Saga Mac Brón: Chapter 13

22 minutes

Violence

The Altars of the Worm

The empress slipped. It began quietly, and Lassater and Tammet missed it. She did not cry out, nor could the rangers at the opening of the crack have seen what occurred. Only Mac Brón saw. Like some beast, he felt the change in pressure in the darkness, and reached out blindly to snatch her, first with his missing right, and then, like a cat, with his good left hand. When he pulled her up, Rusu was shaking in the darkness.

“What was that?” whispered Lassater?

Mac Brón chewed his lip. He held the empress as firmly as he dared, realizing only then what it would have cost him had he missed his grip.

“A slip,” he finally said. “The rocks are wet.”

“Aye,” said the ranger. “I told you that.”

The three followed him even more closely now. Mac Brón cursed his missing hand. It throbbed always, though it did not bleed. That was the boy’s doing. The northman might have the instincts of a cat, but he was constantly aware of how the loss refuted all those long-worn habits of his body. Trying to use the hand that wasn’t there had nearly ended in disaster.

Descending the crevice would have been harrowing enough with two arms. With one it was nearly impossible. He quietly resolved, should they make it through the Black Lands, to visit Nokitsmaa in the Middle Sea, and obtain a hand of steel and gears.

“It’s not much farther, I think,” said Lassater.

“Have you been down here?” asked Tammet. “I mean all the way down?”

Lassater did not immediately answer. He held out his arm to stop the others. The light from above was nearly gone, but an uncomfortable grayness came up from somewhere far below.

“It opens up now,” said the ranger. “Very, very big. Do you know what this is?”

No one wanted to say it. Speaking made it real.

“Worm hole,” muttered Tammet.

“Yes,” said the ranger. “But old. Around the time of the Cataclysm. It’s grown since then.”

“The hole?” said Tammet?

Lassater made a grim sound in the darkness. “No, boy. The worm.”

He led them along a sort of ridge. The ranger was looking for something in the darkness, and they left him to his concentration. Finally, he sighed.

“Here it is. We’ll take this to the floor. Easy now.”

They followed one-by-one down a narrow crack, until the four of them stood inside a large space. The ground was not flat, but rudely curved. The gray light from the east, from the Black Lands, picked out the details of the cave bottom. It was vaguely cylindrical, but jagged, as if something large and sharp had forced its way through the solid rock. And, indeed, something had. The worm tunnel continued west, back in the direction of the Devil’s Beard, but there it became smaller. Lassater pointed to the right.

“You see how it shrinks down there?” he whispered. “That was when it was young, before the High Ones came to Vireah, and bound it here. It comes back here sometimes, and flings itself against the barrier.”

“I see no barrier,” commented Mac Brón.

“It’s there, anyway,” said Lassater. “They’ve chained it here. But its kind once roamed free, carving the whole world. It cannot pass the boundary now, so it burrows and grinds, down, down, down. Into the dark and hidden places, where it feeds on eyeless things. Or so they say. Anyway, that’s why the ground is riven and scarred. We’ll see it when we enter. This whole country is slowly falling into itself.”

He waved them forward, and was about to say something more, when the empress spoke.

“We, my knight?”

Lassater stopped, and looked at her. “My lady must know that I am coming too.”

She smiled, but shook her head. “No. You must go back, and do as I said. We shall slip through in secret.”

“You’ll need my help!” he protested. “You have only a boy, and a lame man. I’ve watched this place from above. Even through the mist, I’ve learned some of its secrets. I can help you. We’ll be stronger with four!”

“And that is why it must be three,” she said. “Strength will avail us little here. Four travelers together will draw more interest. Three — one maimed, one scarred, and one slight of frame — shall better wear the disguises. Have you brought them?”

Lassater stared at her, and shook his head. He slipped his pack from his shoulders, and drew forth three gray cloaks. In the Black Lands, the leeches moved about their tasks like slow, gray flotsam. But occasionally, one fled his masters, and ran up the mountainside. There, against the rocks, or on the stones of a fortress, he’d break himself. The men on the wall sometimes dared each other to go over, and strip the raiment from these human husks. They kept them as trophies. Lassater had stolen these. He pressed them towards the company. Their smell was discomfiting, and just north of vile.

“Might as well put them on now,” he sighed. “You’ll be wearing them for…”

He shook his head. Heaven only knew if they’d ever get a chance to take them off. The empress selected one, and slipped it over her travel clothes. Mac Brón watched, waiting for her to become sick. He took the largest cloak. It was stained with old blood, and gods knew what else. The empress pressed her lips together hard, but kept her composure.

“Tell me again the lay of the land,” said Mac Brón.

Lassater lit a torch, stuck it into the ground, and drew in the ash with his finger. There were six wards, and a temple overseeing each. Not even trolls ventured this far, but there were the Péistghrá, and their acolytes, and the leeches. And things crawled the lands, disappearing into the mines, while others darted through the air. Some on the wall thought these were the same creatures, but there was no consensus on the matter. It was hard to see down through the mist, and thick air. Between the wards there were white flats, which Lassater had never seen crossed, save by the flying things. There were great fissures in the dead soil, and many places one could fall in, and never get out. The mines themselves were but the Worm’s trail, which it cut through the lifeless rock beneath the ash as it moved. The low, identical buildings on the surface housed the leeches at night. These were laid out in a series of rectangular lines under the watchful eye of the Worm’s temples. Last of all, as if working up to it, Lassater confirmed what they had long heard of the Lot that was drawn, and of the awful price of being chosen.

“Don’t talk to others,” he pleaded. “That should be easy. Everyone there hates everyone else. Don’t look anyone in the eye, nor let any man look into yours. Above all things — empress — do not let on that you are a woman. And never, ever go to sleep. Do these things, and perhaps you will make it to the Diamond Wall.”

But Lassater looked away from her, clearly not believing what he said. His despair could not but be infectious. Mac Brón steeled himself for terrible things. Even the empress gave off little of her hopeful aura. They all stood there, saying nothing, waiting for the awful thing to begin. Tammet broke the silence.

“But if no one crosses the flats…” he began.

“Then there must be a reason,” finished Lassater. “’Twould be the straightest way to the Diamond Wall.”

“Yes,” said the boy. “But, I mean, how can we pass from ward to ward? How can we even move southward?”

Lassater sighed, and rose from his haunches. He looked at the empress, and shrugged.

“That I can guess. There is some way, for the Péistghrá move between the wards. Or we think so, anyway. The sea bounds the Black Lands to the east, and it’s as haunted by sea worms there as anywhere. But the Péistghrá have no navy, and we observe no convoys. It must be that they go by subterranean roads. Their agents — those who go out from Black Lands — must travel out that way.”

Mac Brón grunted, and smiled grimly. He remembered seeing something like this in the canyon. “But any paths between wards must be closely guarded,” he said, “or else the slaves would slip their wards, and perhaps escape north. Or try the Diamond Wall.”

Lassater nodded. “Aye. There must be other paths, but I cannot tell you where their entrances lie. Inside the temples, I’d guess.”

Mac Brón did not bother to ask the next question that came to mind. For if there were underground roads between the Worm temples, how was it that the Worm did not cave them in as he swam in the ground? But he guessed the answer. The Péistghrá were the People of the Worm. They served their terrible god, and it reciprocated, after a fashion. The Worm would supply his servants what they needed, so long as they continued to supply it what it craved. Or until it tired of them. As he considered these things, the barbarian felt the fear that lived in these lands scamper up, and lay its fingers on him. He looked around, and was not surprised to find his old friends, the shades, sulking only a stone’s throw off.

“If we are to go, empress, then we should go now,” said Mac Brón. “We cannot make any plan, save to keep to ourselves, and to probe, and, perhaps, to learn, by inches, what routes the worm-lovers take between the wards. Yet we are trying what the slaves of the worm must already have tried, and failed to do. The leeches are the most desperate of all the peoples in Vireah. Even the slaves of Bolghim have more hope. But if this is your will-”

“It is,” said the empress.

“But why, my lady?” interjected Lassater.

She took a deep breath before responding to him.

“The emperor,” she finally said, “was a good man. Courageous, in his way. Still, ‘twas the greater boldness of evil, its desperate swiftness, that tipped the scales against us. The wicked of this world rush forward, while the just are slayed by too much prudence. If we are to triumph now, it must be through a boldness even they cannot foresee. Or, even if they guess it — as perhaps the steward has — their own despair must blind them to its possibility of success. We may suppose that even this move of ours is watched. Yet we go anyway, for it is the only move, and the light must triumph.”

“You mean you’re going, even though the enemy may have guessed your course?” scoffed Lassater.

“Yes,” said the empress, “though we don’t know we’re expected.”

“I don’t understand-”

“-Indeed, you do not,” said Rusu. “There are other happenings besides those you understand. I must come here. I must face…and there is much at stake. Leave us now, knight of the Royal Blue, and fulfill your duty toward me.”

Lassater bowed, and retreated without a word. Rusu leaned in and gripped Mac Brón’s forearm. Her white hand looked small, childlike resting there.

“No more delay,” she whispered. “Let us plunge in, before we doubt.”

He nodded. They did.

They filed out of the old worm tunnel at the base of the cliffs, and into the second ward. A gray and black soil lay thin upon the surface, but underneath it were hard, irregular stones, as one might find on a creek bottom. The stones shifted beneath their boots, laboring to trip the walkers, or at least twist their ankles. The unseen thing that chewed the earth also left its hard regurgitations everywhere. The ashen soil seeped into the cracks, filled them, and made every step a hazard.

It was not possible to look very far south. A thick mist lay on the land, and it worked like a viscous fluid, catching the black soil kicked up by wind and walker, and making it linger in the air. All they could spy at the furthest southern horizon was the faint line of a white plain, and beyond that, the temple of the third ward.

This ward’s temple lay uncomfortably close. Knowing that they couldn’t linger near the feet of the mountains without drawing attention, the company of three made for the valley below. A trickle of bodies moved west. The further they descended, the more closely they fell in beside other gray walkers. Now all seemed to angle in a southwesterly direction. The trick was to move on the outskirts of this ever-growing crowd of laborers, to follow without seeming to follow, and to thus keep each other in view. Tammet tried to memorize the shape of his mother beneath the formless gray shroud, while Rusu did the same of Mac Brón’s gait. They’d not discussed it beforehand, but now that the gray crowd gathered and swelled, each was deathly terrified of losing sight of the others.

When a low, deep horn rang through the land, the crowd of leeches began to double its pace. The horn seemed to have been blown from atop the Worm’s temple, but Mac Brón resisted turning back to satisfy his curiosity on that point. Instead he reassured himself that the empress and her boy were the two leeches nearest him. Now he lost them behind two, then three new gray cloaks. They were sure to become separated as even more leeches poured in from all directions, and he worked to close the gap, intending to walk past them, and let them see him, before slipping again behind them.

“It rushes?” said a spidery voice beside him.

It was so slight — almost a hiss — that he could almost have imagined it. He knew he had not. An instinct warned him to pay the speaker no mind; to do just as he’d been doing without alteration. He passed Tammet and his mother at a natural pace, then gradually slipped back just behind them. Now they were a group again. The horn sounded a second time, and its purpose suddenly became clear.

The school of human leeches pivoted, and began stumbling down an incline in the ashy surface. The incline became a sort of funnel. All manner of loose stones had been turned up, and lay visible on the soil. Heavy flat panels and bits of deadwood, nailed and lashed together, served as the rude door that had been rigged across the bottom. The first leeches to arrive set to work lifting it. They were helped reluctantly by other arrivals, and that only because two were not enough for the job. Most of those coming down cursed at them, and refused to lend a hand. Once the door had been moved clear, the others poured into the darkness beneath it, leaving the few to shoulder the burden. These cursed their fellows in low voices, and threatened to drop the door if they’d not take the burden in their turn. The voices were all thin, and spent, and partial. They did not call each other “you,” but “it” and “this,” and other squashed, guttural sounds.

Driven now by the many bodies behind them, Mac Brón and the others slipped through the entrance, and it was only moments after that the first unwilling doormen indeed dropped the door, running inside the tunnel, and letting those behind them take its falling weight. There was a screech, because someone got his leg stuck underneath it, and then cruel laughter spread through the crowd already inside.

For a moment, all was darkness. Bodies shifted around him, and Mac Brón willed the empress and boy not to move until more light could be found. Yet even before the rearmost leeches were forced to lift the door, his eyes began adjusting to the light inside the mine.

It was a mine, of course. A mine, and a worm tunnel, for they were the same thing. As they walked, the space seemed to grow larger and larger. It was plain to see that some huge thing had moved through it; that the place had opened up violently, and then had fallen in on itself. It might fall in on them at any moment. Dim torches had been placed into the wall, but only at the longest intervals. Big as it was in some places, the great gray cabal squeezed into the rocky tube, filling it, bunching, and gathering mass as it went, like something being collected and compacted. Vile. Intestinal. Mac Brón felt his own throat heave. He bit down hard, then opened his mouth to stop breathing through his nose.

The tunnel angled downward, and the gray mass oozed forward. He was shoved from behind. He shoved others before him. His eyes darted around, trying to keep track of the boy and his mother. Sometimes he would spot one of them, and then lose them again as the herd shifted. As they had come in on the right, the barbarian tried to keep that way, even though he risked being scraped against the tunnel walls.

These were jagged, and crumbling, and there were many places where rocks had been pulled from the wall, leaving behind darker gaps. Two double lines of rope ran down the shaft at either end of the tunnel near head level. These, he supposed, were for sending back the ores recovered from the tunnel walls. It occurred to him then that he carried no tools for mining, nor had he seen any leech carrying a pick or hammer. Perhaps they concealed things beneath their cloaks, as Mac Brón did his sword. As he was pondering this, he caught sight of the empress. He angled towards her, and came up beside her, brushing against the elbow of her cloak. She looked down, rather than up, and he knew she was looking for the point of his boot coming out from beneath the cloak. It occurred to him then that many here were barefoot, or wore shoes made of cloth wrapped around their feet. They would have to be careful.

Rusu nodded slightly up and to the left. Mac Brón saw Tammet, and sighed internally. They were together again.

Those at the head of the gray swarm began to slow. They were coming to a place with more torchlight, and Mac Brón saw the lead walkers fanning out, and taking places on the wall. Now he observed the implements strewn about the ground. There were pickaxes, which the leaders quickly scooped up and claimed, but there were also ax heads, or heads with only a bit of handle still attached. There were files, and rude blades, and what seemed to be spikes and awls. A glance was enough to see that some would be left without tools. There was a sudden frenzy of movement.

Fearing that Rusu or the boy would be deprived of tools, and unsure what that would entail, Mac Brón crouched down. He swept up one of the few remaining pickaxes, and — using his bulk to his advantage — grabbed two spikes with rude handle grips. His one good hand held all three, so that they barely fit inside his grip. He gave a spike with a hand-grip to the empress, bumping into her, and dropping it into her hands. Beside him, someone let out a curse.

“Ehh! Rusher! This’n sees wattitdid! This’n sees! Takes mor’n its one!”

Mac Brón froze, and then tried to relax. He watched as fifty eyes, soot-reddened, and lit by the torch-fire, turned on him. He was a big man, and cloak or no, not so easily hidden once noticed.

“It’s eager ain’t it?” snarled the man. “Wants acolyte we s’poses? ‘Oos getting estras, this’n likes to know?”

The northman edged away from the empress. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Tammet’s wary look, but only because the boy and his mother were the only two not stalking towards him. And if they were to be discovered here in this cramped place, or if, as now seemed clear, he’d committed some deed to mark him out, Mac Brón did not doubt that their time in the Black Lands would be short. He looked around, seeing that only a few digging implements hadn’t already been claimed. Some gray cloaks were even taking advantage of this unexpected distraction to slip extras into their robes. He smiled grim beneath his cowl, then tossed the pickax into an open place.

Immediately, the crowd turned and fell upon the tool, fighting for the luxury of wielding it. Even the one who’d marked him now tried for it, but Mac Brón stepped on his naked foot, and drove him up against the wall. He took the man around the neck, pressed his thumb down on the ball of his throat, and leaned in.

“If it speaks,” he hissed. “It dies terrible.”

The other trembled and gagged under his grip. Mac Brón would have liked to kill him quietly, but he was sure in this tight place that the death would be marked.

“In its sleep, in its nightmares,” growled Mac Brón. “This’n climbs in, and guts it. If it says a word.”

The other man nodded. Mac Brón released him, and quickly passed forward into the crowd. By now the pickax had been recovered, and several of those who’d tried and failed to gain it moaned, and clutched at themselves. Mac Brón feared what would come next, should the losers turn upon the man who’d given them false hope. But that moment didn’t come. There was the crack of a whip, and the whole gray assembly turned toward it.

A white-robed man stood in their presence. His cowl was trimmed in bronze. His face was covered by a white mask, with two rectangular slits for eyes. At his feet were two creatures that were like great scorpions, but bat-winged, caked in needle-sharp white hairs, and each the size of a hunting hound.

“Lot!” said the man behind the mask. “Extra Lot this moon. Put ‘em out!”

A hush went through the place. It was plain that no one had been expecting a lot now. The white-robed figure had slipped in behind them, and the other gray cloaks seemed as surprised by the fact as Mac Brón. A kind of sigh went through the place. Slowly, arms were extended. They protruded from the ends of tattered robes, trembling in the torchlight. Mac Brón observed that there were men of every race here; even some from the Claw Lands, far below the Triarchy of Nezzyl. And the naked wrists were marked, every one of them, with the rune-dash figures used by merchants to number their goods.

The white-robe stepped into the throng. His devil dogs followed, their eyes pink and milky, their breath wet, putrid, and so thick it could practically be seen. Wherever he stopped, they stopped, examining each gray-cloak with eyes that were somehow as vacant as they were malicious. Their master would glance at each outstretched hand, and sometimes mutter in a high but menacing tones that the sleeve must be pulled farther back. Despite the thick crowd, he moved swiftly from one to the next, looking for the number only he knew. Mac Brón had no choice but to extend his own left arm. The boy and the empress did the same.

Soon the cowled figure had made his way through one side of the crowd, and was moving over to theirs. As he passed, the arms went down one-at-a-time, and it was clear from the way their bearers relaxed into themselves that they’d each been spared something awful. Finally, the man in the white cowl and mask was but a few feet from Mac Brón.

How the barbarian would have liked to slip his other arm beneath his robes, and grip the pommel of his sword, but of course he could not. He had only one hand available, and it bore no marks but the scars from the things that had taken the other. The white robe stepped closer. He was directly before the man whom Mac Brón had choked. Now the barbarian saw his eyes darting back towards Mac Brón; saw the man’s tongue slip out, and wet his dry lips. He was trying to get up the courage to tell the white robe about Mac Brón.

The slit-eyed mask leaned in, and studied the man’s wrist mark. It seemed to examine him longer than it had the others. Mac Brón prayed to the gods that this was the man they were looking for, but the white robe shook his head slightly, and moved towards Mac Brón. Mac Brón timed his strike, waiting to seize on that instant of confusion when the white robe saw no rune mark. In that instant, he would snatch the hand back, grab his sword, and gut the man. As he thought these things, one of the two devil dogs craned its head segment up towards him, as if it sensed the threat. But the other dog held back, lingering by the spidery-voiced man. Now it rose on some of its cruel, segmented back legs, while the forelegs crawled up the man’s robe. It uttered the most unsettling blend of a growling and clinching, as if a hundred little sharp mouths snapped and chuckled within its thorax. The white robe stopped, and turned again on the spidery-voiced man.

“What is it, sweet?”

The figure reached down to caress the devil dog. It chittered, then leapt up, opened its jaws, and bit down hard on the man’s head. He began to scream.

“Now, now,” said the white robe. “Even if you’re correct, it’s not for you.”

The jaws, which had opened many times their apparent size to enclose the man’s skull, relaxed only slightly. Mac Brón’s interlocutor collapsed, and now lay curled on the cave floor, slapping at the beast’s exposed mouth parts. The scream congealed into words, as the white robe crouched beside him, gracefully pulling the robe back to expose the wrist.

“Aaaaa…aaaacolyte…thiiiiiss’n can esplaaiiin!”

“Can it, now?” said the acolyte, in a silky, effeminate voice.

He turned over the wrist, then began to rub at the skin. There was a wound there, right where the runic figures aligned. It seemed that the man had rubbed a number out.

“Aha,” said the acolyte, breathily. He brushed the beast aside, and raised the man up by his ear. “Don’t damage it, sweet.”

The man was on his knees now, trembling. Blood seeped down from many puncture marks on his head.

“P-please,” he stammered. “This’n d-din’t m-mean it.”

“Yes it did,” said the other, tsking. “And now it doesn’t matter what its number was or wasn’t, does it?”

He made the leech stand, then flung him forward. The devil dogs jumped up, their wing-joints rising on their backs, their huge jaws opening, and snapping shut inches from his face.

“Make haste,” said the acolyte. “My master hungers.”

The leech turned, and pointed at Mac Brón.

“Take this! Take it, the big one there! Where’s it come from? Disn’t act right! Smells too sweet! An’ disn’t know minin’ ways!”

The acolyte made a swishing motion with its wrist, and both insectile dogs leapt into the air, opened their wings, and engulfed the leech’s arms within their jaws. At the same time, their wings beat rapidly, and they dragged him away, up toward the tunnel entrance.

“An’ mor’n one!” he continued to screech. “Spare this’n! Look! See!”

His screams became moans as the creatures took him far away. The acolyte remained standing. Under his white mask, shadowed within the folds of his white cowl, Mac Brón could not make out what he looked for, only that he looked at Mac Brón. He could not see the figure’s eyes. Yet he could swear that the gaze shifted, ever-so-slightly, to where Mac Brón knew Rusu stood. The barbarian could do no more than stand still as a statue. The acolyte turned away. With an almost girlish lilt to his movements, the white-robed cleric of the Worm slipped back up the tunnel.

The leeches waited for him to go, then dropped their implements, and followed. Mac Brón didn’t need to ask where the crowd was going. The Lot had been drawn. The sacrifice had been found. They were off to the temple, the Altar of the Worm.

* * *

The temple of the Worm was composed of two narrow black ziggurats, each rising from a vast stone base, like the two jaws-parts of a great beetle, their topmost points staring across at each other over a wide gap. The structure on the left was slightly shorter than that on the right, and a thick metal chain ran across the high gap, connecting one peak to another. Steep stairs led up the sides of each half-temple. On the left one, near the top, leaned a black altar.

Mac Brón and the others stared up at the vertical slab from their place far below, bunched within the crowd of hundreds who watched. The spidery-voiced man, the man whom Mac Brón had choked, could speak no more. The Péistghrá, in their black robes, had lashed him to the vertical slab that was the Worm’s altar. His mouth they had sutured closed, and his eyes, open, but his hands — once they’d hung him over the gap — would be left free. For that is how the Worm liked his victims: eyes filled with tears; hands batting hopelessly at the air; lips unable to utter a prayer.

Now the Péistghrá turned the handle of a great wheel, and released a length of chain. At the end of it was a set of shackles, which they fixed upon his ankles. With the wheel, they drew it taught, until the victim’s feet were pulled away from the sacrificial slab, and he hung suspended sideways in the air. One of the Péistghrá drew a long knife, and with it cut the ropes that still bound him to the altar. Then tension from the chain drew him out from the curling ziggurat peak, and onto the greater chain fixed between the two curving, jaw-like structures. Now the Péistghrá turned the wheel again. With every hard turn, the man was pulled further and further along the black chain. Finally he reached the middle. The Péistghrá stopped turning the wheel. Their victim hung upside down, two hundred feet or more in thin air. He clawed at nothing, clutched at his head, and made what terrible sounds he could without the help of his mouth.

Across the way, atop the higher ziggurat, a single robed figure stood on a narrow platform. He was bearded, and his lips were painted pink. His robes were red, and his long black hair spilled out from inside his robes, and, even braided, hung at his feet. Beside him was stretched a taught hide over a cavity, and in his hands he held a staff. The horn which they had earlier heard blew once more, and the red-robed figure raised his staff, and swung it hard into the stretched hide. Six times he struck it, then stood, and waited, looking down.

Far below, in the gap between the two half-ziggurats, yawned a massive pit. The leeches could see it from where they stood behind a guarding wall. It was ninety feet or more across. One could see that the stone around it, once laid neatly, had long ago been torn, and ruptured, for the hole had grown with the Worm. Someday it would grow large enough, perhaps, to swallow all the ground up to the ziggurats themselves. And then what? Would the temple itself fall in? Would the Worm swallow it too?

Rusu trembled beside the northman. He would not risk a look at her, but he did not need to look to know that it was not fear that shook her frame. Not in the main. No, it was sorrow, and just rage. Rage that such evil things should be free upon the earth, or even under it. He knew that her heart dwelled not on herself, nor on her own danger, but on the poor, pathetic creature who must soon feed the beast.

Then the ground shook. The leeches crept backwards, as if the thing that rushed up from the depths might change its aim, and come for them instead. It could have, if it wished. A vile smell rushed up from the depths. And then it came.

A white worm filled the top of the black hole. Now it squeezed through, wrenching and turning as it came. As it rose, it dragged earth with it, and also darker, stranger things, lightless creatures, and things like deathly funguses that clung to it from the depths below thought, and which now fell from it onto the suffering black earth. It was scaled, like the worms of the sea, but its color was pink, and white. It was obscene. It climbed slowly in thin air, as if it had power over gravity. Above it, the hanging victim struggled and thrashed, and held out its arms, as if it might repel the Worm.

The beast slowed as it approached him. It seemed at first to have no eyes. Scaly segments near its great head opened, and slid down. These were like the hard outer wings of a scarab beetle. Beneath these segments was a pink, flesh-hood. It slowly retracted, peeling down, and bunching over the scarab plates. Now the face of it was clearly seen. Many, many needle teeth, set row within row, and inward pointing, and — unlike the dragons of the ocean — a long, thin, black tongue. The tongue slipped out, eel-like, and tasted the thrashing victim.

The worm hung there, almost two hundred feet of its length resting in the air, supporting the head, as with meticulous care, the beast drove the poor man insane. Somehow screams of fear broke through the sutured lips, and the sharp black tongue that wrapped him, tasting him, scaring him to death. The tongue retracted now. The worm rose higher, placing the thrashing man within the gamut of its needle teeth. Now they closed, slowly, daintily, piercing him for as long as they could until the poor creature finally stopped moving. No sooner had his thrashing ceased than the Worm snapped him down into its gullet. The beast let out a wet, frustrated moan, so high-pitched that even the Péistghrá guarded their ears. It closed its jaws. The pink skin rolled up over its mouth, and the scaled segments re-closed.

The Worm turned toward the Péistghrá. They protrated themselves. It turned toward the red-robed, womanish creature who’d struck the hide. This one also bowed low. Last of all, it surveyed the leeches. Though its eyes were now covered, Mac Brón did not doubt that in some way, it saw them. It promised them that their time was coming. With terrible violence, the Worm yanked itself down, and in moments disappeared into the stone pit like a sheet torn from the block.

* * *

The leeches walked in silence toward the gray, flat compound where they slept. Each cell was large enough only for two or three men, but some cells held as many as eight. There were less populated cells available, but these preferred to have their nightmares all together. Mac Brón could hardly blame them.

He took no chances now, keeping the boy and his mother close to him as he tried, again and again, to locate an empty cell. Finally they came upon two or three that had no occupants. They went inside the cleanest of these, and Rusu and Tammet collapsed on the simple cots laid out there.

Mac Brón surveyed the inside. There was a shelf built into the wall, which was the same here as in every cell in the compound. On it, several rations of hard brown bread had been laid in a bowl, and there was beaker of water. He took some of the bread, and bit into it. It was roughly made, and crammed with some bitter seed, but hardy too, and filling. The water was clean, apart from the ashes and soil particles.

“Thank the gods for that,” he muttered. “Come and eat.”

Rusu and Tammet came over. The three ate in silence. Even if they’d wanted to discuss the horrors of that day, they could not risk it. And night was coming. They were tired, and they dare not sleep. Mac Brón swallowed the black and hopeless feelings that assaulted his mind, and which he knew must be tempting the others as well. They must soon find some path out of here. Or else they must slip back to the old worm tunnel under the cliffs by which they’d entered this land. The empress’ plans be damned. This could not last. He heard the sound of many legs.

Mac Brón saw it by the cell door. One of the insect things, a devil dog, like those who’d followed the acolyte. It watched him for a long time, as if it had heard his thoughts, and waited for him to act on them. He stared at it, not wanting to, but afraid to turn his back on it. The creature inflated itself, poking out its white quills all over, making itself sharp, and doubly menacing. Mac Brón didn’t budge. He glared back to show the beast his lack of fear. Finally the thing seemed to lose interest. It skittered away.

He turned back, risking a glance at the empress. He expected her to be forlorn; perhaps exhausted, and thinking about the long night during which none of them could sleep — and she most of all. But her expression was strange. It was certainly not a smile, but neither was it despair. Hers was the grim face of a warrior before battle. The things she had seen today had only steeled her, and now she hungered for some confrontation, the shape of which he could not fathom.

“Empress,” said Mac Brón. “That man. He was eaten long before today. This place eats you. If you’re awake. If you’re asleep. I feel it in me. Consuming all it can. I know you feel that.” - He looked at Tammet’s ashen face - “and the boy too. We ought to go out this very night, and look for this hidden path. Or else we ought to return the way we came.”

She looked at him. “We will not return. I told you that. Not until I do what I must. But yes. Let them all slip into their nightmares, and then we shall slip outside.”

He nodded, looked at Tammet, then back at her.

“Empress, what are you planning to do? Something else, besides what you’ve said?”

Rusu did not answer him. She wrapped her robes about her, set her jaw, and stared at the cell wall. And none of them saw the slinking thing that came back before the cell door, when Mac Brón had turned away. None of them heard it slip into the room, retracting its many feet, and sliding worm-like, upon its abdomen. None saw the finger-like proboscis that emerged from its second mouth.

Mac Brón was the first to be stung, of course. Tammet, turning in surprise, found the beast already on his back. The black finger shot out deftly, tagging him on the throat. Both men fell unconsciousness, and were pulled into that same endless nightmare that haunted all under the power of the Péistghrá. But the empress was awake, and her eyes were wide with alarm. Wide enough to watch helplessly as the northman’s three shades fell upon him at last, and entered his sleeping body. Wide enough to take in the full horror of that creeping, skittering monster before it stung her. Wide enough, indeed, to see the small army of black-robed Péistghrá waiting at the door.

End of Act 1

TO BE CONTINUED

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