Read Online In the House of the Worm by George R. R. Martin - Free Book Online Page B

pillars—eight of them, he saw now—were bright orange, though the other metallic shapes remained shadowed. The doors were dark, but yellowish light leaked around the edge of the one he had come through. It pulsed. The very air seemed to give a dim light, a ghostly glow that Annelyn found hard to pin down. The dead grouns and the worms opposite stood in rows like soot-gray statues, outlined by the illumination around them.
    Annelyn's fingers found the theta on the crest of the helmet. He was wearing a rune of the Changemasters, clearly! But—but why had it been on a groun ?
    He considered the question for an instant, then decided that it did not matter. All that mattered was the helmet. He picked up his metal shaft again, a cool gray stick in the smoldering reddish chamber. The glass at its end had been broken into jagged shards by his efforts to smash through the window. That was fine. It would make an excellent weapon. Almost jauntily, Annelyn turned toward the far door.
    The burrow beyond was dark, but it was a darkness he could deal with, a darkness he had dealt with every day of his life in the dimly lit tunnels of the yaga-la-hai ; it was made of shadows and vague shapes and dust, not the total blackness he had wandered in since fleeing the Meatbringer. Of course, it was not really like that—once, hesitantly, he lifted the helmet and instantly went blind again—but he cared little, if he could see. And he could see. The cool stone walls were a faded red, the air faintly misty and alight, and the ducts he passed were orange-edged maws that spewed streams of reddish smoke out into the burrows, to curl and rise and dissipate.
    Annelyn walked down the empty tunnel, for once imagining no sights and hearing no noises. He came to branchings several times and each time chose his way arbitrarily. He found shadowed stairways and climbed them eagerly, as far up as they would take him. Twice he detoured uneasily around the man-sized, dimly radiant pits he recognized as wormholes; one other time, he glimpsed a live eaterworm—a sluggishly moving river of smoke-dark ice—crossing a junction up ahead of him. Annelyn's own body, seen through the helmet, glowed a cheerful orange. The bits of fungus that still hung from his tattered clothing were like chunks of yellow fire.
    He had been walking for an hour when he first encountered a live groun. It was less bright than he himself, a six-limbed specter of deep red, a radiant wraith seen down a side burrow out of the corner of his eye. But soon Annelyn observed that it was following him. He began to walk closer to the wall, feeling his way as if he were blind, and the groun who ghosted him grew more bold. It was a large one, Annelyn observed, cloth hanging from it like a flapping second skin, a net trailing from one hand, a knife in the other. He wondered briefly if it could be the same groun he had met before.
    When he reached a stairway, a narrow spiral between two branching corridors, Annelyn paused, fumbled, and turned: The groun came straight on toward him, lifting its knife, padding very quietly on its soft feet. Oddly, Annelyn discovered that he was not afraid. He would smash in its head as soon as it crept close enough.
    He lifted his glass-edged club. The groun came nearer. Now he could kill it. Except, except—somehow he didn't want to. “Stop, groun,” he said instead. He was not quite sure why.
    The groun froze, edged backward. It said something in a low guttural moan. Annelyn understood nothing of it. “I hear you,” he said, “and I see you, groun. I am wearing a rune of the Changemasters.” He pointed at the theta stitched in gold on his breast.
    The groun gibbered in terror, dropped its net, and began to run. Annelyn ruefully decided that he ought not to have drawn attention to his theta. On impulse, he decided to follow the groun; perhaps, in its fear, it would lead him to an exit. If not, he could always find his way back to the stair.
    He pursued it down