Chaosbound

by David Farland

  The wyrmling guard dropped without so much as a grunt, and lay for a moment, staring at the stars, bright and inaccessible, as his life’s blood oozed from his throat.

  Dark shadows passed before his eyes as human runelords flitted into the tunnels.

  Bells began tolling in the Fortress of the Northern Wastes, deep bells that reverberated through stone, carrying their warning through Crull-maldor’s feet. She stood in the Room of Whispers, a perfect dome lit only by glow worms along the ceiling, a room riddled with miniature tunnels in the walls. Each tunnel contained a glass tube, a special glass designed to conduct sound. And each tube went to a different reporting post.

  At each end of the tube, the glass flared wide. By talking into the tubes the wyrmlings could communicate the entire length of the fortress.

  “They’re coming!” a messenger shouted, his voice emitting an urgent whisper from the tube. “Humans have breached the tower!”

  There were shouts of challenge, the clash of arms, roars of pain, the sounds of wyrmlings dying, followed almost instantly by more reports from another tube, urgent whispers: “Enemy spotted, Tower Post Two!”

  “Death Gate One—humans coming!” a third voice cried.

  In the perfect acoustics of the Room of Whispers, it seemed that the voices came from everywhere and nowhere, like the distant hiss of the sea. It was as if the guards were incorporeal, like Crull-maldor herself.

  Crull-maldor smiled inwardly. She had anticipated this attack, but she had not thought that it would come for another day or two. She had underestimated the runelords.

  Two hours past midnight, bonfires had begun to blaze upon the nearest hills, summoning the small folk to battle. Within minutes fires had burst forth upon distant peaks all along the coast.

  The runelords came. They raced through the night more swiftly than Crull-maldor had anticipated.

  She’d thought that they would first attack at the Death Gate, as the previous men had done, but they had surprised her by scaling the watch-tower. To wyrmlings, with their huge bulk and clumsy fingers, the tower looked unclimbable.

  At Crull-maldor’s side, her new captain reported, “Their numbers outside are great. We cannot see them all for the fog, but their numbers are easily in the tens of thousands. Their elite troops have scaled the tower, but a larger force is rushing the tunnels.”

  “Perhaps their numbers are great,” Crull-maldor mused, “but if all that you could see from the tower was their fires . . . ? It is an old trick, to try to dismay an enemy by building many fires in the night. By having your troops sing loudly, five thousand can sound like fifty thousand.”

  She spoke comfortingly, but Crull-maldor knew that the humans really did outnumber her troops. They might even be strong enough to overwhelm her wyrmlings.

  Yet she hoped that powerful runelords would lead this group so that she could decimate them.

  No humans had escaped from the warrens alive in the first assault. So the small folk would have no choice but to send stronger forces.

  The humans would not be prepared to face a wight. She wanted to crush the spirits of the human inhabitants of the island, and thus begin her dominion over them.

  “Milord,” a wyrmling reported, the voice rising in a whisper. “Human forces have secured the tower level.”

  The news came unexpectedly quick. It had not been a minute since the alarm had sounded. Five hundred wyrmling troops, destroyed like that?

  Some of these runelords must have many endowments of metabolism, Crull-maldor realized.

  But the small folk still had no idea what resources Crull-maldor had at her command.

  “Drop all of the portcullises in the tower corridors,” she said, so that the humans would not be able to escape. “Then light the tar fires in level two. These runelords may be tough, but they still have to breathe.”

  “Milady,” the captain began to argue.

  At that instant Crull-maldor felt a presence seize her consciousness, a sense of heightened intelligence filled with malicious intent.

  It was a sending, a message from Emperor Zul-torac. Deliver all of the corpuscite that you find to Rugassa, he whispered to Crull-maldor’s soul. Send your wyrmling troops to scour the Northern Wastes in the search.

  Crull-maldor raised a hand to silence her captain, lest he disturb her further.

  It was not the most opportune time to be receiving messages from the emperor.

  Crull-maldor did not want her superior to know what she knew, so she envisioned a wall between herself and the emperor, a wall of stone, impenetrable. She made her mind a fortress against his probes.

  Corpuscite? Crull-maldor feigned ignorance. Did you ask for corpuscite?

  The emperor evaded the question. Time is short. Do as you are told.

  Crull-maldor reported, Humans have entered the fortress, humans swift and deadly. We are under attack! I cannot send my scouts out now! The emperor’s dark mind brimmed with smug satisfaction at the news. There was nothing that Zul-torac would like more than to see Crull-maldor humiliated.

  Take care of it, the emperor warned. This is your first priority. The time has come to prepare for a great war, a war unlike any other. Lord Despair commands that you raise production on your arms and armor. Every man and woman over the weight of four hundred pounds must be fitted for war by the end of the week.

  Crull-maldor smiled grimly. A male wyrmling could reach four hundred pounds by the age of ten years. Despair was ordering that women and children be armed for war?

  Making the armor alone would be all but impossible. Every child would have to be pulled from indoctrination classes and put to work carving the bones of world wyrms.

  Surely Despair does not fear the small humans so much, Crull-maldor mused. But she began to wonder. With endowments, a woman or a child could be fearsome indeed. In fact, some of the human fortresses might be difficult to penetrate for a wyrmling—a large one would not be able to fit through doors. But a child . . .

  Despair has no fear of the small folk, Zul-torac replied. We are preparing to conquer the heavens. Despair is opening doors to far worlds, and our troops shall overwhelm them all!

  Crull-maldor considered the implications. The emperor was demanding all of the blood metal in her realm—blood metal that Crull-maldor would need to ready her troops for the coming invasions. She dared not deliver it.

  Yet the promise of a coming war was a heady thing. Crull-maldor had seen some of the beasts that the emperor had brought through doors in the past.

  There were treasures to be plundered. Crull-maldor did not care for gold or silver. She was far more interested in the treasures of knowledge that might be gained on far worlds.

  I will do what I can to obtain corpuscite, she promised. But it is exceedingly rare here in the North. A few stones we might find, but I cannot guarantee that we will find much more.

  The emperor snarled and ended the communication abruptly. The sense of heightened awareness—and great corruption—both broke off with a nearly audible snap.

  All around the room, whispers were rising. The sound of portcullises falling came from a dozen holes, metal sliding over stone, bolts being thrown so that the portcullises could not be raised. Shrieks and howls were coming from Death Gate where human forces had overwhelmed the wyrmlings.

  But all too soon the humans would find themselves trapped.

  Crull-maldor smiled inwardly. So, Zul-torac had already learned the lore of the runelords and how to form corpuscite into forcibles.

  Crull-maldor had wrung the secrets from the dead earlier, and now she saw a great opportunity.

  For nearly two hundred years she had been banished to this waste, and in that time she had ranged far across the barrens. She could not recall where every single stone of corpuscite lay, but she had seen them from time to time, and remembered one decent outcrop not sixty miles to the northeast. Though the humans encompassed her fortress, they had not yet discovered the secret gate, which exited into the hills some twelve
miles to the north. Already Crull-maldor had sent troops to recover the corpuscite.

  A great war was taking form, Crull-maldor realized. She intended to win it, to dominate the humans in her realm. She intended to put them to good use. As slaves, they could work the wyrmling mines and reap fish from the sea and caribou from the plains. Their skins would warm the wyrmlings during winter nights when the air grew bitter cold. They could provide meat in a pinch, and their glands could be used for harvester spikes.

  All that Crull-maldor had to fear was that the humans would gain access to the blood metal.

  There would be small pockets of it elsewhere here in the barrens, she knew. The island itself was four hundred miles across on the southern tip. To the north, the boundaries were often blurred, for in the winter the sea froze over, creating a continuous mass that stretched off into the bitter cold. But some years the ice would melt along the eastern shore, giving hints of the island’s shape.

  So the island itself was vast, some eighty thousand square miles at this time of year.

  The greatest danger that Crull-maldor faced was that the small humans would retrieve the metal before she did.

  She felt reconciled to the fact that they would get some of it, but she intended to take the majority.

  The humans were too many and were spread too far and wide for her to control perfectly. They’d stumble upon a few stones here and there, perhaps even a rich vein.

  She’d have to take it from them. The blood metal was too great a weapon. She couldn’t let it fall into the enemy’s hands.

  In the room of whispers, suddenly she heard human cries from the tubes in the ceiling above, cries broken and muted by coughing and hacking.

  Metal clanked upon metal as the small folk tried to break through a portcullis with their war hammers. The blows rang swiftly at first, but the humans with their boosted metabolism not only lived faster, they died more quickly.

  All too soon the clanking slowed and became broken by shrieks of fear and shouts of despair as good men begged the Powers that be for air.

  Crull-maldor bent her ear, bent her whole will upon the whispering sounds of death that drifted into the room, and imagined the humans in the tower crumpling in ruin upon the floor.

  The battle at the Death Gate was just ramping up. The warriors racing down the long corridor were not powerful runelords apparently. They moved far too slowly for that, and they made far too much noise, singing and shouting, hoping to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy.

  The wyrmling troops were eager to engage. It had been far too long since they had been able to prove themselves in a pitched battle.

  The captain was listening to a distant whisper at a hole. “Spies at the Death Gate report fewer than five thousand humans have breached the corridors. Our troops have fled before them, down into the labyrinth. They await your orders for the time and manner of the ambush.”

  “Very good,” Crull-maldor said. She could kill the humans with fire, or perhaps take them herself. But her troops needed battle, the good clean smell of blood. So she ordered, “Unleash the wyrmling horde.”

  Book II

  THE WARLORDS OF INTERNOOK

  12

  THE PROPHECY

  No man can know the future, for the future is malleable. Having foreseen disaster, we can often take steps to avert it. Thus, when we look upon the future, we see only a future that may be.

  —The Chaos Oracles

  Darkness engulfed the great fortress of Rugassa. A roof covered the world, a roof of made of swirling clouds so thick that they blackened the sky.

  The clouds did not smell of wetness or rain. Instead, they filled the air with fine sediments of soot, giving the air an acrid tang, as if a volcano had exploded, sending ash to mushroom out for as far as the eye could see.

  The winds high overhead screamed, night and day, a distant piercing whine.

  Sunlight could not penetrate the storm, yet light exuded from it: brief flashes of lightning that strobed high up among the dust and debris, lighting the heavens from time to time in strange colors—the green of a bruise, the red of flame.

  The storm was centered over Rugassa, but its effects covered the land for a thousand miles in every direction, sealing all of Rofehavan beneath shadows, eternal night.

  Thus it was that nine days after the binding of the worlds, the lich emperor Zul-torac took his first walk in the daylight in nearly three hundred years, venturing out of the fortress to explore his lands.

  He feared no danger. No sunlight could touch him, and no enemy could strike him down. In the nine days since the binding of the worlds, the wyrmling hordes had crushed all human resistance—destroying armies, enslaving nations. With a mountain of blood metal at their command, the wyrmlings were unstoppable.

  More importantly, their leader was unstoppable. Lord Despair now marched at the head of the wyrmling armies, and with his vast powers and wyrmling runelords, he was invincible.

  Even now, Lord Despair had taken his armies to a far world, to the One True World that had existed from the beginning, where he hunted now for the Bright Ones and the Glories, destroying those who had the greatest chance to strike him down.

  Rumor said that the war went well. The enemy was fleeing from Despair, desperately seeking escape. Zul-torac’s master had slain thousands of them, and now his troops were searching the wilderness, trying to corner the last of them, though they hid from him like foxes in their dens.

  Yet there was a worry upon Zul-torac’s mind that had nothing to do with assassins or armies. It had to do with his daughter, the princess Kanhazur. She had fallen ill, and it looked as if she would die. There were certain rites he hoped to perform this coming winter, rites that required the lifeblood of his only child. He could not allow her to die before the solstice.

  The lich lord was dressed in a robe made of black spider cloth with powdered diamonds sewn into it, so that he glimmered as he floated above the ground.

  Thus he made his way up a long, winding road, out of the fortress, traveling a tunnel that ran through the cone of the volcano.

  Suddenly, there was copious light ahead, thrown by the magma at the volcano’s core. So high up, the winds’ piercing howl grew to a keening wail; Zul-torac could taste dust upon the remains of his tongue.

  He followed the road along a steep path. To slip off the side would send him plummeting into the molten ore.

  Ahead, the path leveled out into a plain that had been gouged out of the mountain. Huge columns of black stone had been arranged upon the ground—not in any pattern that a wyrmling could discern. Some of the pillars stood upright, others canted to the side, as if a great temple had fallen.

  There was a sense of order to the ruins, but not a pattern.

  Circling this plain were dozens of doorways to other worlds, each an archway made of shimmering light. Zul-torac peered through them. In one world he saw great beasts wading amid a swamp, using their broad faces to gather algae from the scum-covered surface of the water. Another door opened into a world covered in bitter snow. A third showed an impenetrable jungle of odd vines. Through that door came two wyrmlings bearing a huge leather bag, sopping wet.

  Inside it, some nameless evil growled and thrashed about.

  The wyrmlings grinned as they passed, and warned, “Watch yourself. This one is nasty! Bog crab, we’ll call it. Got more teeth in its mouth than I have hairs on my arse.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Zul-torac asked.

  “Throw it in a swamp on the borders,” one wyrmling replied, “and let it eat anything that happens by.”

  The two carried their thrashing burden past Zul-torac.

  The bog creature was but one of Lord Despair’s new recruits. Through these doorways, tens of thousands of creatures had passed during the week—Darkling Glories that rode the night winds, giant walking hills from a planet called Nayaire, and nameless monsters from a hundred other realms.

  But now Zul-torac focused on the plain before him
. Amidst the black pillars, the chaos oracles hid—both from themselves and others. The creatures were so hideous, it was said, that the sight of one unveiled would drive a man mad. So the chaos oracles twisted light away from themselves, cloaking themselves in shadows the way that a wyrmling might wear his armor of bone.

  Still, the thought of seeing one unveiled was tantalizing, and so Zul-torac peered.

  Gloom had gathered around them, black shadows thicker than the mists in the sky above, darkness that swirled and eddied, sometimes parting just enough to reveal the tantalizing hint of a form, then just as quickly gathering again to immerse their masters in blackest night.

  The chaos oracles were not of this earth, not of any earth that Zul-torac had heard of. They liked it here by the volcano, relished the taste of sulfur in the air.

  The shadows parted from around one an instant, and Zul-torac caught a tantalizing glimpse of a hunched back covered in horns, and twisted limbs, and one bright golden eye that peered at him, filling him with horror.

  His blood ran chill and his breathing stopped.

  Then the shadows coalesced, and thankfully the chaos oracle was cloaked again.

  Zul-torac saw flashes of memory from his childhood as a chaos oracle accessed his mind. He could feel something, a presence, moving through his brain—from the right temporal lobe, to the left, then back down to the brain stem.

  All of his secrets were laid bare.

  “You come because you fear for the life of your daughter,” an oracle whispered in his mind.

  “Yes,” Zul-torac said.

  “You wish to know how to save her. . . . This I cannot see. Time is like a river, flowing toward eternity. Yet there are eddies and swirls. I cannot see all, but I see your death.”

  An image flashed into Zul-torac’s mind: a darkened corridor, where glow worms lit the tunnel like ten thousand gleaming stars. In the distance was a light, a torch, but its flames boiled and sputtered as it rushed toward him. A man was coming, a man blinding in his speed. He raced toward Zul-torac in a blur. Zul-torac sought to flee, but his opponent was too fast. A dozen endowments of metabolism he might have had, and there was no escaping him.