What Was, Will Be

“Sarah, was her name. Sarah Young. Tall, blonde, firecracker of a woman. Spoiled her huskies rotten. Picky eater.”

“The kind that gets worryingly skinny, or the kind that gets fat on starch and fried crap?”

“Body more like the former, but with the sheer lack of green that ever seemed to find its way onto her plate, I think that was more metabolism than anything else.”

“Maybe you dodged a bullet, comrade. You get a woman knocked up, and anything you thought you knew about how her body works is out the window.”

Grant was glad the Russian was out of arm’s reach. “Yeah, Misha? Is this what happened to you?”

“Changes happened, but they both wore the extra bulk well, my Alina back on Earth and my Areta here on Nod. Thank God or Heaven or whatever.”

“Was this Alina still alive when you came to Nod, Misha?”

“Hey, I didn’t do anything wrong. ‘Until death do us part’, Grant, and unless I just imagined a Liberian warlord firing on my cargo ship with the same RPG-7s I sold him, we’re dead, at least as far as Earth is concerned. I’d recommend you find yourself a new girl. Hell, you’re riding with Cain’s steppe tribes, now, aren’t you? Kidnap yourself a whole harem of Bekhite women.”

Grant spat. “If Bekhite women have anything at all in common with the men, I’d get about the same results by taking a rusty knife to my junk.” Grant reflected a moment, then turned with flushed cheeks to Linshou.

The eunuch waved the comment away. “It would go poorly indeed, for a eunuch who took issue every time a man expressed concern for the well-being of his member. By the way, Master Grant, I believe we have arrived at another possible Worm feeding ground. Perhaps this one will prove more fruitful than the last.”

As he said so, the khan of the Jarchit, seniormost among the Cainite warriors assembled for the hunt, called a halt with a raised hand.

They stood on the edge of a wide, shallow canyon. This desert seemed to Grant a patchwork of what he had seen in the American Southwest– dense, clay-rich dirt spattered with cactus and scratchy shrubs– and the barren, shifting sand dunes movies had taught him to expect if he ever paid the Middle East a visit. This canyon had both, packed close together. Directly under its cliffs were flat swathes of dense earth, bearing creosote bushes and something like a taller, more tree-like relative of the prickly pear cactus. Down its middle was a sandy stretch, like the bed of a river which only flowed part of the year, though the sand within took a shape that looked more formed by the wind coming up the canyon then water flowing down it. A thin line along the middle of this seemed faintly muddy, the only sign that any water at all had run here in many years.

This was not the first landscape of its kind they had encountered, but Grant noticed two odd features. First, that many of the plants on the flats below them were dead and tumbled over, with the soil beneath them disturbed in jagged lines. The second oddity seemed at first to be unusually many branches and clumps of dead foliage in amongst the sand, for a riverbed so neglected of late by its tributaries. Then Grant made out lengths of white, and realized he was seeing dry remains, matted fur and unravelling clothes clinging to pressed-together skeletons, as though they had been swallowed whole, then passed very efficiently through the guts of some giant serpent.

A serpent, or…

One towering paddled cactus fell on its side, and dust rose from the cracks in the ground where it had been rooted. One of the jagged lines of pushed-up sand and clay ended there.

“It's in the clay below us.” the Jarchit khan confirmed.

Abutai turned to face the novice Worm-hunters: Grant, Misha, and the Jalabartan governor. “It will move much slower through the clay than the sand, but it can feel your footfalls better through the clay. It has a hide of armored plates, and our arrows and spears will pierce it only if it is in the sand, and not deep; in the clay, we cannot threaten it at all unless it surfaces.”

A Yurkut warrior, a grim-eyed man whose height suggested one of his parents or grandparents was Cain’s direct progeny, dismounted. “Abutai, you are light on your feet, are you not? I propose we send all our other hunters down to ride along the canyon wall, while you, I, and these three follow carefully on foot. They can draw the Death Worm off, get it to expose itself, and we pad up behind, get close shots or spear-thrusts in as soon as it surfaces. That many hooves will drown out our footfalls, certainly.”

Grant counted the hunters, who had now all lined up near the canyon edge while their servants and squires had hung back. They totaled thirteen. “Will five be enough, if it turns to face us?”

“I would not expect to remain undetected, even with the the best distraction, if we brought more. These are the mightiest warriors in the service of Cain on the steppe’s finest horses, new blood, they can double back and be on the Worm faster than you can blink.”

Abutai dismounted, and beckoned to a his squire, one of the Bayut khan’s younger sons. His kid brother brought him a spear, shorter and thicker than Misha’s pike, with a long fine-pointed tip not unlike those of Grant’s armor-piercing arrows. “It seems a serviceable plan of attack, so long as everybody watches the Worm for anything unexpected. If no one objects, let’s be to it.”

The hunters found a path down along the canyon wall, bending to their left and depositing them not far up-canyon from where the Worm knawed at cactus-roots, within easy bowshot. The eight mounted hunters turned out left and put more distance between themselves and their quarry, at a trot, while the rest stayed just above the canyon floor and waited. Grant and the Yurkut had their bows ready, Abutai his thick Worm-hunting spear and Misha his long pike, while the Jalabartan governor came up behind, javelin at the ready, with a padding cat-like gait that seemed at odds with his broad-shouldered, pot-bellied frame. Even if this was not his usual quarry, Grant noted with satisfaction that the man was clearly no stranger to hunting.

Within a few seconds of the horsemen riding out onto the clay flats, the worm’s line of churned earth broke off in their direction. Its speed surprised Grant; if the Worm chased him, it underneath the clay and him running on foot, it would come down to a contest of endurance, if he could not climb atop a solid rock quickly. He shuddered to imagine what speed it could make beneath sand.

The footmen stepped down carefully from the tumbled rocks of the canyon wall. As soon as the last pair of feet touched the clay, their plan went to shit.

The Worm turned a sharp corner, and made for the sand in the canyon’s center.

The five of them froze, only able to watch as dust spewed out of the ground in a long line, the Worm moving underground like a horse at full gallop. When it came alongside the riders, it slammed back into the sand-clay barrier, rode the harder sediment up, and breached like a shark taking a seal. The rider nearest the canyon’s center, not showing the faintest awareness of the danger, was caught on the shoulder by the toothy end of a tube, about two feet wide near its ends and more than three around its center, at least twenty long, encased in rings of tan chitin. Dozens of needle-teeth dug into the Cainite’s flesh, and the Worm’s body was pulled taught like a rope as he was pulled from the saddle. Grant could just barely make out the base of its stinger on the other end, the curved appendage working as an anchor in the clay as it dragged its victim under and fled into the sand.

The air hung still and silent. Then, in a slow, careful whisper, the Jalabartan governor asked, “Is that it, then? Will it hide away to consume its prey?”

The Yurkut shook his head. “They lie in wait for their prey, in a land with little life to wander across their territory. When a whole herd of horses or caravan of men come along, they become frenzied, swallowing everything they can and storing the rest, paralyzed and slowly suffocating, beneath the ground.”

“Should we retreat back onto the cliff? Get rock between our feet and the soil?”

“Don't.” Grant said, “The path up is narrow, and the Worm can stretch its body an awful long way. You would be mostly safe if you made it to the top, but… better to stay here, I think, where you can dodge in any direction.”

“So what do you propose, Cainite?”

Grant watched the Worm’s movements in the sand, tracking the dusty plume it kicked up as passed. It slowed down as it curved wide toward the canyon’s opposite end, but did not stop. Rather, it turned to face the party on foot, and accelerated faster than before.

Grant started to reach for a broadhead arrow, thought better of it, and strung one of his gun barrel bodkins. “Hold.” he commanded, not daring to raise his voice, “Spears angled down.”

The ground trembled as the Worm slammed into the side of the clay deposit and burrowed in. A thin crack in the ground grew in their direction, meandering back and forth in a waveform.

The distance from the edge of the clay flat to the canyon wall was no more than fifty yards. The Worm drove past the halfway mark…

“Hold. Feet planted. Don’t attack until it surfaces.”

Twenty yards away. Ten.

The governor, from his position behind Grant on the group’s left-rear flank, leaped out sideways, stumbling and catching himself in a string of sidesteps.

The Worm’s wavy line of advance pulled tight, and it angled straight for him.

Grant drew on his bowstring, tracking the crack for only a split-second before he saw a lighter tan breach the red-brown of the clay. The worm writhed as an arrow took it in the side of the face and a javelin behind its head, and rather than being grabbed and pulled under, the Jalabartan aristocrat was knocked on his side. His leg was only lightly scratched by the Worm’s twisting bushel of teeth, but it visibly cramped first in the calf, then the thigh as the venom spread.

Misha charged at the exposed head of the Worm, but before he could pierce it a third time, it slid back underground, leaving the shaft of a javelin and the fletched end of an arrow in the dirt. A raised mound doubled back the way it came, digging much faster through the already agitated soil.

The Worm’s stinger lashed out of the ground in an arc, narrowly missing Grant as he dropped to a squat. The Yurkut loosed an arrow, missing the tail as it retracted. He shifted as he drew a new one, and at that footfall, the Worm's head sprang up, spraying venom in a wide crescent.

A single drop fell on Grant's right pauldron, but Abutai and the Yurkut were caught square on. Abutai caught most of the spray on his steel armor, but hastily unstoppered a waterskin with his teeth and poured it where the venom had caught his neck and chin. The other warrior, more lightly garbed, cast down his bow to tear off his toxin-drenched tunic.

The Worm’s head turned to where the bow hit the ground, visibly tensing. “Hold still.” Grant whispered, not daring to rise from his low squat even as he nocked a broadhead. “Abutai, you good?”

“I am still in the fight.”

“Brace for another charge.”

When the Bayut nodded, Grant drew, and planted his arrow in the ground, in a spot just within his arm’s reach to his right and Abutai's to his left.

When the Worm dove again, Grant drew his sword, and breathed in sharply. Straight motion, he reminded himself, strength is secondary, or else Yuya wouldn't be able to cut better than you.

Grant's arrow in the ground sank inward, and he felt his right foot give as the ground broke apart and funneled toward the Worm’s open maw.

Abutai drove his spear into the Worm’s jaw. It pushed up, sending the Bayut prince sliding back with his feet driving scrapes into the ground, and venom dribbled from the spear’s tip, pressure in the sacs lost after its last discharge.

Grant watched the articulated chitin plates on its neck carefully, and when two stretched apart as it pushed until their thin edges had virtually no overlap, he chopped down. His saber bit only a short way through the exoskeleton, but when the Worm jerked back into its hole and wrenched the blade from his hand, it stopped suddenly with a shudder of pain, as the tip and hilt pressed into the hard clay. Blood flowed freely from the now pried-open wound.

For how many things had happened and how much time seemed to drag to a halt around Grant since the Worm had attacked them, very few seconds had actually passed. In light of that, it was to the credit of the mounted Cainite hunters that the six swiftest-steeded archers were close up on the worm in this moment of vulnerability, in position to loose at the mouth and gaping wound. Three of their arrows contacted soft flesh, and the Worm shuddered again. Grant, bow still in his off-hand, strung another one of his armor-piercing arrows and shot into the wound, upon which the Worm finally went limp.