David Farland: Chaosbound

Instead, he dropped to one knee and just squatted, gathering his breath.

“Aaath Ulber,” Wulfgaard whispered. “Are you hurt?”

Aaath Ulber checked himself visually; he was drenched in blood. He wiped it from his eyes, felt it running down his arms and face like sweat. At first he thought that it was all wyrmling blood, but then he noticed a pain in his right bicep. A wyrmling had caught him with a meat hook. There were smaller slashes on his chest, scoring through his leather jerkin, and scrapes on his face and knuckles. He had enough endowments of stamina to withstand such wounds, and he would heal from them by sunset, if all went well.

“I’m good enough,” he said, as memories washed over him. He recalled the threats made against his wife and family, and his stomach knotted. Beyond that, everything was vague—charging through tunnels lit by glow worms, the sound of screams, wyrmlings dying at his hands by the thousands, mothers and children with heads cleaved by the ax, babes dashed against the floor. “I am well,” he said in despair. “I am well.”

His muscles were quivering, trembling. He turned and glanced at Wulfgaard. A warrior named Anya stood at his back. Both were covered in gore.

Behind them the passage was choked with bloody bodies, wyrmlings bathed in red, many of them still twitching or flailing their legs.

“Where are the rest of our troops?” Aaath Ulber asked.

Wulfgaard ducked his head, peered at the ground, and whispered, “They now ride in the Great Hunt, may their spears be sharp and their aim be true.”

“We need to stop and eat,” Anya begged Aaath Ulber. “You were the one who said that we should eat and rest every hour or two.”

Aaath Ulber grunted. He felt weak and wasted. He’d never imagined a hunger that ran so deep. A runelord can fight for hours on end, but not without food. It takes energy, and already Aaath Ulber’s fat stores were depleted.

Anya threw off her pack and pulled out some bread, roast chicken, and blueberries. It would take only a minute in real time for them to eat, to catch their breath. But in that minute the wyrmlings would have some time to regroup.

“How long was I out?” Aaath Ulber asked. “How long have we been fighting?”

“Five hours, I think,” Anya said.

“Six, by my guess,” Wulfgaard answered.

Time was a relative thing for them. Each had a different mix of endowments, and each had his own sense for the passage of time. Down here in the wyrmling hole, there was no sun to measure time by, only wild guesses.

Aaath Ulber had never been trapped in a berserker’s rage for more than half an hour. But this time he had been gone for hours?

I am undone, Aaath Ulber thought. Taking that endowment of will was unwise.

Yet he could not undo the damage.

It was too long to have gone without eating, and so the warriors fed.

“Where have we been?” Aaath Ulber asked.

“Endless warrens,” Wulfgaard said. “There are several tunnels that run parallel to one another. Most of them house workers. We found the breeding cavern. You were right, there were thousands of wyrmlings in it, but they were not . . . properly attired for battle.”

Aaath Ulber had heard the rumors of course—naked wyrmlings driven mindless with lust. But no human had ever really witnessed such a thing. The tales all came from captured wyrmlings.

Aaath Ulber only vaguely recalled the sight—wyrmlings by the hundreds, naked and wrapped in one another’s arms and legs, mindless in their breeding frenzy.

“Our main goal,” he said, “should be to find their Dedicates.”

After the Dedicates were secure, he didn’t care what happened to the rest of the wyrmlings. He’d try to set fire traps, let the smoke smother the wyrmlings in the chambers above.

“They can’t be far,” Wulfgaard reasoned. “You can’t hide a quarter of a million people down here.”

Aaath Ulber agreed.

So they wolfed down their food and chugged their ale. No wyrmling dared to attack. The creatures were running up the tunnels, struggling to escape. They screamed and trampled one another, leaving dozens injured and dead in their wake.

It made for less work for Aaath Ulber.

Inside five minutes as Aaath Ulber’s body measured time, he finished feeding. The others were not done yet, and he studied them. They were moving slower than he.

The folks in Ox Port know of our plight, Aaath Ulber realized. They’re vectoring endowments of metabolism to me. I’m moving faster than my companions.

How much faster? he wondered. Twice as fast? No, he didn’t feel that he was moving that much faster. But it seemed that he had more endowments of metabolism than the others, five or ten more.

He glanced at a fallen wyrmling woman lying nearby. Her tunic had been slashed in the back, revealing her pale skin. A pair of scars showed on her back.

Aaath Ulber pulled at the fabric, ripping it, to display the scars better. Runes of metabolism had been burned into her flesh.

“All of them have endowments,” Anya said, “even the babes.”

Aaath Ulber took out a stone and began to sharpen the spikes on his war hammer, expertly pulling the oilstone at an angle.

He pondered the implications of wyrmling babes and mothers taking endowments of metabolism. An entire wyrmling hive living at three times the speed of a normal man? What would it lead to?

He imagined miners hauling ore from the ground at three times the normal rate, and smiths hammering out blades. He imagined babes growing at three times the normal speed, while mothers spawned two or three wyrmlings in a single season.

The implications were enormous. They’ll outwork us, outbreed us. They’ll create . . . a society that will overrun ours.

What had Gaborn said? “Their armies will sweep through the heavens like autumn lightning?”

And it would cost the wyrmlings virtually nothing. One does not have to feed a Dedicate who has given an endowment of metabolism. One does not have to give him drink or worry about his escape. Such folk simply fall into a magic slumber until the day when their master dies.

It is said that those who give endowments of metabolism still breathe, but it happens so slowly that Aaath Ulber had never seen it. It is said that their blood still flows. But their rest is like hibernation, except that their sleep is deeper than that of any bear.

It took nothing to maintain such folk. All that you had to do was to make sure that the rats didn’t gnaw at their flesh. A few rat terriers in the Dedicates’ Keep handled the job.

The monumental horror of the wyrmlings’ scheme struck him.

The only way that such a society could exist was if the wyrmlings continued to take endowments from the humans.

They’ll take metabolism from us all, Aaath Ulber realized. That’s what they’re doing here on Internook: taking endowments as fast as their facilitators are able. They each have two endowments now, but in a week they’ll each have three, then four or five. Where does it all stop? When the wyrmling cows are dropping nine of their calves a year, or ten?

In a month, he realized, we could reach that point. In three months, the wyrmlings could each have fifty endowments or more.

His people would not be able to compete against such monsters. There would be no war—not even a hope of war—not if a wyrmling child matured to adulthood in a single year and spawned a dozen more of its kind!

He looked to Anya and Wulfgaard in alarm, speechless.

“Yes,” Wulfgaard said. “We see it, too. We found their armory, where they carve armor from bones. They use reaver horns to make their awls. The children were making armor for themselves, the women too. The whole wyrmling nation is preparing for war.”