Orson Card - Wyrms

"Sit and brood? Feel his fingers close in on your heart?"

Sken piped up from the bed. "If I can bathe every day, you can go down and play Kalika."

"Sken is right, you know. We're here pretending to be pleasure-seekers. We therefore must seek some pleasure.

Whether it pleases us or not."

"Visit the whores for me. Angel. Do double duty."

But she left the window and walked to the mirror. Her hair was still cropped short, and deeply marred by the surgery. Still, the stubble was now a good two centimeters long. "Angel," she said, "cut the rest off, will you?

To this length."

"It's not your most attractive style," said Angel.

"I may need to shed my wig somewhere along the way. Be a good fellow." She smiled flirtatiously. Since Angel was the one who taught her how to smile that way, she knew he would see it as a joke. And, indeed, he smiled. A trifle late, though. He was preoccupied. It was harder for them to pretend to be calm when they were here in Cranning, with Unwyrm's lair somewhere above them.

Angel took the shears from his trunk and began to cut.

It gave her a severe look, to have her hair almost gone.

"Where is the nearest tunnel from here?" asked Patience.

"Reck says we'd be insane to try the tunnels from here. It would take three times as long, and there are robbers who live in the shallow caves."

"I didn't ask if we should use the tunnels, I asked where the nearest tunnel entrance was."

Angel sighed. "There's probably one in the back of this place. Somewhere. Along this cliff, though, the houses are built half on top of each other. Who knows which ones touch the mountain face at a point where a tunnel comes out?"

"If I could once step inside a tunnel, I'd know where he is. I have the geblings' memory of the labyrinth. I'd have a sense of where we're going, then."

"And what's to stop him from forcing you to go through the tunnels? He can keep you safe enough, Lady Patience, but we'll have no protection. I imagine he'd be just as glad to have us all dead somewhere in the tunnels, and bring you safe and sound-and alone-to meet him."

"If I want to step into a tunnel for a moment, Angel, I don't see why I can't do it."

"Do you want to?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Doyow want to?"

Or was the idea coming to her from Unwyrm? She frowned into the mirror. "Are you trying to make me doubt everything?" she asked.

"I just want to make sure you're doing what's best."

Patience kept silent. Everyone seemed so eager to give her advice. As if the presence of Unwyrm's urging in her mind made her incapable of making decisions on her own. Or was her resentfulness coming from Unwyrm, in his effort to separate her from her companions? She wondered if she could trust her own judgment. It would be so comfortable to concentrate on keeping Unwyrm at bay, while letting Angel lead her up the mountain. Angel could keep her safe. Perhaps she should have been taking his advice all along. She thought about Will and Reck and Ruin in the next room, and wondered if she had been wise to take the road through Tinker's Wood after all.

They were just an added complication. Angel was enough, with Sken to help them where brute strength was needed.

Reck and Ruin were too unpredictable-when had human and gebling interests ever coincided? And Will-what insanity, his religion. With Patience as deity, a love goddess, a sacrifice; that morning on the boat was a dream, a deception. How could she go up the mountain with these strange people tagging along? Who knew what they might do?

She almost suggested to Angel that they ought to leave now, without telling the gebling king, just disappear into the crowds. As soon as she was far enough from Reck and Ruin, Unwyrm would repel them from Cranning again; they could never follow her.

But she felt uneasy about that. A fleeting memory of lips on her cheeks, fingers touching her body. Am I such an adolescent, to be held by such meaningless stirring in the blood? But it held her. And something else, too: the memory of being the gebling king herself. She felt the pressure of that, too, the sense that Cranning was herself, that all the millions of geblings who lived their busy lives here were her responsibility, hers to protect, hers to command. She remembered clearly that she had ruled here once, when only a few thousand geblings inhabited the place. She couldn't cast aside that responsibility, not easily, anyway. So she said nothing.

Angel set aside the shears. "Lovely," he said.

"You look like a prisoner just getting out of Glad Hell," said Sken.

"Thank you," said Patience. "I find the style becoming, myself." She put on her wig and became a woman again. "What's the game of the house?"

"Actually, this is more of a show house." Angel smoothed the back of her hair. "There's a theatre here, with a company of gaunts. But they do have worm-and- slither fights, and the betting gets quite intense sometimes."

"I've never actually seen a worm-and-slither," she said.

"Not pretty," said Sken.

"We ought to bet something, or they'll think we aren't gamblers, and they'll worry about whether we're worth keeping around." Angel tossed a heavy purse into the air and caught it. Sken's gaze never left the bag.

"Still. The show sounds better. What is it?"

"I don't know. In this place, probably a scat show."

"Maybe we can look for a show somewhere else."

Angel frowned. "If you want theatre, there are better places than Freetown."

"I'm here on business," said Patience. "So I don't have much choice."

A knock on the door. Will stuck his head in. "We're ready when you are."

"We're ready now," Angel answered.

There was a fair-sized crowd in the worm-and-slither room. Angel led them to the pens first, to size up the evening's competitors. The slithers all clung to the front of their glass cases, colors shifting like ribbons inside them, new arms and legs growing in various directions as others retreated. They weren't more than five centimeters across. "I thought they'd be bigger," said Patience.

"They will be, during the fight," said Sken. "They starve them down to low weight for transportation. Slithers are all pretty much the same, anyway. What matters is the worms."

The worms were kept in swarms, as many as a dozen to a case. They drifted slowly and aimlessly through the water. Patience quickly lost interest in them and looked around the gaming room.

It was strange to see how easily humans and geblings intermingled here. There was no sense of separation, no hint of caste. There were even a few dwelfs who were not servants, and gaunts who might not have been prostitutes, though it was hard to tell about that. Gaunts wouldn't do very well in a game of chance-they'd take too many bad bets. Surely the people here weren't so unsporting as to steal from creatures with no resistance.

Everyone was beautiful, or at least wanted to seem so.

Dozens of thick women and paunchy men wore clothing tailored to emphasize this sign of wealth; jowls and chins abounded. Brocades tumbled from padded shoulders; velvets flowed from uncontainable hips. But the gaunts who stood here and there among the crowd made a mockery of human attempts at beauty. The human ideal was massive and strong for men, rounded and fertile for women; good breeding stock, it was called, and it was high praise. But men and women both had a way of thumping when they walked, as if beneath their clothes they wore bronze plate. The gaunts, on the other hand, seemed to glide. Not ostentatiously, the way a dancer might do it, isolating the legs from the trunk, so that the head stayed on an even, unmoving horizontal plane. Rather they moved like a ripple in the earth itself, as if they grew out of the floor like the graceful, purposeful pseudopodia of the slithers in their cages.