Fiction:The Worm Turns

Prologue
Rough hands jostled him in front and in back, pulling and pushing, driving him, stumbling, forward. Low voices muttered around him. He heard fragments only --

“-- going to be late --”

“We’re late already, a few minutes more won’t matter --”

“-- told the Father, you know him --”

“Did we pass it? It was supposed to be Canticle Avenue --”

Saints save me from incompetent cultists, he thought. When they’d jumped him in the park and strapped the blindfold around his head, he had expected some kind of professionalism. They had excellent coordination, but shortly turned out to have basically nothing else. Mystery cults: they had an upper limit to ability.

“Hang on, let me get my bearings,” someone said. Hooves clattered on cobblestone as the speaker jogged down the street (a narrow one, based on the echoes).

Another voice muttered in his ear. “Sorry. It’s not usually like this. I mean, the blindfold is, but you know what I mean.” “Don’t worry,” he said, dryly.

Hooves came clattering backwards. “Right!” called their owner. “Canticle was back that way, we missed it.” Three other voices groaned. Four pairs of hands began dragging their captive back, who sighed.

Back, and right: sounds of recognition and relief from his sort-of captors. Their pace slowed. They crossed a boundary. He felt it in his head and over his body, like pushing his hand through a soap bubble, and suddenly he could hear the noise. Muffled music, a lively cacophony of pipes and drums and horns. They have a counter-vibration ward canceling the sound, he thought. So there are practitioners in this mystery cult? Well, he’d fit in just fine, then.

He felt one of his escorts leave his side. A few seconds later, something ahead of him made an off-kilter series of knocks, followed by the hiss-latch sound of something sliding back.

“We’ve brought a new initiate!” shouted the knocker. Then: “What? It’s me, isn’t it? Come on, we’re not exactly a secret these days.”

A door opened. The music grew louder. As before, he was half-pushed half-pulled inside.

Warmth gusted against his face, welcome in the night’s chill. Smells assaulted him: bodies, food, fragrant incense and tobacco smoke. Laughter, chatter, raucous music. The noise was a roar. Above the roar roared a voice, deep and resonant:

“WHO COMES BEFORE THE YAHFEHRENEZ?”

A cheer went up. It nearly drowned out the response from beside him. “A new convert, hungry for joy!”

“WHO IS HE, AND WHY HAS HE COME?”

“A magus of the Vaucarne Court --”

“Acolyte!” he hissed, mortified. He was still two years away from graduating to magus.

“-- sorry. An acolyte of the Vaucarne Court, seeking distraction from his drab studies!”

“LET HIM NAME HIMSELF, SO WE MIGHT KNOW HIM!” came the reply.

Someone dug an elbow into his side. “Just like you practiced!” she hissed.

He breathed in, inhaled a gust of smoke, coughed hard, and called out hoarsely, “I’m Banesh Kirardad, acolyte third class of Seshadar College!”

“LET BANESH KIRARDAD BE UNMASKED!” bellowed the voice.

Cheers from all around. The blindfold came off. Banesh blinked wildly as his eyes adjusted. After a few moments, he recognized the common area of an apartment complex, the expansive and expensive sort that particularly well-to-do serfs lived in. Glass lanterns ensconced in the walls radiated simulant firelight, flickering off of brightly colored mosaics. They made the smoke-hazy air glow. At the far end of the room, between a pair of spiraling stairs leading to the apartments proper, rose an abstract altarpiece: a twisted triangle framed from below by a narrow crescent.

The rest of the room was full of people. So many of them! A quintet of musicians played on five separate tables, islands in a sea of faces: a mass of life, dancing, drinking, blowing rings from hookahs, skimming plates of food off of trestle tables running down either side of the room. One held court above all. A big man, seated beneath the altarpiece, his horns curled and magnificent, his beard long and braided. He wore uncommonly fine robes, the sort of quality usually found in the nobility. A magus?

He lifted a gilded chalice and shouted. “HAS HE BEEN INDUCTED?”

“He has, Father!” came an answering shout from behind Banesh.

“HAS HE BEEN INITIATED?”

“He has, Father!”

(Banesh remembered his first initiation distinctly. It had been much less overwhelming: blindfolded by his four cohorts, spun around a few times, and plunged naked into water.)

“THEN LET HIM BE CONFIRMED!”

Masked figures emerged from the crowd. They carried wands, goblets, whips, bowls. Banesh submitted himself to their attentions, internally rolling his eyes, as they carried out some obscure ceremony around him. Wine was flicked into his face. Salt was sprinkled into his mane. It was all very symbolic of some ancient king or hero or whoever, to whom this mystery cult was dedicated. Banal. Very banal.

A whipcrack signified the end of the rite, and another cheer went up. “WELCOME, BANESH!” shouted the man they called Father. “JOIN THE FESTIVITIES! ENJOY YOURSELF! THAT IS THE YAHFEHRENEZ WAY!”

His throat must be incredibly durable to survive shouting like that, thought Banesh, a little disoriented as the crowd absorbed him. Someone pushed a glass of strong-smelling cider into his hand. Join them, study their beliefs, make a full report. His first assignment as a trainee, provisional magus. Its religious aspect, anyways. No doubt his other classmates were learning how to make servitors out of flesh and metal or something, something that actually applied his thaumaturgical learning. Banesh, on the other hand, was interning for the heresy detection agency. On the plus side, I do get to party.

And it was a party. Behind the ritual trappings, the cult was ultimately a way for bored, repressed serfs to live it up a bit. A lot of them would be nursing hangovers in the morning, but it looked otherwise completely harmless. Just another mystery cult popping up the way they did among the lower classes. The Vaucarne Court indexed and examined each one regardless, just in case it diverged too far from orthodoxy and/or some of its founding members had an objectionable agenda.

Someone bumped into him. His glass slopped, spilled -- hung. Banesh exerted his will further, and the free-floating cider slid obediently back into the glass. He breathed out. He looked aside. He met the eyes of the very pretty woman who’d bumped into him, staring at him in unconcealed amazement.

“Hello,” he said.

“You’re really a magus,” she said.

“Yes! Well, no. Acolyte. Still training. That’s what I said.” He took a sip.

“I thought you lived in palaces, giving orders to the nobility.”

“For me, one day,” he said. “For now… nothing but study, study, study.” He shrugged, with a what-can-you-do sort of smile.

“So why come here, then?” she asked. She was getting really quite close to him. “Don’t nobles throw their own parties?”

“Oh, you know them. Bunch of stuffy old men and women. Nobody there knows how to have fun.”

She giggled. “Not like us, you mean?”

“Definitely not like you,” he said, grinning. “And they don’t have you, either.” He downed a gulp of cider, trying to be suave, and proceeded to choke on its fumes.

The next half-minute involved a great deal of coughing and wheezing while she pounded his back. His cider bobbed safely above his head.

“You’re not really good at fun, are you?” she asked, as he recovered. Her eyes were alight with laughter.

“Stronger hhhh than I gckk expected,” he gasped.

In response, she slid up to him, wrapping her arms around his body. “Oh, you. Let me teach you.” And she kissed him.

The cider fell to the ground and shattered.

Nice, he thought. Wait a second slow down I don’t even know your name he thought, at the exact same moment. But she tasted like apples, and her tongue was on his, and something hard-shelled and many-legged was crawling from inside her mouth into his throat, and Banesh Kirardad’s last thought as Banesh Kirardad was oh gods, it's a Worm cult, the Worm is back and this whole thing is a Worm cu--