Empire of the Worm (21 page)

“Under the open sky?” Davril asked.
Day was just dawning, he knew by the somewhat rose-tinted light that had
flooded the gardens.

“Even now storm clouds gather over
the Square,” the Lady of Behara told him. “They block out the sun.”

“But why in the open instead of in
the Temple?” It was what he had prayed for, but it still made him wary.

“Obviously to draw us out,” said
General Trius. “They want us to attack them. And they’ll be ready for us,
believe me.”

Davril nodded. “I believe you. Fortunately
we won’t come anywhere near Sraltar Square, not today. ”

“We go to the Light-House, then?”
Father Trisdan asked, hopeful. When Davril nodded, the old priest smiled.
“Excellent. Perhaps the Lost Books can be recovered, after all.”

“
You
will keep your hands off them,” Father Elimhas snapped. “They
belong to my order.”

“Fool! You can’t even read the
language they were written in.”

“It is the Holy Language, not meant
for Men to utter.”
“It is Ancient Illisic. All the priests of Tiat-sumat are taught it. The Books
are exactly what we need to quicken the Jewel.”

“I hope so,” said the Lady. “We
can’t defeat the Worm otherwise.”

“Perhaps not,” Davril said. “But I
mean to hurt him nonetheless. Father Trisdan is correct, though; our main
objective is those books. Ready yourselves. We go at once.”

Chapter
16

In the darkness of Sraltar Square, they gathered, huddling
in the chill warmth, while atop the pyramid the fish-priests sang and warbled,
and the pounding of their drums rolled across the city. Drawn by the drums, the
people came, in ones and twos, in dozens and scores, some in fear, some in
wonder, some in worship. But however they came, they came—to witness the return
of a god.

As soon as the drumming began, in
the early hours before dawn, they came. They knew what the drumming signified. For
weeks, months, Uulos’s eventual return had been the subject of endless
discussion, by the residents of the city as well as the fish-priests who now
led them. At every sacrifice, every day, the priest who wielded the knife
promised that this death brought Uulos that much closer to returning. At the
words, the people had trembled, and they trembled now even as they gathered,
summoned by the singing, by the drumming, by the darkness.

They gathered before the grand
pyramid, jockeying for position, the best view, to be closest to Uulos when He
returned. Not all of them wanted to be close. Many did not even want to be
there. But Uulos was mighty, and his influence had spread. All those that
participated in His ceremonies, in His sacrifices, fell deeper and deeper into
his shadow.

They gathered in Sraltar Square,
where Lord Davril Husan had once been crowned, where so much of this woe had
begun. The great, octagonal slab that was the Black Altar stood proud and hungry
on the pyramid’s top, right where Davril had knelt before the three priests to
receive his crown. The people gathered, and as the day dawned and the crowd
grew, the Lerumites led them in prayers and songs, and in several prolonged
sacrificial rituals. The sun rose bright and burning, then passed behind the
storm clouds and slept. Still, the people sweated.

The Black Altar loomed defiant. The
people turned restless, then starved. Aisles were formed in the throng, aisles
down which sacrifices were herded, sacrifices in the hundreds, in the
thousands, in the tens of thousands, all in chains, their heads bowed, their
eyes glum. The Sedremerans felt little pity for them; these were the people who
had attacked and besieged Sedremere in her moment of weakness, after all—the
Ctai, Ysagra and Aesinis. They had raped and slaughtered and looted. As far as
the Sedremerans were concerned, they deserved what they got.

Even so, as first one prisoner was
led up the pyramid’s stairs to its top, then slaughtered over the Black Altar,
then another, and another, one by one until hundreds, then thousands had been
systematically dispatched—so that blood ran in rivers down the blood gutters of
the ancient pyramid, the pyramid built by the Avestines long ago to honor the
Serpent in this very manner before he had woken, as the bodies were thrown to
the butchers and dismembered, and the meat passed around to the people, and the
uneaten remains festered and stank, as the rivers of blood grew wider, the
lower layers hard and sticky and foul, as the stench of death grew unbearable,
and the line of sacrifices marched on, and on, led inexorably to their doom one
by one—eventually the Sedremerans felt pity. Eventually, even as they were
forced to eat the flesh of the sacrifices, even as they sang or chanted when
bidden, even as they shouted in concert whenever a Lerumite decapitated a
sacrifice, even as they outwardly rejoiced in the Old One’s return, inwardly
many shriveled, and knew despair.

As the sacrifices went on, the
Black Altar throbbed with power, and it seemed that each of the Sedremerans
felt it in their blood, a steady, rhythmic beating, as of some monstrous heart
quickening, growing stronger . . .
nearer
.
Gorged on blood and death, the Altar throbbed, swelled in power, and dark
clouds boiled in from the east and south and obliterated the sun, throwing greater
darkness across Sraltar Square. A chill rain washed down, and the people
shivered.

Davril was surprised that the Avestines’ tunnels ran all the
way into the Gold Quarter, almost right up to the grounds of the House of Light
itself. Eagerly he led his company through the halls and then up through the
gutters of the region.
Like rats
, he
thought.
A host of rats.
But it was
not plague they carried. They bore the Jewel of the Sun.

They arrived at the Temple just in
time. The Lerumites—now that they need wait no longer, now that their Master
was returning—had sacked the Asqrites’ compound and were even then burning both
priests and their sacred books in a great bonfire in the courtyard before the
Light-House. Priests of the Order of the Golden Plumage screamed and wailed as
their bellies were slit and their still-thrashing bodies tossed upon the blaze
to be roasted upon their holiest words. Already a score or more had died, their
remains blackening and twisting, fat oozing from their insides to feed the
flames. The bonfire cast blazing sparks high overhead, warring with the rain
that filtered down.

“Let us at them,” Davril said.

Without a second thought, he led
the charge.

The fish-priests turned their
powers on the men, but their powers were weakened in the presence of the Jewel.
Davril’s men skewered them with their Light-blessed weapons, cut them into
fishy chunks and tossed them on the fire. The smell of roasting fish competed
with the stench of roasting Asqrite.

The men set about freeing the
surviving priests and priestesses, who mewled thankfully, some having been
tortured.

Davril found Father Trisdan
standing over a pile of books the Lerumites had been tossing on the pyre. He
was holding one and leafing through it, staring at the pages with awe.

“Well?” Davril asked him.

Trisdan looked up, and for once his
vulture-like face was filled with child-like joy. “The Lost Books of Tiat-sumat!
It’s as we’d hoped.”

Father Elimhas stalked up and tore
the book from Trisdan’s hands. “Don’t you touch them!”

“They belong to the followers of Tiat-sumat—as
does the Jewel. They were stolen by your people.”

“Liberated!”

Trisdan snorted, then eagerly at
Davril. “With these books, my work with the Jewel will progress rapidly.”

“Good.” Davril glanced up at the
dark House of Light that loomed above him, silhouetted against the storm-swept
sky. “Now we have work to do.”

For to the east, darkness was
growing.

In Sraltar Square, more and more sacrifices marched down the
aisle, heads bowed, treading in the congealing blood of those who had gone
before. At the base of the pyramid the blood gutter ran into another gutter
that circled the whole structure so that a veritable moat of blood surrounded the
pyramid. After two thousand men had died on the Black Altar, the moat rose high
enough to channel into the tributaries, and then rivers of blood ran through
the great courtyard, a slow-moving, tacky river whose constant flow kept it
from congealing. From time to time the watchers, some of them, those who had
truly converted to the worship of Uulos, would crouch down and drink from the
rivers, or even dip naked in them where they formed pools and rut like wild
beasts.

Still the prisoners came, marched
over the rivers of blood, over the stone bridges that spanned that fetid moat,
past the bodies that toppled down the stairs, up those grim, blood-stained,
gore-strewn stairs, finally to reach the top, where the fish-priests sang, and
the air shimmered with power, and the Black Altar throbbed, and the taste of
seaweed and sulfur gathered in the air. There General Hastus stood in all his
finery, surrounded by his inhuman allies, confident that he had chosen the
right side.

There the sacrifices were led, kicking
and cursing until the power of the place overcame them, and they ceased
struggling, growing strangely submissive. Finally they were led to the blood-drenched
Altar, past the mounds of bodies covered in flies and smelling of offal, to be
laid down on that slab, face upward, to stare at the roiling black clouds. Then,
one by one, the High Priest reared over them, sacrificial blade glistening, wet
with blood, and plunged it into the victim’s belly. The blade cut upward, sawing
back and forth, up into the victim’s ribs, and he could smell his own offal as
his intestines were split, hear the sound of his bones being ground and broken,
snapping. Then the High Priest’s slick, fishy hand thrust down into the
sacrifice’s chest, groping, at last closing over the still-thumping heart and
ripping it free. Then the carving would begin.

The crowd would cheer as the head
was lifted up, blood still dripping from it, and tossed down the stairs. Some
of the heads were heaped in twin mounds beside the stairs that led up the
pyramid, some tossed to the crowd, where the cheeks and eyes and tongue were
eaten. Others were broken open and the brains devoured by the Lerumites. Meanwhile
the bodies were butchered, either at the pyramid’s top or sides. Whole teams of
butchers cut the bodies apart, cleansed them of offal, heaped the intestines in
reeking carts that when full would haul the waste away, while the cuts from the
bodies were distributed among the throng, and the whole place stank of blood .
. .

The day waned, and darkness
gathered in the skies as though called to dinner, and red flashes appeared in
the clouds. Thunder shook the Square. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, had
died upon the Altar, and its emanations strengthened until its throbs pounded
louder than the thunder, and the people cried out in fear.

“He comes!” they shouted. “The
Great One comes!”

Some tore at their hair, in anguish
or ecstasy or both. Some took out knives and slew themselves, or their
children, or turned on each other. Some ran from the Square, screaming; dark
shapes rose from the alleys, shapes that had been spawned by the Lerumites in
their deep caverns, and gorged themselves on those that fled. Others fell to their
knees in joy and worship.

The black clouds roiled, and at
last some of the revelers discerned that they were swirling about come central
point—a great, black whirlpool in the sky. More saw it, and they stared up at
the great black mouth opening in the night, yawning into abysmal gulfs. There,
far away but growing, a Thing moved, a great and powerful thing whose very presence
would shake the world, a thing who had gorged and grown strong on blood and
souls, and now It climbed from its ancient prison and clawed its way through
the gulfs, through the doorways that were now open, clawed and slithered and
shoved its way to the shining beacon and anchor that was the Altar . . .

People screamed, and even the most
stalwart fell to their knees or bellies and writhed about, tearing at their
hair. Even the Lerumites ceased their warbling and turned their fishy faces
upward, all gathering about in a circle, trembling and sinking to their knees. The
General, face pale and drawn, sank to his knees, too, and tried to hide his
shuddering.

Thunder boomed, and people
screamed, and from some distant gulf the Thing roared, and at the sound any man
or woman still standing or kneeling fell to the ground, even the General.

Some vast, shapeless Thing shoved
Its way from the black mouth in the sky, and began to take solid shape over the
Altar. The Lerumites, their allies and slaves drew back, kneeling and bowing
and writhing, as a great, shapeless form materialized. The air shimmered, and
strange colors ran through it, and smells, and reality seemed to bend. The
Thing grew more solid, it was almost there . . .

Suddenly a burning light lanced out
of the darkness from the west. A great red light appeared in the faraway House
of Light and speared directly into the Thing, which roared in pain and fear. The
sound slew some in the gathering instantly. They simply exploded from within. It
drove others mad, and they turned on each other.

The Thing writhed, and the burning
lance grew stronger, and the fish-priests gnashed their teeth and gasped out
prayers to strengthen their god. To the south, the Tower stood, a stout black
column against the stars, the red light lancing out from its uppermost chamber,
as in days of old when enemy fleets had attacked from the sea . . .

Somehow General Hastus forced
himself to his feet. Acting quickly, he gathered his lieutenants and set off to
collect the host of soldiers that waited nearby. An attack by the rebels had been
expected, even desired, and so the men and their horses had been kept in a
certain square where the Lerumites blocked the reverberations of the Old One’s
coming. So it was that these men were ready and able to mount and ride.

Still trembling with all he had
seen, still feeling and hearing the shrieks of the Worm, General Hastus led his
men west, to destroy the rebellious Davril Husan once and for all.

“Yes!” Davril cried, stepping to the railing of the terrace.
Beside him the terrace ended, and the beam of reddish light blasted out from
the system of mirrors and lenses that ended in a sort of large telescope
jutting from the Temple wall. The light shot from it in a narrow beam, lancing
through the night into the heart of Sraltar Square several miles away. Once
this light had been used to destroy enemy ships descending on Sedremere; now it
would destroy a greater threat.

Davril stared at the massive
assembly of humanity and nonhumanity gathered in the Square, at the great
darkness there, heard the screams and roars of the Thing as It struggled at the
end of the beam of light like a fish on a hook, and Davril shuddered.

He could
feel
the rage, the power, of the Worm. It boiled off the shapeless,
formless mass just then materializing atop the pyramid. The ground shook with Uulos’s
anger, the air hummed with it, and reality seemed to twist and boil. At any
moment, Davril half-expected the very fabric of the world to simply peel away,
for the World to fold back and burn under the strain of Uulos’s wrath.