Wurm War

by Christopher Golden

  August Hill loomed ahead. Verlis and Cythra were two dark slashes in the morning sky ahead, but Edgar did his best to keep up. He flew onward, wings growing more tired as he went higher and higher, rising toward the peak of August Hill. Far ahead and above, he saw the two panicked Wurm, Cythra and Verlis, reach the Cade estate. They circled once around the top of the massive old house.

  From behind—back the way he had come—Edgar heard a thunderous roar that became a scream of fury. Raptus’s fury. But there was panic in the sound as well.

  The rook could not wield magic—but it was in him. He felt it. So when the very air itself rippled as though a wave of magic had swept over him, he dipped a wing and turned just for a moment, glancing back to see what had happened.

  He heard a rumble like a massive ground quake and saw, back near the place where the remaining members of Parliament had been fighting Raptus, a tall, cone-shaped building begin to fall apart. To crumble. The top tipped to one side and collapsed.

  Far, far in the distance, where the city gave way to the eastern coast, he could see the shape of SkyHaven hanging magically above the ocean. He was high enough, and his eyes keen enough, to make out the shape of its battlements and towers, and the jagged underside of rock and earth that made up the foundation of that floating fortress.

  Even as he caught sight of it, he realized it was falling. To Edgar it was like a nightmare. It seemed so strange that he could see SkyHaven tumble from the air, but not hear it, that the angle of his view and the buildings out near the edge of the city blocked his sight just enough that he knew it had fallen into the ocean, but did not see it splash down and begin to sink.

  The fortress had been evacuated. He hoped no one had been foolish enough to stay behind. That no one had—

  “No!” he screeched, spinning around and darting again toward August Hill.

  He caught just a glimpse of Cythra entering from one of those upper-story balconies. Verlis must already have gone inside. Edgar cawed loudly and tried to cry out to them, but he knew he was much too far away to be heard. He flew with all his strength, ignoring the pain in his muscles. His eyes were wide with terror, and when he began to hear more shouts and more rumbling in the city behind him—other buildings supported by magic crashing down—he did not bother to turn.

  All the magic in Arcanum had gone away. Timothy had somehow cut the world off from the matrix, or even—as terrifying a thought as it was—shut the matrix itself down. The grand observatory would crumble, Edgar thought. The aviary where he had been born would also tear itself apart, its architecture not made to stand without magic. The tower of the Spiral Guild would never hold together. So many.

  So many.

  “Verlis!” Edgar shouted.

  Now the Cade estate loomed ahead. Edgar flew, a couple of black feathers tearing loose and floating down toward the mountainside below. August Hill rose up in front of him. The home that Argus Cade had built was a grand old thing, dangling there on the cliffside.

  “Cythra! Verlis! Get them out now!” Edgar screamed.

  He felt as though he would drop from the sky himself in exhaustion. Edgar did not bother to go toward the front door, but flew above it. The rook pinned his wings back and soared like a bullet toward the same open balcony door that the Wurm had used.

  Below him, the stone stairs in front of the Cade estate cracked off and dropped into space, striking the mountainside far below and shattering into rubble.

  Edgar cried out in horror and veered off, turning quickly around to watch for any Wurm—parents or children—to emerge. He scanned the windows for some sign of Sheridan, his friend. His best friend.

  Then the Cade estate collapsed under its own weight. The corner where it was attached to August Hill remained anchored and so it fell at an angle, the whole house tilting down. Walls shattered and buckled, and then it was tearing itself apart. The entire structure that had served as the home of Argus Cade, and which Timothy had inherited, rolled down August Hill and became nothing but rubble. The rook screamed.

  Timothy landed the gyrocraft in the vast area where the battle had taken place, where all the buildings had already been destroyed and there was no chance of him being crushed by crumbling architecture. The worst part was, he felt that perhaps he ought to be crushed. He had stopped Raptus, true enough, but at what cost? The magic had rippled and then winked out, and he had been waiting with every passing second for it to blink back on again, just as it had done when he had defeated Alhazred. Now, he did not know what was going to happen.

  All he knew was that dozens of buildings around the city were falling down, and it was his fault. Most of them, perhaps even all, had been entirely empty. The city had been evacuated except for those who remained behind to fight. He supposed some of the acolytes might have been killed in the aftermath of the magical power outage. But he didn’t want to think about it right now.

  The gyro landed roughly, something cracking as he set it down. Timothy didn’t care. He flung the crossbow aside and climbed out. As he did, he scanned the square where only a minute before, Raptus had been preparing to burn the rest of Parliament to death. Some of the mages were in a circle far away from him, and he suspected he knew what they were doing. Surrounding Raptus. Capturing him, perhaps even killing him.

  He looked to the northward sky and saw that there were only a handful of enemy Wurm still there, fighting members of Verlis’s clan.

  The battle was all but over.

  “Timothy!”

  He heard the voice, knew who it belonged to, but still he was reluctant to face her. His own power had caused just as much disaster as Raptus’s dream of conquest and vengeance.

  “Tim!” she called again.

  He turned to face Cassandra. She ran toward him, her smile relieved and exuberant. Timothy could not help it. Despite the weight of guilt on him, he smiled in return. To see her looking at him like that, her green eyes lit with pleasure at the sight of him … all he could do was open his arms and embrace her when she came to him.

  Cassandra held him tight and whispered his name several times. Timothy kissed her hair, and then she pulled away, reached up to cup his jaw in her palm, and guided his face to hers. Their lips met and the kiss was like a balm to soothe the pain in his heart.

  “I… caused this,” he said as she pulled away. He searched her eyes. “All of these buildings … the magic…”

  She shuddered, and pain rippled across her features. Cassandra nodded. “I know. It’s … being without it, that’s going to take some getting used to. But it’s only temporary, right? The magic being gone. It’ll come back any minute, I’m sure.”

  Timothy shrugged. He made sure she saw his eyes when he said, “I don’t know.”

  Her face paled as that worry settled in. Cassandra was as shocked as he knew all the other mages would be. But then she knitted her brows, seeing his own worry and pain. She reached up to touch his cheek, this time making sure that he would look into her eyes.

  “You did what you had to do to stop Raptus. Whatever the sacrifice … it can’t be as terrible as the massacre of an entire city, as the enslavement of all the mages of the world.”

  Timothy understood her point, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

  Across the ruined square he saw some of the mages turning away from where they had taken Raptus prisoner, the mighty Wurm so drained now that he was no match for so many mages, even without their magic. Small gouts of fire flew into the air, the diminished Wurm, the defeated tyrant, trying until the end to have his revenge. Among those mages, Timothy saw the Voice, Alethea Borgia, pull Lord Romulus aside. She pointed across the smoldering rubble at Timothy and Cassandra. Several of the others looked their way as well, including Foxheart and Tarquine.

  All of them without magic now. For the moment they could not be grandmasters, because without magic there could be no guilds for them to lead. They were just people. Warriors and politicians. Just people.

  They began to walk across the square
toward Timothy, and he steeled himself to tell them the truth. He didn’t know how to turn the magic back on. He didn’t know how long it would be gone, or if the matrix had been damaged forever.

  The air rippled beside Timothy. He felt Ivar’s presence a moment before the Asura made himself visible, letting the pigment return to his skin. One moment it was as though Cassandra and Timothy were alone, and then Ivar was simply there.

  His eyes were full of grief.

  “Timothy—”

  “Ivar!” the boy said. “You’re okay! Thank the moons you’re okay!”

  But only then did he see the grimness of his friend’s expression.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Ivar?” Cassandra said. “What’s happened?”

  The Asura glanced away a moment, off toward August Hill, then back to Timothy. “Your father’s house … your house … when the warning went out, Sheridan could not have heard. Verlis and Cythra and Edgar went to carry the warning themselves, but—”

  “No,” Timothy said, a fist of grief clutching his heart. “Oh, no.”

  The boy glanced upward, saw several Wurm flying toward the ruined square now that their enemies had been captured or destroyed. Timothy began waving to them frantically.

  “Here! Down here! Hello, is that Torga? And Usbek! Come down, come down! Hurry!”

  They spiraled down to alight on the ruined cobblestones beside him. Timothy ranted, racing through an explanation of his plan and his fears of what might happen. Their eyes lit up with terror. Torga’s own children were among those at the house. She picked him up in her arms as though she were embracing him after a long time apart. Usbek picked up Cassandra.

  “You have to explain to the others,” Timothy told the Asura as the Wurm hoisted him and Cassandra off the ground and they began to fly toward August Hill. Tim could see Romulus and the Voice hurrying toward the place where Ivar now stood alone. Romulus shouted something at Timothy, but the boy did not hear a word of it. The wind stole it away.

  For two hours he and Cassandra led the search for survivors from the collapse of the Cade estate. The remains of the house were strewn up and down August Hill. The search would have gone much more quickly with magic, but of course no one had any left. With every passing moment the shroud of despair and panic grew in the city. Mages were wondering what to do now that they had no magic. Most of them did not even know how to bathe without the help of spellcasting.

  But some of the mages—and all of the surviving Wurm from Verlis’s clan—put aside such fears and questions for another time. They worked feverishly, sorting through the rubble strewn up and down August Hill, to no avail.

  Eventually Cassandra forced Timothy to take a rest.

  Edgar, who had been sifting through rubble himself, as best he could, settled down on a shattered wooden beam beside him.

  “If only I’d been faster,” the rook said, ruffling his feathers.

  Timothy shook his head. “You’d only have been in the building when it fell. You’d have … gone, with them.”

  Edgar cocked his head at a strange angle. “Maybe I should have. Better that than know I couldn’t do anything.”

  A long shadow fell across Timothy. It was Lord Romulus. Without his ruined helmet he was still imposing, but on this day his face was etched with grief and kindness. He was a man of good heart.

  “Anything?” Timothy asked the man.

  Romulus frowned, deeply troubled. “Not a thing. No survivors, but no bodies, either. We haven’t found a wing or a claw. We know they were all in there, the Wurm children as well as Verlis and Cythra. But it’s like the house was empty when it all fell apart.”

  Timothy grimaced and stared at the sky. It was clear and perfect, the kind of sky that always made him think of home. Not here, not the home of his birth and now his home by choice, but home back on the Island of Patience …

  A small smile lifted the corners of his mouth. He glanced at Romulus. “No trace at all. Nothing. Like they weren’t even there?”

  Lord Romulus nodded.

  Timothy sprang to his feet, laughed, and clapped his hands once. “Good old Sheridan!” he cried, understanding at last what had happened, realizing that Verlis and Cythra had gotten their warning to the house in time after all. “Good old Sheridan.”

  He shook his head, grinning.

  “Well done.”

  Epilogue

  The Xerxis still stood.

  Half a day had passed since the defeat of Raptus and the devastation of so much of Arcanum. The people who had been evacuated from the city had been told it might be many days before they were allowed to return. Without magic, every building had to be inspected to see if its construction was solid enough to stand on its own. No one could return to those structures until they were proven safe.

  The combat mages and acolytes and Wurm who had survived were working together now to clear some of the rubble and tend to the dead. Most of Raptus’s soldiers had been killed or captured, but some had been driven off. Raptus himself was reportedly still unconscious, but being held under Wurm guard in a jail cell in the Arcanum headquarters of the Legion Nocturne. He would not escape.

  Timothy had been asked by Cassandra to come with her to the Xerxis, where the surviving members of Parliament were to gather to discuss the future of Arcanum. Messengers were being dispatched to ride on horseback out to other cities and villages. No other communication was available. Timothy had wanted nothing more than to go with her, but he could not even consider entering the Xerxis now, or appearing before Parliament.

  Not after what he’d done.

  Instead he sat in a small room at the University of Saint Germain. At Cassandra’s request, her new assistant had arranged with the headmaster for Timothy and his friends to stay there until other accommodations could be found. With both his father’s house and SkyHaven destroyed, he had nowhere else to go. For the past hour he had done nothing but lie on the rough mattress in the dormitory room. Edgar was perched on the windowsill, peering out at the city. From time to time he would fly out the open window and survey the damage, then return to report any news.

  Ivar sat perfectly still on the floor near the door, a sentinel, watching over Timothy. The Asura did not have to say it, but Timothy was aware that Ivar was protecting him. There would undoubtedly be mages who hated him for what he had done, no matter what his reasoning. It was as though he had stripped each of them of their arms or legs. Magic was as much a part of them as those limbs, and Timothy had crippled them.

  The thought made him cringe. He thought of Sheridan, and of Verlis and Cythra and the Wurm children, all of whom were trapped on the Island of Patience, in a parallel dimension that could not be reached without magic. They were stuck there unless and until the matrix could be restored. He thought of those mages who were his friends—particularly Caiaphas and, remarkably, Lord Romulus—and the knowledge of what he had done to them made him shudder and draw himself into a tight ball on the bed. Caiaphas had been badly injured during the war for Arcanum. He would recover completely, but there would be scars.

  Timothy knew he was to blame, and he let himself burn with guilt for a time.

  And then he frowned, and scowled in disgust at his reaction.

  He sat up.

  Ivar raised an eyebrow and studied him.

  “Tim. Are you all right?” Edgar asked, fluttering his wings. The blackbird cocked his head, obviously concerned.

  “No,” the boy admitted. “But I can’t hide forever.”

  “You have no reason to hide,” Ivar told him. “You saved them. All of them. Perhaps you even saved the world.”

  Timothy sighed, nodding. “Maybe. But you saw the way they looked at me. You heard the things some of them said. There are mages out there who would rather be dead than have all their magic taken away.”

  “Hey,” Edgar said, “it might come back.”

  “Probably. It will probably come back,” Timothy agreed. “But there are no guarantees. That’s not
much comfort to them. It’s as though I’ve taken their hearts.”

  “They live,” Ivar said firmly “Their families live, because of you. The collapse of the matrix is a crisis, yes, but magic is not life.”

  Timothy had nothing to say to that. He was sure that most of the mages would not see it quite so simply.

  In the silence of that moment, there came a knock at the door. Ivar sprang to his feet and set himself in a defensive posture as he opened it. Timothy saw him visibly relax and was relieved when Ivar stepped aside to let Cassandra into the room.

  He loved her. But he did not go to her right away. After what he had done, he wasn’t sure how she would feel.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” she replied, and he saw a glint of hurt in her eyes and knew he had been wrong to be so distant.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t know how to speak to anyone right now. I can’t imagine what they’re saying about me.”

  Cassandra smiled softly and shook her head. She went to him and took his hands in hers. “They’re saying that you did what you had to do. They’re saying that without you, all would have been lost.”

  She tucked a lock of red hair behind her ear and offered a small shrug. “Or, at least, that’s what most of them are saying. And no one is listening to the others. We were all out there, Tim. We all felt the panic of knowing that we had lost, that we were dead. Raptus had won. Even those who are wishing some other solution could have been found cannot deny the fire and blood that they saw with their own eyes. And besides, the Voice and Lord Romulus are proclaiming you a champion of Arcanum. No one is going to argue with them today.”

  Timothy blinked and stared at her. “A… champion?”

  Cassandra reached up to touch his face. “Of course! If you’d only seen yourself, you’d understand.”

  “You were pretty impressive, kid,” Edgar said from the windowsill, ruffling his feathers. “I’m proud of you.”

  “As am I,” Ivar agreed.

  Timothy shook his head, hardly able to believe it. “But the magic—”