In the House of the Worm Read online

  “I wonder how you will taste,” Annelyn said.

  The Meatbringer laughed.

  “I suspect your flesh would be foul,” Annelyn continued. “I will not eat you. Better you be carrion for the eaterworms.”

  “So,” said the Meatbringer. “More of your great wit.” He bowed. “This meat I carry hampers me. May I cut it loose?”

  “Certainly,” said Annelyn.

  “Let me place it inside, out of the way,” the Meatbringer said. “So we might not trip over it.”

  Annelyn nodded, and circled warily to the side, suppressing a smile. He knew what the Meatbringer intended. The other took his knife and slit the knots that bound the child to his back, then placed the body on the far side of the door. He turned, framed by the purplish light.

  Laughing, he said, “The yaga-la-hai and the grouns, you are so alike. Animals.” He reached out and swung shut the wide doors, and again Annelyn’s ears rang to the clang he had heard once, long ago.

  “No,” Annelyn said. “Alike, yes. But not animals.” He put on his helmet. The thick darkness vanished like a mist.

  The Meatbringer had danced silently and deftly to one side. A great grin split his face, and he advanced with stealthy steps, his knife ready to thrust and disembowel.

  If Annelyn—like the late, unfortunate Groff—had tried a rush attack on the place where the Meatbringer had been, in the last instant of light, the thrust would have left him open and vulnerable to a fatal stab from the Meatbringer where he now was. It was a crafty, polished technique; but Annelyn could see. For once, darkness and deception were of no use. And Annelyn’s rapier was longer than the Meatbringer’s knife.

  Quickly, easily, casually, Annelyn turned to face his enemy, smiled beneath his helmet, and lunged. The Meatbringer hardly had time to react; it had been years since he had fought on even terms. Annelyn ran him through the abdomen.

  Afterward, he pushed the body down the air shaft, and prayed that it would fall eternally.

  * * *

  The Masque of the Manworm was still in progress in the High Burrow when Annelyn returned to the yaga-la-hai. In the dusty libraries, men in dominoes and women in veils writhed and spun; the treasure rooms were open for viewing, the pleasure chambers open for other things; in the Highest Hall, the Second Vermentor lay beneath a thousand torches while the worm-children danced past him, and sang chants of his demise. The Manworm had no face now; he was one with the White Worm. Beside him, the priest-surgeons stood, in white smocks with scalpel-and-theta, as they had stood for a week. The Seventh Feast had just been laid.

  Caralee was there, bright golden Caralee, and the bronze knights, and many who had once been friends of Annelyn. But most only smiled and made soft witticisms when he came striding unexpectedly through the doors.

  Some, perhaps, did not recognize him. Only a short time ago, at the Sun Masque, he had been brilliant in silk and spidergray. Now he was painfully gaunt, cut and bruised in a dozen places, his eyes restless in dark hollows, and the only clothes he wore were black tatters that hung on him like a mushroom farmer’s foul rags. His face was bare, without so much as a domino, and that set the guests to muttering, since the time of unmasking had not yet come.

  Very soon they had more to mutter about. For Annelyn, this strange, changeling Annelyn, stood silently in the door, his eyes jumping from one mask to another. Then, still silent, he walked across the gleaming obsidian floor to the feasting table, seized an iron platter piled high with fine white grounflesh, and flung it violently across the room. A few laughed; others, not so amused, picked slices of meat from their shoulders. Annelyn went from the room.

  Afterward, he became a familiar figure among the yaga-la-hai, though he lost his flair for dress and much of his fine wit. Instead, he spoke endlessly and persuasively of forgotten crimes and the sins of bygone eons, painting deliciously dark pictures of monster worms who bred beneath the House and would one day rise to consume all. He was fond of telling the worm-children that they ought to lie with grouns, instead of cooking them, so that a new people might be fashioned to resist his nightmare worms.

  In the endless long decay of the House of the Worm, nothing was so prized as novelty. Annelyn, though considered coarse and most unsubtle, wove entertaining tales and had a spark of shocking irreverence. Thus, though the bronze knights grumbled, he was allowed to live.

  Chicago

  February, 1975