The Worldwound Gambit

by Robin D. Laws

  "We'll find a way out of this," Gad whispers.

  Xaggalm's head turns.

  Calliard does not respond.

  The sound of dripping liquid builds. They turn a corner. The corridor widens. Before them gapes an oozing mouth of an arch, twenty feet high at its apex. A curtain of energy warps and shimmers across its threshold, concealing whatever lies on its other side.

  Viscous, semitranslucent egg sacs grow from the surrounding walls. One bulges out, detaches itself from the surface it clings to, and slops down to the floor. From the egg bursts a quartet of wriggling, transforming fetuses. Gad watches in riveted revulsion as they develop and grow. They become segmented, serpentine things who regard the scene with goggling insect eyes. Within a minute, they are as big as adult humans. They shake, hissing angrily, as layers of egg-slime drip from their newly formed bodies.

  The generals step aside as three of the demons, snarling and clawing, rush away from the arch-mouth and around the corridor bend. One of them swipes at Gad as it passes; an ex-crusader guard feints fearfully at it with his sword.

  The remaining newborn, confused, turns itself in circles before finally rushing into the curtain of energy. It disintegrates instantly. Not a drop of its green blood survives to spatter the walls.

  The two generals take an uneasy pause to survey the rest of the eggs. Seemingly satisfied that the hatching is done for the moment, they bow in unison before the shimmering energy. Fraton signals for his men to bow as well. They poke Gad and Calliard with drawn blades. Gad grabs one of their forearms for balance and grudgingly sinks to his knees. The bard drops down unaided. The guards comply with Fraton's unspoken command and drop as well. They lay their swords on the floor, hands on hilts, ready to use them if Gad or Calliard try anything.

  Fraton and Xaggalm prostrate themselves further. Fraton physically flattens himself against the floor. The shadows constituting Xaggalm's demonic form flow from a kneeling to a prone posture. They kiss the rippled, muscular ground.

  "O Yath," intones Xaggalm, "it is I, your unquestioning servant Xaggalm, whom you have named general, who seeks direct communion with your ineffable presence."

  Fraton repeats the same greeting, substituting his name for the demon's.

  "I bring a gift, for your service," Xaggalm says.

  "I bring a hated foe," says Fraton, "for your consumption."

  The energy gate dissipates. Gad tries to peer beyond the archway. He sees but does not perceive. A blurring occludes his vision. Pain shoots from his scalp into his head, down his neck and into his shoulders. Nonexistent insects skitter across his skin.

  Calliard weeps blood-red tears. "Yath," he mumbles. "His blazing awareness. Cutting through me. Harbinger of all ends. His everywhereness. His everywhereness."

  Gad reaches for him. "Pull yourself together."

  "In my blood in my blood ..."

  The nearest guard shakes his sword at them.

  Xaggalm drifts to Calliard's side. "To your feet," he commands.

  Calliard stiffly obeys. "Everywhereness, everywhereness ..." he says.

  "Yes, yes," says Xaggalm. "Feel Yath pervade you. You shall be his mortal herald. Eclipsing all others."

  Fraton's mustache twinges. He strides to Gad and yanks on his collar, pulling him up.

  "Hear that?" Gad says to him. "Sounds like Cal's your competition."

  "You understand nothing," Fraton says.

  He pulls Gad's arm, leading him to the mouth.

  Calliard's feet move as if by their own volition, pulling him toward the archway like iron filings tugged toward a magnet. Xaggalm flows through and around him.

  The fallen crusaders bring up the rear.

  Seeing them approach the arch, Xaggalm forms his toothy maw into a grinlike shape.

  Fraton halts. "What?"

  Xaggalm's shadowform ripples smugly.

  "What's so amusing?" Fraton demands. He looks to his men. Realization dawns. "We did not seek permission for the entry of my retinue," he says.

  Xaggalm makes a trilling noise.

  "You meant for them to cross the threshold and be torn apart," Fraton accuses.

  "Would it not have been amusing?" Xaggalm asks.

  "It would not," says Fraton.

  "Matters of precedence, mortal. I can't have you appear before him with an honor guard, while I stand before him unaccompanied."

  With visible effort, Fraton suppresses the retort he clearly has in mind.

  "You may bow a second time before him," suggests Xaggalm, "and revise your supplication. It would show faith in our master's patience."

  "Pranks are beneath you at a time like this," Fraton sniffs. "You four wait here. Should more hatchlings emerge, you are free to defend yourselves."

  The ex-paladins unhappily nod.

  Fraton steps through the archway, pulling Gad with him.

  Vitta has been crushed to death a dozen times now. No longer is there a distinction between the pain she endures during her extended death and the memory of that pain when she is reassembled in the cell. The last time, she was unable to move through it. She merely lay there as the time elapsed and the walls flattened her again. Now she has the hammer in her trembling hands and has found a hollow bit along the caustic wall. With numbed fingers she locates the thin edges of a plate. She circles woozily to her pack, selects the finest-edged of her chisels, and goes to work prying it up. Beneath the plate, she tells herself, there must be a lock. She pries off the plate. The time for the next death is nearly upon her. If she gets the plate off, will it still be off after she dies again? She hopes so. Logically, it will not be so. The place exists to torment her, does it not?

  She rips the plate from the wall. Inset into the wall behind it is a sturdy-looking lock. Vitta reaches in to explore its outline with her fingers.

  A blade slices through the join between the inset and the wall, severing her hand. She watches as the hand drops into a nest of gears. They whir together, grinding it into flecks of gore.

  Clutching her stump, she slides to the floor.

  So this is the next stage. Her Abyss has grown bored. It wishes to add variety to the equation. At least the part where the walls crush her is over with. Now it will dismantle her by inches. She will have to endure this, as she has endured the other. Grinning insanely through her pain, she crawls to her pack in search of bandages.

  The walls slam shut, crushing her.

  Gad registers a few coherent impressions of Yath's hall before the madness descends. They stand in a cavernous chamber. It extends up for hundreds of yards, and down for as many more. It offers no floor to stand on, aside from a lip of bone arrayed around the chamber's edges. It is so narrow that a single wrong step will send an occupant hurtling into the pit below. The chamber's dimensions shouldn't fit within the tower, yet here it is. He guesses that, in some way that would not make full sense to him even if Calliard carefully explained it, the cavern intrudes into the Abyss.

  There are other details—cartilaginous breathing tubes, knifelike hairs, sideways pools of liquid—but they flash by at the periphery of Gad's awareness as he learns what everywhereness means.

  The demon Yath pulses bends warps coruscates white shimmering milky purulent purling blinking insubstantial suppurating

  formless yet formed

  exploding and imploding

  everywhere yet nowhere

  It is like the chaos vault, but alive, malignant, perverse, and oh-so-much larger. A roiling contradiction of natural law. Its existence jolts and pummels Gad. Negation permeates him, drives him unbidden to the precarious walkway.

  His overwhelmed senses cease to fully function. They fragment and detach.

  He hears Fraton telling Yath who Gad is. Declaiming in a loud voice. In his most formal style, Fraton recounts their many run-ins, de
scribes the threat Gad represents to the plans of demonkind. He is of disorder, yet not of evil, and so must be destroyed.

  Gad shrinks against the wall, as far as he can get from the lip of the precipice. Someone is gibbering a string of high-pitched, meaningless vowels at him. No, wait—that's him gibbering. His bladder empties itself. There's a wetness on his cheeks. Without checking, he can tell his tears have, like Calliard's, turned to blood. He feels his mind disassemble, opening the floodgates of delirium.

  He's Hendregan now. He's Calliard, with the shadowblood in him.

  No, that's not correct.

  He's Gad.

  He is a man with one weapon. A weapon that can never be taken from him, even when he is searched, as the traitor paladins searched him.

  His composure, his poise, his confidence—it is all he has and all he has ever had and all he will ever need.

  The others. He brought them here. His plan got them thrown into the Abyss. This is his scheme. They are his team. They need him to get this right.

  He straightens himself. Pushes away from the wall. Stands to face Yath.

  Calliard throws him the bag. He catches it.

  Fraton interrupts his speech.

  Xaggalm flows toward him.

  Gad pulls at a cord holding the bag together. It unfurls. Inside is the orb. He rolls it into his left hand.

  "No!" Fraton yells.

  Calliard draws his sword and stabs Xaggalm in the back of the head. The enchanted blade flashes as it digs deep into shadow-flesh.

  "I stopped you!" Fraton cries. His stamping foot nearly slips from the lip of bone. He leaps back, pushing himself into the wall. "I stopped you from stealing that!"

  "Correction:" says Gad, "You stopped us today. From stealing the fake orb we left behind yesterday. When we stole the real one."

  With the pulling of the cord, the bag has fallen away into a single sheet of fabric. Occult sigils are woven throughout it in gilt thread. It is the fabric scroll woven for them on Maeru's loom.

  Xaggalm wheels on Calliard, wrapping himself around the bard's leg, trying to pull him off the ledge. Calliard drives him back with a flurry of feints. The demon disperses and reforms.

  "Fake orb?" Fraton mouths.

  "From the monastery at Tala," Gad says, "You recall your history, yes? That they created many near-perfect orbs before making the one they thought would be a weapon against demonkind? But was in fact this orb here? Well, along the way, we stopped at Tala and liberated the closest of the prototypes. Which is now down in the vault, safely on its pedestal, serving as decoy. Now if you'll excuse me, I've a ritual to commence."

  Yath comes at him, a white-black veil, a spiraling sharpness.

  Gad pronounces the first syllable of the banishment.

  Yath retreats, as a dark sea lashed by a hurricane. The impossibility of his physical form recedes. The Shimmering Putrescence turns into something bounded, describable. Yath becomes a funnel, pushed toward Fraton and Xaggalm. The spinning force creates a wake, pulling the shadow demon toward it, and away from Calliard.

  Gad continues the ritual. As he reads the arcane words, the gilded threads vanish, replaced by a golden light.

  Yath spins into ever tighter circles.

  Fraton fumbles with his pack. "You wanted to be captured," he shrieks. "You needed to be captured, to gain admission to this place." He produces a crossbow. "And both of you had to be here, but why?" He seizes a bolt. "Because ...because you were searched, but the bard was not." He places the bolt in the mechanism. "But he, contaminated with Xaggalm's blood, cannot perform the ritual, which is why you must also be present ..." He pulls back the string, drawing tight the stirrup. "No, no, no. I am not a fool. I have not been fooled. You have not done this, Gad!" He places his finger on the triggering mechanism.

  Calliard's thrown dagger pierces Fraton's hand. The shot arcs wide. The crossbow drops into the depths.

  Yath thunders its fury.

  Gad speaks the last of the syllables. The sewn letters of the final word disappear, sparking into the golden halo that has gathered around him. The halo attacks the orb. It pops, crumbling into a shower of glassy sand, and runs through Gad's fingers.

  A black-white rent appears in the air.

  Gad knows better than to look. On the other side lie the vastnesses of the Abyss.

  The hole in space pulls at Yath. The diminishing entity snakes out shrinking tendrils. They encircle Xaggalm. They draw Fraton into the air. Yath speaks without words, cursing the stupidity of his generals. Tendrils rip through Xaggalm, lighting him from within, canceling his shadow with crimson Abyssal light. Calliard gasps with pain and relief.

  The second tendril pulls Fraton into the hole in space. As Yath is drawn through it, Fraton hits its edge. The hole closes around him before he is fully through it. From the waist up, he disappears. His abdomen and legs tumble into the pit below.

  The walls buckle. Calliard loses his footing, slipping from the walkway. Gad rushes to him as the floor wildly pitches. Calliard grabs the ledge with one hand. Gad braces himself and pulls him up.

  "You good?" Gad asks.

  "Been better," he says.

  "Fine shot, though."

  "Thank you."

  They dive for the mouth-shaped arch. Calliard slams into its edge as the tower quakes.

  There is no need for explanations. It is as they predicted. The tower is an impossibility in this world. Without Yath the entity to anchor it, its physical outgrowth will collapse and die.

  Gad remembers what he told the others when he laid out the scheme: killing the tower is the easy part.

  Getting out—now that will be hard.

  They land in the midst of Fraton's ex-paladins. The crusaders skid across the tilting floor. One falls into an egg casing, popping it. A swarm of half-formed fetal demons disgorges from it. They descend on the fallen paladin. He bats at them with the flat of his blade. They screech under and over it. Rubbery arms tear the helmet from his head. They strip his face to the bone.

  Gad leaps on one crusader from behind while plunging his dagger into another's throat. Calliard slides into a third, trapping him against a puckering wall, pinning his sword-arm.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Hard Part

  Hendregan wanders through a city of paper. It perfectly replicates a city from his youth—though the exact name of the place eludes him—with one exception. It is constructed entirely from parchment and papyrus. Words inscribe themselves on the paper cobblestones beneath his feet. When he first came here—how long ago was that, now?—he stopped to read them, but they were never interesting. Provision lists. Bureaucratic scribblings. Complaints from jilted lovers. Fragments of discarded poems. All trash.

  Hendregan—a magician who was once able to burn things—tarries beneath a paper tower. The warm wind blows a cloud of confetti into his face. Paper people pass him. They tip their paper hats in jaunty greeting. Grin at him with paper teeth. Paper, paper, paper. They're mocking his impotence. Sometimes he wants to jump on them, to tear them to shreds with his hands. But that would violate a principle, albeit one he can scarcely bring to mind.

  Famished, he shuffles to a paper stall and with pilfered paper coins buys a paper leg of mutton from a paper vendor. He puts the flavorless food in his mouth and wanders from the city into yet another forest of dead trees. How many of these brittle woods has he passed through now? He is long past counting.

  Part of him knows that this is all a complicated trick. The other has concluded that it does not matter. The vexation is too great. It is better to forget who he used to be. That way he protects himself from madness. That is what this is all about, he tells himself. It's to drive him mad. But he was always mad. A paradox. Best not to dwell on it. If he really was a magician—and a nagging inkling says he was more than t
hat—maybe he can learn a new magic, one that works here. Transform himself into a paper man. Then he might walk contentedly through parchment streets. Put that paper food to his lips and find the taste in it. He'll build a paper house, marry a paper wife, have paper children, settle into a paper happiness.

  Dry trees encircle him. Desiccated leaves rise up to his ankles.

  A jagged vent appears in the gray sky. A beam of faint yellow light drizzles down from the tear.

  He remembers Gad. And then the mission, the others, the tower. Gad has done it. The scheme has worked. Every one of them a part in the scheme, each ready to play their part. They've wounded the tower. Killed it. Now comes Hendregan's task: to get out, and then to free the others, before they die inside it.

  The spar of light strikes the leaves at his feet. For an instant, a red spot appears in the radial point of a curled, six-pronged leaf. A drift of diffuse smoke rises from it.

  The hot wind snuffs the tiny red dot. Further tears appear in the sky.

  Though real, the place is unreal, and so is Hendregan's place in it.

  He knows who he is again. He is Hendregan. He is fire.

  This place was made to destroy him.

  It has wavered.

  He was made to destroy it.

  Flames sizzle from his palms and fingers. Orange, yellow, and blue, they wrap eagerly around him, delaying and extending the joy of their ecstatic release. He holds them to him until he can resist no longer. They fly from him. They strike the leaves. They explode. Pillars of flame roar up the trunks of the trees. Burning tendrils leap from branch to branch. The forest becomes a conflagration. The flames pick Hendregan up, hurl him into the air, throw him into the city of paper. He lands, sheathed in fire, in the dry flatness of the town square. The papyrus townsfolk flee from him, seeing their doom. The tiles of the square whoosh into an inferno. Flames caressing their shoulders, their necks, the backs of their heads, the paper people flee, taking the blaze with them like a contagion. Wherever they take shelter, whomever they embrace, they consign to ash.

  "Take heart," Hendregan shouts, his words exhaling as a billowing flare. "You are only stuff of the Abyss!"