Orson Card - Wyrms

She paused once in a safe cluster of branches to strip off her women's clothing. Underneath it she wore the short breeches and long shirt of a common boy. She was almost too large now to play the part, since boys took to long pants or professional gowns as soon as they could these days. At least her breasts were not too large yet, and Father had been gracious enough not to die when it was her time of month. She smudged her face, pulled off her wig, and tousled her short hair. She decided to keep the wig-it was a perfect match for her hair, and she'd be hard put to find another. She stuffed it into her bag.

The dress she jammed into the crook of a branch. It was black, of course, and it wouldn't be easy to see it from the ground.

It was already dusk when she got to the wall and dropped to the ground on Granary Row. No one saw her.

She appropriated one of the drawcarts and pulled it by its rope to Larder Row. After years of practice with Angel, her boyish stride was utterly convincing. No one took a second look at her. She had no trouble leaving her cart and walking, as so many servants did, to pay her respects to the dead in Slaves' Hall. If those who saw her had thought to examine her face, they might have known her-the daughter of Lord Peace had the best-known face in King's Hill. But the essence of disguise, Angel had always said, is to avoid close examination. The clothing, the walk, the dirt, the coarseness kept them from noticing her at all.

The doorkeeper wasn't there. He rarely was, and would have caused her no problem if he had been. He was almost blind.

She wandered among the shelves of living heads. She had spent many hours here, and knew most of the faces, had talked to many of them. Long-dead ministers of long-dead kings, they had once wielded vast power or influenced monarchs or served as the King's voice in hundreds of foreign courts. As usual, most of the eyes were closed, since few of the dead took much pleasure in living company. Instead they dreamed and remembered, remembered and dreamed, calling up with perfect clarity all that they had ever seen and felt in their lives. Only a few of them watched her pass; even if one of them had been able to muster up some curiosity, he could not have turned his head to see where she would go.

Father would not be here, of course, not upstairs among the favorites. It would be too soon for that-his head had to be trained and broken to the King's will first. So Patience made her way to the place under the stairs where a wooden louver in the heating vent was missing.

The weather was warm enough that none of the ovens was alight; the air was cool in the stone passageway. She climbed downward into the darkness. At the bottom she turned-left?-yes, left, and crawled until she came to a wooden grating on the floor. It was dark under her. They had not yet started on Father, then.

So she lay near the grating, absolutely still, listening to the sounds that tunneled through the heating system.

There were places all over Slaves' Hall where conversations could be heard distinctly in these passages. A good part of Patience's self-education in politics had taken place here, as she listened to the cleverest ministers and ambassadors pry for information from the dead or conspire for power with the living.

To her surprise, they did come to Slaves' Hall looking for her-she heard the soldiers ask the gatekeeper and search the public floors. But they were searching in a desultory way, not because they expected to find her here but because they had been told to search everywhere.

Good. They had lost her in King's Wood and had no idea where she had gone from there.

Later, the headkeeper came into the cellar room, lit the bright oil lamps, and began to work on her father.

She had heard and seen the process often enough before. It took less than an hour to link the headworms with the nerves in her father's spine. She watched coldly as her father's face sometimes writhed in agony, for most nerves caused pain when they were awakened by the headworms. Finally, though, the headkeeper dismissed his apprentices. The physical process was finished.

His neck bones were attached to a rack, his windpipe was attached to the breath bladder, and his neck was just touching the gel that sustained the headworms that clung to his nerves and the gools that sent tendrils through his blood vessels. They would keep his head alive, his memories intact, for the next thousand years-or until a King grew tired of him and had his head thrown out.

The headkeeper talked to him then, asking him questions.

He taught the headworms by dripping certain chemicals into the canister when Lord Peace's answers were forthright, and other chemicals when he hesitated or seemed agitated. The headworms quickly learned which of the head's nerves caused pleasure and which caused suffering.

In a short time they were ready, and needed no more stimulation from the headkeeper. Now the headworms would be agitated by the increased tension of resistance, of lying. Then they in turn would stimulate other nerves, so the head felt extremes of urgent needs-the bowel or bladder full, the belly famished, the throat dry with thirst, the nerves of sexual pleasure on the edge of orgasm but never quite there. When the head answered truthfully, it got some measure of relief. When it lied, the longings increased until they were agony. Isolated from their bodies, heads never had much stamina, and their will was usually broken in a single night, however much they might resist.

Patience calmed herself, prepared herself to listen to her father endure much before the worms broke him.

And at first it seemed his resistance might be long and painful. Then to her surprise he began to whine. It was a sound she had never heard before, and she thought she knew all his voices.

"No matter what I do," he said. "You can always make it worse and worse."

"That's right," said the headkeeper. "The worms will find the things you most long for, and you'll never be satisfied until you learn to speak the truth."

"Ask me again. Ask me anything."

They did, and he told them. No resistance at all.

Intimate things, terrible things, secrets of state, secrets of his own body. Patience listened in disgust. She had been prepared for her father's pain, but not for his quick capitulation.

They thought he was resisting them when he said he didn't know where Patience was. But Patience knew that he had held nothing back. Perhaps he had known he would break this easily-perhaps that's why he had prepared so well for her escape. He must have known his own weakness, though he concealed it from everyone else until now.

"I knew that you'd ask me, and so I made sure I didn't know. I told Angel a year ago to make plans with her, and tell me nothing of them. Then when I felt death was coming on, I sent Angel away-I knew they'd kill her bodyguard first. Patience is on her own until she can meet him. But Angel and I trained my daughter carefully, gentlemen. She speaks every language that I speak, she is a more accomplished assassin than Angel himself, and she is cleverer by far than any adviser to the king.

You will never catch her. She's probably gone already."

The headkeeper finally believed him. "We'll tell the King you're ready now."

"Will he come and talk to me?" asked the head.

"If he wants to. But no one else ever will. With the things you know, there's no chance he'll put you in a public room. Who knows? Maybe he'll install you in his private chambers." The headkeeper laughed. "You can watch every intimate moment of the King's life, and he can get your advice whenever he wants it. There is precedent, you know. Your grandfather-"

"My grandfather was a twisted wreck. King Omc is not."

"You hope," said the headkeeper.

"King Oruc is a great Heptarch."