The Worldwound Gambit

by Robin D. Laws

  "In other words," says Jerisa, "a con."

  "That's right."

  "They took what he wanted to believe, and turned it into what they wanted him to do."

  "It's a guess," says Gad, "but it fits what we've learned. What happened back on the battlefield. How they'd get him and why they'd want him."

  "It fits human nature, is what you mean," says Jerisa.

  "And halfling nature, and half-orc nature, and and and ..."

  "Let's assume the conjecture," says Vitta. "What does it mean for the rip?"

  "We can't get caught unawares by him," Gad says. "The moment he spots any of us, we're cooked."

  "Any of us? What about Tiberio?"

  A mournful look crosses the half-orc's face. "I approached him back in Nerosyan. He might not remember me ..."

  "You're memorable, Tiberio."

  "Maybe all half-orcs look the same to him," offers Vitta.

  "Probably so," says Gad, "but we can't wager the fleet on it."

  Vitta addresses Hendregan. "What about you, fire wizard? Or sorcerer, or whatever you are? Does Fraton know you?"

  Smoke drifts faintly from the magician's pores. "There was an incident, sadly, on the outskirts of Kenabres."

  Gad groans. "So the only one of us he couldn't spot at the outset, he can spot now."

  "He seems to have free run of the place?" Jerisa asks.

  "If he can swan up and rap on the high priestess's door, it's safe to say he does."

  "Have I mentioned," says Jerisa, "that I still don't like the entire high priestess part of this?"

  "You have registered that objection, yes." Gad's pacing quickens. "Fraton's a complication, but that's all he is. The job is still the orb. Let's run through the casing again. Jerisa, is the route clear?"

  "We're inside a gigantic creature," she says. "In a state of perpetual alteration." She points to the growing orifice. Feathery protrusions have appeared around it. They move as if brushed by a gust of air. "What we find tomorrow may not be what we found today."

  "But the route as reconnoitered is clear."

  "At present, yes."

  "Tiberio, what can go wrong at the guard post?"

  "They can figure out that I'm not one of them. Half the time, I want to laugh at their madness. The rest, I want to throw up. Gad, impersonation is not my game."

  "You've done all right so far."

  He works his tusks anxiously. "The time I have to spend in their company, it goes on so long ..."

  "Believe you can do it, and they'll believe you. That's all it comes down to. And remember, walking abstractions are easy marks."

  "You say that like you believe it."

  "Tusks up, Tiberio. You can do it. Hendregan, the wall of demon sculptures?"

  Hendregan chortles.

  "Translation, please."

  "Worry not," says Hendregan. "We are brethren, those faces and I."

  "How comforting," says Vitta.

  "And the vault door?" Gad asks her.

  "I don't know," Vitta says.

  "You don't know?"

  "You didn't see it," she says. "Vault door fails as an adequate term of description. If the demons are abstractions, it's an abstraction of a concept that can't be abstracted. A physical paradox. A macrocosmic reflection of the Worldwound itself."

  "But can you crack it?"

  "I said already. I don't know."

  "No door, no orb."

  She tosses the metal shovel against the wall. The sound of impact is disconcertingly organic. "This is the part of the plan where all it says is Vitta figures something out. And I'm telling you I haven't figured anything out. I can't even see where to start. After staring it down, I'm surprised I can string words together instead of drooling and giggling like Fire-Master over there."

  Hendregan has created a flaming representation of the face wall. He sheepishly dismisses it.

  "We don't have much time," says Gad.

  "I am well aware of that," the lock-breaker snaps.

  "With Fraton prowling around," Gad says, "we'd better plan for a crumble. I'd feel easier if we had a back exit."

  "Hold on," says Jerisa, "you went through everyone else's part. What about you and the priestess?"

  "What about it?"

  "Explain what we're getting out of that, again."

  Gad maintains a steady tone. "The right to stay here and have this conversation unmolested, to start with."

  "And unmolested is the right word?"

  "We all have our sacrifices to make."

  "Jerisa," says Vitta, "let's stick to business."

  "This is business," Jerisa says. "You asked us what could go wrong. What can go wrong with you and Isilda?"

  "If it does go bad?" Gad purses his lips. "Most likely, her slitting my throat mid-coitus."

  "I object to both elements of that scenario."

  "Ahem," says Vitta.

  "A second exit," says Gad. "It would be good to have one. So far we've only seen the front gate. Jerisa, I need a scout-around. There's always a hidden way out, if only for the leaders. Around the roots of the tower, maybe?"

  She checks her knives. "Right," she says.

  Gad rubs his forehead. "And where did Calliard say he was going, again?"

  "To relieve himself," Hendregan volunteers.

  "In that case," says Gad, "shouldn't he be back by now?"

  Chapter Twenty

  The Sidetrack

  Calliard stumbles, insensate, through narrow corridors of bone and yellow and red wax. His head lolls. His feet impel him on as if pulled forward by a puppeteer. Rounding a corner, he bumps into a mantis-demon. He stands drunkenly oblivious as it spits digestive fluid onto his chest and arms. The mantis-demon opens its mandibles for feeding, then stops itself short. Barbed antennae dart around, belatedly reading the occult resonance that surrounds its would-be victim. An instinct for survival trembles the demon's stick-thick limbs. This one, it realizes, is protected. Frantically, it wipes its acidic slime from Calliard's tunic. It scampers away as blisters rise on Calliard's neck.

  Unfazed, the bard continues on his muddled way through squamous tubes, over a bridge of tar, through a forest of rushlike hairs.

  He comes to in a lightless place. He's lying down. The floor around him is scratchy and damp.

  He perceives, but does not see, a malignant presence.

  Red eyes make themselves visible. It is the big shadow demon again. Xaggalm.

  "You are ready to speak to me now," it says.

  Calliard can't tell if the words are spoken or drip directly into his mind.

  "Where have you taken me?" he asks. His own voice is unfamiliar, pitched and cracking.

  "You brought yourself here, Calliard."

  "No."

  "It's pointless to lie to me, Calliard. I smell your shame."

  "You're running a bluff on me," says Calliard.

  "I also smell what courses in your veins."

  "Let me go."

  "You took the demonblood, as was inevitable."

  "It was only a moment of weakness."

  "It is in your moments of weakness that you mortals show your true selves. This is who you are, Calliard."

  "It was once, but I can stop."

  "How difficult it is, to constantly deny yourself."

  "Maybe so."

  "Why would you come here, to the wellspring of blood, if not for this?"

  "If you want to kill me, do it."

  "You are too valuable for that, Calliard. We have need of you here in the realm of the living."

  "I won't serve you."

  The air chills. The demon chuckles. "You already do. There are others of my number who would only e
nslave you. They would not see the entirety of your potential."

  "A standard demon line."

  "Perhaps, but in this instance entirely accurate. Why have you spent your life learning to sense and fight us? Because you feared what was within your own heart, and sought to expunge it. Every day you spent girding yourself against us made you a stronger servitor of the Abyss."

  "Half-baked philosophical nonsense," Calliard sputters.

  "Whether you accept it now or later is of little consequence. I have more to offer you than words."

  "Riches? Authority? Revenge? I spit on all of those."

  "I had in mind a more concrete gift."

  Abruptly, Calliard can see within the shadow. Darkness becomes radiant, its own form of illumination. Xaggalm towers over him, the edges of his form curling and twisting. With a dagger-sharp finger, the demon etches a wound in its own bristling forearm. An oil-thick discharge bleeds from it, so red and dark as to be without color.

  A blazing euphoria courses through Calliard's body. It ripples under his skin. He feels his organs rearrange themselves in his chest cavity. His bones liquefy and re-harden in a current of electric joy.

  It is the sensation that came the first time he tasted the blood, so many years ago, the one he thought he could never recapture. This time, the sensation is a hundred times stronger.

  "You think you've tasted the true essence before, child? No, no, no. All you have experienced until now is diluted, adulterated slop. The blood of minor demons. Burnt and muddled in an alchemist's alembic. This is shadowblood, Calliard. As a student of demonology, you have surely heard of it."

  "Shadowblood is a legend. A lie."

  "Your senses tell another tale."

  A fresh wave of shame rolls over him, momentarily blunting the ecstatic rush. "I searched for it and never found it. Every avenue a dead end."

  "It was hard to keep you from it, Calliard."

  "What are you saying?"

  "I'll give you credit. You were dogged in your pursuit of it. But the time was not right. We needed you fresh for the final battle."

  "You're lying."

  Xaggalm leaves the accusation unanswered.

  Calliard asks: "What final battle?"

  "Don't be tedious. Open your mouth, and I will feed you."

  "In exchange for what?"

  "Do not spoil this moment with stupid questions."

  "My soul. My allegiance."

  "You must go through these gyrations before you convince yourself. Very well. Purge your last vestiges of shame, Calliard."

  "I won't give you my soul."

  "You want to go?" The demon waves a finger, coated in his blood, under Calliard's nose. "Go. I won't tell the others. They needn't learn about you or your friends or their doomed and cretinous plan. Not until it suits me."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Then don't. Tell your friends all about me. Tell them you've already betrayed them. Sacrificed them to your thirst. You promised them you wouldn't partake. Didn't you?"

  "I ..."

  "You told them you were good."

  Now it is Calliard who will not respond.

  "This was decided the instant you agreed to come here. Eventually you will concede this. So go." Xaggalm shivers, and the trickle of blood falls upward, rushing back into his opened vein. The cut in his shadowy substance seals tight. The demon widens a toothy smile. "I am as patient as night, child. As patient as night."

  Calliard stands at a junction between blood-slicked corridors. The oozing demonblood, heady with mesz as it is, no longer fascinates. Its redolence is nothing, now that he's had a whiff of shadowblood.

  He can't remember how he got here or how to get back to the others. He plucks images from his journey to the shadow room as if recalling a dream. In his mind's eye he conjures a vision of the orb. He concentrates on it until it feels real to him. He seeks its presence in the tower. He senses it far below. Comparing its depth to his present position, he estimates the number of levels he must travel to reach his destination.

  As he lumbers on, the lingering elation instilled by the shadowblood's proximity painfully ebbs. Calliard's skin prickles. His feet and fingers go numb. In the waxen maze he nearly faints, and must stop to gather his strength. Since coming to the tower, he has lost the knack for distinguishing night and day, or guessing the passing of the hours. His internal compasses have all attuned themselves to the unrealities of the Abyss. All he can tell himself is that time slips, like a key failing to turn in a lock.

  He arrives at the hiding place, pale and dried-out. The heads of his comrades swivel as one toward him. His shame must be written on his face.

  But all Gad says is: "Where were you?"

  "I got lost."

  "Lost?"

  Calliard throws himself on the chamber floor. It has grown a lush carpet of violet moss. Together the strands feel like the surface of a cow's tongue.

  Vitta reaches into a wooden cask, withdrawing white chunks of pickled herring. She passes them to the bard, along with a flask of brandy. Both cask and flask are gifts from the high priestess.

  Calliard throws dignity aside to tear greedily into the vinegary morsels of fish. He chews rapidly, mechanically, his chest heaving between gulps. When he is finished, he lets a few abstemious drops fall from the spout of the cask into his open mouth. Vitta gives him more herring; he eats the second portion nearly as quickly as the first.

  "Water?"

  She hands him a wineskin. "I've boiled it, but be careful."

  He ignores the halfling's warning. His larynx bobbles as he half-empties the skin. He wipes water from his lips.

  Hendregan plays a game with the purple moss. It has decided he's different from the others. Its strands shrink from him. He crawls on all fours, watching the cilia plaster themselves to the floor as he nears them.

  "Where's Tiberio?"

  "The guardhouse," says Gad.

  "They expect him down there," says Vitta.

  Calliard nods his understanding. Tiberio has to keep up the ruse. "And Jerisa?"

  "Still hunting for a second way out," says Gad.

  "Still?"

  "She went out last night, and several times today," says Vitta. "Without result."

  Calliard blinks. "What do you mean?"

  "By what?" asks Vitta.

  "How can she have been out last night and also today?"

  Gad ducks down to look into his eyes as a healer might. "Calliard, how long do you think you've been gone?"

  "A couple of hours?"

  "Calliard, you've been gone for a day."

  A few hours pass before Jerisa returns. Tiberio arrives later still. They bunk down for a restless night, trading watches. When morning comes, Tiberio wakes Gad and readies himself to slip out.

  "You're holding up, yes?" Gad asks.

  "They won't be fooled much longer," Tiberio says.

  "They don't need to be," says Gad.

  An exhausted nod, and Tiberio is gone.

  Gad leans back against a wall, fighting the urge to doze. Perhaps it takes him.

  A too-familiar buzzing swells on the other side of their door. It yanks open.

  The others stir, hands traveling to their weapons.

  The fly-demon, Kaalkur, flanked by a pair of heavily armored sentries, stands in the entrance way.

  "Milady requires you," it buzzes at Gad.

  Gad follows it.

  Jerisa reaches for the waterskin. "I'm going to find that exit," she announces.

  Kaalkur takes Gad to the threshold of Isilda's chamber. To alert her to their presence, it increases the pitch of its buzzing wings. The door swings open.

  "Come in," she says.

  Gad steps inside.

  Isilda's
blond hair has been severely upswept. The gown she has chosen is layered, dense, surmounted by a shimmering cape. A welter of lace covers her neckline, ending in a ruffed collar rising nearly to her chin.

  A new chair replaces the one she broke last time. Wrought in black iron and ornamented by swirling demonic sigils, it is a sturdy piece. It would take great effort to tip it over and immense force to smash. Gad considers the workmanship impressive, though the signs would restrict its sale to a narrow and untrustworthy clientele.

  He goes to her. "You had me near madness, waiting for your summons."

  She withdraws from him, gestures to the chair. "There are matters on my mind other than you."

  Taking a seat, he finds a position of perfect poise. "It grieves me to hear that."

  She narrows her eyes. "Somehow this morning I find your humor less pleasing than before."

  He leans back. "Why would that be?"

  Isilda's slim arms fold together. "The name Fraton ...was it familiar to you?"

  He lets himself seem agitated. "You've been with him, have you?"

  "Address my question."

  "I've trod a tangled path. Along the way I've heard many names."