The Worldwound Gambit

by Robin D. Laws

  Tiberio, behind the wall of briar, clutches his chest, suppressing the urge to retch.

  The cultists finish off the larvae and lie, nauseated, at the foot of their tree. In a complaining tenor, they drone on. Calliard listens intently.

  Jerisa readies twin throwing daggers.

  Gad shakes his head. She stands down.

  A crow flutters into view. It lands atop the briars, perching on a spiking thorn.

  The cultists snap to hungry attention. Slowly advancing, they speak coaxing words to the bird. They've switched to the local tongue, as if crows understand that better. Their hands bunch in anticipation, miming the wringing of the crow's neck.

  The five brace themselves for confrontation. Jerisa is gone. The cultists are nearly upon them.

  The crow squawks and flaps off.

  The cultists see the intruders behind the briar. They reach for locust amulets. The trinkets glow with demonic energy.

  Jerisa pops up behind them. The tall one falls, a knife in his back. Pudding-face whirls, his invocation broken. He falls, a knife lodged securely in his breastbone.

  Jerisa retrieves and dries her weapons.

  "You caught what they were saying?" Gad asks Calliard.

  "They were complaining of hunger," says Calliard.

  "That much I reckoned."

  "They came to the Worldwound by compulsion. Were initiated into demon worship with Yath as their Abyssal intermediary. Found a group here ...the details are unclear. They were afraid of being caught away from their camp. They feared a fiery whip, but at the same time were on the verge of dropping from starvation. The shorter one wondered why Yath would bring them all here and form them into an army without having proper provisions to keep his forces alive."

  "So there are more of them nearby?"

  "Many more, from the sound of it."

  "Why would Yath bring them here and let them starve?" Vitta asks.

  "Demons," says Calliard, "care little for the welfare of their mortal servitors. If they survive to destroy others, that's all to the good. If they expire, then their souls are transmitted to the Abyss to become raw material from which more demons spawn."

  "That can't be the entire tale. It makes no sense, not even by demonic standards." Gad runs a hand across his thickening chin stubble. "If there is a mortal army, and Yath hasn't taken measures to provision them, he must be planning to use them soon."

  "To invade Mendev?" Vitta asks.

  "Where else?"

  Gad inspects the corpses, pulling at their robes. "We need six of these, one of them big enough for Tiberio. Without telltale bloodstains."

  "We can try reverse-tracking them," says Vitta.

  Calliard presses his eyes shut, awakening his demon sense. He trembles. A jolt of awareness runs through him. "No need," he says. "There are demons nearby. A large number of them, at what must be the camp. I can find it."

  "Take Jerisa with you," Gad says.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Camp

  Calliard and Jerisa set off through the forest. They walk in silence, stepping over vines and ducking low to avoid prickle-leafed ivy. A trail appears in the trees. Without needing to confer, they veer from it, mirroring its path from the cover of the woods.

  Calliard quivers and signals Jerisa to stillness. A flightless grub-demon lurches into view along the trail. In its gargoyle jaws it carries a decaying elven arm. The thing pulses along the trackway; they wait until it's out of sight.

  They traipse along, keeping a good distance from the trail. An hour later, it forks. Calliard concentrates. He chooses the fork that leads northeast. Jerisa follows.

  "I'm not stupid, you know," she says.

  "Pardon?"

  "I've seen how you look at me. You and all the others."

  Calliard searches for a reply to this. "Did I offend you in some way?"

  "Pity. You look at me with pity."

  "You are mistaken."

  "I don't want you to deny it, I just want it to stop."

  "I assure you, my pity is in short supply. I waste none of it on others."

  "Don't think I'm blind. I see how this is going to end."

  "You don't think we can banish Yath."

  "That's not what I'm talking about."

  Calliard clears his throat uncomfortably. "Perhaps that's where our thoughts should go. The rip."

  "A person can see that her actions are hopeless and still undertake them."

  "Half the songs in the world are about that."

  "She can act foolishly and not be a fool."

  "Perhaps we are all fools."

  "I haven't convinced myself that I can make him feel for me as I do for him. He never has and never will. He thinks bringing me along will help me see that. But I already do."

  "He thinks we need what you can do."

  "I already see it, and nothing will change, and it doesn't matter, and still I'm here. And if he asks again, no matter what it is, I'll go there too. And that's how it is. So spread the word: I have shame enough. I don't need pity."

  A twinge of pain brings Calliard up short. He rubs his forehead. "We're close," he says.

  They shut up and walk.

  Muffled sounds soon confirm the bard's demon sense: the murmur of massed men, axes striking trees, inhuman barks of command. The magnified thwack of sword on shield as countless soldiers drill. The hiss of fresh-cut wood consigned to the fire.

  Ahead, the corrupt forest thins. Smoke billows through the wood. Jerisa and Calliard skirt around a palpitating egg mass and creep to the tree line. They find bushes to hunch behind and peer into a wide clearing.

  Hundreds, perhaps thousands of cultists and soldiers gather there. Rude tents made from rotting clothes flap against a growing wind.

  Armored warriors conduct a mock battle, spurred on by gargantuan, bat-winged demons. Laggards suffer the lash of their fiery whips. Weird adornments have been welded to the soldiers' helmets and shoulder guards. They bristle with spikes, horns, skulls. Certain of the helmets remind Calliard of the shadow demon Xaggalm and the arrangement of curved horns around his toothy face.

  Axe-wielding cultists expand the clearing, chopping down trees, breaking them apart, and dragging them to bonfires arbitrarily scattered on the clearing's edge.

  Their less energetic brethren lie groaning on the stump-strewn ground. Reduced to skin and bone, they clutch their stomachs and cry out for food. A flaming whip lands in their midst; they barely muster the force to scatter. One stumbles, the whip curling around his legs. It pulls tight, severing them below the knees. He screams and crawls, robbed of locomotion. His plight arouses rippling excitement among the cultists. They leap on him, seizing his still-milling arms, and bear him to a crude stone altar. An impromptu ceremony commences. The drilling soldiers try to join it, but are herded back into battle formation by demonic sergeants.

  Cultists swell around the altar. They strike up a chant, a tumble of throttled, warring consonants. A long, curved knife is held aloft, then passed between the worshipers. The chant builds.

  Jerisa covers her ears. "What is this? A summoning?"

  "A sacrifice," says Calliard. "To the demon lords, who will receive the fruits of slaughter through Yath's intercession."

  "These people are starving," Jerisa says. "I don't want to see what they do with the body."

  "This is our chance," says Calliard. He points to an empty tent on the camp's periphery. With all heads turned toward the altar, they duck and dash their way to it. Inside, in a stinking heap, lie the puce-dyed robes. He and Jerisa rifle through them, searching for one that might fit Tiberio. They find a sack filled with helmets and armor pieces still wet with blood. Jerisa picks out a few suitable items as Calliard locates the last of the robes. Working quickly, they make a
rough sack of the robes and wrap them around the purloined armor. About to slip away, they spot a pole from which a variety of talismans, each on a leather string, dangle. There are mummified fingers, chunks of bone, segments of insect chitin. Rendered in tin or clay are the signs of several demon lords: Deskari's crossed locust wings, Cyth-V'sug's moldering tentacle, Pazuzu's fierce avian visage. Calliard seizes a handful of amulets, all of them depicting a misshapen tower that can only be Yath.

  A climactic howl resounds through the camp.

  "They've killed him," Jerisa says.

  "Time to go."

  She peers through the tent mouth. "Yes, it is," she says. Perhaps five in six of the cultists remain around the altar, where they have taken up a shuffling, jerking gambol of celebration. The rest, though, fan out through the camp, murderous intent etched in their faces. "One sacrifice has put them in the mood for more."

  A couple of the amulets fall from Calliard's grasp and into the heap of robes. He pulls on them to find what he has dropped.

  A vial rolls out from beneath the pile. It stops against the toe of Calliard's boot. The stoppered, clay vial is opaque, but Calliard can smell its contents.

  Demonblood.

  His hand jitters.

  Jerisa's attention remains on the approaching cultists. "Take what you've got and let's go!"

  Calliard pockets the vial.

  "Wait," he says. He throws her one of the robes. She shimmies into it. He pulls another over his head, and dons a helmet for good measure. From its back rises a piece of flattened metal shaped to approximate a pair of menacing, beetlelike wings.

  A robed cultist pokes her head into the tent. Her face is a mass of scabs, her left eye sewn inexpertly shut. "Where is Sibotin?" she demands. "He has not long to live, and thus is due for his transmission to glory."

  The woman speaks Hallit, a local language. Calliard responds with a blister of demonic growls: "Who dares employ such a tone in the presence of Xagros? Make proper obeisance!"

  She shrinks from him. "I d-don't—I cannot yet speak demontongue ..."

  Calliard switches to the vernacular: "Then get out of my sight, wretch, before it is you who is fed to Yath's altar!"

  She pales and without further word performs an about-face.

  Clad as cultists, Calliard and Jerisa exit the tent. He heads for the trees. She catches him by the sleeve, pulling him further into the camp. "When you don't want to be seen in a crowd," she says, "never go in a straight line. Determined movement attracts the eye."

  She leads him on a bouncing, seemingly aimless path, first into the mass of cultists, then away from them, then toward the drilling soldiers, then away.

  Ahead, a cultist makes a beeline for one of the larger tents. A flaming whip reaches out to encircle him. His robes char as the whip drags him to face a demonic sergeant. "Where are you going?" bellows the demon, in its native tongue.

  With pitiful human words, the cultist pleads for forgiveness.

  The sergeant orders him to forage for food and water for his soldiers, but still in its own language. The cultist stutters indecipherably. The demon moves to throttle him.

  "I see what you mean," Calliard says to Jerisa.

  The two of them fade through the crowd and back into the forest. They crouch on its edge, waiting for the bustle of the camp to die down.

  "There's one bit of good news," Calliard says.

  "What?"

  "Plenty of Yath's human followers don't speak the language of the Abyss. I was worried about that."

  "Because otherwise, you'd be the only one of us who could successfully impersonate one of them."

  Calliard nods.

  They look to the sky. Dusk is on its way.

  "We got here because you can sense where demons are," says Jerisa.

  "Yes," says Calliard.

  "So how do we get back?"

  "Well ..." says Calliard.

  A new round of savage cries emanates from the altar area. The cultists have identified their next sacrifice.

  "I certainly don't want to bunk anywhere near here," says Calliard.

  "If we can find that trail, we can work our way back. Let's make as much distance as we can while there's still light. Once we're away from here, I'll feel safer firing a lantern."

  They trek through the forest. The trail eludes them. Gloom gives way to darkness.

  "I think we're a good ways to the north of the route we took in," Jerisa says. "You feel any demons around here?"

  For the first time since they neared the camp, Calliard consults his sixth sense. "None. We still have to worry about cultists."

  She pats her belt of knives. "Cultists are not my concern." She unbundles her pack, assembling and filling a lantern. The Suma crest adorns its copper housing.

  Calliard takes the opportunity to redistribute the robes and armor pieces. The vial of demonblood burns at his hip. Its pull is incessant. He considers tossing it into the brush. Somehow it stays where it is.

  Jerisa is wrong, he thinks. Knowing that your actions are foolish does not make you less of a fool. No, that means you are the biggest fool of all.

  As Jerisa strikes sparks with flint and tinder, the sound of drums rolls in from the north. She snuffs the spark before it hits the oil.

  "Demons?" she says.

  "No," says Calliard. "I don't feel it. And the rhythm is too regular, too disciplined, for an Abyssal horde. Or its human accomplices."

  "Who, then?"

  "Light the lantern. We'll douse it if we have to."

  They creep toward the sound. It beckons them to an edge of the corrupted wood. It borders on a vast, beaten plain crisscrossed by crevasses. It is like the trench-ridden terrain they encountered when they first entered the Worldwound, though here the slashes in the earth are larger still.

  Bonfires light a small army of crusaders. Dozens of pennants, each signifying the presence of a separate warrior order, fly above the columns and rows of armored infantry. Cavalry companies array themselves on the army's forward ranks, and along its flanks.

  "That must be half the warriors in Kenabres," says Jerisa.

  "At least," replies Calliard, surveying them with Vitta's spyglass.

  "Then we can tell Gad we're not needed here after all."

  "I'm not sure about that. First, they're attacking the camp, not the tower. As long as the tower stands, that camp, or another like it, will continue to draw maddened, disposable foot soldiers from Mendev and beyond. And second ..." Calliard hands her the spyglass. He directs her to a knot of leaders conferring on horseback at the formation's apex. "Look who's in charge."

  Fraton rides out to address a line of his colleagues. Their arrangement, and the deference the other leaders lend him as he declaims, makes evident his position of command. A herald holds the Everbright pennant behind him as he issues his orders.

  "I'll give him this much," says Jerisa. "He's fighting demons for once, instead of rounding up thieves and prostitutes."

  "A few days ago, I was one of those thieves," says Calliard. "I'm not prepared to give him anything, save for a swordpoint in the gizzard."

  "He cuts quite the splendid figure, you have to grant," says Jerisa. "He'd fill me with confidence, too. If I didn't know him."

  "If they're drumming now, they're preparing for a night raid on the cultist camp."

  "That's not the wisest scheme," Jerisa observes. "Unless they know something we don't."

  "Or Fraton, being who he is, has leapt to some lunatic false conclusion."

  "You're speaking as if he's leading them to inevitable doom. They're equal in number to the cultists, better equipped, surely more experienced. The demon-lickers are ill trained, rudely armored, starving, and sick. No matter how reckless their commander, they'll cut through them like scyth
es through a wheatfield."

  Calliard reclaims the spyglass. "As a clever killer of my acquaintance once said, the cultists are not my concern. It's the demons. They'll throw out waves of cultists to bog down the cavalry. Then they'll take wing, devastate the infantry and, once the footmen are all dead, come back to capture the leaders one by one. How much fell magic will Yath absorb when they're bled on his altar?"

  "We have to warn them," Jerisa says.

  "With Fraton right there?"

  "Then what do we do?"

  Calliard looked at her levelly.

  "Get far away from here. So we don't have to hear the screams."

  Chapter Twelve

  The Amateurs

  A half-prone Vitta leans against her overstuffed pack. Gad snoozes, sprawled on a horse blanket, lightly snoring. Tiberio sits cross-legged, chin to his breastbone, also sleeping. Hendregan is awake but resting, his cloak over his face. They have cleared a patch of ground behind the briars so they needn't lie on a carpet of noxious plants.

  Predawn light shines into the forest. A sound snaps Vitta from her state of partial alertness. She leaps up, draws her short sword. Uses it to tap Tiberio's knee. He starts, shakes Gad's shoulder, and heaves himself into a crouch. Gad wakens without a sound, brushing drool from his mouth. He nudges Hendregan. Blinking, he turns toward the source of the noise. People move through the brush, coming their way. It can't be Jerisa and Calliard. They're making too much noise.

  Vitta listens to the footfalls. With the fingers of her off-hand, she counts her estimation of the approaching party: two, four, five ...

  Through clawing boughs they shuffle into view. Like the cultists before them, they are dizzy, emaciated. They're clad not in dyed robes, but in motley rags. A couple wear studded leather breastplates and hard caps, but are otherwise unarmored. Three are human women. One of the men is a gnome. The other appears to have some elf in him. Smears of grime slash across their faces. Each is bandaged somewhere.

  One of the women has gauze wrapped around her left hand. Only one finger and her thumb remain.

  Gad reveals himself.