In the House of the Worm Read Free

him. He glanced down and saw his own face looking up, foolish and shaken, from the cold obsidian.
    The Meatbringer studied Caralee with approval. “Share my bed tonight,” he said suddenly, as blunt as any torch-tender. The Meatbringer had no shame. Annelyn looked up again, shocked. Caralee wore blue-and-spidergray, even as he did; clearly they were together. And he had given her the cup of the mating-worms!
    She looked at Annelyn briefly, then seemingly dismissed him with a toss of her bright curls, turning toward the Meatbringer. “Yes,” she said, strange excitement in her voice. Then they went off together onto the vast black mirror of the dance floor to whirl and writhe and slide together in the intricate ancient patterns of the yaga-la-hai .
    “He has humiliated us,” Annelyn said furiously to Riess and Vermyllar as he watched the Meatbringer clumsily parody Caralee's graceful moves.
    “We should go to the Manworm,” Vermyllar suggested.
    Riess said nothing, but his round face was screwed up in agitation as he reached for another spiced spider.
    “No,” Annelyn said. Beyond the sea of wriggling dancers in all their gorgeous colors, Groff had returned the Manworm to his sand pit. Squat torch-tenders were moving around the fringes of the chamber, snuffing two flames of every three. Soon the obsidian grew clouded by darkness, and the bright reflections faded to red streaks on the glass. In shadowed corners, a few bold couples had already commenced the unmasking-of-the-bodies; others soon would follow their example. Annelyn had planned to unmask Caralee. Now he was alone.
    “Why not?” Vermyllar was demanding. “You heard him. He called me an animal, and I am the grandson of a man who might have been Manworm."
    Annelyn waved him quiet. “You will have your revenge,” he said. “But my way, my way.” His deep blue eyes stared across the chamber. The Meatbringer was leading Caralee off toward a corner. “My way,” he repeated. Then: “Come.” And he led them from the room.
    * * * *
    They met the next morning, early, amid the dust and fading tapestries of the seldom-used Undertunnel, which connected most of the main burrows of the yaga-la-hai before curving away on its long descent into infinity. Annelyn was the first to arrive. He was dressed all in shiny-smooth black, with a hood of the same color to hide his bright hair. His only concession to vanity was a gold theta, embroidered on his breast. A belt of black rope held both rapier and stiletto.
    Riess soon materialized, in a tight-fitting shirt of mail and leather and a heavy cloak of spidergray. He and Annelyn sat together on a stone floor across from a black mouth that belched hot, moist air at them through a rusty grid. Light, such as there was, came from scattered torches set in bronze hands on the walls, and from the windows—narrow slits in the ceiling, twenty feet above their heads—that leaked a dim red radiance. The windows were set ten feet apart all along the Undertunnel, until it began to sink. Once, as a boy, Annelyn had piled junk high in the middle of a burrow and climbed to look out, but there had been nothing to see—the glass, even as the stone of the walls, was thicker than a man is tall. It was fortunate that any light got through.
    Vermyllar was late. Annelyn sat cross-legged, his eyes on the hanging tapestries whose images had all turned to mottled gray. Riess was very excited. He was talking about imaginative tortures they could inflict on the Meatbringer. “When we catch him, we should hang him upside down by running cords through his ankles,” the stout youth suggested. “Then we can buy a pot of bloodworms from the surgeon-priests and set them all over his body to drink him dry."
    Annelyn let him prattle, and finally Vermyllar appeared, wearing black and gray and carrying a torch and a long dagger. The other two sprang up to greet him.
    “I should not have come,” Vermyllar said. His face was very drawn, but he seemed