In the House of the Worm (7 page)

He turned, holding the length of metal like a club, and brought it down hard on the nearest of the eaterworms. The blow broke skin, but barely, barely; it was an old worm, as large as Annelyn. It oozed, and turned aside, colliding with one slightly larger. It did not die.

He could not fight them. He swung the club once more, then went back to the door. The middle bolt came free after three sharp knocks. The lowest shaft proved an illusion; it disintegrated into flakes of fungus-eaten rust when Annelyn wrapped his hands around it. Frantic, he pounded at the length of metal between the brackets until it fell apart, and the door was free. Something bit him. He screamed and pulled at the handles, and they came loose in his hands, but the door moved only a fraction of an inch. Then he scrabbled madly with his fingers, tearing loose a nail, wedging his hands into the slim black crack until he had purchase. He could
feel
the monsters behind him. With all his strength, he pulled backward.

The hinges screamed, the metal creaked, while fungus worked against him to keep the door shut. But it moved, it
moved!
An inch, two, then six all at once. That was enough for Annelyn. He flattened himself and held his breath and squeezed through, into the quiet dark beyond. Then he threw himself to the floor, rolling over and over and thrashing up and down, until the worm that had clung to him was only a slimy paste that coated his clothes.

When he got up, he struck a match. He did not look back at the purple hell beyond the narrow opening he had forced.

He was in a very small chamber, solid metal, round, dark. Before him was another door, also of metal, and round. In its center was a wheel.

His match went out. Fungus still hung from his besoiled garments and his fine blond hair, and more was scattered on the floor, glowing dimly. Annelyn pulled at the wheel. Nothing. He tried turning it, but it would not move. Beside it was a metal bar, in a slit. That refused to move also, until he put all his weight on it and forced it down. Then he could turn the wheel, though it spun slowly and with difficulty.

Annelyn was drenched in sweat, and the metal was moist with the wetness of his palms. But it was not rusted, he suddenly realized. It was dark and strong and cool, like something newly pulled from the forges of the bronze knights.

Hissing suddenly began, all around him. He stopped, startled, and looked over his shoulder, but none of the eaterworms had yet squeezed through, so he went back to the wheel. When it would turn no more, he pulled, and the door swung smoothly outward on its huge hinges. The hissing grew louder, and Annelyn was buffeted by a tremendous gush of moist air, rushing forward from behind him.

Then he was through, pulling the door shut. It was pitch dark again; the little fungus fragments that hung on him became worms’ eyes in the blackness. But better this than risk the chamber of the eaterworms again.

His matches again. The match box rattled despairingly when Annelyn shook it. He counted the remaining matches by feeling with his fingers. A dozen left, if that; his fingers kept losing track, and he might have counted the same match twice. He chose one, grateful for its brief light.

He was standing less than a foot from a groun.

Annelyn moved, backward, in a leap. There was no sound. He came forward again, holding the flame before him like a weapon. The groun was still there. Frozen. And there was something between them. He touched it. Glass. Feeling infinitely easier, he began to move the match up and down. He lit another, and explored further.

A whole wall of grouns!

Annelyn briefly considered trying to shatter the glass and eat one of the imprisoned grouns, but discarded the idea. They were clearly stuffed; they had probably been here for more years than he had lived. And they were unusual grouns, at that. Males and females alternated, and each in the long row was partially flayed, a section of its skin peeled back to reveal inside. A different section on each groun, at that. There were also statues of grouns and groun skulls, and a six-limbed skeleton. The last groun was the most singular. Though colorless, its garments were as fine and rich as any of the
yaga-la-hai
. On its head was a metal helmet, such as a bronze knight might wear, all of black metal with a thin red window curving around the front for its eyes. And it held something, pointing it.

A tube of some sort, fashioned of the same black metal as the helmet. Strangest of all, both helmet and tube were emblazoned with silver thetas.

Annelyn used four of his matches examining the row of grouns, hoping to find something that would help him. He had so few left, but it was foolish to hoard them now. Finding nothing, he crossed the room, groping for the other wall. He tripped over a table, went around it, and collided with another. They were both empty. Finally he felt glass again.

This wall was full of worms.

Like the grouns, they were dead, or stuffed, or cased in the glass; Annelyn did not care which it was, so long as they did not move. A four-foot-long eaterworm dominated the display, but there were dozens of others as well. Most of them were unknown to him, though he had eaten worms all his life. They had one thing in common: they looked dangerous. A lot of them had teeth, which Annelyn found very disquieting. A few wore what looked like stings in their tails.

He explored the rest of the chamber; it was long and narrow, sheathed in metal, seemingly untouched by time, and capped by a large, wheeled door at each end. A lot of tables were scattered about, and metal chairs, but nothing of interest to Annelyn. Once he came across something shaped like a torch, but the shaft was metal and the head glass, totally useless. Perhaps he could fill the glass part with the glowing fungus, he thought. He tucked the instrument under his arm. Other things he found as well, bulking pillars and shapes of metal and glass, vaguely like those he had seen shattered on the edge of the bridge in the Chamber of the Last Light, and in the Meatbringer’s throne room. He could not fathom their purpose.

At length, his matches all but exhausted, he went back to the wall of the grouns. Something was nagging at him, pulling at the back of his brain. He looked again at the last groun in the row, then at the tube. That was being held almost like a weapon, Annelyn decided. And it bore a theta. It might be useful. He took the metal shaft of the thing-that-was-almost-a-torch, and smashed at the thick glass with a series of sharp blows. It cracked and cracked and cracked some more, but did not shatter. Finally, when his arm had begun to ache, Annelyn ripped through with his hands, clawing aside splinters of not-quite-glass that still hung maddeningly together. He grabbed the groun’s tube, and began to play with its various bars and handles.

A few minutes later, he discarded it with disgust. Useless, whatever it had been.

Something still bothered him. He lit another match and considered the helmeted groun. A wrongness there . . . .

It hit him. The helmet, the reddish window. But a groun had no eyes! Annelyn widened the gap he had made in the glasslike wall, and lifted the helmet from the dead groun’s head.

This
groun had eyes.

He moved his match very close. Eyes, all right; small and black, sunk deep in moist sockets, but definitely eyes. Yet this groun was the only eyed groun in the wall; the next one down, a heavy female, was eyeless, as were all the rest.

His match died. Annelyn tried on the helmet.

Light was all around him.

He shouted, whirled, bobbed his head up and down. He could see! He could see the whole room, in a glance! Without a match, or a torch! He could see!

The walls were glowing, very faintly, smoky red. The metal pillars—eight of them, he saw now—were bright orange, though the other metallic shapes remained shadowed. The doors were dark, but yellowish light leaked around the edge of the one he had come through. It pulsed. The very air seemed to give a dim light, a ghostly glow that Annelyn found hard to pin down. The dead grouns and the worms opposite stood in rows like soot-gray statues, outlined by the illumination around them.

Annelyn’s fingers found the theta on the crest of the helmet. He was wearing a rune of the Changemasters, clearly! But—but why had it been on a
groun
?

He considered the question for an instant, then decided that it did not matter. All that mattered was the helmet. He picked up his metal shaft again, a cool gray stick in the smoldering reddish chamber. The glass at its end had been broken into jagged shards by his efforts to smash through the window. That was fine. It would make an excellent weapon. Almost jauntily, Annelyn turned toward the far door.

The burrow beyond was dark, but it was a darkness he could deal with, a darkness he had dealt with every day of his life in the dimly lit tunnels of the
yaga-la-hai
; it was made of shadows and vague shapes and dust, not the total blackness he had wandered in since fleeing the Meatbringer. Of course, it was not really like that—once, hesitantly, he lifted the helmet and instantly went blind again—but he cared little, if he could see. And he
could
see. The cool stone walls were a faded red, the air faintly misty and alight, and the ducts he passed were orange-edged maws that spewed streams of reddish smoke out into the burrows, to curl and rise and dissipate.

Annelyn walked down the empty tunnel, for once imagining no sights and hearing no noises. He came to branchings several times and each time chose his way arbitrarily. He found shadowed stairways and climbed them eagerly, as far up as they would take him. Twice he detoured uneasily around the man-sized, dimly radiant pits he recognized as wormholes; one other time, he glimpsed a live eaterworm—a sluggishly moving river of smoke-dark ice—crossing a junction up ahead of him. Annelyn’s own body, seen through the helmet, glowed a cheerful orange. The bits of fungus that still hung from his tattered clothing were like chunks of yellow fire.

He had been walking for an hour when he first encountered a live groun. It was less bright than he himself, a six-limbed specter of deep red, a radiant wraith seen down a side burrow out of the corner of his eye. But soon Annelyn observed that it was following him. He began to walk closer to the wall, feeling his way as if he were blind, and the groun who ghosted him grew more bold. It was a large one, Annelyn observed, cloth hanging from it like a flapping second skin, a net trailing from one hand, a knife in the other. He wondered briefly if it could be the same groun he had met before.

When he reached a stairway, a narrow spiral between two branching corridors, Annelyn paused, fumbled, and turned: The groun came straight on toward him, lifting its knife, padding very quietly on its soft feet. Oddly, Annelyn discovered that he was not afraid. He would smash in its head as soon as it crept close enough.

He lifted his glass-edged club. The groun came nearer. Now he could kill it. Except, except—somehow he didn’t want to. “Stop, groun,” he said instead. He was not quite sure why.

The groun froze, edged backward. It said something in a low guttural moan. Annelyn understood nothing of it. “I hear you,” he said, “and I see you, groun. I am wearing a rune of the Changemasters.” He pointed at the theta stitched in gold on his breast.

The groun gibbered in terror, dropped its net, and began to run. Annelyn ruefully decided that he ought not to have drawn attention to his theta. On impulse, he decided to follow the groun; perhaps, in its fear, it would lead him to an exit. If not, he could always find his way back to the stair.

He pursued it down three corridors, around two turns, before he lost sight of it entirely. The groun had been running very quickly, while Annelyn was still getting an occasional twinge from his ankle, making it difficult to keep up. Yet he continued on after the groun had vanished, hoping to pick up the trail again.

Then the creature reappeared, running
toward
him. It saw him, stopped, glanced back over a shoulder. Then, seemingly determined, it resumed its headlong, four-legged gallop, one of its remaining limbs brandishing its knife.

Annelyn flourished his club, but the groun did not slow. Then inspiration struck. He reached into his pocket, and produced his last match.

The groun shrieked, and four long legs began to scrabble madly on the burrow floor as it skidded to a halt. But it was not the only one surprised. Annelyn himself, dazzled by the coruscating brilliance that seemed to stab into his brain, choked and staggered and dropped the match. Both of them stood blinking.

But something else moved. A cold gray shadow was drifting down onto the groun, filling the tunnel like a wall of mist. The front of it rippled in and out, in and out, in and out.

Annelyn shook his head, and the eaterworm loomed clear.

Without thought, he jumped forward, swinging his club over the head of the groun. The blow glanced harmlessly off the worm’s leathery skin. Then Annelyn drew back, kicked the groun to get it moving, and thrust his glass-edged pole into the contracting mouth of the attacker.

He was running then, the groun next to him, darting around narrow turns until he was certain that they’d lost the worm. They retraced their old footsteps, and the narrow stair appeared in their path.

The groun stopped, and swung to face him. Annelyn stood with empty hands.

The groun raised its knife, then cocked its head to one side. Annelyn matched the motion. That seemed to satisfy the creature. It sheathed the blade, squatted in the dust thick on the burrow floor, and began to sketch a map.

The groun’s finger left glowing trails that lingered for a time, then faded rapidly. But the symbols it used meant nothing to Annelyn. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I cannot follow.”

The groun looked up. Then it rose, gestured, and started up the stair, glancing back to see if Annelyn was behind it. He was.

They climbed that stair and another, walked through a series of wide burrows, pulled themselves up rust-eaten ladders through narrow wells. Then came more tunnels, the groun looking back periodically, Annelyn following docilely. He was nervous, but he kept telling himself that the groun
could
have killed him before; surely if that had been what it intended, it would have done so by now.