Chaosbound (49 page)

“They can't be far,” Wulfgaard reasoned. “You can't hide a quarter of a million people down here.”

Aaath Ulber agreed.

So they wolfed down their food and chugged their ale. No wyrmling dared to attack. The creatures were running up the tunnels, struggling to escape. They screamed and trampled one another, leaving dozens injured and dead in their wake.

It made for less work for Aaath Ulber.

Inside five minutes as Aaath Ulber's body measured time, he finished feeding. The others were not done yet, and he studied them. They were moving slower than he.

The folks in Ox Port know of our plight, Aaath Ulber realized. They're vectoring endowments of metabolism to me. I'm moving faster than my companions.

How much faster? he wondered. Twice as fast? No, he didn't feel that he was moving that much faster. But it seemed that he had more endowments of metabolism than the others, five or ten more.

He glanced at a fallen wyrmling woman lying nearby. Her tunic had been slashed in the back, revealing her pale skin. A pair of scars showed on her back.

Aaath Ulber pulled at the fabric, ripping it, to display the scars better. Runes of metabolism had been burned into her flesh.

“All of them have endowments,” Anya said, “even the babes.”

Aaath Ulber took out a stone and began to sharpen the spikes on his war hammer, expertly pulling the oilstone at an angle.

He pondered the implications of wyrmling babes and mothers taking endowments of metabolism. An entire wyrmling hive living at three times the speed of a normal man? What would it lead to?

He imagined miners hauling ore from the ground at three times the normal rate, and smiths hammering out blades. He imagined babes growing
at three times the normal speed, while mothers spawned two or three wyrmlings in a single season.

The implications were enormous. They'll outwork us, outbreed us. They'll create . . . a society that will overrun ours.

What had Gaborn said? “Their armies will sweep through the heavens like autumn lightning?”

And it would cost the wyrmlings virtually nothing. One does not have to feed a Dedicate who has given an endowment of metabolism. One does not have to give him drink or worry about his escape. Such folk simply fall into a magic slumber until the day when their master dies.

It is said that those who give endowments of metabolism still breathe, but it happens so slowly that Aaath Ulber had never seen it. It is said that their blood still flows. But their rest is like hibernation, except that their sleep is deeper than that of any bear.

It took nothing to maintain such folk. All that you had to do was to make sure that the rats didn't gnaw at their flesh. A few rat terriers in the Dedicates' Keep handled the job.

The monumental horror of the wyrmlings' scheme struck him.

The only way that such a society could exist was if the wyrmlings continued to take endowments from the humans.

They'll take metabolism from us all, Aaath Ulber realized. That's what they're doing here on Internook: taking endowments as fast as their facilitators are able. They each have two endowments now, but in a week they'll each have three, then four or five. Where does it all stop? When the wyrmling cows are dropping nine of their calves a year, or ten?

In a month, he realized, we could reach that point. In three months, the wyrmlings could each have fifty endowments or more.

His people would not be able to compete against such monsters. There would be no war—not even a hope of war—not if a wyrmling child matured to adulthood in a single year and spawned a dozen more of its kind!

He looked to Anya and Wulfgaard in alarm, speechless.

“Yes,” Wulfgaard said. “We see it, too. We found their armory, where they carve armor from bones. They use reaver horns to make their awls.
The children were making armor for themselves, the women too. The whole wyrmling nation is preparing for war.”

“What did you do to the children?” Aaath Ulber asked.

“We left the smallest of them alive,” Wulfgaard said, “as planned. I didn't know what else to do.”

With an edge of hysteria to her voice, Anya said “They'll put us all to the forcible. They'll take metabolism from each of us—from every man, woman, and child.”

There were four million people in Internook. Aaath Ulber had imagined that he had enough barbarians to defeat the wyrmlings. But now he considered how the wyrmlings might see them. These four million people weren't rivals, just cattle ready to be slaughtered. Four million people were not foes, they were potential Dedicates.

The wyrmlings' plan was so diabolical that Aaath Ulber felt sickened. He realized something else. Thousands of men and women on the island had been forced to grant endowments to the wyrmlings' children, and those men and women could not be freed until the wyrmling children were dead. This bloody task would fall to him. The very thought of slaughtering babes—even wyrmlings—nearly left him unhinged.

Killing innocents, Aaath Ulber considered. Is this the subtle trap that Lord Despair has set for me?

How can a man slaughter a babe without doing irreparable harm to his soul?

Aaath Ulber closed his eyes. Will I be a hero if I do what must be done? Or will I become food for a wyrm.

He could see no way past this.

I'll have to go back and kill the children and babes, he realized.

But before I become food for a locus, he vowed to himself, I will strike a blow against the wyrmlings from which they can never recover!

Aaath Ulber finished sharpening his blades and then leapt to his feet. “We must find the wyrmlings' Dedicates' keep,” he said solemnly. “We cannot rest again until we have claimed it.”

Wulfgaard's eyes flashed to Anya, as if asking if she would be up to the challenge. As one the three gave a cry and set off.

Aaath Ulber led the way, racing through the warren's tunnels. Some wyrmlings were on the floor, trampled and wounded. He left them to the care of Wulfgaard and Anya, and considered: He was searching for Dedicates, and housing a quarter of a million would be hard under normal circumstances. But a sleeping body doesn't require much space.

So he ran ahead, rounded a corner, and spotted citizens fleeing.

But off to his right was a wide side tunnel, and in some dim recesses he glimpsed a brilliant white light.

Aaath Ulber wheeled and raced down the tunnel, into a broad chamber. The limestone ceiling was hung with stalactites. Water was seeping along the walls, leaving the room humid.

Aaath Ulber felt a cool chill, the presence of wights. His breath came out as fog, and ice fans glinted on the ceiling. Across the room he spotted forty or fifty shadowy wights wearing nothing but shimmering black spider cloth.

Some began to whisper and hiss as they cast hasty spells.

He reached to his belt and pulled out some wyrmling war darts—heavy iron darts that weighed roughly a pound each. He tossed four at once, letting them fan out across the room.

The war darts screamed into the wights' ranks, ripping through robes and vaporous flesh.

A dozen wights shrieked at their touch, giving off a piercing wail. A foul green-black cloud erupted as the creatures unraveled. The cold iron blessed by Myrrima's spells made for a fatal combination.

Several wights lunged toward a far door. Aaath Ulber pulled a dagger and hurled it into the crowd.

Two wights erupted in a foul smoke, while others rushed away.

He raced into them, drew his longsword, and danced among them, taking them with ease, careful not to let one touch him.

He felt a cold wind at his back, whirled to find a wight floating toward him, shadowy hands extended.

Aaath Ulber slashed at it, and the wight exploded into noxious fumes. A cold wind seemed to drive through Aaath Ulber, freezing his heart, but the wight was gone.

He whirled and peered about. He could not see any more of the wights, but he wondered how he'd missed that last one.

They could be tricky. A wight must hide from light by day, but any shadow will do—a snake hole or the crack under a rock. They can fold themselves into extremely small spaces.

Nowhere in this room was safe.

He studied the room: it was a laboratory where wyrmling sorcerers worked. There were iron spikes on one table and crucibles filled with vile secretions nearby. The wyrmlings had been making harvester spikes here.

Over on one wall hung a pair of artificial wings, in the process of completion. The bones of the wings looked to be carved from the bones of a world wyrm, but the wights had stretched the skin of a graak over their frame, and now long pipes made from arteries and veins climbed the wall like vines and carried blood to the wings, so that they might grow. The heart of some large creature was lying in a wooden tub half full of blood, pumping nutrients to the wings.

All of this Aaath Ulber took in during a single glance, but one thing above all caught his attention: a cloudy white orb that sat on a table, emitting a flickering light.

“The orb!” Wulfgaard called. “The Orb of Internook!”

Aaath Ulber did not know whether to believe it. He didn't trust such luck. The orb was a thing of legend, a relic said to hold tremendous power.

Erden Geboren himself had brought it from the netherworld in ages past and had bestowed it upon one of his friends.

But as with all relics, thieves had sought it. Hundreds of times over the centuries the orb had disappeared, only to be recovered a few decades later.

As far as Aaath Ulber knew, it had not resurfaced in the past century.

“Is it,” Anya asked, “is it real?”

Aaath Ulber approached the thing, peered into it. The ball looked to be of clear crystal, shot through with clouds. But the clouds inside the ball swirled slowly, much as clouds will float on a summer's day.

If it isn't the Orb of Internook, Aaath Ulber thought, it's something equally as mysterious.

He glanced around the room, spotted dozens of artifacts in the making. He recognized all of the other wyrmling creations, but had never seen anything like this.

“It's the orb, all right,” Wulfgaard said. “See, it sits upon a human cloak. The wyrmlings were afraid to touch it. So they brought it here to study.”

Aaath Ulber peered down. A rich green cloak with hems of cloth of gold served as the resting place for the orb; the cloak had a gold cape pin upon it shaped like a hawthorn leaf. It was something that a fat lord might wear.

“The wyrmlings have been raiding our homes,” Anya said, “taking everything of value—gold, weapons.”

“Well,” Aaath Ulber said, “it looks as if they found something better than gold.”

He leaned close and studied the orb, saw that its surface was inscribed with fine lines—graceful runes that danced along the surface. But he'd never seen runes like these.

He grabbed the orb, wrapping the cloak over it protectively, and hefted it.

The orb sparked when his finger grazed it, sent out a pulse of bright light. The air crackled from static electricity as fiery butterflies whirled about him, then dove into his flesh. His muscles cramped and burned at their touch.

“It punishes you,” Wulfgaard said.

The orb was not enormous. It seemed to be a foot across. But as Aaath Ulber bundled it tightly in the robe, he felt the ball shrink at his touch, as if fleeing from him.

In a moment it was only four inches in diameter, and it went as black as night.

“What did you do?” Wulfgaard demanded.

“Believe me,” Aaath Ulber said, handing the thing off to Anya, who immediately pulled off her pack and began to stuff it in, “I have no idea what I'm doing. But we don't have time to figure out this mystery now.”

“There are tales of the orb calming the seas for our warships—” Wulfgaard said.

“And hurling storms against enemy fortresses,” Aaath Ulber said. “If you can figure out how to unleash a storm against this fortress, be my guest.”

Anya whispered, “Tellaris used it to guide her daughter's spirit back from the land of the dead.”

Aaath Ulber knew strange legends about the orb. There were hints of a curse. Too often those who sought to own it wound up dead.

Of course, he thought, the same could be said of any man who owned a fine horse, too. The world was full of thieves who would gladly slit your throat for something like this.

“Move on,” Aaath Ulber ordered. “We've got to find those Dedicates, and time is wasting. . . .”

“Myrrima,” Rain said, her face filled with concern, “I think that I should row out to the
Borrowbird
. A battle is coming. Sage should go with me. It will be safer there.”

Rain's heart pounded. The revived Dedicates had warned that wyrmlings knew the name of Ox Port. That meant that they would be here soon. A man with ten endowments of metabolism could easily run sixty miles an hour. At such a speed, the wyrmlings couldn't be more than an hour and a half away. Probably, they would be here much sooner.

Can we even make it? Rain wondered.

Fleeing sounded like a good idea right now—not just for Rain, but for all of them.

“Won't you come with us, Mother?” Sage asked.

Myrrima smiled grimly and shook her head. With a jut of her chin she motioned toward the collected Dedicates. “I can't,” she explained with infinite sadness. “These are your father's. Someone must protect them.”

There was a runelord guarding the room, the young woman Hilde. But
Rain understood what Myrrima meant. She couldn't just leave the Dedicates in a stranger's care.

Draken growled and drew his sword. “Nor can I leave.”

Rain studied his face, so full of resolve.

“Aaath Ulber is not your father,” Rain pointed out to Draken. “You don't owe him your life.” She pleaded with Myrrima, “Nor is he your husband.”

“You're right,” Myrrima said. “Perhaps there is only a tiny piece of Borenson left in him, a small corner of Aaath Ulber's mind. But even if he is only a ghost of a memory, I must remain faithful to him. I know that now.”