J. King: Onslaught

"You're back," he said heavily. "I knew you were in there, alive despite all the death."

She nodded wretchedly and, between the bugs, blurted, "It has been… a prison… Phage is the worst part of me… holding the best part captive."

Kamahl watched the swarm emerge, insect by insect. "Where did all this come from, all this blackness?"

She couldn't answer, so choked on roaches. The awful cascade eventually slowed and ceased. The last of the evil scuttled from Jeska's mouth, and she hunched on the ground like a sick dog.

"Sister…" Shaking his head, Kamahl lifted Jeska in a gentle embrace.

"Stonebrow was here… He went to find you…" She began to sob. "My stomach… The old wound."

Drawing back, Kamahl saw it-the jagged laceration. Though once stitched together by Braids's dark magic, the wound had broken open again. Jeska was as near death now as on the day that Kamahl had abandoned her. "We have to find a healer." Kamahl scanned his troops, hoping to see a druid. "Perhaps my axe…" His hand strayed to his belt, but then he remembered dropping the axe to pick up the Mirari sword.

"Where is your axe?" Jeska asked wearily.

"I don't know," Kamahl muttered. He glanced around the battlefield. A rebel impulse cried out for him to go find it. "It doesn't matter. I'm not leaving you."

"We need your axe," Jeska said. "Not just to heal me. To fight those." She pointed toward the spinning cloud.

"Fight beetles with an axe?"

"Not beetles. Not any longer."

From the convulsing swarm, individual bugs were dropping. They thwacked the ground, one after another, like hunks of meat. Their shells split and oozed, and the flesh within expanded. Beetles stretched into long pills of muscle. They riled, becoming pupae, as if the adult beasts were reverting to more primitive forms. Pupae in turn elongated into black worms, and they too grew. The length of a man, then a sapling, then a tree, soon they were not just worms, but wurms, dwarfing even the giant serpents.

Each of those black things became as wide around as a house and a league long. Their heads were masses of fleshy spikes, and their mouths were wide, fangy things for eating away the world. Already two score such creatures filled the nightmare lands, and every moment, more beetles crashed to the ground and began to transform.

"What are they?" cried Kamahl in astonishment.

Jeska's eyes, so briefly bright with hope, reflected the dark tangle of monsters. "They are my worst nightmare. They are the folk that Phage-that I-have killed: one wurm for each murder. Deathwurms."

The first such beast lifted its head above the fields of the dead. The green army quailed before it. Like a cobra stretching before it struck, the deathwurm bobbed for a moment, then lunged, mouth gaping.

It grabbed the head of a giant serpent. Teeth crunched, piercing the brain pan.

The snake writhed, its body lashing and crushing nearby warriors.

The deathwurm gulped, peristalsis dragging the serpent deeper into its throat. The creature did not die. Its spasms continued as it descended. The sides of the wurm bulged, showing the blind contours of the snake's head. With a final lurching gulp, the wurm swallowed the shuddering tail.

Another wurm lunged. It caught a rhino in its vicious mouth, and the pachyderm disappeared. The wurm withdrew, swallowing, and more of its kind reared up to feast.

The allied legions withdrew. They had stood in the face of shape shifters, crabmen, jellyfish, and even their worst nightmares, but these wurms…

Kamahl bowed, scooping Jeska in his one good arm. His wounded arm hung useless at his side, but he had the strength to lift his sister. She was as light as a fallen sparrow. Cradling her to his chest, Kamahl staggered up.

The motion caught the eye of a deathwurm. It rose, swaying hypnotically. Its mouth edged open, and saliva the color of ink slipped from between its teeth.

Kamahl turned and ran across the killing field. Clambering over the corpse of a gigantipithicus, Kamahl rushed amid the still jittering parts of a zombie platoon.

Air whistled. The wurm was lunging for them.

"Hang on!" Kamahl shouted. He pulled Jeska all the tighter to him, and she clung to his neck. His eyes were pinned to the corpse of a giant centaur just ahead. If only he could reach it A blast of grave breath plumed over them.

Kamahl leapt. He and Jeska barely cleared the massive corpse, tumbling over it. They landed in a sprawl on the ground just beyond.

The deathwurm's mouth smashed down around the giant centaur. Its teeth bit like shovels into the ground. A snout of rubbery black flesh impacted beside Kamahl's leg. The thing's bubble eyes stared hungrily at him. Jaw muscles flexed, and teeth descended through the ground, scooping up tons of soil. A strange hiss began around the massive head, and dust fled in under it. As the wurm lifted its head, the suction only grew stronger. Winds raced into the hole it had bitten.

The wurm had chomped through the very fabric of the nightmare lands. It had left a sucking pit. Within lay nothingness.

Kamahl hunkered down, holding himself against the ravenous winds. Jeska clung to him though her hands were growing weak. Clutching the ground, Kamahl waited for the wind to abate.

A rising shadow told him he could wait no longer. Another wurm rose.

Still holding his sister, Kamahl crawled away from the sucking hole. Once he had gotten beyond the worst winds, he clambered to his feet and ran.

Kamahl dodged beside a shorn rhino just before a deathwurm struck and ate it. A gaping hole opened where it had been, and air sucked down through it. Kamahl kept his feet, running ahead.

The whistling sound came again. It rose in pitch, and Kamahl leaped the other way. With a profound concussion, the deathwurm smashed against the corpses just beside Kamahl.

He only ran. Holes opened across the ground, dragging bodies into them. Another wurm struck, and another, and Kamahl evaded each by a narrower margin.

A hundred more running steps and he would be beyond the nightmare lands, where perhaps he could fall and rest… But even then, Jeska would die.

He couldn't think of that now. He could only run.

All around him, deathwurms crashed.

Braids crowed in mad delight. "Death! Carnage! Destruction!" She turned a back flip atop the caravan. "Amazing! Incredible! Inescapable!"

She was right. A deathwurm crashed down atop a nearby wagon, gobbling up the conveyance and the noble within.

"Who wants to take odds on survival?" Braids shouted, bounding down onto the sands. She leaped along the curve of caravans as more deathwurms snatched up her patrons. "I'll give any of you fifty to one against. If you survive, you'll be rich. If not, it won't matter!"

It was an excellent wager, but no one seemed interested. The nobles were scampering everywhere. Folk who had not taken a single step this whole trip now took hundreds. No longer did they cower in their wagons.

They ran.

They fell.

They died.

Braids shook her head in a paroxysm of sadness. All that money lost. If only they had taken the bet!

"Where are you going? This is the payoff! This is what you came for! You wanted death! I give you death!" Braids grew angrier and angrier as she ran beside the wagons, overturned and half-chewed, spilling bodies both living and dead. Didn't they understand? This had ceased to be mere entertainment. This was art. "So few people appreciate art."

Braids did. She gave up on her patrons-after all, she'd gotten enough money out of them. Instead, she turned to the wurms and watched as they ate.

"Beautiful!"

Their flesh was like hers, their appetites-these were friends, things she understood. Surely, they understood her.

One of the huge beasts lunged down to snatched a man beside her. Braids took the opportunity to leap onto its head. While the wurm munched, she settled in, grasping its fleshy spikes. She would ride the wurm right through this war. She only hoped its appetite would hold.