Goddess Worldweaver

1
Armada

The bastion loomed high on the culmination of a world. Three great mountain ranges, jagged ridgelines that dominated their realm of shadow and chill, encircled the fortress like walls on a cosmic scale.

Great plains that had once teemed with ghost armies were still now, the hordes long ago marched off to war. Cliffs loomed silent and forbidding, while ramparts and towers stood empty and dark. Even the stony gargoyle, the bestial giant poised atop one of the loftiest crests, guardian of the great citadel itself, seemed as lifeless as a statue, a mere image carved from rock.

Deep harbors, sheltered by wall and tower, guarded by lofty fortress and shallow boom, had once contained the hulls of countless warships. Those ships were gone, formed into a fleet that had sortied more than fifty years earlier, embarked on the invasion of an entirely different world.

But though the warriors were gone, their ruler Karlath-Fayd, called the Deathlord, remained. He sat in his great throne, the stone blasted from the very bedrock of his great mountain, and he remained as immobile as that stone.

His very self was invisible, his flesh a transparent veil. Only his eyes were there, glowing like embers, burning from the deep fire within.

Those mighty eyes remained open, the pupils fixed and staring from their perch at the far end of the cosmos. There were those upon the Fourth Circle, druids with their Tapestry and sages with their scrying globes and other magic, who looked upon the Deathlord, studied him for signs of movement and burgeoning danger. Those eyes, hellishly bright, were all that they could see. But still, they feared him.

For the Deathlord was waiting, and all knew that his patience was beyond measure.

T HEY spread across the Worldsea in a legion of darkness, black ranks of sails and masts covering the ocean’s surface to the far limits of the horizon. Shadows shifted and danced across the decks of the death ships, ghosts of past violence seething impatiently, anxious to reach the shore, to draw warmth and sustenance from a living, fertile world.

The cold hulls sliced the waters of the vast ocean, and wakes trailed behind each transom. These were not the frothy whitecaps that chased every normal ship, however. Instead, the track of a death ship was marked by a spreading V of toxic black, smeared like oil over the surface of the sea. Fish died in great numbers and floated to the surface, forming rafts of rotting, scaly flesh. Seabirds were emboldened by the plenty, but as they dipped and slashed at the wasting meat, they convulsed and fell from the sky, adding their own feathered carcasses to the vast swath of decay.

The ships seemed without number, viewed from the sky like blades of grass in a meadow. The vanguard was ten miles wide, a hundred ships with lofty sails and smoky pennants of shrouded black. Behind them came rank upon rank upon rank of additional fleets, each wider than the last, sweeping across the horizon in a seemingly endless progression.

They were watched from the sky by a pair of observers, one sitting astride and borne by the other. The mount was massive, scaly, and serpentine: a monstrous dragon with a wingspan long enough to encompass a playing field. The rider was a man perched at the base of the great wyrm’s neck, his long black hair bound into a tail, his bronze skin smooth and stern. He wore a leather shirt and gloves, with a slender sword at his waist. Together they soared above the vast armada, looking at the long lines of ships, wondering at the assemblage of black-hulled vessels.

The dragon flew with relaxed grace, riding the sea winds with little effort of his mighty wings. The pair had made this reconnaissance countless times over the last five decades. At least once every interval, Natac and Regillix Avatar had flown forth to watch the ships of the armada in their seemingly endless progression around the world of Nayve. Their target seemed to be that realm at the center of the Worldsea, the nexus of all the Seven Circles, of everything, but for such a long time the ships had made no move toward shore.

So the watchers watched, and they waited. Long ago Natac had given up trying to count the ships. The pattern of lines was deceptively irregular, and even in the early years he had never been certain if his count was accurate. As time passed, and more and more black ships sailed from the Deathland to join the armada, he formed an impression only of numberless vastness. He carried this impression back to the Fourth Circle when his draconic steed, after a week or ten days of constant flight, was forced to return to land.

“As always, it seems there are more of them than ever before,” said Regillix Avatar, turning his crocodilian head to regard his rider with one slitted, yellow green eye.

“Many more,” Natac agreed. “Their numbers are swelling with fresh blood… Miradel told me that twenty thousand men were slain in the first day of yet another great battle in the Seventh Circle.”

“Surely they have enough strength to attack,” the dragon snorted in exasperation. “Do they expect to bore us to death? Fifty-one years of waiting for a war!”

“I have a feeling we don’t have much longer to wait,” replied the man. “In fact, I’ve seen enough here. What do you say we get back and make our report?”

“I was going to suggest the same,” said the dragon. “The course of the vanguard is still circular, but I detect a shift, as if they are moving toward shore.”

Natac had noticed it, too, as if the fleet was preparing for a great change of course, the lines of the armada dressing themselves in preparation for a turn toward the coast of Nayve. They had waited for this maneuver for decades, but he knew that, when the death ships turned, the attack would follow swiftly.

“Let’s go, then.”

The dragon banked steeply, the man resting without fear in the deep niche between two of the serpent’s neck plates. Long wing strokes bore them through the sky. Soon the air felt brighter, cleaner, as they passed beyond the fringe of the dark armada. A thin line of green marked landfall before them, and with a look at the sky, where the sun was just beginning to ascend toward Darken, they knew that they would reach the shoreline by full night.

Before them, the world of Nayve awaited.

T WO figures slipped through the night, gliding past rocks that jutted like sentries from the mountainside. Steep, craggy summits rose on all sides, a fanged horizon clearly visible against the starlit sky. One of the shadowy forms dashed from a gully to crouch beside a looming boulder while the other remained still, watching and waiting. Fifty feet down the steep slope a stream washed through a rock-walled draw, silky and shimmering in the faint light.

Waiting for Juliay to join him, Jubal paused to watch a constellation move like a formation of geese, curling through the cosmos in the direction that was neither metal nor wood. The stars danced and hovered, then dropped from view behind the shoulder of a huge, pyramid-shaped mountain.

Even now, after five decades in the Fourth Circle, Jubal allowed himself to be surprised when he saw the stars moving around. More of the twinkling lights popped into view, a cluster rising in an equilateral triangle before speeding apart, evenly dispersed into the three directions. He was reminded of the fireworks that he had watched every Fourth of July when he was growing up in Virginia.

The memory was jarring and anachronistic. That world was gone… had been gone even before Jubal had fallen, pierced by Yankee bayonets above the banks of Appomattox Creek. Now, as a man who had spent sixty years in Nayve, time had passed with no failure of his joints, none of the withering of strength that inevitably accompanied mortal aging. He couldn’t imagine what the world of short-lived humankind had come to.

Unlike Natac, who regularly examined every aspect of Earth’s ongoing history and had been doing so for more than four hundred years, Jubal made little effort to remain familiar with the world of his birth. Of course, Juliay and the other druids saw the Seventh Circle with the Wool of Time, and they had told him of the great war that now raged, threatening to consume all of Europe. It irritated him that mankind seemed to have learned nothing from the monstrously destructive American war that had claimed Jubal’s life-his first life, in any event-some fifty years ago.

The fact irritated him, but it didn’t surprise him. From what Jubal had learned, it seemed that the British and French and German generals were making the same crude and unimaginative attempts at battle that had characterized so much of the conflict he had known as the War for Southern Independence. These obtuse leaders expended their men in fruitless charges, and the spirits of the dead only served to expand the enemy’s fleet. At least Grant had learned his lesson at Cold Harbor. Would the same ever be said of the brutes who were methodically sending the young manhood of their respective nations into the meat grinder of trenches, machine guns, barbed wire?

It made him tired just thinking about it, and he couldn’t afford fatigue. Now, here, he had important work to do.

Juliay joined him, moccasins silent as the shadow in which they both sought concealment. He felt her hand in his, and he was heartened again, ready for the task at hand.

“There is one Delver behind us, another pair across the river right here,” she said, barely voicing the words, pointing to indicate location.

He nodded, saw the two dwarves, dark metal armor seeming to absorb the little starlight penetrating the narrow valley. Knowing the preternaturally keen hearing of his enemies, Jubal carefully shrugged the small crossbow from its sling across his shoulder, pointed to his quarry, and started to carefully move down the slope toward the stream. Juliay, in the meantime, backtracked toward the lone Delver on their side of the water.

Finding a boulder with a relatively flat top, Jubal stretched out on the crude platform and leveled his crossbow, the razor-edged dart of steel homed on the breastplate of the nearest dwarf. The water was near, no more than fifteen feet below, but still it slipped past with an eerie, nearly soundless rush. Over that faint hiss he heard a grunt, then a jarring clatter as of an armored body rolling down the hill; he knew that Juliay had done her job.

The two Delvers heard the noise, too, stiffening, then crouching in the shelter of a rocky outcrop. Julbal winced; he had lost his shot.

He remained steady, holding his bead on the place where the dwarves had vanished. In a few moments a light flared down the valley, Juliay setting off her coolfyre torch. Not wanting to impair his night vision, Jubal avoided even a glance at the source of the illumination, knowing that Juliay would likewise keep her eyes away from the night-bursting brilliance.

The diversion was enough to draw the two dwarves forward. Jubal could see the blank helmet plates, completely covering the eyeless faces as featureless as shadows. He was not fooled; bitter experience had proved that, since coming to Nayve, these dark-dwelling dwarves had somehow learned to see. How they did so remained a mystery. For this mission it was enough to know that they could be distracted and alarmed by a sudden light. Now, the duo of Delvers crept along the steep trail, each armed with a pair of multiple-bladed knives, attempting to sneak up on whoever was making this brightness.

Jubal aimed carefully and shot the first one, the dart punching through the dwarf’s side just below his upraised arm. The force of the missile knocked the stricken Delver to the side against the rising slope. The wounded dwarf kicked and tried to make a noise before he started to roll down toward the water.

The second spun around and dove for the shelter of the rocky outcrop. With a smooth gesture Jubal nocked in a second dart, brought up the weapon, then shot in a single, continuous motion. The dwarf was pierced in the guts and cried out pathetically as he, too, rolled down to the water. For a moment Jubal was reminded of Gettysburg, the dreadful stillness after he had joined Pickett’s attack. One of his men had made a moan that sounded exactly like the cry of the dying dwarf. Mercifully, the noises ceased as the dwarf plunged beneath the surface of the stream.

Knowing he had no time to lose, Jubal jumped to his feet and hastened along the narrow valley, meeting Juliay as she descended to the water’s edge, upstream of where all of the dead dwarves had fallen in. She kicked off her moccasins and buckskin leggings before wading into the waist-deep stream. In seconds Jubal had joined her.

They knew that Belynda Wysterian had chosen this spot with care, when the elfwoman had studied this valley in her Globe of Seeing. The water slowed and meandered here, the current’s impetus diluted at a bulge in the channel. Since it did not form a natural eddy, it was not a perfect place for the imminent magic, but those imperfections explained why this locale was so lightly guarded. All of the true eddies, where the stream swirled of its own accord, were heavily guarded by Delvers and harpies. This mission was only possible because Jubal and Juliay had selected a poorly defended section of this unique and precious stream-the waters that Juliay herself had discovered fifty years ago.

Before the mission could be performed, they would have to create a disruption in the flow, a curl in the river so that the water spun through a circle, forming a vortex to anchor the spell that the sage-enchantresses in Circle at Center were prepared to cast.

“How much time do we have?” whispered the man from Virginia.

“I reckon a half hour,” Juliay replied. “We’d better get to work.”

Jubal was already probing along the shore, where he found a bank of small boulders. Many of them were loose, and he hoisted one in both his hands, carrying it toward the middle of the meandering stream. He dropped it in place, and the druid added another to the pile.

Working quickly, the two humans pulled rocks from the shoreline and laid them on the streambed, raising a quasidam in a matter of a few minutes. They were gasping for breath and exhausted when they crawled from the water, but they could see that the flow, before continuing down the channel, now spun through a rapid, circular swirl.

Sitting down upon a flat-topped boulder, they watched, knowing they would not have long to wait. Jubal was not surprised to see faint illumination sparkle in the air-the aura of magic being cast at night. In the space of three or four heartbeats the brightness took on a humanlike, though overlarge, form. In the next instant the light was gone, replaced by the hulking shape of the giant, Rawknuckle Barefist.

Jubal was about to offer a greeting when the giant waved his hand and pointed up. “Harpies! Belynda spotted them in her Globe. They’re diving at you right now!”

Instantly the man toppled onto his back, clacking another dart into the spring of his crossbow. Julay rolled behind the boulder, nocking an arrow and drawing back her bowstring. Rawknuckle, meanwhile, raised his massive battle axe and looked at the sky.

Jubal saw wings, huge and dirty gray, spread wide to slow the harpy’s headlong dive. He fired at the darkness between those wings and heard the shriek of pain, proof that he had found his target. The filthy beast crashed into the water, vomiting oily bile that slicked the surface and hissed into flame when it contacted the air. More specks of fire appeared, spattering the ground around him, gobbets spat by flying harpies as two more swept past.

Rawknuckle cursed as one of the fiery globules thwacked onto his shoulder. He swung the axe, the attacker flying past just too high-but not beyond the reach of the crossbow. Jubal cracked off another shot, and the harpy fell with a crippled wing. The giant stalked over to the spitting, infuriated creature and whacked off the grotesque, vulturian head with one swift blow, while Juliay brought the last one down with a well-placed arrow.

“Any more?” asked the man, crossbow at the ready, eyes scanning the starlit sky.

“Belynda sent me ahead to tell you about those three,” the giant replied, wiping his axe blade on the harpy’s limp wing. “But there will be more on the way, you can bet, as soon as they know we’re here.”

“Let’s move, then!” Juliay urged.

By then more lights swirled, a dancing pattern of sparkling brightness cycling around the whirling water. Tamarwind Trak appeared, the elf blinking slightly and shaking his head to get over the disorienting sensation of the teleport spell. Belynda came next, followed by the druids Cillia and Waranda. Last to arrive was the centaur, Galluper, who shook his mane of thick, dark hair and snorted anxiously. Six water casks were strapped, three on each side, across Galluper’s sturdy, equine back.

The travelers went to work without any wasted motion, each taking one of the casks and lowering it to the stream. The centaur paced on the bank above, a sturdy bow, with arrow ready, in his hands.

Jubal pulled the cork from his keg and held it in the stream, allowing the silky water to pour into the container. Around him the others were doing the same, maintaining the filling even as they cast anxious glances at the sky.

Juliay was the first to finish. She stood her cask up and slammed in the cork. Rawknuckle was there, and he picked up the heavy barrel as if it was nothing more than a full tankard of ale. Quickly he placed it against the centaur’s flank, strapping it to the harness and then holding it while Jubal and Tamarwind lifted a second keg and suspended it on the opposite side of Galluper’s pack.

The rest of the casks were filled by then and quickly strapped into place.

“Above!” cried the centaur suddenly. He leaned back and launched an arrow into the sky as several dirty white shapes winged from the darkness. More and more harpies swept downward, blocking out the stars as they wheeled overhead. “The rest’ll dive any second now!” warned Galluper.

“There,” said Jubal, smacking the last keg as Tamarwind lashed it into place.

“Here they come!” cried Rawknuckle, lifting his axe and snarling into the sky. Dozens of harpies, perhaps a hundred or more, plunged downward, shrieking hateful cries, gurgling as they prepared to spit their fiery sputum. Jubal took a shot, watched the dart disappear into the night as a haze of brightness, like a circle of fireflies, suddenly sparkled around them. This was magic at work, but it seemed to inspire the harpies to press home the attack with increased savagery and desperation.

Fire glared and spattered above as the harpies, sensing their prey’s escape, spat their fireballs. But then Jubal felt the magic take hold, the powerful spell seeming to grab him by the guts and catapult him and his companions through space.

And then the harpies were gone, and he was staring up at the silver loom of the Goddess Worldweaver, rising gleaming and proud into the night above Circle at Center.

T HEY called themselves by a bewildering array of names: regiments and legions, divisions and brigades, corps and armies, and impis and battalions. They were organized into columns and lines and companies, commanded by centurions and captains and consuls and colonels. For centuries they had marched to battle on foot or ridden horses and sailing vessels. More recently, on the Seventh Circle, they were borne by trains and trucks, by steamships, and even, occasionally, by frail, sputtering flying machines. They fought with swords, with muskets and carbines and machine guns and cannons. They laughed and cursed and shouted and cried.

But mostly, they died.

Miradel had been watching them die for a long time. For years she had spent much of her time in the temple at the Center of Everything, in this sacred chamber. Here she studied the Tapestry of the Worldweaver, observing the great saga of life and violence in all the worlds of the cosmos. Mostly, her studies had focused on the Seventh Circle, the world called Earth. Long ago, many hundreds of years ago, she had found the man she loved by studying the Tapestry, picking Natac’s thread from the war-torn land that was now called Mexico.

More frequently, however, her research brought only a sense of dismay. She had watched the fate of Natac’s homeland as Cortes and his conquistadores had brought those peoples to their knees. She had borne witness to other great wars, watched Napoleon march upon Moscow, then beheld the horrors of the American Civil War in excruciating detail. At the time she had thought that mankind’s capacity for self-inflicted horror had reached its zenith. But now, in the muddy fields of Flanders and France, she saw an even greater holocaust taking place… and there was no end to the carnage in sight.

“A half a million men killed on the Somme… and the same number slain at Verdun, not a hundred miles away. This is a bloody year, indeed.” The words, the familiar sense of the calm and detached observer, came from behind her.

Miradel sighed and looked up as the goddess herself came into the room. The immortal weaver brought a sense of lightness with her, such that the druid could see her even though the only source of illumination in the dark viewing chamber was a small candle.

“And they all go to the death ships, swelling the fleet of Karlath-Fayd,” Miradel acknowledged. “But how long can it last? Will his numbers just continue to grow until they darken the seas?”

“I fear we shall soon learn the answer.” The goddess frowned, lines of care etched into her cheeks and chin. She looked to be a stout human woman of unusual height, sturdy and square, with graying hair pulled back into a tight bun. She had a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses that she wore occasionally, and now she took these off and rubbed the bridge of her nose.

“I have selected more druids, another hundred, from the Seventh Circle. The Ceremony of Arrival will occur at tomorrow’s Darken.”

“All female?” Miradel didn’t know why she asked the question-she knew the answer even before the goddess nodded serenely.

“With the waters that just arrived, we may be able to retrieve another sixty or seventy warriors.”

Miradel was silent, feeling strangely melancholy, and the goddess concluded her thought. “We shall need them all, and very soon.”

“How do you know… and what do you think we will learn?” The druid asked, frightened by the resigned acceptance she detected in this being of such great wisdom and power.

“You have only to look,” replied the Worldweaver, gesturing to the candle, the tiny tufts of wool that were nearby, neatly arrayed on the table.

Hesitantly Miradel took up some of the threads, allowed them to drop into the flame. Her eyes were on the white-washed wall of the room, where now was displayed the image of the Deathlord’s armada, hundreds upon hundreds of dark ships. She took a moment to scan the skies, seeking the familiar image of her lover and his proud, draconic steed, but there was no sign of him. Instead, the fleet drew all of her attention. The steaming and polluted wakes, the marks of tortured water left by each hull as it passed, were hooked now, unusually curved. Instantly the druid realized that the entire fleet was changing course, each ship making a wide, precise turn to port.

She drew back from the image. The goddess was proved right: the fleet, for the first time in sixty years, had made a dramatic change in course. The new bearing was shown as the shoreline came into view, the verdant fields and forests of Nayve.

The fleet of the Deathlord was making toward that shore. At last, after so many years of circling the Worldsea, the legions of the dead were advancing toward war, toward Nayve…

Toward the Center of Everything.

T HE first thing Awfulbark did every morning when he woke up was to reach for his sword. Typically he did this as soon as first consciousness glimmered, before he was fully awake. Since he kept the blade razor sharp, this practice had resulted in numerous stabs and cuts to himself and his wife. On three occasions, in fact, he had cut his right foot off and then spent the next hour cursing as the limb painfully grew back.

But such was his pride in the gleaming steel weapon, a gift from General Natac himself, that the king of the trolls could not bear to have it out of his grasp. It was his most treasured possession.

Of course, it was his only possession as well. Really, it was the only possession among the whole tribe of forest trolls, the thousands of them living under Awfulbark’s wise and beneficent leadership. They were exiled, in a fashion, for their ancestral home lay across Riven Deep. They had fled that home, an extensive forest of ancient oaks, when they had been attacked by harpies and dark dwarves from circles beyond Nayve. Their king had led them across Riven Deep on the bridge that once stood at Sharnhome, where they had joined humans and elves in the defense of the Fourth Circle. When the bridge had fallen, they had been stranded.

Though the humans and the elves maintained their diligence-the dark dwarves and harpies were still present and abundant across the gorge-the trolls had grown bored with the war within a few months after the battle at the bridge. Awfulbark had led them inland, and they had settled in another forest of ancient oaks interspersed with numerous apple and cherry groves. Many of the trolls spoke wistfully of happy times in their ancient capital city, Udderthud, but in truth Awfulbark understood that living in the New Forest was easier, offering better weather and much more abundant food, than existence in Udderthud had ever been.

So it was that the king of the trolls was a little bit fat and was feeling very lazy when he took up his sword and ambled through the tangled paths of his domain. He left his wife, Roodcleaver, snoozing under the widespread branches of the oak they had claimed as the royal abode. Her easy snores comforted him, for they reminded him that she was well fed and thus content.

He stopped to speak with several of his subjects and watched a few youngsters play vigorously at the timeless game called Squash the Raccoon. The object of the game’s attention proved quite vigorous and would have escaped back to the wilds, but for the keen aim of a young troll’s stone.

“Stones good,” the king remarked, drawing a beaming smile to the youngster’s toothy gash of a face. “But sword better. Remember that!” He flashed the blade and instantly-despite the fact that it had been years since he had amputated a child’s limb-all the young trolls disappeared.

Shrugging, he continued on his way, failing to notice the shadow that crossed the sky, interrupting the beams of sunlight that spilled through the leafy canopy. Only when the troll king came to a clearing did he see the massive serpentine shape, the mighty wings pulsing down to send a gust of wind blasting between the trunks. Blinking the dust from his eyes, Awfulbark recognized Natac, the great general already dismounted from the dragon and striding toward him.

The king tried to think. He judged it unlikely that the man was coming to take back his sword; after all, Natac had bestowed it with great ceremony, in thanks for the troll’s aid during the Battle of Sharnhome. There was a chance, a good chance, that he was returning now to ask Awfulbark’s assistance in some undoubtedly unpleasant and arduous task. This, thought the monarch of the New Forest, was a much more likely prospect. He considered fleeing, knowing that he had a very poor record of standing up to Natac’s requests for assistance.

But there was a third possibility, and this kept him rooted in place: perhaps the man was coming to give him another gift. Of course, he couldn’t see any likely-looking parcels, either on the man or his dragon, but hope was strong in the troll king, and so he clutched his sword and waited for Natac to reach the shade of the trees.

“Greetings, O King,” said the man, making a formal bow. “I hope that life in the New Forest continues to suit you.”

“Well, okay enough,” said Awfulbark grudgingly. “Could wish for some good Udderthud caterpillars though, spice up these soft apples.”

“Indeed. The foods we are raised with, those are the finest tastes,” Natac acknowledged sympathetically. “How I longed for the taste of tart chocolate and chilis when I first arrived here.”

The troll didn’t know what the man was talking about but pretended to nod in understanding. It was then that Natac sprang his trap.

“I need your help,” he said.

Awfulbark blinked and, with longing, thought of the winding forest trail, the route into shadow and obscurity that he had considered moments earlier, before it was too late. Now, there was no way he could refuse the man, not when the trolls were needed. It had never happened before he had met Natac and the other warrior, Jubal. Never had there been a time when the trolls were needed for something. The first time it had happened, Awfulbark had tried to resist. But now, there was no use.

“What we do now?” he asked.

“There is going to be another war,” Natac said. “I need you to bring your trolls, everyone who is strong enough to fight, to the shore of the Blue Coral Sea.”