The Worldwound Gambit

by Robin D. Laws

  "We stick to the plan," says Gad, forging on, forcing the others to keep up. "This isn't the last distraction we'll encounter here. This place wants us to fail. To lose ourselves and forget what the rip is."

  Jerisa touches his shoulder. "Right," she says. "Now get back to the middle of the formation and let the killers take point."

  "Like the plan says," says Hendregan.

  Gad complies.

  They spot the first traversable slope in the line of rocky hills and alter course toward its foot. Halfway up, their chosen hill shifts to a deceptively dizzying rake. Hearts hammering, they pull themselves upward.

  Ant-demons, their heads red and long-tongued, fly overheard in a tight formation. The six press themselves to the steep ground. The demons wing close enough for the party to hear their buzzing gibber. A probing tongue caresses the rocks, coming within a few inches of Jerisa's ankle. Unaware of the intruder's presence, the demons bank upward and are gone.

  "What were those?" Gad whispers.

  "I've neither seen nor heard of them," answers Calliard. "The collision between worlds may be spawning new demonic types, never before documented."

  "And was that demon-speech?"

  "Yes."

  "Could you make it out?"

  The bard blanches. "Most of what a demon says, you don't want to hear. It's all murder and vicious obscenity. But I did hear this: now that the soldiers of Mendev have been turned to carrion, the priest will come to claim his priestess."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I wouldn't hazard a guess. But then the other one said this: the final battle is soon to begin."

  "Let's keep moving," Gad says.

  They groan their way to the top of the ridge. A vast upended plain reveals itself beneath them. From the center of its chaotic jumble of riven earth, the tower of Yath rises. Its form is a forced union of worm and tree. Great roots plunge firmly into the ruptured ground. At its base pools a moat of rancid blood. It laps at the roots, nourishing them. A winding footbridge spans the pool, leading to a gaping archway in the tower's side. Fresh corpses, held fast by straps and spikes, adorn its posts. Gad takes a closer look through the spyglass, then passes it along to Calliard and Jerisa.

  "The crusader commanders we saw near the cultist encampment," Jerisa says.

  They survey the rest of the tower. The slowly tapering column reaches high into the sky. A bedlam of revolting adornments covers its outer walls. Cascades of dribbling flesh. Knobbly puckers of muscle. Gargantuan, serrated hairs. Feelers and fins and vestigial wings. Bulging, multifaceted eyes hang over networks of leaflike veins. Iridescent scales arrange themselves in jumbled bands. Frames of cartilage form windows and arrow slits. Together these features seem to shift and flow, exchanging positions as if drifting on a liquid surface.

  Vitta separates herself from the others. She finds a flat, shelflike chunk of exposed rock and sits herself on it. Dazed, she shifts her gaze away from Yath. Then looks at it. Then looks away.

  Jerisa, scanning the ridge for danger, sees the halfling's glazed distress. She looks to Gad; he and Calliard have stepped aside to confer. Jerisa hesitates. She approaches Vitta. She sits beside her, but not too close, adopting a precarious perch on the side of the rock.

  Jerisa allows Vitta time to speak.

  Vitta's gaze remains locked on the tower.

  Finally Jerisa says, "Do you reckon you might need the salve now?"

  "This is not how I thought it would be," says Vitta. "It was described to me, but this is so much worse."

  Jerisa wonders what Gad would say to this. Or, for that matter, her father. The first response that comes to mind, that the tower is a demon thing, and horror is what one expects from demons, she rejects as clearly wrong. Both Gad and her father listen for a while and then make their points. They set the person to talking. That is maybe the most important part. "I understand," she says, not understanding. "Usually, when you imagine a terrible sight, the reality is not so bad as what you had in your head. But this, this isn't what I pictured either." The words sound good as they come out of her mouth, although Jerisa isn't sure what she pictured, or if she'd pictured Yath at all.

  "There's no sense to it," Vitta says, hushed. "The demon cage, that was from the Abyss, but it had a logic to it that could be found, if you looked and watched long enough. But this ...I don't want to watch it. I don't want to understand. This is not good. This is madness we're looking at, given solid form. Bricks I understand. Turrets and parapets and watchtowers. If the tower had those things, it would also have proper vaults and locks. Its traps would be governed by weight-plates, tripwires, pulleys and gears. Rational thought could be applied to them. This ...this is ...Gad should have chosen someone else."

  Jerisa reaches to take her hand.

  Vitta pulls it away. "I'm frightening you, aren't I? You didn't think I would be the one to crumble. Neither did I. I'm not crazy. Hendregan's crazy. Maybe you are a little too, I don't know. Yet now I see it's a protection to be mad in this place, because there are no expectations to defeat ..." Now she reaches for Jerisa's hand. She squeezes tightly. Jerisa's fingers go white.

  "Cover for me," Vitta whispers. "The others can't see me falling apart like this. Bad for morale. Give me a moment and I'll collect myself. I'm supposed to be the sensible one. Don't let Gad know. He needs someone to depend on."

  Suddenly Jerisa wants to smack her. She mustn't do it, naturally. It is better to be solitary than to try to be a leader, she tells herself. "Gad can depend on all of us," she hears herself saying. "Or we wouldn't have been chosen. And you will gather yourself together, because we require your abilities, and you're not weak, you're strong. Aren't you?"

  "Don't tell Gad this happened."

  "I'll go get the salve for you." Jerisa heads to Tiberio, who has the jars of stolen ointments in his pack. Vitta's remark, about her maybe being crazy, stings. She feels it burn in her cheeks and at the back of her neck. Jerisa pushes the insult away. She thinks of the next time she'll throw a dagger into a demon-worshiper's back.

  "Time for the Talar salve," she tells the half-orc. Without comment he fishes into his bag for one of the tiny jars. To hide Vitta's state, Jerisa daubs it on herself first. She follows the instructions Calliard gave them after the monastery raid: place the tiniest bit of the precious substance on each temple, in the hollow of the throat, in a line down the breastbone. "Need this yet?" she asks Tiberio.

  "Once we're inside," he says.

  She takes it over to Vitta, administering the salve. The yellow-white grease readily disappears into Vitta's soft halfling skin. The supply seems paltry now that they're here. Even if they restrict themselves to a few dabs a day, the treatment won't last long.

  Jerisa waits a few moments before asking: "Feel any better?"

  "That's not a place," says Vitta, "it's a creature. And we're about to walk straight into its gullet."

  In freakish helmets and fetid robes, the six descend a precarious natural staircase to the ruptured plain. They scuttle around slabs of displaced rock. Hop over its fissures and trenches. Skirt its puddles of acrid blood.

  Halfway to the footbridge, a trio of fully grown bat-demons drifts from the air to block their path. Calliard bellows at them in the demon tongue. They hiss back. Further rumblings pass between man and demon. Then, suddenly bored by the exchange, the bat-beasts lift off in search of more interesting prey.

  "What did you say to them?" Jerisa asks.

  "We traded threats, in anatomical detail."

  "Charming."

  "Minor demons. They only care if you seem weak. Stand up to them, and they assume you're shielded by a mighty patron."

  "And that's if they believe you're on their side," she says.

  "That's right."

  They edge onto the footbridge. Each step is a mocking creak.


  "No more talking from here on out." Gad's helmet is full-faced; it muffles his curt delivery. "It's like we're strolling through the village market. Nothing we see here surprises us."

  Nails carved from bone secure the drawbridge's posts. The ropes holding together its planks are woven tight from strands of mortal hair.

  The party nears the displayed corpses of the slain crusaders. Pins hold their mouths agape to better emphasize the agony of their defeat. With knives and branding implements, their killers have incised demonic symbols on their exposed flesh. An array of postmortem bruises and cuts attest to their use as targets by idle guards. Gad half-expects to see Fraton among them. One of the dead wears the Everbright blazon, but it isn't him.

  Closer to the tower, the moat of blood swells with other bodies. Apparently these are victims of lesser renown: common soldiers still bearing the crests of the great crusader companies. For every slain warrior, there is a body clad in cultist's robes.

  Later, Gad decides, when it's safe, he'll ask why Yath has filled his moat with the remains of his worshipers. Did they displease him, or simply starve? Or can they all be disguised interlopers who failed to pass muster?

  "Oh no," says Tiberio. Realizing his mistake, he replaces his dismayed expression with an orcish lip snarl. He juts out his tusks as if ready to fight.

  With a nudge, he guides Gad to the left of the drawbridge. There float the broken bodies of Vasilissa and Maleb. Bumping against the tower roots is another corpse that might be Krasa's.

  "Look who wriggled off the hook," Vitta hisses to Gad. To cover her words, she adopts a drooling, vacant expression and a madwoman's shamble.

  Gatekeepers study their movements. There are five of them, four mortals and a blood-red demon. The men, well fed and elaborately muscled, wear a higher grade of grotesquely fashioned armor, where they are armored at all.

  "You sure they wouldn't give us up?" Vitta asks.

  "Too late to turn back now," says Gad. "Translate for me," he says to Calliard. He takes the bridge's last few planks in a clatter of imperious strides.

  "Make way!" he barks. "We arrive by Yath's decree! We seek immediate audience with him!"

  Calliard repeats his words in the demon speech.

  One of the men makes to speak. The red-skinned demon, of the same bony type that once held Vasilissa prisoner, sinks claws into the guardsman's soldier and shoves him rudely aside. The demon yowls back at Gad.

  "He asks," Calliard translates, "by what right you demand audience."

  Gad yanks up his visor. "By right of blood!"

  Calliard transforms the statement into crunching, spitting demon-tongue.

  The demon reaches forward to grab Gad by the breastplate. It pulls him up into its grinning crimson face and spits out demonic abuse. Caustic slime scores the breastplate and burns speckled holes into the ragged robes.

  "Clearly, he says," Calliard reports, "we are gross imposters, as any true servant of Yath knows that only his greatest generals may personally enter his putrescent presence."

  Gad slavers back: "And clearly, you are an ignorant maggot if you do not know the atrocious Gad and his retinue!"

  The demon grins wider and sets him roughly down. "You think me ignorant of your pathetic mortal tongue? By whose authority come you hither? If you are but another pack of dreamers, you must go to the training camp, to be treated as any other foot soldier."

  "Foot soldier! Your slithery intestines will be ground to paste! If you are so observant, can you not see that we carry ourselves with the authority of the priestess herself?"

  "Isilda sent for you?"

  Gad butts his chest into the sharp rib-line above the demon's abdomen. "Yes, we have been summoned in dreams. But not to toil and die as gormless infantry. In these hands rests the fate of Mendev!"

  "What makes you so valuable?"

  "You are the priestess's confidant, then? A stick-leg red demon, relegated to gate duty?"

  The demon seems ready to slap him with a slime-coated hand.

  Gad straightens his spine. "Dare you delay our victory? Dare you face our priestess's awful wrath?"

  The demon drops its claws. "I merely tested you. Had you been ready to spill our mistress's secrets, you would have proven yourselves liars and fools."

  "Then I may report to her, when I see her, that her guardians guard Yath's threshold with penetrating surety!"

  "Tell her that there is much else I could do for her," the demon says.

  "And what name shall I praise?"

  The creature puffs out its meatless chest. "Speak to her of Jebel-Hau, of the screaming emanation. At my command, four paladins and three holy inquisitors committed offenses viler than they knew possible, corrupting other souls before they died. Though I take pleasure in my work—" he gestures grandly to Vasilissa's floating corpse, "—my capacities have been grossly overlooked. So much more could I do, were I freed from this post."

  "And these others?" asks Gad, indicating his mortal comrades. "Shall they be accorded accolades as well?"

  "No. These are mewling lapdogs, unfit to gaze upon the priestess's shadow."

  "Both assessments shall be conveyed." Gad sweeps past him.

  The team follows him through the gateway.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Get-In

  Lined in angry pink tissue, the arch resembles a set of diseased gums. Yellow, daggerlike teeth protrude from it. Viscid saliva drips down from the top teeth, spattering the intruders as they step beneath them. The archway twitches. Calliard shudders in realization: on a command from the gatekeepers, the teeth can jut out and the gums slam shut, impaling those caught between them.

  On the mouth's other side they find a narrow foyer, lined by hairy stingers. Beads of steaming venom form on their tips as they probe for patches of exposed skin. Calliard shrinks back from them.

  Gad eases in between him and the halfling. He claps his hands together. "I can't speak for the rest of you, but I'm going to like this place."

  "You're joking," says Vitta. "Wait, I'm stating the obvious again, aren't I?"

  Like the rest of the tower, the chamber burns with an inner phosphorescence. It casts a green pallor onto Gad's jaunty smile.

  "He's not joking," says Jerisa.

  "Of course I'm not. This place is full of demons!"

  Vitta's tiny teeth grit together. "You say that as if it's a desirable state of affairs."

  "Indeed I do."

  Vitta frowns. "That first demon was stupid, I grant you that."

  "No, no," says Gad. "Demons aren't stupid. And that works in our favor."

  "It does?"

  "Stupid people are impossible! They're used to being fooled, and wary of it. Demons, on the other hand ...what's the signal quality of the ideal mark?"

  "Greed?" Vitta asks.

  "Close enough—selfishness, of which greed is a major variety. And what is a demon?"

  The corridor ahead fills with pea-colored steam.

  Gad stops and turns to face Vitta, visor still upraised. "A demon is a creature of pure selfishness. And that's no metaphor. Come on now, we've heard it now how many times since we started? What are they made of? Bits and pieces of rancid souls, all the mortal individuality systematically pounded out of them until only the nasty desires are left. I don't have to tempt demons—they're born tempted. They're made of temptation." He rubs his hands together. "That makes them mine."

  "It sounds convincing when you say it," Vitta allows. "Of course, that's what we want to believe."

  "All that damn journeying, that was the hard part. Here's where we go to work."

  "You're saying this rip isn't as insane as it feels," says Vitta.

  The fog parts. The foyer opens into a cavernous central chamber. A sickly radiance suffuses its shadowed vast
ness. Its fleshy, vaulted ceiling is domed and ridged, like a distorted top palate. Ropy strings of viscera hang across it. Sacs of organic matter dangle from the strands, contained in translucent epithelial sheaths. Vitta tries to count and mentally catalog the various organ types: there are masses of fibrous meat, bags of ochre liquid, twisted arrangements of tubes and fibers. Side by side with these hang cocoons, egg masses, and inexplicable collections of insect body parts trapped inside balls of webbing. Unnatural bugs scuttle along the visceral pathways, stopping periodically to feed from them. They nip off chunks of tissue with sharp mandibles, or spear proboscises into juicy organs.

  Cultists and demons wend across a red, nubbled floor. It sinks yieldingly beneath their feet. Some inhabitants move purposefully through it. Others mill in small groups, or stand alone, dazed and swaying. These last denizens hum snatches of demonic chants, or murmur half-intelligibly. A large knot of cultists has gathered along a length of wall. They sit in bored expectation, passing a jug between them. A scrawny woman, her features hidden by an outlandish, grinning helmet, carves lines into her forearm with a scorched and blackened knife.

  Tubular, connective passageways open at irregular intervals throughout the great hall, sloping upward into the tower. From these portals issue more cultists and demons. One, a hunching, asymmetrical glob of winged flesh, slashes at the sitting cultists with a razored whip. A few scatter into the tunnels. Others throw out their arms to ecstatically receive its lashes.

  Ill-shaped orifices, no two alike, appear at irregular intervals across the skin of the vaulted hall. Some are raw and purulent, others sprouting jagged arrangements of horn or metal. They shudder, blasting forth hisses of air, which become discordant, blatting notes. Together they produce a harsh, insistent whine. Occasionally the sound threatens to resolve into a mad harmony, then lapses back into unsettling dissonance. Vitta pulls her spiked helmet lower over her ears, trying to block out the noise.

  Overpowering stenches come at them in waves: vinegar, ammonia, unspeakable effluvia, rotting flesh. A clammy humidity falls upon them. As they slip across the hall, they pass through pockets of shocking cold and others of intense heat.