The Worldwound Gambit

by Robin D. Laws

Gad hears a flurry of movement to his left.

  Jerisa is gone.

  He draws his sword and charges.

  The nearest paladin menaces Vitta, who has lost her footing and defends from a disadvantage with her short sword. Gad comes on him from behind, rattling a blade on the back of his helmet. His target turns, allowing Vitta to roll to her feet and smack him in the back of his knees with the flat of her blade. He falls, slashing ineffectively with his heavy greatsword.

  Tiberio faces two opponents. One wears a bucketlike greathelm. Tiberio, his swords still in their sheaths, shoulders aside the paladin's weapon, slamming his body against his enemy's. He grabs the helm in both hands and gives it a deft one-quarter turn. With massive hands he crimps the bottom of the helm so that it can't be twisted back. His helmet's eyeholes firmly lodged over his right ear, the paladin staggers from the fray, unable to see.

  The half-orc seizes him by the arm and swings him into his second opponent. They topple into a ditch. The second paladin's helmet bounces off a jutting boulder. He lies stunned, his blinded comrade caught in his limbs.

  Hendregan jockeys around the fight, looking for an angle to loose a fireball. He hisses in frustration as a squire comes up behind him to brain him with a war maul. The young fighter's enthusiasm thwarts his aim; the blow goes wide. A delighted Hendregan rounds on him, arms and hands ablaze. He lays them on the young man's neck and shoulders. The squire's skin roasts and blackens.

  "Easy, Hendregan!" Gad calls.

  The wizard releases his boyish opponent. The squire drops to his knees, crisped skin sliding from his wounds.

  "We have no quarrel with you," Gad says.

  An armored knight, features hidden by a bascinet helmet, points his lance in Gad's direction. "It's him! The sin-bearer!"

  "Sin-bearer?" repeats Gad, ducking a mace blow as a mounted knight gallops in to clout him.

  Arrows pepper the ground before the horse's hooves. The yellow fletching identifies them as the product of Calliard's bow. The steed rears up. Gad avoids its hooves. The rider tumbles from the saddle to land at Gad's feet. Impeded by heavy armor, the attacker works to right himself. Gad takes the opportunity to reach down to his hip and pull the man's sword from its scabbard. He tosses it away. It hums with magical power as it flies through the air, thumping into a stand of bedraggled reeds. The knight reaches for a long dagger and drops into a fighting stance. Calliard's arrows circle his feet, driving him back.

  The bascinetted knight aims his lance at Gad's chest. Gad slips under the blow and moves in close, turning his opponent's superior reach against him. He bangs his sword hilt against the lancer's hand, forcing him to drop the weapon. "What do you mean, ‘sin-bearer'?"

  Meanwhile Vitta holds two squires at bay, while Tiberio tears a helmet from a lithe warrior's breastplate and locks her in a chokehold. Jerisa reappears atop a white steed caparisoned in the solar colors of the Everbright order. Behind her she drags a plate-mailed woman, her right heel still entangled in a stirrup.

  A squire tosses a sword to Gad's enemy. Gad tries to bowl him over in his moment of distraction, but the knight checks his move and keeps his footing. He whirs a howling sword in riposte; Gad parries, knees groaning to absorb the impact.

  "I promise you," Gad grunts, "your leader nurtures a mistaken opinion about me."

  Fury echoes in his opponent's helmet. "Are you not the notorious swindler Gad? Gad the Deceiver?"

  "I thought paladins were supposed to be ..." He parries another wheeling blow. Arcane sparks fly when blade meets blade. " ...charitable!"

  "You cannot be allowed to reach the tower of Yath!"

  "And why is that?"

  The knight drops his sword, draws a dagger, and stabs it deep into the unprotected space between the front and back plates of Gad's torso armor.

  "Because," the knight exults, "if you go there, the world ends!"

  Gad clutches instinctively at his wound. The knight kicks him in the head. Gad falls. The knight reaches for his dagger hilt, and twists it.

  Calliard rides in, astride his horse, the group's other steeds running behind it. He aims an arrow at the knight beating Gad. It pierces the man's hand. He reels back. Flame wreathes him; another of Hendregan's spells has found its target. His tunic and helmet feathers turning to trailing ash behind him, the knight flees. His comrades regroup, arranging themselves into a defensive square.

  Jerisa, on her confiscated horse, pounds toward the knight. Rage distorts her features.

  Vitta and the others ring around Gad. He gasps into her ear; she shouts his command to Jerisa. "Let's get out of here!"

  Thundering hooves drown out her cry. Jerisa reaches the still-burning knight. She pulls tight on the horse's reins. Panicked by the sudden movement and by the yellow tongues of fire coursing around the knight's body, it proceeds to trample him. Jerisa uses the force of the bucking horse to propel her from its back. Arms outstretched, she lands on her feet with appalling poise. The knight's body, flames finally extinguished, ragdolls to and fro under the hooves of the terrified horse.

  Tiberio drapes Gad over the back of his horse. He yanks the knight's dagger from Gad's abdomen.

  The trampling horse finally leaps away. The rest of the rearguard crusaders, twelve of them still in fighting shape, dash for their mangled comrade. But Jerisa is there first, to rip off his helmet and put a dagger at his throat.

  She sibilates into his ear. "You don't get to do that."

  "Enough!" Vitta shouts. "Move it!"

  Tiberio uncorks a healing potion and pours it directly onto Gad's wound. The flow of blood ceases. Parted flesh gathers together and is made whole.

  Jerisa cuts her man's throat. Then his fellows are upon her. She slashes at them with a pair of curved daggers. Though each opponent is bigger and better protected than she, they instinctively ease back.

  Hendregan spurs his horse toward the fight.

  "No!" Vitta yells.

  "Not you too!" shouts Calliard. He follows Hendregan, the reins of Jerisa's horse in his hand. At full gallop it follows his steed.

  The air writhes and ripples around Hendregan as he chants an incantation.

  A wall of flame erupts between Jerisa and the knight's would-be avengers. Hendregan rides up, basking in its heat. "We're leaving," he tells her.

  Calliard brings her horse alongside. She lifts herself onto the stirrups. The six flee over the border, into the demonlands.

  Chapter Nine

  The Cages

  Gad lies propped up against a trench. Tiberio tips a dribble of water onto his lips. Vitta sits at his side. Jerisa has plopped herself down on the trench's other side. She faces him but will not meet his gaze.

  "That was our strongest healing draught, wasn't it?" Gad asks Tiberio.

  "None of the others would have done it," he replies.

  "And we're how far inside the Worldwound?" says Vitta.

  "Less than half a mile," says Tiberio.

  "That was a rhetorical," says Vitta.

  "Vitta, let me ..." says Gad. His breathing remains uneven.

  "What were you thinking, Jerisa?" Vitta asks. "Wait, sorry—I withdraw the question. It bases itself on a false premise."

  "Shut up," Jerisa moans.

  "Vitta ..." says Gad.

  "We needed to get out of there, not murder that crusader," Vitta says.

  "You saw what he did," says Jerisa.

  "Gad was already saved. When the rest of us are ready to run, we can't have you plunging further into a fight."

  "I'm a killer," says Jerisa. "I kill."

  "In the future, here's a simple test for you. Ask yourself: is this madder than whatever Hendregan is doing?" They look around for the wizard, but he's still off on a scouting ride with Calliard. Vitta continues: "If the answer is yes, then yo
u ought to—"

  "He was an enemy and deserved my blade."

  Gad coughs. "No."

  "No?"

  "The crusaders, even the Everbrights, aren't our enemies." Gad gathers the strength to talk. "Yes, they're prigs and fools and men of law and they're bad for business. But they're here to fight demons, just as we are. We might even be able to leverage them to our advantage, if we can penetrate Fraton's thick skull. Which is admittedly difficult. Still. Maybe we can trick them into succeeding despite themselves." He briefly convulses, a residual pulse of healing energy seething through his veins.

  Jerisa takes a whetstone from her pack. "Gratitude is too much to expect, but a lecture?"

  "I should have explained this more clearly," Gad says. "This will be the worst job you ever worked. The worst place you've ever been. If we're going to execute this rip, we have to trust each other, yes?"

  "You think I don't understand that?"

  "I know that you do," says Gad. "But when you get angry ..."

  "I'll be good from now on," she mutters.

  Vitta snorts. "That doesn't sound like—"

  Gad silences the halfling with a gesture. "Jerisa," he says, "never risk yourself on my account. If something happens to me, I don't want you breaking away to avenge me. You want to do right by me? Carry on with the plan."

  "Nothing's going to happen to you."

  "So I don't have to worry about you, then?"

  "You don't," she says.

  A night's rest and Gad feels hale—disturbingly so. He can't count the number of magical curatives he's consumed over the years, yet whenever he is healed, he still acutely feels their unnaturalness. His heart races. The landscape around him seems sharper. Far-off crows caw more clearly. The potion has repaired not only the wound in his side and the damaged organs beneath, but a variety of other barely measurable conditions. A throbbing corn on his left baby toe has turned to soft and tender flesh. A spot inside his cheek where he bit himself chewing is as good as new. Since his walk from Krega, his left knee has been slightly out of joint. Now it has realigned itself.

  The potion leaves him hungry—hungrier than their rations allow. Gad yearns for a great chunk of roasted boar haunch. He joins the others for an ascetic meal of cheese, nuts, and hardtack. Despite his panging stomach, he's careful to take only his share. Tiberio notices and palms him some of his hazelnuts.

  The six mount up. They have to ride around the snaking fissures, as the crusaders did before them. The circuiting elongates their journey. A distance that should take an hour to cross instead costs them three.

  Molten, liquid shapes mar the purple sky. They open like sores and burst like blisters. The tortured shapes obscure the sun; its trajectory across the sky can be perceived only dimly. Shadows blur and vanish.

  The landscape reeks of bile. Across the plain, pools of ooze bubble and seep. Clouds of discolored vapor rise from them. As the travelers move through it, the mist reddens their skin. It coats their palates with nauseating phlegm.

  A dark shape coruscates above. Panicked, Hendregan's steed bolts. The wizard stays on its back at first but leaps for safety as the animal barrels toward a trench. The horse's legs crunch appallingly as the beast hits the trench's side and hurtles in. Tiberio climbs down in to pet its muzzle, to comfort it, and then to mercifully snap its neck.

  Before the day is half over, the remaining horses sicken. Vitta's is the first to drop. It falls without warning, nearly crushing her beneath its haunches. She climbs aboard Gad's horse. The other beasts grow weak and skittish. An hour later, Jerisa's steed falters, a jarring, choking noise rising from its throat. Once watered, it seems to recover. An hour later it halts and refuses to go on. She dismounts, talks to it, and watches as it lays down and expires.

  Nightfall comes early, preceded by a weird pulsing in the sky. Then a starless blackness abruptly comes. By this time there is only one animal left, Tiberio's stout-hearted warhorse. He dismounts; they lead it along, leaving it only the packs and supplies to carry.

  Hendregan's flaming light-stick casts a lonely luminance across the cancerous plain. It makes them a target, they decide. The wizard commands it to dim itself. They seek a trench to shelter for the night.

  The first they investigate seems crumbled and unstable.

  Acrid goo seeps from the bottom of the second.

  In the third are piled eleven corpses, stuck together by filaments of amber webbing. They belong to crusaders, their tunics marked with a family crest of distant Cheliax. The knights are freshly dead, their eyes, lips, and ears eaten away. One seems to move, as if still alive. Jerisa jumps down to find it writhing with locustlike larvae.

  The fourth trench seems acceptable.

  They take their usual watches. When off-shift, they slumber fitfully. Far-off sounds bounce across the plain: the buzzing of swarming wings; screams of agony; a strange, reversed thunder.

  The travelers set out feeling more exhausted than when they bunked down.

  Hendregan, who since Sodevina's death has seemed tranquil and lucid, reverts to his old demeanor. He clucks his tongue, scratches rudely at his drying skin, and every now and then barks with inexplicable laughter.

  Gad sidles up to him. "Are you good?" he asks.

  Calliard hears the words and shivers.

  "I am well," Hendregan says, and smiles. "I understand this place."

  "How so?"

  "You'll see."

  "You can't say that. You have to explain."

  He laughs. "Fight madness with madness," he says.

  A flock of flying demons appears at the horizon line. The team scurries for the cover of a trench. The demons wing overhead toward Mendev. Vitta counts hundreds of them.

  "Can you figure where they're going?" Jerisa asks her.

  "This place plays havoc with my sense of geography," Vitta says. "I can't see the sun properly. And why it gets dark at an earlier hour than across the border—that I don't even want to understand." She withholds from Jerisa what Gad has already realized—that the demonic flock heads to Suma Castle.

  The trenches recede, giving way to scourged and rocky ground. They gasp and wheeze through yellow fog. The six sojourners and their last horse heave themselves up a slope. A viscous rain comes to clear away the fog. They reach the top of the rise. It leads down another grade to a marshy depression.

  At odd intervals across the swampy earth tilt dozens of metal cages. Gad gestures for a general halt.

  "What are those?" he asks Vitta.

  "Wouldn't hazard a guess," she answers.

  "How big would you say they are?"

  She calculates. "Fifteen high, fifteen long, ten wide."

  Calliard steps up. "I've seen them called demon boxes. Also blade cages."

  "You've encountered them before?" Gad asks.

  "Only in books. In the tongue of demons, they are called urannag." Calliard pronounces the inhuman term with a hissing, glottal fury. "In her famous account of an exploration of the Abyssal realms, Ualia the Sojourner describes an entire layer dotted with urannag, as far as the eye can see."

  "What does she do about them?"

  "She is carried off by a half-spider, losing the opportunity to examine them closely."

  "So," asks Gad, "the Worldwound is becoming more like the Abyss, where the demons come from?"

  "Since its first appearance, it has always been a piece of the Abyss," says Calliard, "growing onto our world as a fungus grows on a tree. But if urannag are here, the infection may have accelerated. Become more virulent."

  "Because of Yath?"

  "I imagine so," says Calliard.

  "Do we go around the marsh?" Gad asks.

  "We don't know how far it extends," says Vitta. "Whatever's on either side of it might be worse." She pulls a compass from her pack. Its dia
l spins crazily. "And the further we get from a straight line to your tower, the less confidence I have of staying on track. We could get turned around and wind up all the way down in the Shudderwood." The Shudderwood is a haunt of twisted fey, far from their destination.

  "Onward, then," Gad proposes.

  "Onward," agrees Vitta.

  Calliard coughs. He removes his helmet, pats driblets of sweat from his hair, and replaces it. "Onward," he says.

  Tiberio coaxes his balking horse down the graveled slope that will take them to the bog below.

  Vitta peers through the obscuring rain. "There's movement."

  "Where?" says Gad.

  "Inside that first cage."

  The halfling speeds up. The others cautiously follow.

  A whispered cry for help cuts through the sound of rain. Vitta takes the lead. The rest follow. They wade through a soupy mess of sickly, albino-white vegetation. Tangling marsh weeds claw at their ankles. Hairy projections probe their clothing, seeking bare flesh.

  They reach between Tiberio's boot and leggings, their leaves flattening tight against his skin. Their veins swell and turn crimson as they suck blood from his capillaries. Tiberio rips the leaves loose only to see them curl around his hands and start to feed from those as well. The others come to his aid, ripping the hungry vines and leaves to shreds.

  Visibility decreases as they close in on the cage. They are a few feet away when its prisoners resolve into view. The figures inside are drenched and muddy. They sit trembling in pooling blood. Their emblems match those worn by the corpses the team found the day before. Around them are arrayed the bodies of their comrades. In the tangle of dismembered limbs and bisected torsos it is hard to make a count, but Vitta reckons there are four dead.

  Up close, the cage is a chaos of contradictory lines. Its bars swirl and course across the surface of the cube. They widen and narrow, apparently at random. Some of the bars project into the cage. Gears and sprockets are sometimes visible at the joins. Vitta squints at them. There is something in their illogic that makes them hard to correctly perceive. She can't see how the gears are supposed to work. Are they strictly ornamental?