The Wurms of Blearmouth

by Steven Erikson

  Sordid snorted. “That’s fine. Let them try.”

  Bauchelain studied her for a moment, and then said, “I am afraid you do not intrigue me in the least, which is unfortunate, as you are rather attractive, but by your tone and the cast of your face, I see both inclined to dissolution in the near future. How sad.”

  She glared at him, and then slouched back in her chair, drew a knife and began paring her nails. “Now it’s insults, is it?”

  “Forgive me,” said Bauchelain, “if in expressing my disinterest you find yourself feeling diminished.”

  “Not nearly as diminished as you’ll feel with a slit throat.”

  “Oh dear, we descend to threats.”

  Korbal Broach returned to the table, sat and looked round for his cookie. Frowning, he reached out for another one.

  “My friend,” said Bauchelain, “I ask that you refrain for the moment.”

  “But I like icing, Bauchelain. I like it. I want it.”

  “The bowl awaits you in the kitchen, since I instructed Mister Reese to make twice as much as needed, knowing as I do your inclinations. Is that not so, Mister Reese?”

  “Oh aye, Master, half a bowl in the kitchen. Ground powder of sugar cane, moderately bleached and with a touch of honey, too. Nice and cool by now, I should think.”

  Smiling, Korbal Broach rose and left the dining hall.

  Emancipor looked over at the bench to see that Heck had gone over to his companion, who was now sitting up. Divested of bandages, he was now recognizable as Gust Hubb, although one of his eyes was green while the other was grey, sporting a new pink nose that was decidedly feminine, and the ears were mismatched as well, but of scars and wounds there was no sign.

  “High Denul!” hissed Heck Urse, shaking his friend by the shoulder. “You’re all healed, Gust! You look perf—as handsome as ever!”

  “I’m marked,” groaned Gust. “He marked me. Might as well be dead!”

  “But you’re not! You’re healed!”

  Gust looked up, wiped at his eyes and sniffled. “Where’s Birds? I want Birds to see me.”

  “She will, Gust. Better yet, we’re getting our cut! All we got to do is kill all the wreckers and go out to the Suncurl and collect it all up!”

  “Really?”

  “Really! See, it’s all worked out for the best!”

  Gust slowly smiled.

  A moment later Lord Fangatooth Claw strode into the room, drying his hands with a small towel, and in his wake trailed Scribe Coingood, pale and sweaty and, as usual, burdened with wood-framed wax tablets. Eyes alighting on the heap of cookies on the pewter plate in the centre of the table, the lord nodded. “My, don’t those look tasty!”

  “Oh they are,” said Bauchelain, reaching out without looking and taking one. He bit it in half, chewed and swallowed, and then plopped the second half into his mouth and followed that down with some wine. Sighing, he settled back. “Delicious, but of course that does not surprise me. I speak not from a dearth of modesty, as the kitchen was impressively stocked, Lord Fangatooth. Most impressively.”

  “It is nonetheless a shame,” said Fangatooth, “that the sacred notion of host and guest must be dispensed with before the dawn.”

  “I fully understand,” said Bauchelain. “After all, we are two sorcerors under the same roof. High Mages, in fact, and so see in each other the deadliest of rivals. Like two male wolves in their prime, with but one pack awaiting the victor.”

  “Just so,” Fangatooth said, pouring himself some wine—all the servants were gone, it seemed, or perhaps in hiding. The lord lifted the goblet and then made rolling motions with his other hand. “Rivals indeed. Tyrants in the same bed. Rather, the blanket, only big enough to warm one of us. While in that bed. Two fish in the same basin, and only one rock to hide under.” He faltered for a moment, and then said, “Oh yes, just as I said, Bauchelain. Rivals, in the midst of deadly rivalry. Foes, already locked in a contest of powers, and wits.” Then he blinked and looked round. “Why, it seems we shall have ourselves an audience as well! Excellent. Dear strangers, make yourselves at home as my guests!”

  “Right,” said the woman in a drawl, “at least until you decide to kill us.”

  “Precisely.”

  She faced Bauchelain. “Whereas you are prepared to let us go, is that right?”

  “Why, so it is.”

  “All right, then, we’re with you, and not just for that, but for healing Gust, too.”

  Smiling at her, Bauchelain said, “Why, you grow warmer in my eyes, my dear.”

  “Keep it up,” she said, “and I might melt.”

  “You do understand, don’t you,” said Bauchelain, “that I see little of the negative in dissolution?”

  She grunted. “Why, that makes two of us. Which is why you’re too upright for me. Sorry, but we won’t be rolling in a wedding bed anytime soon, I’m afraid.”

  “Hence my earlier sadness.”

  Fangatooth cleared his throat, rather loudly. “I see, Bauchelain, that you have commandeered my chair at the head of the table.”

  “My apologies, sir. An oversight. Or, perhaps, impatience?”

  “No matter. In any case, you will not leave this room alive, I’m afraid. I have sealed the chamber in the deadliest of wards. Death awaits you at every exit. I note, of course, that your friend, the eunuch, is not here. But so too is the kitchen sealed, and should he endeavour to return here, intending to assist you once he hears your terrible cries, he will die a most terrible death.”

  Bauchelain reached for another cookie. Bit, chewed and swallowed.

  “The sorcery I have perfected,” Fangatooth continued, “is solely devoted to the necessities of tyranny. The delivery of pain, the evocation of horror, the agony of agony—Scribe!”

  “Milord?”

  “Are you writing all this down?”

  “I am, milord.”

  “My last line, get rid of it. Devise something better.”

  “At once, milord.”

  Emancipor filled up his pipe and lit it using one of the candles on the table. He drew deeply and filled his lungs with smoke, and then frowned. “Oh no,” he said. “Wrong blend.” The scene sagged before his eyes. Oh, and that was uncut, too. His eyes fixed on the plate of cookies. Sweat sprang out under his clothes. He could feel his heart palpitating, and saliva drenched his mouth.

  As Bauchelain reached for a third cookie, Fangatooth held up a hand and said, “Please, you have well made your point, Bauchelain! I know well that these cookies are no more than a distraction, a feint, a not-so-clever attempt at misdirection! No, I imagine you have secreted about you an ensorcelled sword, or knife, as you clearly appraise yourself a warrior of some sort. But I am afraid to say, such things only bore me.” He reached out and collected up a cookie. Examined it a moment, and then used one fingernail to scratch loose some icing, which he then brought to his mouth, and tasted. “Ah, very nice.” He bit the cookie in half, chewed and swallowed, and bit the next piece in half, and then the next, and so on until the cookie was gone, except for a single crumb on one finger, which he ate whole.

  He sat back and smiled across at Bauchelain. “Now, shall we begin?”

  Bauchelain’s brows lifted. “Begin? Why, sir, it is already over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I have won, Lord Fangatooth.”

  The man leapt upright. “It was poisoned! A double blind deception! Oh you fool, think you I am not also immune to all poisons?”

  “I am sure that you are,” Bauchelain replied. “But that will not avail you, alas.”

  “Prepare to defend yourself!”

  Bauchelain sipped at his wine.

  Emancipor, trembling to keep from stealing a cookie, started as Fangatooth suddenly clutched his stomach and gasped.

  “What? What have you done to me?”

  “Why,” said Bauchelain, “I have killed you.”

  The lord staggered back, doubling over in pain. He shrieked. Then
blood erupted from him, spraying out from his body. He straightened, arching as if taken by spasms, and his torso bulged horribly, only to then split open.

  The demon that crawled out of Fangatooth’s body was as big as a man. It had four arms and two bent, ape-like legs with talons on the end of its toes. Beneath a low, hairless pate, its face was broad and dominated by a mouth bristling with needle-like fangs. Smeared in gore, it clambered free of Fangatooth’s ruptured corpse, and then coughed and spat.

  Lifting its ghastly head, the demon glared at Bauchelain, and then spoke in a rasping, reptilian voice, “That was a dirty trick!”

  Bauchelain shrugged. “Hardly,” he said. “Well, perhaps, somewhat unkind. In any case, you will be relieved to know that I am done with you, and so you may now return to Aral Gamelain, with my regards to your Lord.”

  The demon showed its fangs in a bristling grimace or grin, and then vanished.

  “Mister Reese!”

  Bauchelain’s hand slashed down, knocking the cookie only a hair’s breadth from Emancipor’s mouth.

  “Beneath the icing, my friend, you will find pentagrams of summoning! Ones in which the demon so summoned is already bound by me, until such time that the pattern is broken by someone else! Now, step back, Mister Reese, at once. You were one cookie away from death, and I’ll not warn you again!”

  “I was just going to lick off the icing, Master—”

  “You were not! And that is not rustleaf I am smelling from that pipe, is it?”

  “My apologies, Master. It didn’t occur to me to think.”

  “Yes,” Bauchelain replied, eyeing him, “upon that we are agreed.”

  The dissolute woman stood. “Glad that’s all over with, then,” she said. “Lord Bauchelain, would you be so kind as to disperse all those deadly wards surrounding this chamber?”

  Bauchelain waved a hand. “Korbal did so already, my dear. But will you not stay the rest of the night?”

  She turned to her squad-mates. “Find beds, soldiers. A dry and warm night until we greet the new dawn!”

  At that moment a loud crashing sound came from the stairs. Blearily, Emancipor turned to the doorway beyond which was the wide hallway that led to the staircase, in time to see that door burst apart in splinters and shards, with a dented, broken golem tumbling into the chamber. Its bucket head rolled away from its leaking body, rocked back and forth for a moment and then fell still.

  From somewhere atop the stairs came Korbal Broach’s high, piping voice. “It was an accident!”

  Yowling in frenzy, Witch Hurl fought among herselves just outside the door to the King’s Heel. She cursed that infernal barrier, and the pathetic claw-clattering paws sadly lacking in thumbs, a detail that made the door stand triumphant and mocking before her glaring, raging eyes.

  The wind buffeted her writhing, spitting forms, forcing a few of her to slink low upon the frozen mud of the street. And still the fury within her burgeoned. Her serrated scales running the length of her spines were almost vertical; her tails whipped and reared like seaworms awaiting a fast-descending corpse. Her jaws stretched wide to lock the hinges of her canines, and that horrible wind whipped into the cavern of her mouths, cold and lifeless but hungry all the same. She slashed the ground with her claws. She leapt into the air in berserk rage, only to be flung sideways by the gusts storming down the street.

  Murder filled her mind, a word that stood alone, that floated and surged up and down and slid to one side only to swim back to the centre of her thoughts. She could taste that word, its sweet roundness, it slithering tail of sound at the end of its utterance that stung like tart berries in a goat’s belly. Fires licked around it, smoke curled from it, blackening the air. It was a word with a thousand faces and a thousand expressions displaying but the faintest variations of universal dismay.

  She wanted to eat that word. Take it by the neck and hold on until all life left it. She wanted to leap upon it after a vicious rush low over the ground. She wanted to eye it venomously, unblinkingly, from nearby cover. She wanted it to stalk her dreams.

  And in the midst of this mental tantrum of desire, the cruel door buckled, indifference torn away until its very bones of flat wood and banded bronze quivered as if with ague, and then it swung open.

  Witch Hurl converged upon that misshapen eruption of light, and the figure silhouetted within it.

  Murder!

  Puny bellowed and staggered back. Scaly creatures clung to him, upon his chest, fighting to close jaws on his throat; upon his arms where they writhed like tentacles; another attempting to burrow into his crotch. Blood spurted. He batted at the things, tore them away, flung them in all directions.

  His brothers roared. The patrons screamed.

  Feloovil, standing behind the bar, hissed a vile curse under her breath.

  Nine lizard cats and not one of them much bigger than a house-cat, or a scrawny, worm-ridden barn mouser. But this did nothing to mitigate their viciousness.

  Puny clambered back onto his feet. Tiny and the others began swinging their huge weapons. Blades crashed through chairs, tables. Shrieks ended in frothy gurgles as those weapons struck hapless locals. Severed skull-pates knotted with hair spun across the room; limbs flopped, bounced and twitched atop tables or on the muddy and now bloody floor. The lizard cats evaded every blow, spinning, leaping, darting, clawing at everyone.

  Feloovil beheld utter carnage from her place behind the bar. She saw two of the brothers struggling to ready a three-handed sword, only to wither to an exploding tabletop, staggering apart, their faces and necks studded with splinters. A cat leapt to wrap itself around the side of one of the brother’s heads, tearing the ear off with its jaws, while the other brother stumbled over a chair that collapsed under him, and as he thumped on the floor, four cats closed in. His scream became a spray.

  Then, as if of one mind, the lizard cats spied Feloovil, and all nine suddenly rushed her, leaping over the counter. Their multiple impacts made her stagger back. She screamed as talons raked through her tunic, bit deep into her flesh. Clothes disintegrating under the assault, she was stripped naked in a welter of blood.

  Until one cat, seeking to sink its fangs into one of her breasts, instead found savage teeth clamping about its throat. A moment later another cat howled as another mouth, this one from the other breast, caught hold of one of his forelimbs and bit down hard enough to break bones.

  All at once, more mouths appeared upon Feloovil’s ample form: upon her shoulders; upon her low-slung belly; her thighs. Another split open on her forehead. Each one stretched wide, bearing teeth sharp as knife-points.

  “You damned witch!” Feloovil shrieked from countless mouths. “Get away from me! I am your goddess, you stupid fool!”

  In the room before Feloovil and her snarling or yowling attackers, where only a few huddled figures still twitched amidst the wreckage, and only three of the Chanter brothers stood with heaving chests, with weapons draining blood and gore, with lacerations upon their bodies, faces turned, eyes fixed upon the battle on the other side of the bar.

  A dead cat, its throat crushed and leaking, hung from Feloovil’s left breast. The cat trapped by the other breast’s mouth, had clawed that swelling of soft flesh into ragged ribbons, and still the mouth held on, masticating to grind through the creature’s forelimb.

  The other cats withdrew, crowded on the blood-smeared counter-top, and then from their throats came a wavering, shrill chorus of voices. “She’s mine! You promised! Your daughter is mine! Her blood! Her everything!”

  “Never!” Feloovil screamed.

  Its ruined limb chewed through, the cat upon her right breast fell away, running three sets of claws down Feloovil’s belly on its way to the floor. She glanced down and stamped on its head, making a crushed-egg sound.

  The remaining cats all flinched, barring the dead one hanging from the other breast.

  Feloovil’s many mouths all grinned most evilly. “I got rid of you once, Hurl, and I’ll do it again! I swear
it!”

  “Not you, whore! Her father did that!”

  A voice then spoke from the doorway. “And it seems I shall have to do so again.”

  The seven remaining lizard-cats all spun round. “Whuffal Caraline Ganaggs! Vile Elder! Leave me be!”

  The grey-haired man with the finely trimmed beard, moustache and eyebrows slowly drew off his fox-fur hat. “I warned you, Witch. Now look what you’ve done. Nearly everyone is dead.”

  “Not my fault! Blame the Tarthenal!”

  “Lies!” bellowed Tiny Chanter. “We was defending ourselves!”

  Whuffine studied them. “Begone,” he said. “I have already slain three of your siblings and if necessary, I will do away with the rest of you. It’s this nostalgia,” he added, with an apologetic shrug. “It’s not good me getting nostalgic, you see. Not good at all.”

  Growling, Tiny glared about, and then said, “Tiny don’t do getting killed. Let’s go.”

  “What about Relish?” asked Midge.

  Tiny pointed at Feloovil, “Send her up to the keep after us.”

  Feloovil’s mouths twisted into sneers. “Just be glad she ain’t no virgin,” those mouths all said. “Hurl wants herself a sacrifice.”

  “No more sacrifices,” said Whuffine, leaning on his walking stick. “It’s my talents with stone what’s done us in here, and so it’s up to me to clean all this up.”

  “Then kill that Fangatooth!” shrieked Feloovil.

  “No need,” the comber replied. “He’s already dead.”

  “Then kill the one who killed him! Away with all sorcerers! I will not again be bound to a witch or warlock!”

  Whuffine sighed. “We’ll see. A word or two might be enough to send them on their way. I don’t like violence. Makes me nostalgic. Makes me remember burning continents, burning skies, burning seas, mountains of the dead and all that.” He pointed at the D’ivers. “Witch Hurl, best semble now.”

  The lizard cats drew together, blurred and then, in a slithering of spicy vapours, transformed into a scrawny hag of a woman. “Aagh!” she cried, “look at me! My beauty, gone!”