In the House of the Worm (3 page)

They stood clustered on one end of a slender metal bridge that spanned a cavernous chamber a hundred times the size of the Chamber of Obsidian. Far, far above was a vast roof of glass panes (each of them the size of the one behind the Manworm’s pit, Annelyn thought) set in a latticework of black metal. The sun loomed over it, with its oceans of fire and plains of ash, so they did not need the torch.

There were other bridges, Annelyn saw—five of them; slim threads that swung from one black wall to the other, above a pool of some sluggish liquid that stirred and made noises just below their feet. And there was a sixth, or had been, but now it was shattered, and the twisted ribbon of its span hung down into the moving blackness below them.

There was a smell. Strong, thick, and sickly sweet.

“Where are we?” Riess whispered.

“The Chamber of the Last Light,” Groff said brusquely. “Or so it is called in the lore of the bronze knights. But groun hunters call it the grounwall. This is the last and deepest place where the old sun can peer in. The White Worm created it to keep the grouns from the burrows of his children, some say.”

Annelyn walked to the rail of the bridge. “Interesting,” he said casually. “Are there no other ways for the grouns to climb up, then?”

“No more,” Groff told him. “Once. But bronze knights sealed them with bricks and blood. Or so it is said.”

He pointed his ax toward the shadows on the far side of the bridge. “Across.”

The span was narrow, barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast. Annelyn stepped forward hesitantly, reaching out to the guardrail for support. It came away in his hand, a small piece of metal tubing, eaten through by rust. He looked at it, stepped backward, then chucked it away, off into the liquid.

“The damp,” Groff said, unconcerned. “The bridge itself has rust holes, so be careful where you step.” His voice was stern and inflexible.

So Annelyn found himself edging forward again, step by careful step, out above the sloshing blackness into the abyss of dim red light. The bridge creaked and moved beneath his feet, and more than once he felt something give as he set down a tentative foot, so he was forced to pull back quickly and step somewhere else. Riess came after him, holding the useless rail tightly whenever there was a rail to hold. Groff cheerfully walked on the places the others had tested.

Halfway across, the bridge began to sway—slowly at first, then with greater speed. Annelyn froze, clutched for the rail, and looked over his shoulder at Groff.

The bronze knight swore. “Three is too much,” he said.
“Hurry!”

Not daring to run, Annelyn began to walk as quickly as he could, and as he did so the swaying got worse. He walked even faster, and behind him he could hear the others. At one point, there was a sudden snapping and a crunch, followed by a screech of pain.
Then
he ran, all but jumping the last few feet to the stone semicircle that anchored the bridge on the far side of the chamber. Only then, safe, did he turn back. Riess had hit a rust spot; his right leg had plunged right through the metal. Groff was helping him out. “Hold it steady,” the bronze knight shouted, and Annelyn went back to the stone precipice and steadied the shaking bridge as best he could.

Soon Groff joined him, supporting a limping Riess. The leather he wore had saved him from serious injury, but the jagged metal edges had still cut into his leg, and there was some blood.

While Groff tended to him, Annelyn looked about. The stone platform on which they stood was ringed by dark shapes, great square boxes that stood along its edge like a row of rotten teeth. He went to one. It was metal, scarred by rust and disuse, and studded by a dozen tiny glass windows, behind which was nothing but dust. There were holes in the boxes, too, and several of them had been smashed. Annelyn could make no sense of it.

Riess was on his feet again, looking shaken. “I dropped the torch,” he said.

“There are others to be had,” Groff said. “We could not have used ours, in any event. The Meatbringer would see its light. No, we must enter the groun-runs in the dark, and wait there until we see the light of
his
torch. Then we will follow that.”

“What?” said Annelyn. “But Groff, that is madness. There will be grouns in the dark, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” Groff replied. “Not likely, not this close to light, to the grounwall. Groun hunters, in my time and even before, had to go deeper to find prey. The upper runs are empty. But we will not go far.” He pointed toward the wide black door that waited for them where the platform met the wall.

Annelyn drew his stiletto and went swiftly forward, not to look a coward. If a groun lurked in the blackness, he would be ready for it.

But there was nothing. Faintly, in the small light that still bled from the chamber, he saw the outline of three burrows, each darker than the one before.

“The left leads down,” Groff said, “into the richer parts of the runs. The center is bricked-off and abandoned. We will wait there. We can watch the bridge, hidden by darkness, and follow the Meatbringer’s torch when he passes.”

He herded them forward, and they sat on the dusty stone to wait. The door to the Chamber of the Last Light faced them, like a dim red window; all else was black and silent. Groff sat unmoving, his ax across his lap and his legs crossed under him. Riess fidgeted. Annelyn put his back to the wall, so no grouns could creep up behind him, and toyed with his stiletto.

It was not long before he began to hear noises, soft mutters and low sounds, like the ugly voices of grouns grouping to attack them. But the tunnel was a solid blindness, and the harder he listened, the more the noise became blurred and indistinct. Footfalls? Or only Groff’s breathing? Or perhaps it was the sound of the stirring liquid, not far off? Annelyn gripped his blade tighter. “Groff,” he warned, but the other only silenced him.

He was remembering stories—of how the grouns could see in total darkness, of how they padded up so quietly on soft white feet and wrapped their six long limbs around straying
yaga-la-hai
—when the other noise began. Soft first, then louder; this could be no mistake. It was thin and ragged; it rose and fell, full of chokes and sobs. Groff heard it, too. Suddenly, silently, he was on his feet. Annelyn leaped up beside him, then Riess.

The bridge swayed slowly in the red window before them. Someone was coming.

The noise grew, and became more human. A voice, a real voice, warped by fear. Then Annelyn heard words:
“ . . . please  . . . not into the dark again  . . . grouns  . . . they’ll  . . . can’t do . . . .”
And then, very clearly, “My grandfather was a son of the Manworm.”

They saw. Vermyllar was coming across the bridge. Behind him, holding a long knife half-seen in the light, was the Meatbringer, squat and ugly in his suit of grounskin. “Quiet!” the Meatbringer said, and Vermyllar stumbled onto the safety of the stone, looking up fearfully at the black door that gaped before him.

Suddenly Annelyn felt Groff’s hand on his chest, pushing, pushing. “Back,” the knight whispered, oh-so-softly, and this time Annelyn gladly went deeper into the shadows. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.

Neither Vermyllar nor the Meatbringer was carrying a torch.

“Get up,” the Meatbringer said. “Get up and walk. I’m not going to carry you.”

Vermyllar rose unsteady and whimpering. “Don’t,” he said. “It’s
dark
. I can’t
see
. Don’t.”

The Meatbringer pricked him with the knife. “In and to the left,” he said. “Feel if you can’t see, animal.
Feel
.” And Vermyllar went into the tunnel, groping for the wall, sobbing, seeming to look straight at Annelyn before he turned to the left. But the Meatbringer never glanced their way as he went by, prodding Vermyllar forward with his blade.

To Annelyn it seemed a solid hour that he stood in the black of the middle tunnel, but it could only have been minutes. Finally the sound of Vermyllar’s protests and wails dwindled to a small noise down below them. Then Groff spoke. “No torch,” he said, and even
his
stern voice seemed shaken. “The man’s eyes are possessed by a groun.”

“Are we going back?” Riess said.

“Back?” Groff was outlined in the red light of the door. “No. No. But
we
must see. A torch, we must have a torch. We will catch them. We know the way he went, and the Manworm’s great-grandson was making much lament.”

“Why does he want Vermyllar?” Annelyn said, in a whisper. His wits had fled him.

“I can conjecture,” Groff said. “But we will see.” He gave orders, and the three of them began to roam the small length of burrow, feeling for torch grips. Riess found nothing but an air duct, but Annelyn’s hands finally closed over a familiar bronze fist. It held a torch.

While Riess lit it, Annelyn turned to Groff. “A fist, the work of the
yaga-la-hai
, here, in the groun-runs. How is that, Groff?”

“These were not always groun-runs. The worm-children carved these burrows, a million years ago. The grouns drove them upward in a great war, or so it is said. The burrows that have always been the grouns’ are different. Now the grouns cluster below, and the
yaga-la-hai
above; both were created many and strong, and both we and they have decayed, as all things great and small decay in the sight of the White Worm. So these tunnels and the Chambers of the Last Light and our Undertunnel are all empty where once they were full.”

Riess, holding the torch, made the sign of the worm.

“Come,” Groff said. “The burrow goes straight a long way, down and down, but it finally breaks, and we must not lose them.”

So they began to walk—Riess with the torch and Groff with his ax, Annelyn clutching his stiletto—and they made good speed. The burrow was utterly empty: a long, wide stretch of hot-mouthed air ducts and broken bronze fists that clutched at air. Twice they passed bones—whether groun or human Annelyn could not tell; the rest was all dark nothingness. Finally, when they reached a juncture where many tunnels met and branched, they could hear Vermyllar’s weeping again, and they knew which way to choose.

They followed for a long time, losing the sound twice in the maze of interconnecting burrows, but each time quickly retracing their steps when the sobs began to grow faint. These, Annelyn realized with a shiver, were the groun-runs, the real things, and
he
was in them, descending to infinity. His blue eyes grew wide and sharp, and he watched everything in the flickering torchlight: the black beckoning squares of the tunnels they passed, the endless corroded fists, row on row, the carpets of dust that lay thick in some places and were strangely absent in others. Noises, too, he heard, as he had when they waited for the Meatbringer: soft mutters and softer footsteps, growls, the stirring of impossible cold winds in tunnels not chosen, and a dim, distant rumble like nothing he had ever imagined. Real noises, phantoms, fevers of a nervous brain—Annelyn did not know. He only knew that he heard them, so that the empty burrows seemed to fill with dark and unseen life.

There was no talk. They went down and around until Annelyn had lost track of their turnings. They descended twisted stone stairways, climbed down rusted ladders in echoing empty wells (always afraid that the rungs would snap), passed wide, slanted ramps, and vast galleries that swallowed the light of their torch, and furnished chambers where all the furniture was covered with dust and worm-rich rot. Once they walked through a high-ceilinged room much like a mushroom farm; but here the water-runs were dry and empty, and the long, sunken growing tanks held only a foul-smelling fungus that glowed a faint and evil green. Another hall they found was rich with tapestries, but each of the hangings was a gray rag that came apart at the touch.

The noises went ahead of them. Always.

Groff spoke only once, when they had stopped at the end of a bricked-in tunnel and were preparing to descend another of the round, black wells. “There are no grouns left,” he muttered, more to himself than to them. “These are the places they once swarmed, and now they are empty.” He shook his head, and his face was troubled. “The Meatbringer goes deep.”

Neither Annelyn nor Riess replied. They found the rungs, and began to climb down. Then there were more tunnels.

Finally, though, they seemed to lose the way. At first the noise was ahead of them—Vermyllar’s sobs, holding steady—but suddenly the sound grew less. Groff muttered something, and the three of them walked back to the last turning and chose another burrow. But they had gone only a few steps into the blackness when they lost the sound altogether. Back again they went, and into a third path; it proved silent and bricked-in.

“This was the right way,” Groff insisted when they returned yet again to the junction, “the way we went first, though the noise
did
dwindle.” He led them back, and they heard Vermyllar again, but once again the sound began to fade after they had followed it a short way.

Groff turned and paced down the tunnel. “Come,” he said, and Riess hurried to his side with the torch. The knight was standing next to an air duct, its breath warm around them. The torch flame danced. Annelyn saw that the duct had no gridding. Then Groff reached inside. “A rope,” he whispered.

Suddenly Annelyn realized that the sounds were coming from the shaft.

Groff fixed his ax to his belt, gripped the rope with both huge hands, and swung into the plunging dark. “Follow,” he ordered; then, hand under hand, he vanished below. Riess looked at Annelyn, his eyes frightened, questioning.

“Spidersilk, no doubt,” Annelyn said. “It will be strong. Put out the torch and come after.” Then he, too, took the jerking rope.

The shaft was warm, but not as warm as Annelyn had imagined; he did not burn. It was also narrower than he had thought; when he grew tired, he could brace his knees against one side and his back against the other, resting for a moment. The rope had a life of its own, with Groff climbing below him and Riess above, but it was strong and new and easy to hold onto.

Finally, his feet kicked free; another level had been reached, and another grid was gone. Groff grabbed him and helped him out, and both of them helped struggling, panting Riess.