a place for you.”

  He saw his father, and his brothers, and they were smiling and dancing. They, too, beckoned to him. “This is the final home of all true Husans,” his father said. “It’s your place. Come. Come, Davril, come.”

  Davril felt a keen longing that he did not understand, and for a moment he hesitated. Then he shook his head.

  “Never,” he said.

  The city faded, and the songs grew distant, and he woke up bathed in cold sweat, on a narrow bench in the underground warrens of the Avestines, a thin blanket about him. His heart beat rapidly in his chest.

  I’m safe, he told himself. I’m safe.

  But it was not victory he felt. It was grief, a strange pang at a thing that could have been and now would never be. Unless . . .

  He tried to return to sleep, but sleep would not come. When he closed his eyes, he could still hear the singing.

  BOOK TWO:

  RETURN