Wurm War

by Christopher Golden

  After those weapons ran out, they would be left with only whatever edged weapons they had brought with them and their own magical skills. But acolytes were not combat mages. Most Wurm had skill and power with magic that was nearly as significant as that of an acolyte, and the Wurm were physically stronger, far more vicious … and they had their fire.

  If the war was still raging when they ran out of the weapons that had been supplied to them, the acolytes up on those rooftops would be easy prey. But they did not lack for courage. They would fight for Arcanum. For Terra.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?” Nimue asked, her voice quiet so she would not be overheard.

  Carlyle frowned. “How do you mean?”

  Her ice blue eyes narrowed. “It should never have come to this. The Parliament betrayed the Wurm before my mother was born. What they did was wrong. If they’d just let the Wurm live in Tora’nah in peace, all those years ago…” She scowled in disgust.

  Carlyle nodded. “They were the villains back then. It was treachery of the worst kind. But now Raptus wants to destroy our entire civilization. He’s already slaughtered hundreds, perhaps thousands, on his way here, many of them children and noncombatants. Whatever was done to his people in that dark time, there must be a better path to the future than this. I wish what happened then had not happened, but I won’t stand by while he blazes his trail of vengeance. My friends and family were not responsible for what happened to his people. My children did nothing wrong.”

  Nimue stared at him for a long time. “I wasn’t aware you had children.”

  “They live with their mother in Torwall.”

  She let out a long breath and then turned so that she stood beside him, the two of them looking at the southern horizon along with the rest of the squadron.

  “Still, it didn’t have to be like this,” she said after a moment.

  “No,” Carlyle agreed. “It didn’t.”

  Even as he spoke the words, voices were raised in alarm, and the squadron began to move. Carlyle shouted orders.

  A single Wurm had been spotted coming toward the city, silhouetted against the sky in the early-morning sunlight. It was Cythra, arm bands whipping behind her as she flew. Her speed was incredible.

  A moment later Carlyle understood why she was flying so fast. One by one, other Wurm began to appear in the southern sky. First only a few, but then several dozen, and then several dozen more. He lost count fairly quickly. There must have been two or three hundred, all told.

  He felt the magic crackling around his fingers, ready for war.

  Then the ground shook, just slightly, beneath his feet. On the horizon were the country homes of some mages who preferred not to live in the city and then, beyond those, nothing but forest and the road going south.

  Trees cracked and fell, knocked aside as Raptus stepped from the forest, so large that it looked doubtful his wings could hold him up. As tall as the tallest tree. Even taller. There were spires in Arcanum that did not reach his height.

  “By all the gods of old,” Carlyle whispered.

  “After seeing that,” Nimue rasped beside him, “how can you still believe in gods?”

  Magic swirled in the open palm of Alethea Borgia, the Voice of Parliament. She stood in the courtyard before the main entrance of the Xerxis, surrounded by the gathered grandmasters of every guild. Shifting in that magic was a figure made of mist and shades of green, the image of one of the acolytes who worked for the Voice up in the watchtower, the secret chamber in the Xerxis from which every corner of Arcanum could be magically viewed.

  “Speak quickly,” the Voice demanded of the woman whose image shifted on her palm. “Do any of the watchtower spyglasses show Wurm approaching the city from any other direction?”

  The rest of the grandmasters were just as silent as if Alethea had stolen their voices.

  “No, Madame Voice,” the sentinel of the watchtower reported. “They come only from the south. But … if you could see Raptus…”

  There was fear in that voice. Cassandra heard it, and she glanced at some of the grandmasters gathered around her. Foxheart twisted his upper lip in disdain. Bayonnis of the Celestial Guild swallowed visibly and glanced about as though wishing for a clear path along which to flee. Tarquine of the Caerleon and Parzival of the Winter Star stood together, and it was clear that they knew and trusted each other. They might even have been friends, although such allegiances had long been considered risky within Parliament. The two mages exchanged a grim look at the tone of the sentinel’s voice.

  “We shall see him,” the Voice assured her, and as such, assured them all. “And soon.”

  Lord Romulus had been clutching his massive black helmet beneath his arm, offering a rare glimpse of his face. His grim features seemed sculpted from stone and his eyes burned with the intensity of hungry fire. He stood a foot and a half taller than any other member of their congregation, so attention was always on him. This morning more than ever.

  At the Voice’s words, Romulus raised his helmet up by one of its horns and shook it in the air. “That’s it, then. We’re off! And remember, brothers and sisters, we do not have room for half measures. If we fall, so falls Arcanum, and all of Terra behind her.”

  He began barking orders as he slipped the helmet down to hide his face again, leaving only those gleaming, brutal eyes revealed. Then he was running, gesturing as he did so, reminding grandmasters what their positions were to be, commanding even the greatest among them as though he had been born to it. And Cassandra thought perhaps he had. Lord Romulus had been Timothy’s enemy for so long that it had taken her time to realize that they were fortunate now to be on his side.

  The bells were ringing all through the city, warning of the attack of the Wurm. The gathered grandmasters ran for the collection of sky carriages that had been awaiting them. Some got inside, but most of them climbed on top of the crafts or stood on the metal bars that ran around the outside, holding on to handles that were put in place for servants and footmen. Cassandra thought these arch mages had probably never imagined themselves riding sky carriages the way their lowliest servants might, but this was a time of change and an age of firsts.

  They needed to be ready as they rode through the sky, prepared for an aerial assault, positioned to cast spells and hurl devastating curses should the Wurm fall on them while they were still in flight. Yet such things were the least of their concerns. Turning away these attacks would be simple enough for the mages. It was Raptus that concerned them. He was their one and only target. The various facets of the war had been assigned to others. Raptus was theirs.

  Cassandra held on to the back of a sky carriage and tried to keep her footing, thinking how ridiculous and embarrassing it would be if she fell off. She felt painfully out of place among archmages of legendary status and power. As the granddaughter of Nicodemus, she was innately stronger with magic than the average mage, and she had worked all her life to master the skills necessary to wield such power, to tap deeply into the magical matrix. But alongside such men and women, she felt herself a novice.

  But she would say nothing. As grandmaster of her order she had been called to duty this day, and if that duty cost her her life, then so be it.

  The thirteen sky carriages raced along, perhaps fifty feet above the ground. The grandmasters were silent and grim, except for Parzival of the Winter Star, who caught Cassandra’s eye and smiled. It was not a flirtatious smile, but one of encouragement, as if to say he had faith in her. Though she was sure he could not know her well enough to have such confidence, still she smiled in return, grateful.

  The bells seemed to grow louder. Cassandra looked all around, scanning the upper floors of some of the taller buildings. She knew that the buildings where the acolytes had been stationed were bespelled with magic that made them nearly fireproof, but still they all seemed like towering, hollow tombs to her. As they passed, many of the acolytes came to lean off roofs and cheer them, these archmages going to war. The best of the best.


  Cassandra gnawed her lip each time she saw the mages urging them forward with such passion.

  So many of them would soon be dead.

  She wished that she was on one of the lead carriages with Romulus and the Voice. They knew her, at least, whereas to so many of those around her she was a total stranger. Cassandra did not want to die among strangers.

  “There!” shouted Belladonna from the sky carriage beside hers.

  Cassandra looked up and saw that the Wurm invasion had already reached farther into the city than she had thought. The dragonkin were dark against the morning sky, most clad in crimson or black armor, their wings like blades slashing the air. They were not far ahead and several had obviously seen the caravan of sky carriages and now began to dip their wings, preparing for an attack.

  A pair of acolytes appeared on the roof of a library up ahead. They hurled spell-bombs at the three Wurm. One of them was enveloped in a cloud of icy mist, and when it emerged from that cloud it was crusted with frost, nearly frozen solid. The Wurm fell, left wing striking the library and shattering like glass. It broke into shards when it hit the ground. The other spell-bomb was explosive, and it went off with such concussive force that it sent the other two Wurm careening through the air. One of them struck a Spiral Guild assembly hall and fell unconscious. The other caught a corner of a building and held on. When it looked up, its eyes blazed with fresh hatred.

  They weren’t easy to kill.

  Several others had seen the conflict brewing and now flew in from east and west, peeling away from the northward course so many others were following—and there were dozens of them now, hordes of Wurm moving across the city.

  A curse-cannon fired, the sound like a resonant hand clap, and Cassandra saw the magic had blown a Wurm out of the sky.

  A cadre of five Wurm warriors descended upon the roof of the library with swords and axes, breathing the fire of their ancestors from the furnaces in their gullets. The acolytes on the library were slaughtered. Cassandra heard their shouts of pain and anguish and fury.

  Her knuckles were white from the way she gripped the handle on the outside of that sky carriage. The wind whipped her hair back, and she gritted her teeth against it as the carriage picked up speed. Her skin prickled with the magic that seethed inside her, the force ready to be unleashed. Those acolytes had drawn the focus away from the grandmasters and died as a result. But they had also done one other thing. They had shown that the Wurm were not as difficult to kill as Parliament had feared. If she calculated all the acolytes and combat mages, the odds were perhaps one hundred to one, mages versus Wurm. The invaders had no chance of winning. It was a matter of attrition.

  Or it would have been, if not for Raptus.

  And now the sky carriages turned into a broad avenue headed due south, and she saw him for the first time. Even over the tops of several residential buildings, she could see his massive, horned head and the spread of his wings, which seemed to throw a shadow over an entire block of Arcanum. Primal terror—something dredged up through memories passed down from her ancestors—filled her. But Cassandra refused to allow it to take hold.

  The sky carriages began to spread out to prevent themselves from being attacked all at once. Then they rounded another corner and saw the ruin of the south side of Arcanum. Buildings had been razed to the ground and were now nothing but burning rubble. From every visible shelter, combat mages tried valiantly to slow Raptus’s march across the city. There were Wurm raiders flying high above, but the combat mages on the ground ignored them now, leaving them for the city’s other defenders, and likewise the Wurm ignored the mages on the ground. Why bother with them, when Raptus was coming?

  The gigantic Wurm seemed as tall to her as the spire of the Xerxis. He loomed above the ruin, magic crackling and dancing all over his leathery flesh. His wings were partially spread and his talons held out in front of him as though he might try to lunge at them. Yet when the thirteen sky carriages carrying the entire Parliament of Mages appeared, one by one, at the front line of the war where hundreds had already died, Raptus seemed barely to notice.

  Those huge eyes opened wide, gleaming a sickly yellow, and gouts of fire blazed from his snout. A ragtag collection of combat mages stood their ground at his feet, staring up at the hundred-foot-tall monster. They ought to have been beneath his notice, but this handful of combat mages had survived his onslaught. Even now magic of many colors coalesced around their upraised fists, and they began to shout in unison—joined in battle as their individual guilds had never been joined—and the magic was about to leap from them.

  Raptus opened his great maw and Cassandra felt the suction of his inhalation tugging at her, shaking the sky carriage in which she rode.

  “Defend yourselves!” Tarquine shouted, shooting a glance at Parzival and then at Cassandra.

  The grandmasters threw up defensive magic shields in the same instant that the volcanic fire erupted from the massive jaws of Raptus. It was like a hurricane of flame, blasting out across the rubble of the entire block. The flames buffeted the grandmasters’ shields but were turned away easily.

  As for the handful of combat mages who had been on the ground and up close to Raptus … they were gone. Incinerated completely. Their magics had helped to slow the monstrous Wurm’s assault, and they had survived longer than any of their comrades, but that was over now.

  One of the dead was Carlyle.

  Cassandra had seen him at the last moment, before the fire was battering the shimmering shield of golden energy she had manifested from her open hands, and in the noise and fury of the moment, she could not even scream. Grief clutched her heart, but she fought against it as if it were its own war.

  Teeth gritted tightly, she began to shout a kind of battle cry, surprising even herself. The others took up the cry and the sky carriage cruised to a halt.

  They all leaped off and began to run across burning cobblestones and blasted earth. From the ruins all around, combat mages who had been fighting in other parts of the southern perimeter rushed to join them. The line of grandmasters and combat mages ranged along several blocks in a rough half circle, and all of them began to attack Raptus. Magic struck him like a thunderous storm hammer, stabbed him with lightning, filled his eyes and mouth and lungs with poison.

  Raptus began to laugh, the noise echoing out over Arcanum, drowning out even the warning bells.

  “Now it becomes interesting,” the Wurm said, still laughing. “I want you all to remember later, if any of you survive, that you had a chance to surrender and refused. That you brought the fire down upon yourselves.”

  And he laughed. Then his wings spread, magic leaping from him in destructive bolts, Raptus inhaled again, the fire churning in him, ready to burn everything in his path.

  Timothy had gotten up before dawn and prepared the gyrocraft. While it was still full dark and the morning was not even a glimmer on the horizon, he and Ivar had set off from a balcony at the rear of his father’s house and flown west from August Hill. Edgar had hesitated, seemingly reluctant to leave Sheridan behind, but the rook knew that someone had to watch over the Wurm children and eventually Sheridan had demanded they depart. When Timothy had piloted the gyro away from the house, Edgar had been flying beside him, leaving the big mansion empty save for the mechanical man and his young charges.

  It had taken some hard work, but Timothy had rigged the gyro so that he could steer with pedals at his feet, leaving his hands mostly free. Ivar would have to do most of the aerial fighting, with the nets Timothy had made and a set of throwing knives Lord Romulus had given him. The plan was for them to swing in behind the Wurm raiders who had already crossed the city line and begun to attack with fire and sorcery. Neither of them was under any illusions. They were well aware that there was a limit to how effective they could be in the air, and that as soon as they had run out of weapons they would have to land. Timothy planned to fly the gyro to the nearest rooftop battle, where they’d abandon the invention and fight hand to hand. Iv
ar had his tribal dagger and Timothy had the sword he had gotten from the Legion Nocturne at the battle of Twilight.

  But first, the air.

  He had remained airborne just east of Arcanum and awaited sunrise. When he heard the bells begin to ring in the distance, shortly after dawn, he had begun to fly toward the perimeter of the city, sneaking around behind the invading army. Now he saw several Wurm in the sky. Beyond them, he saw Raptus.

  “Look at him,” he whispered.

  “The monster is even larger,” Ivar said.

  “At least twice as big as he was before.” Timothy swallowed, his throat dry and sore, and he picked up the crossbow he’d made. He snatched up a sharpened wooden shaft and nocked it into place, working the controls of the gyro with his feet. “But Raptus isn’t our target. The grandmasters are going to take care of him. They’ll be all right. The combined magic of all of those archmages … they’ll be fine.”

  He wished he could believe his own words, but they sounded hollow even to him. On the other hand, what could he do? One boy without any magical ability at all against a hundred-foot-tall dragon? Nothing. He could do nothing against Raptus. Timothy had considered what might happen if he touched the gigantic Wurm—with the magic of the Spawn of Wrath coursing through him—but he could not imagine Raptus allowing him to get close enough to do so. He would be incinerated.

  No, the mages would handle him.

  Edgar had been flying above them, surveying the battle from on high. Now the rook swooped lower, cawing loudly. “All right, Tim. The war’s on. Raptus’s soldiers are completely focused on what’s in front of them.”