Worldbinder

HIDDEN TREASURE

Thul ransacked the prisoners’ packs, pulling out spare garments, studying trinkets and mementos, then casting everything aside as if it was excrement. The Knight Eternal’s cowl and robes hid his face, but his disgust showed in every angry move.

The prisoners lay frozen upon what was left of the floor of the house, scorched as it was from the battle. The touch of the grave was upon them, and they lay paralyzed, like mice that have been filled with scorpion’s venom.

The spell would wear off by dawn.

“I see only three packs here,” Vulgnash said. “Where is the fourth?”

Thul glanced around, looking for sign of a fourth pack. “Perhaps it fell when we pulled the walls off,” Thul answered.

“Find it,” Vulgnash said.

Thul growled in resentment, and then walked around, carefully studying the ground. “I don’t see one. I think…the wizard is their leader. He would not carry a pack. He would make the others carry.”

Vulgnash could not argue with that. No wyrmling lord would stoop to such menial chores. He climbed down to the ground level and grabbed some withered vines, long tendrils of morning glory that had been burned by the sun. When he had several feet of them, he leapt in the air, flapped up to the prisoners, and threw the vines upon Fallion in a twisted heap.

“Bind them firmly,” he commanded.

The vines began to slither, twisting around the hands and feet of each prisoner, clamping legs together, cinching the arms tight against the chest.

When the prisoners were firmly bound, Vulgnash knelt and studied their weapons. He touched the fine reaver-bone bow that Jaz had held, and recoiled in horror. There was life in that bow, the blessing of a powerful undine.

He kicked it over the edge of the house with his boot, studied the other weapons. They were similarly accursed. He kicked them all into the bushes behind the little shop. “Rust upon you, and rot,” he hissed, casting a spell. In a month the fine steel would be nothing but mounds of corrosion, the bow turned to dust, and the wooden staff would be food for worms.

Thul turned away from the packs, went and hunched over one of the small humans, the smallest of the women. Vulgnash glanced at him, saw Thul reaching down to place a finger over each eye.

“Do not feed on her!” Vulgnash hissed.

“But she is sweet!” Thul said. “Besides, we only need the wizard.”

“We need them all,” Vulgnash countered. “We must get the wizard to accept a wyrm. Sometimes, a man cannot be tortured into it, but he will break if another is tortured in his place.”

Thul growled deep in his throat, whirled, and went back to the packs, began hurling things around in his rage.

There was a clanking, the sound of some bits of metal, copper perhaps, banging against one another. Thul dumped a bag of rods upon the floor, sniffing at them. “What are these?” he asked. “I smell wizardry.”

Vulgnash strode to him, knelt and peered at the rods, thinking that perhaps they had stumbled upon a human harvester, and that these were his harvesting spikes. But the rods were not made of iron. They were made of corpuscite. Each rod was about the length of a hand, from the bottom of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. Each was about the diameter of a small willow frond.

And at the tip of each was a rune, one of the primal shapes that had formed the world from the beginning.

Vulgnash picked one up, studied the rune. It was easy to decipher for those who were wise enough to see: swiftness. Attached to the rune were others- seize, confer, and bind.

He had never seen such a device, but instinctively Vulgnash knew what it was. The rod had been created to transfer attributes from one being to another.

“This is a weapon,” he told Thul in rising exhilaration, “a marvelous weapon.”

With mounting excitement he poured out the other branding irons, studied each one in turn: resilience, memory, strength, beauty, sight, hearing, smell, song. A dozen types of runes were represented, and Vulgnash immediately recognized that he could make others that the creators had not anticipated-greed, cruelty, stubbornness-the list was endless.

“But can you make them work?” Thul demanded.

Vulgnash could not wait to try. But first he had to get the prisoners back to Rugassa. His wings could not carry so much weight. He’d have to take the prisoners overland.

“Take these rods to Zul-torac,” Vulgnash commanded. “He’ll know what to do. I’ll bring the prisoners to Rugassa in three days.”

“Yes, Master,” Thul said. He grabbed up the small branding irons, raced to the edge of the platform, and his crimson wings unfolded and caught the air. In a moment he was gone, rising up into the starlight.

Fallion lay petrified, a bone-numbing cold coursing through his body, his legs and arms unable to move, bound tightly. He was so cold, he could hardly think. He could do little in the way of making plans. He acted only on instinct.

He sent his senses out, questing for a source of heat. The sun had gone down long ago. There was no heat left in the stones around him, nor in the Knight Eternal.

Even his friends were perilously cold. He could not draw from them, not without killing them.

Wyrmlings came from the fort then, filling his field of vision. They were like men in some ways, monstrous men as pale white as bone, with misshapen skulls, huge and powerful.

One of them heaved Fallion over his back like a carcass, then carried him down the ladder and out along the stone street until they reached a wagon. Upon it lay a huge stone box. There were no horses or oxen to draw the thing. Instead it had handles on the front. The cruel contraption was a handcart, powered by the sweat of brutish wyrmlings.

The wyrmling shoved the stone lid off the box with one hand, a feat that should have required several strong men, then tossed Fallion in without ceremony. Moments later, Talon, Jaz, and Rhianna each tumbled in beside him, and the lid scraped closed.

Fallion could feel the cold begin to wear off. The numbness in his hands was fading; he clenched and unclenched his hands, trying to get the blood to flow.

He reached out with his mind. He could feel heat from the wyrmlings. A dozen of them surrounded the little carriage. He tried to use his flameweaving skills to siphon off their body heat.

He did not need much, just enough to burn the cords that bound his hands.

Instantly it felt as if a wall crashed down between him and the wyrmlings. The little heat that he had in his body drained off, and Fallion was left reeling in pain from the cold.

For only an instant, Fallion tasted blinding agony, and then passed out.

It seemed like long hours before his thoughts returned. He had to fight his way through a seeming tunnel of pain. His teeth chattered and he shivered all over.

He didn’t have the strength to fight his captor. He didn’t even dare try.

Next time, he feared, the Knight Eternal would drain him of heat completely.

The wagon tilted as one of the wyrmlings lifted the front end, and then the wheels began to creak as it jolted down the uneven road.

North, Fallion realized dully as he felt the wagon turn. They are taking us north. But what lay that direction, he did not know.

He thought he’d try his tongue, even though it felt swollen and foreign in his mouth, as if some slab of meat were caught in his throat. “Talon? Talon? Where are they taking us?”

There was a long silence.

At last Jaz answered, “I think…our sister is dead. I can’t feel her breathing.”

It was blackest night in the box. Fallion turned and peered toward Talon.

In his memory, they were all back in their little home on the Sweetgrass. It was the night before they set out, and all of the neighbors had come. Lanterns hung from the peach trees in the front yard, shedding light upon the bounteous feast that had been set before them-piles of strawberries and fresh peas from the garden, succulent greens and wild mushrooms, mounds of spiced chicken, steaming muffins.

There had been music and celebration with a band that had come all of the way from Rye.

And there had been worry. Fallion had seen it in Myrrima’s eyes, and in Borenson’s, for Fallion was setting sail to the far side of the earth and heading into the underworld, where the reavers dwelt.

Fallion had felt so cocksure of himself.

“Take good care of my baby,” Myrrima had begged. She loved Fallion as if he were her own son, he knew. She had never treated him with any less kindness or devotion, even though he was only hers by adoption. But Talon was her first-born, and a girl, and Myrrima had always doted on her when she was young.

“I’ll take care of her,” Fallion had promised.

“Bring her back alive, and whole,” Myrrima begged, fighting back tears. Fallion could see that she wanted to run into the house, to hide herself and cry.

“When we come back,” Fallion had said, “it will be in a more perfect world, and Talon will be whole and beautiful, more beautiful than you can imagine.”

Myrrima had smiled faintly then, wanting to believe.

Fallion reached out with his senses, could find almost no warmth in Talon’s body. The Knights Eternal had drained it all from her.

What have I done? Fallion wondered. He’d brought a change upon the world, but Talon had become a monster, huge and grotesque, nearly as bad as the wyrmlings.

And now she lay at the verge of death.

Rhianna began to weep. Fallion could hear her sniffling.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“So cold,” Fallion said through chattering teeth. He’d never felt anything like it, not even in the coldest arctic storm.

Rhianna rolled over to him, showing more strength than he possessed. She leaned against him, draping her body over him like a blanket. “Here,” she whispered. “Take the heat of my body.”

He continued to tremble, hoping that her warmth might keep him alive. No words of gratitude seemed sufficient. “Thank you,” he managed weakly. And then he realized that he felt so close to death, he might never get a chance to speak to her again. “I love you.”

All through the long night, the wyrmlings toiled down the road, the wagon shuddering as if it would burst each time it slammed into a rut, the wheels of the wagon creaking.

It was wearisome, trudging behind that wagon, when Vulgnash could so easily take to the sky. But the wizard inside the stone box was subtle, and Vulgnash could not leave him unguarded.

Several times throughout the night, Vulgnash drained the heat from the boy, drawing him into a state near death, then keeping him there for long periods, letting him wake just enough to regain some strength before drawing him back down again.

Vulgnash wearied of the job.

By dawn I could be in Rugassa, he thought, studying the branding irons, uncovering their secrets, unlocking their powers.

But no. I am condemned to walk, to guard the little wizard.

Vulgnash would do his mistress’s bidding. He was flawless in the performance of his duties. He always had been.

But how he hated it.

So they marched through the night, through a fair land where the stubble of wild grasses shone white beneath the silver moon, through the night where forbidding woods cast long shadows as they marched over the hills.

There was little risk of attack. These lands had been taken by the wyrmlings years ago, and the warrior clans had long since lost the will to fight for their return.

Vulgnash saw nothing in the night but a pair of wild oxen; some stags drinking beside a pool; and a young wolf prowling in a meadow, jumping about as it hunted for mice.

It was only when they spotted a village in the distance that Vulgnash took pause. It was a village full of new humans, of runts. Their cottages looked restful, lying in the fold of a vale. Smoke curled up from last night’s cooking fires, and he could see goats and cattle in their little stick pens.

Vulgnash had not given much thought to the runts. The wizard he had caught was one of them, and he wondered now if perhaps some of the wizard’s kin might not come looking for him.

As a precaution, he stopped the wagon. “Go down to that village,” he told his warriors, “and kill everyone.”

He stood guard as the wyrmlings loped off across fields that glowed golden in the moonlight. A couple of dogs began wagging their tails and barking as the wyrmlings approached, but their barking grew frantic as they realized that some new terror was approaching.

A human man came to a door to investigate, just as the wyrmling warriors approached; a wyrmling hurled a spear through him.

Then the warriors were on the houses. They did not go in through the doors. They kicked down walls and threw off the roofs. They screamed and roared like wild beasts, striking terror into the hearts of the little ones.

And then they ran down anyone who tried to escape.

They made sport of the slaughter, ripping off the legs of living men, pummeling mothers into the dirt, searching through the rubble of broken houses to find the babes, then squeezing them as if they were small birds.

In all, it took less than fifteen minutes, but it was time well spent.

Vulgnash felt as if he had accomplished something.

They ran afterward, for more than an hour through the night, the warrior’s hearts pumping hard from bloodlust, until they reached an old abandoned hill fort. It had a single watchtower that looked out over the rolling hills, and a great room and a kitchen that had once garrisoned troops. Beyond that, there was nothing more but some moldering sheds, their wooden roofs weighed down by moss and blackberry vines.

The birds had begun to sing and the stars were dying in the heavens. The fort looked like a good place to camp for the day. In fact, there was no other place on the trail behind and no likely spot ahead for many hours. The old fort was Vulgnash’s only choice.