The Wyrmling Horde (13 page)

The sun began to crest the horizon, a cruel red light looming upon the edge of the world. The sight of it brought tears of pain to Cullossax's eyes.

But the tree line was just ahead, promising shade and protection from the sun.

Cullossax ran until he felt as if his heart would burst, and the girl began to fall behind. He grabbed her wrist and pulled, urging her to greater speed.

The sun was a blinding orb ahead of them, and Cullossax averted his eyes, threw an arm across his face, and tried to ignore the pain.

At last he staggered into the cool shadows of the woods. The girl threw herself to the ground well inside the tree line, and Cullossax stood for a moment, grabbing his knees, as he hunched in pain, gasping for breath.

He glanced back along the trail that they'd taken, saw how the bent blades of summer wheat betrayed their path. In the distance, two miles back, three wyrmling warriors gave chase, loping down out of the hills.

Cullossax halted for an instant, studied them. They were running with incredible swiftness.

Speed, he realized. They've taken attributes of speed. He did some mental calculations. It would have taken an hour or two for anyone to notice that he'd gone missing, another hour to figure out where he'd gone.

I should have had a great lead on them.

But these men moved faster than normal wyrmlings, twice as fast, perhaps three times. They'd taken endowments of speed, and probably of strength and stamina as well.

I cannot outrun them, Cullossax realized. And I cannot hope to slay all three of them.

Yet as they raced down from the hills and reached the edge of the distant field, the rising sun smote them. They peered along the trail. They could not see him here, hidden in the shadows. They threw their hands up, trying to shelter their eyes.

At last, in defeat, they turned away and trudged back up into the hills, into the trees, to find some shadows deep enough where they could hide from the sun for the day.

It was with just such a hope that Cullossax had run to the east. No wyrmling could withstand such burning light.

He hid there in the shelter of the woods, and sat for a long moment, thinking. The girl lay gasping for breath.

“Do you have a name?” he asked. It was not an idle question. Many young wyrmlings of the lower castes were not permitted names. They had to be earned.

“Ki-rissa,” she said. “Kirissa Mentarn.”

“That is not your wyrmling name. It is an Inkarran name?”

She nodded. Cullossax frowned at the odd gesture, and she grunted yes, to appease him.

“Kirissa,” he said. “There are soldiers on our trail. They've been granted strength and speed by the new magic. Have you heard of it?”

“The rune magic? I know of it. It came from the other world.”

This admission made Cullossax wonder what other helpful things she might recall.

“The soldiers trailing us are fast. We won't be able to outrun them. So we must outsmart them.”

“All right,” she said. She put on a studious face.

“They know which way we're running,” he said. “So we must change directions. Instead of going south, we should go east or west. And we must take time to cover our trail, and hide our scent. We must hide it perfectly. To do less, is to die.”

“All right,” Kirissa agreed.

Nearby a squirrel began to give a warning chatter. Cullossax halted for a moment, listening, but realized that the squirrel was warning others away from
him.

“One last thing,” he said. “We must leave now. We can't afford to rest through the day. Those who hunt us are moving too fast. But the days are long, and the nights are short. It may be that if we can get far enough ahead of the Bloody Fist, they will lose our trail in the dark, and we will be safe.”

“We will go sunblind,” Kirissa argued, her face paling from fear.

“Close your eyes and hold on to my hand, if you must,” Cullossax said. “I will watch for the both of us.”

He did not say it, but if he tried to walk in the open sun for long, he was the one who would go sunblind. At that point, she would have to leave him.

Kirissa stared for a long moment and finally asked, “Why are you doing this? You were supposed to be my tormentor.”

Cullossax wanted to answer, but when he opened his mouth, he could think of nothing to say.

He had no dreams. It wasn't as if he'd secretly longed for escape his whole life.

Nor did it have to do with her. Kirissa was not quite old enough to mate. He had no lust for her, no desire to possess her. Even now, he imagined that he could strangle her if he wanted.

Yet he admired those who fought against their own executions. How had her Earth King put it, “The time will come when the small folk of the world must stand against the large”?

Certainly, in attacking him, Kirissa had fulfilled her Earth King's prophecy.

Cullossax wondered if he had spared her through idle curiosity. He wondered if he had spared her only because he had spent his whole life in the labyrinth, and secretly he yearned to see what life was like outside.

As a child he had played a game. The world was a harsh place, and instinct told him that he also had to be cruel in order to survive. But he had once heard a lord say that such instincts were bred into the wyrmlings. A man's chances to breed were tied to his ranking, and a man's ranking rose in proportion to his capacity for cruelty.

If that was true, he had considered, then would it not be possible to engineer a different kind of world, one that was less cruel?

He had not been able to imagine such a world. But Kirissa claimed to come from one. And so he was curious.

But that was not it, either. He'd never been a man of great curiosity.

No, Cullossax felt inside himself, and knew only that something was broken, something more vital than bone—his very soul. He had grown sick of his life in the labyrinth. Life there seemed like no life at all, as if it was a walking death, and he had only been waiting for the day when he no longer breathed.

At last he answered, “I came with you because I am weary of living. I thought maybe that in another world, my life would have been better.”

“You can't be weary of life,” Kirissa said. She reached up and stroked Cullossax's face, a gesture that he found to be odd and discomfiting; it felt as if a bug were crawling on him. “Among the wyrmlings,” she said, “no one is really alive.”

  6  

Despair created the earth, the moon, and the stars. Despair owns them all—every world that spins about even the dimmest sun.

That is why, when you look into the heavens at night, you feel so small and desolate. It is your heart bearing witness to your own insignificance, and to the overwhelming power of Despair.

 

—From the Wyrmling Catechism

The first full taste of a meadow in the netherworld was something that Talon would never forget.

The aroma staggered her senses: sweet grass, rich loam, and the perfume of tens of thousands of flowers—from deep beds of clover to vines of honeysuckle and stalks of wild mint. There were wood roses in the meadow, and flowers for which Talon had no name.

And all around, birdsong rose from the thickets, curiously complex in its music, as if by nature birds were meant to compose arias and had only somehow forgotten this upon Talon's world.

When the company was all gathered upon the netherworld, Daylan Hammer returned to the Door of Air, and with the Wizard Sisel's staff, drew another rune. In an instant there was a thundering boom, like lightning striking, and the door collapsed.

Daylan turned to the company.

“Remember my warnings. Touch nothing. Drink from no stream. We will head east, but must find shelter before nightfall.”

“Why is that?” someone called.

“Because
things
come out at night,” Daylan answered.

And he was off, striding across the glade. A trail ran through it, a winding trail like a rabbit run.

Daylan walked along it carefully, as if treading across a fallen log.

“Stay on the trail,” he called. “We walk single-file.”

The folks began forming a line, and soon they were winding down the hill, looking like a great serpent slowly slithering through the grass.

Talon strode along behind the emir. They gave up on their language lessons, and walked silently. No one talked. As well as they could, the forty thousand complied with Daylan's wishes. Babes cried, and occasionally someone yelped as they tripped, but overall, the journey was a remarkably sober one.

They had not gone for half an hour before a child screamed, not a dozen paces ahead of Talon. She peered around the emir and saw a girl, perhaps six or seven, drop a huge posy, its pink flower falling to the ground.

She screamed and held up her hand. “Help!” she cried. “A bee stung me!”

“Help yourself,” her mother whispered impatiently. “You've been stung by bees before. Pull the stinger out—or let me do it.”

But the child held her hand up and studied it in shock, then let out a bloodcurdling cry. “I'm on fire! Help. I'm burning!”

To Talon it did indeed seem that the child was burning. Her hand was turning a vivid red, a color that Talon had never seen in a human limb, and near the sting it had begun to swell terribly. The girl screamed and fell to the ground, writhing in pain.

Suddenly Talon could hear the angry sound of bees swarming, and she looked up to see a cloud of them, rising from the glen in every direction, hurtling toward the girl.

Folks shouted in warning, and some stepped away from the child, frightened by the massive swarm that had begun to form.

“Stay on the trail!” Daylan Hammer cried out up ahead, but folks shouted for help. In moments Daylan was racing back down the line, until he reached the fallen child.

The bees had formed an angry golden-gray mass, and merely hovered in the air above the wounded girl, like sentries waiting to do battle.

Daylan cried out in warning, speaking in a tongue that Talon had never heard before. Yet Daylan's words smote her like a mallet. They seemed to pierce Talon, to speak to her very bones.

“Hold!” Daylan called to the bees. “The child meant no harm. Spare her. She is still ignorant of the law.”

The bees buzzed angrily, their pitch rising and falling, and Talon suspected that they were speaking to Daylan in return, answering in their own tongue.

Daylan reached the fallen child and stood between her and the bees, using his body as a shield.

The girl wept furiously, and soon began to wheeze.

“It's nothing,” the girl's mother said as if to reassure Daylan. “It's only a bee sting. She's had plenty before.”

“On this world,” Daylan said, “a single honeybee has more than enough venom to kill a man. Let us hope that she was not stung too deeply.”

He stood between the girl and the swarm, and called out again. “Please, she did not know that these were your fields,” Daylan apologized. “She meant only to enjoy a flower. She did not mean to steal pollen from your hive.”

He spoke slowly, as if hoping somehow to break through to the dumb insects.

For a long tense moment the swarm buzzed angrily, and the bees began to circle Daylan, creating a vortex, so that he seemed to be at the center of an angry tornado. He turned to follow their leaders with his eyes, keeping himself between them and the girl.

For her part, the wounded child stopped whimpering, and lay now only wheezing. Talon caught a good glimpse of her—pale blue eyes staring emptily into the air as she struggled. Her face was blanched, and her whole body trembled.

The swarm stayed at bay, and their buzzing eased.

At last Daylan reached out his palm toward the swarm. “Show me the way to your hive,” he begged. “Let me speak to your queen. I have not violated the law. You cannot deny me.”

After a thoughtful moment, a single bee flew out of the mass and landed upon Daylan. It walked around in circles on his palm, stopping to waggle from time to time.