Worldbinder Part 12

"It spoke in the old tongue," Talon said. "I think...it said that 'the earth is in pain. The stones cry out in torment, and jays bicker and the wrens wonder why.' It warned us to watch for wolves upon our trail, wolves that cannot die, and it wished us well."

Fallion wondered for a long time. When I melded these two worlds, did I heal them just a little bit? Did I help restore a creature to life that was only a legend-or had the galladem been there upon the shadow world all along? Perhaps it was just a rare specimen, the last of his kind.

Fallion had no way of knowing. Nor could he be sure what its warnings meant.

But soon they were back to running. With each step their feet brushed the full heads of wheat and oats, sent the seeds scattering. Fallion imagined that it was music, a rattle formed by nature, and the sweat streaming from him watered the earth like a rare rain in the dry season.

He lost consciousness as he basked in the full sunlight, and all that was in him was motion, the sound of his lungs working like a bellows, the jarring of footfalls, and sigh of the wind, the droning of bees and flies in the meadows.

At noon they found an abandoned "inn," and Jaz begged for a halt. Talon's pace was brutal, and none of them had their full strength yet. Fallion had been loath to mention it in front of the others, but his legs felt weak and rubbery, and his head had begun to spin. During the run, he concentrated on keeping one foot in front of the other, and hoped that soon he would get his second wind.

But he suspected that he would never get a second wind. So he was glad when Talon called a halt, determined to have a brief rest and a quick meal.

"It looks as if there is a brook down beyond those trees," Jaz said. "I'll go fill some flasks for us."

Fallion was glad for that. He wanted some water, but it looked too far to go.

"Eat," Fallion told the others. "But keep your portions small. Better to take little and often than to eat much."

He got into his pack, pulled out his food. The good people of Castle Coorm had provided well. He suspected that Farion herself had packed the food. There was fresh bread and well-aged cheese, roast beef, and a small savory pie that smelled of chicken and onions. There were even a few fat strawberries.

Fallion ate those first, for their juice was staining his pack. By then, Jaz had returned with the water. Fallion decided to save the beef and the savory for later, so he took some bread in his mouth and strode about, studying the inn.

It was like no building that Fallion had ever seen. It was laid out in a circle, and huge stone slabs formed the walls. There were three levels, one atop another, with a watchtower built at the very pinnacle. Each stone slab in the wall was thirty feet tall, rectangular in shape, and six feet wide. The slabs were fitted together so perfectly that a mouse could not have squeezed between them, and once there had been fair carvings embedded in the stone-images of a hunting party riding with hounds, chasing an enormous elk. But the images had been chiseled down by vandals, and now there were foul markings laid over the fair, glyphs painted in black, white, and red.

Talon went inside, and Fallion ducked his head in. The building had been gutted by fire, but the vestiges of campfires showed that it was still used as a shelter sometimes.

Fallion stepped back out into the sun, for it smelled unhealthy inside, and he studied the glyphs with mounting curiosity. He had never seen writing that in itself seemed evil. But here it was-glyphs portraying a giant spider with a child beneath it, images of warriors decapitating women, a man eating an enemy's liver.

"What do these glyphs say?" he asked Talon when she came back outside.

Talon glanced away, as if she feared to look upon them. "Wyrmlings have camped here," she said. "It is their writing. They paint in only three colors-black, white, and red, for those are the only colors that the wyrmling eye can see."

"Can you read the glyphs?"

"Some."

Talon pointed up at a black circle with a red squiggly line coming out of it. "This is the symbol of Lady Despair, the great wyrm that infests the world. Like the worm in an apple, her influence continues to spread, until the whole will be diseased. She is the one that the wyrmlings venerate, and obey. The rest of the writing is a prayer to her."

She pointed to the white spider above a black child. "This is a prayer that the Stealer of Souls will leave our human children stillborn. The rest of the glyphs...you can imagine."

"The Stealer of Souls?" Fallion asked.

"He is a wrym, what we would call a locus locus on our world, a wyrm of great power." on our world, a wyrm of great power."

Fallion's heart skipped. He'd known that wyrmlings were giants of some kind, like the frowth giants on his own world. But they were more than just giants, they were giants infected by loci, by creatures of pure evil that fed upon their spirits and led them into deeper perversion.

Fallion had faced loci before and sent them into retreat. But somehow, he wasn't eager to face them now.

Too much had changed. Too much was still unknown.

"Tell me more about the wyrmlings," Fallion said.

"They are tall," Talon said, "half-a-head taller than even our largest warriors, and strong. It is said that they were human once, but you could not tell by looking at them. For eons they have served the wyrms, thinking it an honor to be possessed by one of the mighty. There is no kindness in them, no decency or truth. They respect only power. They are motivated only by fear and greed. The best of them have no wyrms in them, but even they are dangerous beyond all measure. They would gladly tear you from limb to limb, hoping only that by doing so they might be found worthy to be taken by a wyrm. The worst of them..." Talon shuddered, turned away.

"What?" Fallion asked.

"The worst of them are possessed by powerful loci, sorcerers who remember lore that should have best been forgotten when the world was young. These are the Death Lords. You do not want to meet them..." her voice trailed into a whisper, "but I fear we have no choice. We heard the sound of wings last night. They are coming."

Fallion shuddered. He peered at the image of Lady Despair, at the world beneath her, and suddenly he saw a wheel of fire again, the Seal of the Inferno, burning like a forge. He blinked the image away, rubbed his eyes.

Was it only in my dreams that I could heal the Earth? he wondered.

"You said that the wyrmlings were once human-" Fallion said, and a thought struck him so sharply that he leapt to his feet.

"What?" Talon asked.

Could it be? Fallion wondered. Every thing on this world, he suspected, had its shadow on his own. What were the wyrmlings a shadow of? Certainly not the reavers. Talon had said that the wyrmlings fought reavers.

Could they have had human counterparts on his world?

Skin of white. Eyes that cannot abide the day. They wors.h.i.+pped Lady Despair. Wasn't it the Inkarrans who so often wors.h.i.+pped the Dark Lady death? There had been wars between the royalty and the death cults for ages.

"Where did the wyrmlings originate?" Fallion asked.

"That knowledge is lost," Talon said. "They destroyed the southern lands millennia ago, and then moved to the west, to what we call Indhopal. Only in the past few decades have they come to the north and east. They move like a plague of locusts, destroying everything in their path."

"Inkarra," Fallion said with some certainty. "They are Inkarrans."

Surprise washed over Talon's face. "Of course, I should have seen it."

"But knowing that doesn't help us," Fallion admitted. "We weren't facing an Inkarran invasion in our own world, at least not like this. It's as if our histories diverged so far in the past, that the two worlds are hardly the same."

Talon grunted her agreement.

This world is a snare, Fallion reminded himself. The loci brought me here for a reason. They brought me here because they have an advantage here.

And then he had a new fear. The dreams had begun shortly after he had slain the locus Asgaroth. It was said that beings in the netherworld could send dreams across s.p.a.ce. Had an enemy sent him these dreams?

If so, healing the Earth might be far beyond his grasp. The enemy might have sent him a false hope. He had not really healed this world so much as simply bound two corrupt worlds together.

Is that all that the enemy wants? Fallion wondered.

He had no way of knowing, but the very question left him deeply troubled. And as they took off again that afternoon, he could not shake the apprehension that he had become the unwitting tool of the enemy.

They ran for nearly an hour, across a broad expanse of plains. Fallion glanced back, could see the trail they'd left, the bent stubble pointing the way like an arrow, and it filled him with worry.

At the end of an hour, they saw a line of trees and imagined that it foretold another brook, but when they reached it the ground dropped suddenly, and there was a broad canyon more than two miles across.

Within it ran a raging torrent, brown water churning and foaming, while huge trees torn and uprooted swirled in the flood. It was as if a dam had broken, and the whole world seemed to be was.h.i.+ng away. In Fallion's own world, no river like this had existed. But here, the mountains were taller, and the range that had been called the Alcairs bulged into a different formation. Now it seemed that with the changes in the land, the river was was.h.i.+ng away trees that had stood for centuries. Most disconcerting of all to Fallion was that the water was flowing west, when it should have been going east. He could only imagine that the river snaked back in the proper direction at some point.

"d.a.m.n," Talon swore. "This is the River Dyll-Tandor. I had hoped that it was farther north."

"Is it always this treacherous?" Rhianna asked.

Talon shook her head. "Not in the summer. There were some vast lakes in the mountains. With the change, it looks as if they are emptying."

"Can we swim it?" Rhianna asked.

Everyone turned and looked at Rhianna as if she were daft. Fallion's legs were already shaking from weariness.

"I'm not up to it," Jaz said. "But how about if you swim it, and we'll all climb on top and ride you, like you was a boat?"

Fallion could not escape the feeling that this flood was his fault. "There has to be another way across."

At that, Talon bit her lip uncertainly. "There is-a bridge, downstream, at the city of Cantular. But it will be guarded."

"How many guards?" Fallion asked, wondering at the odds. There were four of them, and though he had never seen a wyrmling, he was up to the challenge of fighting a few, if he had to. Fallion was good with a sword. And in the full light of day, he still had his flameweaving skills to draw upon.

"Dozens, maybe hundreds," Talon said. "There was a vast fortress there at one time, and the bridge has always been a strategic point. The wyrmlings will have it well garrisoned." She eyed Fallion critically. "Wyrmling archers are good," she said. "They use bows made of bone."

He understood what she was saying. Fallion had skill as a wizard, but a flameweaver could die from an arrow wound as easily as any other man.

"Then we will have to take great care," he said.

15.

THE CHASE.

It is said that the Knights Eternal never die. But some would argue that they never have lived, for the Knights Eternal are recruited from stillborn babes.

-the Wizard Sisel In the cool morning air, Vulgnash and the Knights Eternal raced through a glen, their long legs carrying them swiftly. They had fed well during the night. Fourteen strong men they killed, draining the life from them. They were sweet, these small humans of the otherworld, filled to bursting with hopes and desires that humans on this world seemed to have forgotten.

Vulgnash could not recall when he had last tasted souls so sweet, like fat woodworms. Other humans that he had taken lately were empty, like the husks of dead beetles.

There had been other small humans at the fortress besides the men-women and children. Vulgnash and his cohorts had left them. Perhaps the Knights Eternal would go back to feed upon them at another time.

Now, he was sated, full of hope himself. He hoped to catch the wizard soon.

Already, the morning sun was coming, slanting in from the trees to the south. Kryssidia looked toward it mournfully, as if begging that they stop and find a cave in which to hole up for the day.

"Patience," Vulgnash growled. "We may catch them yet."

The humans had left a trail that was easy to follow. Even without Thul's infallible sense of smell, Vulgnash could have followed the scuff marks among the pine needles, the broken twigs and bent gra.s.s.

Vulgnash used his powers to draw shadows around them, so that they traveled through a lingering haze. Had anyone spotted them there, they would have only seen an indistinguishable ma.s.s of black, loping through the gloom.

Finally, they reached a grotto, a place where the rocky crown of a hill thrust up, with a cliff face that rose some eighty feet on three sides. A few gnarled old pines cast a deep shadow in the cavern.

"The scent of humans is strong here," Thul growled. "The scent of death is strong on them. They bedded here for the night."

It was a good place to bed down, Vulgnash saw. It had hidden the humans from prying eyes during the night, from his his prying eyes, and its shadows would hide him from the burning sunlight. prying eyes, and its shadows would hide him from the burning sunlight.

"They can't have gotten far," Vulgnash said. The sun had not yet cracked the horizon. "They might only be a few hundred yards on their way."

Kryssidia hissed in protest, but Vulgnash went racing down the hill, heading west, using all of his skill to run silently over the forest floor, sometimes leaping into the air and taking wing when the brush grew thick or rocks covered the ground.

Thul raced ahead, loping along, stooping every dozen feet to test the ground for a scent. They glided down a long slope, into a forest of oaks that opened up, inviting more light.

Slanting rays of morning sunlight beat through the trees, cutting Vulgnash's flesh like a lash. He drew his cowl tightly over his face and bent the light to his will, surrounding himself in shadows.

All too soon, they stopped at the edge of a wood. Before them lay a broad expanse of golden field, the morning sun s.h.i.+ning full upon it in the distance, so that a line of light cut hard across his vision.

Kryssidia hissed and turned away, but Vulgnash squinted, even though the light pierced his eyes like nails.

There in the distance, perhaps only a quarter of a mile away, he could see four figures racing through the endless open fields of summer straw. Bright yellow flowers grew tall in the field, with dark centers. They bobbed in the soft morning breeze.

So close, he thought. So close.

The humans could not have known that he was on their trail. Vulgnash and his men had moved as softly as shadows. And though the humans were running, they were not running in their speed. Instead they jogged, conserving their strength as if for a longer race.

Vulgnash peered at the bent gra.s.s they left in their wake. In the starlight, the trail would look as dark as a road.

"Tonight," he said, "we will take our hunt on the wing. Though they run all day, we will be upon them within an hour."

16.

CANTULAR.

See to it that no enemy ever crosses the River Dyll-Tandor without paying a toll in blood.

-the Emperor Zul-torac The sun was riding low in the sky, drifting down into a yellow haze by the time that Fallion's group reached the ruins of Cantular.

They had followed the river for miles, keeping to the edge of the woods, where deer trails and rabbit trails would hide their track, and suddenly they rounded a bend, and saw the city sprawling there in its ruin. A vast stone fortress made up the bulk of it, hundreds of feet long and a full forty feet tall.

Whether it had been deserted for five years or five thousand, Fallion thought that it would look much the same. The ma.s.sive sandstone slabs that made up the walls of the city were monolithic, and looked as if they might stand for eternity. Here, holes had been dug, and the slabs had been made to sand up like pillars. Then enormous stone slabs were laid atop them, forming ma.s.sive roofs.