Arc 9: Chapter 4: Lodge of the Wurm |
We celebrated, as always, at the Candrian’s.
It lay in the Bow Quarter, so far northwest of the mesa that the Tower of Blades — one of the two great spires forming the nexus’s of the city’s walls — cast a shadow over it through most of the day. There were many places in Rot Voraag that saw little daylight, which was well enough, for there were also many inhabitants of the Exalted’s city who abhorred it.
Ekasne and I met the others on the roof, where they’d already gathered beneath the pavilion. Six figures greeted us, four men and two women, all but one of them having already claimed seats at the round table. Lanterns were lit on the pavilion’s posts to chase away the premature night already shadowing the streets.
“There they are! Fashionably late and in the finest fashion, as always.” The one member of the sextet who’d been standing on our arrival spread his arms out wide, letting the wingish sleeves of his luxurious robes stretch out, a saffron and madder eagle. He was both tall and rotund, his blueish skin hairless and smooth as a newborn babes, a slyly smiling mask of alchemist’s gold affixed to his bald head.
“Candrian.” I greeted him, then noticed that they’d already begun pouring the wine. “You started without us!”
The owner of the wine bar and brothel with which he shared a name inclined his head. Though the faint smile on his mask never changed, the expression conveyed apology. “I did try to stop them, madam, but you know how they get.”
“Impatient,” one of the others drawled, this one a rake with a shock of brown hair streaked with white, an old brand mark marring the flesh beneath his left eye. Despite the frost in his hair, he wasn’t an old man, and possessed a wiry build and nervous energy. “You were taking forever! What, did you do a victory lap around the mesa before coming here?”
He’d already sampled the Candrian’s wine, and perhaps more than sampled it. A stunning, ivory-skinned creature clad all in thin white silks leaned against him, massaging his shoulders.
“The sun hasn’t gone down yet,” Ekasne admonished him. “And we only just left the Akropolis. I had to have everything formalized with the court. There were forms, questions, an inscribing ceremony...”
They were playing dice. Tej scowled, scratching at his pockmarked cheek and glaring at the game like he meant to go at it with a cutter. He lifted his bitter eyes to the man sitting across from him, whose visage was shrouded all in robes the hue of wasteland dust. “Four in five is bad luck, but nine in nine is robbery. If you’re using your Spark, Did…”
“He wouldn’t dare,” I said as I began to round the table. “Didikas knows the Lodge’s rules.”
The mage gave me a nod. Beneath the shadow of his brown robes and hood, his tanned face was ravaged by desert winds and almost skeletally thin.
The one massaging Tej’s shoulders gave me a shy smile. Her hair was near white as her skin, long and silk-fine, framing a narrow, almost maternal visage. White too were the feathered wings emerging from her back, given freedom by the cut of her dress.
“We heard about what happened at the Exalted’s court,” the winged woman said in a kind voice. “Well done, you two.”
Ekasne sighed. “I didn’t do anything, Arlee. It was all Shyora, as always.”
The Candrian clucked his tongue. “You undersell yourself, as always, dear Ekasne! We are a city of craftsmen, and you are a master of yours. Merchants like us merely know how to make others see your art as we see it.”
Ekasne bowed to him. “You humble me, Candrian.”
A wisp thin woman with ghostly silver hair sat on the other side of Tej, picking at her black nails with a knife. Though she’d long since ceased resembling her twin brother, she retained a resemblance in manner at least, even in her slouching posture. She watched everything with black eyes heavily contrasted to her pallid skin and hair. Her body was wrapped in black silk, ragged strips of the material obscuring the lower half of her face to hide her disfigurements.
The masked woman greeted me with a flick of her colorless eyes before returning to her grooming. Pazé did not tend toward friendly greetings.
The final member of the group stood and faced Ekasne as she drew near the table. It was like watching a stormcloud crest a horizon or a leviathan break the surface of a sea. He stood most of seven feet tall, a giant of a man with rough skin blistered by desert sun and covered in battle scars, many of them blemishes like from burns or acid. Iron braids bound his ash-brown hair, which was shaved on the sides to display intricate tattoos in ink the color of dry blood. Blood-red too were his eyes, both shadowed by a heavy brow, his mouth a thin slash of grim confidence.
The Eusite did not wear his armor that evening, but even in his worn tunic and oft-stitched leggings he struck an intimidating figure, broad-shouldered and scarred as he was. I watched him step close to Ekasne and tilt her face up, using one hand to take her chin and the other to brush her veils aside. We’d stopped at her parlor on the way back, doffing our courtly attire, so she only wore two layers of cloth over her deadly eyes then.
The barbarian kept those hidden, revealing only the gorgon’s full mouth and elegant nose, the faint green tint of her sun-starved skin. He kissed her, long and tenderly, as the rest of the Lodge politely averted their eyes. I did not avert mine. A full blush darkened Ekasne’s face as the scarred man drew back and smiled down at her, his heavy hand still holding her delicate chin.
“Well done, fríðr naðra,” he said.
Some of Ekasne’s hair had slipped free of her headdress, the multi-colored serpents exploring the man’s features and rewarding him with many lesser kisses from their flicking tongues. Her reply was breathless. “Thank you, Fell.”
The Candrian pulled my attention away from the couple, placing his hands on my shoulders in a fatherly gesture. “You are greatly missed, my dear,” he told me in a warm voice. “When will you come back and work for me, hm? I have many customers who ask after you.”
Peeling my eyes from the outworlder and the glyptis, I said, “You know I am very busy these days.”
“Plots and schemes, is it?” The Candrian snorted, the sound emerging tinny and strange through his mask. “Nothing changes, does it, eh Lady Wurmwing?”
I did not have my wings then, having returned to my human guise after leaving the Exalted’s court. My eyes were once more an uncommon but not-supernatural violet-black, my wings, tail, and horns compacted into my human shape, my hair closer to sable than obsidian.
The Candrian shook his head, his tone becoming imploring. “I would make you the brothel’s madam! No patron would dare ever lay an unkind hand on any of my girls or boys again, were you at my right side.”
The offer surprised me, and it took a moment to muster a response. It was tempting — the Candrian owned a particularly lucrative business, catering to many of the city’s influential citizenry. While I held a stake in his establishment, and many others of a seedier flavor, I was by and large a silent partner in all of them.
But I’d begun at the Candrian’s, just another nameless bedfellow for the guilders and dignitaries who socialized in its lower levels and took their pleasures in its silken bedrooms.
Covering my surprise I asked, “Have there been unkind hands, Candrian?”
The masked face went still, the hands on my shoulders losing a touch of casualness. The Candrian was near as tall as Fell, but his size had a softness to it, an elegance carried by liquid movements and inviting grace. He was good at hiding his emotions, even ignoring that plate of alchemical gold over his skull, but I sensed his unease.
“We will speak of it later,” he said smoothly. “I think the others are getting impatient.”
Fell and Ekasne exchanged words in intimate voices too low for the rest of us to hear, then moved arm-in-arm to the table. I took my seat as well, while the Candrian, always the dutiful host, remained standing. The round table was surrounded by a ring of benches, all padded with soft cushions and headrests, practically love seats. Indeed, they were often used for that very purpose.
We drank wine, spoke, made fun of Ekasne and lauded her in equal measure. By the time true night had settled over the wastes, the sculptress had enough wine in her to not mind any of it. She’d slipped her feet free of her buskins and was allowing Fell to massage them, working out the soreness from a long day marching to the highest heights of the city and back again. Her living hair mostly ran free from her veils, which she’d loosened to only shadow her eyes and leave the rest of her face free. The serpents hissed and tasted the air in a slow, hypnotizing dance as the glyptis relaxed. She still seemed shocked at the day’s events, at the great change her life had just experienced.
The boys played dice and argued. Ekasne told an attentive Fell about our day, and Arlee grew bored of Tej’s complaints and moved to his sister, letting the other woman put an arm around her as she coyly toyed with the mask of black silk hiding the ghoul’s ruined jaws.
The Candrian left us to our own devices, and then it was just the Lodge.
We seven were a motley crew. Whores and mercenaries, heretics and artists, rough-hewn misfits all. None of us was leader or master of the group, and each provided some dubious profession to the whole. The Guilds had great power, standing above nearly all save the Exalted himself, but they were jealous of their secrets and rarely took new members outside their own inbred spheres.
In contrast, there were scores of Lodges in Rot Voraag, smaller coteries who offered their services to those willing to bid on them. Some were uniform in composition, while others were more like ours, a collective of disparate skills working in tandem.
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If one did not have the backing of a Guild, then joining — or forming — a Lodge was the only way to be taken seriously by the city’s many factions. The largest of them were nations unto themselves, made up of the most powerful beings from realms tethered to the Exalted’s influence. An influence that did not touch just this world or even just the material plane in which it floated.
Most, however, were more like ours. The Lodge of the Wurm, we called ourselves, a private joke taken from the quaint name the denizens of the Bow Quarter had given me. They all knew what I was, and while Abgrûdai were hated and feared in the Exalted’s city as they are in all places, I was hardly the only monster roaming those benighted streets.
Or even the only one at that table.
“So you did see him?” Arlee asked Ekasne, drawing my attention back to the conversation. “You actually saw him?”
Ekasne shifted uncomfortably. “We did.”
Arlee’s opalescent eyes widened in devout glee. Like many within the walls of the city, she viewed the Exalted as a god-king in all but name. I knew she even prayed to him sometimes, when she thought no one was listening.
Tej lacked that devout tact. When Ekasne didn’t rush to elaborate, he let out an impatient grunt. “Well, don’t leave us in suspense! What was he like?”
“He was like…” Ekasne considered a moment, her lips pursing beneath her veils. “He was like… I don’t know. I barely remember him, I was so focused on the court. He wore yellow?”
Tej scoffed and jabbed a finger into the table’s surface. “He wore yellow? The Yellow King wore yellow, that’s all you remember?”
The gorgon’s hair hissed with her irritation, but stubborn Tej soldiered on. “You’re telling me that you went all the way up to the top of the mesa, into the court of the master of Rot Voraag itself, and you don’t remember what the blighted fucker himself looked like other than what color he was wearing?”
“Careful,” Arlee said with genuine fear in her glass-hued eyes. “He might be listening. He’s always listening. He’s in the clay.”
Tej laughed at the chimeric woman’s superstition. “To us? We’re nobodies!”
“Some of us are,” Pazé snickered, her words not quite muffled enough by the black silk over her lips to go unheard. Tej threw his sister a venomous look, but she ignored him.
“Ekasne is a full citizen now,” Didikas reminded them in his refined, sepulchral tones. “Both she and Shyora are now known to the court.”
He laced his long fingers together over the table and furrowed his hairless brow beneath the hood, as though the question were deeply philosophical. The pale lights at the centers of his eyes shifted to me, and I lifted my cup to sip wine.
“Why don’t you ask Shyora?” Ekasne said testily. “She was there too.”
When they all turned to me, I paused with my cup still held to my lips and narrowed my eyes as I thought back on that audience. The Exalted had not said a word, and yet his mere presence… It had not felt like standing before some petty king or warlord. More like looking upon the idol of some dread and forgotten god, aloof from mortal concerns, from time itself. He had been as the spires and the tombs of Rot Voraag, an edifice of the city more than a mere man who governed it.
A king-shaped hole. That’s what the Exalted seemed to me. A dark vessel through which something nameless stared out. Perhaps the cults devoted to their King of Kiln and Clay were onto something, after all.
But was that merely illusion, some clever amalgam of presence and spellcraft designed to impress and terrify his subjects?
I did not know. What I did know was that it made saliva flood my mouth, made my legs squirm with anticipation. The writhing mass of flesh and ethereal gasps on that dais had called to me, I could not deny it. Part of me, a self-destructive and starving part, had longed to hurl myself into that mound and become one with it. It had taken every ounce of my self control to remain composed while presenting Ekasne and her sculptures.
Knowing one’s nature and mastering it are two different things. I would need to be cautious of myself.
I said none of this to the Lodge. Instead, shrugging and sipping more wine I said, “He was… something.”
Tej let out a noise of disgust, while Pazé indulged in a muffled laugh. Arlee and Ekasne both smiled, Didikas sighed, and Fell continued to massage his lover’s feet.
“Hopefully it’s more than something, Shy.” Tej grumbled and took his own drink, glaring at the dice game he’d spent the whole night losing at. “I’d think you’d want to have a higher opinion of our Yellow King if you want to join his harem.”
Pazé turned a baleful look on her brother, while Arlee reached over and smacked him on the shoulder. “You can’t just go saying that!” The paphian hissed.
I sipped at my wine while Tej tried to decide whether he wanted to be indignant or ashamed and the others laughed at his boorishness. I let a telling silence linger. Soon enough, their companionable chuckles died and they were all staring at me.
“Wait.” Tej blinked. “You don’t mean…”
We’d been dancing around this topic long enough, and it seemed time to have it out. After all, today was a great change for all of us. This had been another reason why I refused the Candrian’s generous offer.
“It’s true,” I said while keeping my eyes fixed on the surface of the table. “You are right.”
Pazé narrowed her dark eyes, her brother’s mouth fell agape, while Arlee’s own opaline jewels widened. Didikas unclasped his fingers and fixed his attention on me more firmly. Even Fell, who was usually aloof to all business save his own, turned his crimson eyes on me.
Ekasne’s expression was hard to read with her veils, but her mouth pressed into a tighter line.
Ah, well. She knew I had a fondness for her, but they all knew what this city was. None of us lifted one another without climbing up ourselves.
“You all know I’ve spent the years since arriving in this city trying to reach that place.” I gestured in the general direction of the mesa. “You all also know what I am.” I smiled thinly. “Did you hear that I appeared at court in my true form?”
“You did what?!” Didikas placed a hand flat on the table. “Shyora, there were surely Orkaelin agents in the court, if they—”
I batted his concerns away with a wave of my hand. “They are only permitted to hunt in the Exalted’s city when one of my kind go on a rampage, or otherwise causes some degree of trouble.”
I had not forgotten my first day in the city, and my meeting with the Urrson. I was not the only succubus in the Exalted’s realm either, and there were plenty of other varieties of fiend, both subtle and overt. Some of them had been at court that very day.
“My reputation is known in the Bow Quarter and beyond," I continued. "Now certain rumors will be confirmed about Lady Wurmwing, and the court will know me. They will talk about me. They will have a face to attach to the stories.”
While my first few years in Rot Voraag had been spent largely incognito, mostly drifting between brothels and estates as either a paphian like Arlee or some other nondescript servant, I’d started planting the seeds of future influence early. All the Lodges of the lower city knew me, and knew my services were both consistent and valuable. I’d systematically untangled all their notions that every abyssal was a chaotic, feral beast who couldn’t be trusted to do anything short of destroying everything in its vicinity.
Of course, those prejudices were not entirely untrue — I was not tame, and I did hunger.
But I could be patient.
Of course, Didikas’s concerns were not without merit. I’d dodged the followers of the Iron God many times over the past decade, escaping from more than one close call. Not just with them, either. The rivalries between the Lodges were fierce and bloody, and I’d wet my claws early and often following my arrival.
Fell leaned forward and spoke in his smoke-stained voice. “It is not just the parasites clinging to the Clay King’s robes you need worry about, smádreki. You have enemies in lower places, as well.”
I smiled at the endearing term he used for me in his outlandish tongue — smádreki. Little dragon, just like he called Ekasne his pretty serpent.
Tej growled like an angry tombhound. “Karvessa. You know that hissing witch is going to be shedding her rancid scales over what happened today.”
Didikas nodded in agreement, once more lacing his fingers together. “You took her method and turned it from a tool of commerce into an art form, catering to the highest echelons of the city and making her seem an outdated brute all at once. She has friends in the Akropolis, and will have heard of it already.”
“She’s also still angry at Shyora for what happened on Hookstreet,” Pazé reminded all of us without looking up. Her voice held a distinct rasp. Not unlike Fell’s, though it held more hiss than gravel.
Ekasne shifted in discomfort. Then, as though seeking to regain that comfort, she slid over to lay against Fell even as Arlee did with Pazé. The Eusite threw an arm around her.
“Ekasne’s cousin is a brute,” Tej said as he lifted a handful of dice in his fist. “Thing about brutes is, they’re good at breaking your bones.”
“Or turning them to gravel,” Didikas agreed. “Karvessa has a low cunning and is not to be trifled with. But we all understood this when we began working to make Ekasne a citizen. What I am more concerned about is this ambition of yours, Shyora. What possible reason could you have to want to become one of our king’s playthings?”
Didikas was a scholar-magician of the old style, a Star Seeker, one of the disparate sons and daughters of Aghart, Nekhral, and Mediir — all the great and terrible sorcerous empires of the past ages. To him, power was as the Exalted held it — the power of knowledge and of absolute control over secretive forces that moved the machines of Creation, and even of those stranger powers that lay beyond the bounds of charted planes.
He could not conceive of the value of what I sought, and I saw the disgust hidden behind his wind-ravaged features. He’d traveled to the darkest and most maddening hinterlands of the world, even reached his hands beyond its boundaries. He wore the marks of his torments upon his ruined flesh, yet could not imagine why I would want to have my own flesh kneaded in the pursuit of power.
I’d never met a mortal who could stomach my demonic lusts, so instead I said, “There are only a handful of ways to gain the Exalted’s ear besides audiences in that hall where my voice is but one amongst hundreds. Our king heeds his chamberlain, the masters of the High Lodges, or the tantalizing whispers of his lovers. You did not see it, Didikas, but I did — they are not merely playthings. They are whispering between their moans, those wretches, and the Exalted heeds them. I think he might heed something else, too, but I did not get close enough to hear it.”
I thought of those crystals walls behind the Clay Throne. There’d been something looking out from them. Shaking my head I continued, saying, “I am a succubus, dear wizard. I seduce. Was something about that unclear?”
Didikas scowled, and I knew I’d both offended and disturbed him. Tej was nodding along, as though all of this made perfect sense, while his sister drummed her fingers in intense thought. Arlee only looked concerned for me, the downy heart.
Ekasne pressed closer to her barbarian, and as I’d done the whole night I watched them from the corner of my vision. Her serpents were coiling around his arm, slithering up his neck and exploring him while he played with them like he might a lock of ordinary hair. Such a dangerous game, to love a gorgon, and yet Eusite warriors were known to seek danger as fervently as some mortals seek God. But then, they’d found their god and worshipped it with their blood and rage.
“It is dangerous,” Fell said in his disarmingly quiet voice. “The Exalted’s concubines remind me of the sixty-six demon-wives of the Wrathlord, Fulfremman Cull. I fought in his warband for several campaigns, and once saw them devour one of their own during a victory orgy. One of them offered herself to me that same night. I did not wish to become a meal, and I was not the Wrathlord, so I refused.”
Hiding my mouth behind my interlocked fingers I said, “Then I know these demon-wives were no Abgrûdai. If they were, she would have eaten your heart for refusing her.”
Fell tossed his head back and laughed. “I thought she would! But I was still in my armor, and favored by Cull. But you are right, smádreki, she was not of your tribe.”
“Enough of this!” Arlee admonished all of us. “I do not like talk of the Exalted. He is not to be spoken of unless it is with prayer. Tonight is for Ekasne.”
“Skála!” Fell agreed with enthusiasm, raising his cup. The others followed suit in an impromptu toast, and the conversation turned away from the Dark Lord of Rot Voraag. Ekasne pressed closer to her barbarian, and I knew she had not liked the tinge of flirtation in my conversation with him.
The celebration went late, and everyone became drunk. Ekasne and Fell departed first, retreating to a private room to celebrate in their own way. Didikas kept watching me, and I did not know if his looks were studious, jealous, or some mixture of both. He’d always held a fascination for me, as many of his kind did. It was cousin to the gravity all mortals feel for the fog beneath deep cliffs, an echo of Urizen Taar’uk’s own self-destructive hunger for knowledge.
I was not immune to wine. It went to my head quite fast, something I’d been told was common for spirits who took flesh and walked the mortal world. I considered that I might let the sorcerer find his answers.
But there was much to do, and my attention kept straying. The Candrian had said he wanted to talk to me, and the night remained young.
And demons do not sleep.