The Heart of the Worm

Chapter 1: The Last Coin

The ale in Tarsis tasted like piss strained through a dead man's boot, and Drustan Vessark drank it anyway because it was the last cup his last coin would buy.

He sat in the back corner of the Broken Antler, a tavern wedged between a tannery and a slaughterhouse on the south side of the border city where the streets ran with blood-tinged water and nobody asked questions. The corner suited him. He could watch the door and the stairs both, and the wall at his back was solid stone, not the timber-and-plaster rot that made up most of Tarsis. A man who'd lived as long as Drustan had lived by putting stone at his back.

He was tall, broad through the shoulders, and lean everywhere else—the kind of lean that comes from years of eating when you can and fighting when you must. His hair was the color of iron filings, cropped close to a skull that bore three visible scars. His hands, wrapped around the clay cup, were large and scarred and still. They were a killer's hands. He'd stopped pretending otherwise around the age of twenty, and he was past forty now, which was old for a sellsword and ancient for a Northlander who'd left the ice at fifteen with nothing but a hand-axe and a talent for violence.

The Broken Antler was half-full of the usual evening trade: teamsters, off-duty garrison soldiers, a clutch of Zheshi merchants haggling over saffron in their clicking tongue. A woman with hennaed hands played a three-stringed fiddle near the hearth, coaxing out a melody that sounded like a lament for something that had never existed. Drustan ignored her. He ignored most things that weren't threats or opportunities, and lately there'd been precious few of either.

He'd come south after the Vashak wars ended—not because he'd chosen a side and lost, but because he'd chosen a side and won, and the winning side had paid him in promises that turned to smoke when the new king decided mercenaries were an embarrassment best forgotten. Three years of killing in the mountain passes, and he'd walked away with a scar across his ribs, a name that made certain men nervous, and not enough silver to buy a horse.

So he'd drifted. Caravan guard. Debt collector. A brief, ugly stint as a pit fighter in the coast city of Velos, where he'd broken a man's jaw and been told he fought too efficiently for the crowd's taste. They wanted spectacle. Drustan gave them corpses. It was a professional disagreement.

Now he was in Tarsis, and Tarsis was the end of the road for men like him. South of here was the Cinder Waste, and south of the Waste was nothing—or at least nothing that anyone who'd gone looking had ever come back to describe.

He drained the cup. Set it down. Considered the mathematics of his situation with the grim precision of a man who'd been doing this calculation his whole life: no coin, no contract, no prospects. He could sell his sword—the actual blade, not his services—but it was good Northland steel, and a man without a sword in Tarsis was a man who'd be dead by week's end.

He could steal. He was capable of it, if not gifted. But theft required local knowledge, and he was a stranger here, and strangers who stole in Tarsis ended up in the quarries or the river, depending on who caught them.

He could kill someone for money. There was always that. But he'd need a patron first, and patrons required introductions, and introductions required—

"You look like a man deciding between bad options."

The voice came from his left, which irritated him because he hadn't heard anyone approach. He turned his head slowly, the way a wolf turns—not startled, just reassessing.

She was small. That was the first thing. A head shorter than him and built narrow, with quick dark eyes set in a face that was all angles and intelligence. Her skin was the warm brown of the southern desert peoples, and her hair was black, pulled back tight and bound with copper wire. She wore traveler's leathers—good ones, recently oiled—and a short curved knife at her hip that she wore the way someone wears a tool, not a weapon. Her hands were quick and clever-looking, the fingers long and ink-stained.

She was also, he noted, standing just outside the reach of his arm. Smart.

"I'm not deciding," Drustan said. "I'm drinking."

"Your cup is empty."

"Then I'm done drinking."

She smiled. It was the kind of smile that had edges. "My name is Syra Veth. May I sit?"

"No."

She sat anyway, sliding onto the bench across from him with the fluid ease of someone accustomed to going where she wasn't invited. She placed something on the table between them—a leather tube, the kind used for carrying documents. It was scorched along one edge, the leather bubbled and blackened.

"I have a proposition," she said.

"I don't want one."

"You want gold."

"Everyone wants gold. That doesn't make me special."

"No," she agreed. "What makes you special is that you're Drustan Vessark, the Wolf of Vashak, and you killed eleven men at the Battle of the Stonegate with a broken axe and your bare hands, and right now you can't afford another drink." She tilted her head. "That's a waste of a man like you."

Drustan studied her. She'd done her research, which meant she'd been watching him, which meant she'd chosen him specifically, which meant she wanted something dangerous enough that she needed the kind of man people told stories about.

"What's in the tube?" he asked.

"A map."

"Burned."

"Half-burned. The half that matters survived." She unsealed the tube and drew out a piece of parchment that crackled with age and heat damage. She unrolled it on the table, weighing down the corners with his empty cup and her knife. The map showed the Cinder Waste—he recognized the distinctive cross-hatching that cartographers used for the dead expanse south of Tarsis—and in the southern reaches, where the Waste gave way to the true desert, there was a mark. A tower, drawn in red ink that had faded to rust.

Lettering beside it, in a script he didn't recognize.

"The Tower of Zeth-Amon," Syra said.

Drustan leaned back. "That's a children's story."

"Children's stories don't do this." She reached into her belt pouch and drew out a shard of glass—black glass, the kind that sometimes formed in the Waste where lightning struck the cinder-sand. But this piece was different. It was faceted, deliberately cut, and when she held it up, the tavern's lamplight seemed to bend around it rather than through it.

Then she placed it in his palm.

The whisper started immediately.

It wasn't a voice, exactly. It was more like the memory of a voice, the impression of words spoken in a language that had been dead for centuries. It crawled up his arm and settled behind his eyes, and for a moment he saw—or thought he saw—a black spire rising from a field of grey ash, smoke pouring from its peak like blood from a wound.

He dropped the shard. It clinked on the table and went silent.

"What the hell is that?" His voice was flat, but his hand had moved to his sword hilt without conscious thought.

"Proof," Syra said. She picked up the shard and tucked it away. "Three weeks ago, an earthquake split the Cinder Waste from the Thornback Ridge to the Salt Flats. Caravans reported seeing a structure rising from the cinders—a black tower, impossibly tall, in a place where nothing has stood for three hundred years."

"The Tower of Zeth-Amon was swallowed by the Waste," Drustan said. "Three centuries ago. Every scholar in the known world agrees."

"And now the earth has coughed it back up. Along with everything inside it." She leaned forward. "Including the Heart of the Worm."

The Heart of the Worm. Even Drustan, who had no use for legends, knew that name. A jewel the size of a man's chest, faceted like a diamond, black as a starless sky. The treasure of the sorcerer-kings who had built Zeth-Amon before the Waste existed, before the tower sank. Worth a kingdom, they said. Worth ten kingdoms.

Worth enough to make a tired mercenary's problems disappear forever.

"You need a sword," Drustan said.

Syra nodded. "I'm good at getting into places. I'm less good at fighting my way out. You're the opposite."

"I hate sorcery."

"I know. But you love gold."

"I don't love anything."

"Then you love surviving, and right now, Drustan, you're running out of ways to do that." She tapped the map. "Equal shares. Whatever we find, we split. If the Heart is even half what the legends claim, we'll never need to work again. Either of us."

Drustan looked at the map. He looked at the burned edges, the faded ink, the red mark in the dead heart of the Waste. He thought about the whisper in the black glass, the image of the tower bleeding smoke.

He thought about his empty cup and his empty purse and the long, slow slide toward a death that would mean nothing to anyone.

"Who else knows about this?" he asked.

Syra's smile faltered. Just for a moment, just at the edges, but he caught it.

"There's a complication," she said.

"There always is."

"An exiled sorcerer named Malachar Dree. He was a court magician in Velos before they cast him out for... practices the court found distasteful. He's hired a company of Zheshi killers—professional ones, not the merchants you see in the market. They're led by a captain named Ruko Thal."

"I know the name. Scarred man. Missing an ear."

"That's him. They left Tarsis four days ago, heading south. Dree wants the Heart, and he has a head start."

"Then we've already lost."

"No. Dree has numbers, but he doesn't have this." She tapped the map again. "This shows the fissure—the entry point at the tower's base. Dree is looking for the main gate, which was buried deepest. He'll waste days digging. We go in through the crack in the foundation, we're ahead of him before he knows we're there."

Drustan turned this over. It was reckless. It was probably suicidal. The Cinder Waste alone killed more travelers than bandits and disease combined, and that was without a tower full of ancient sorcery and a company of Zheshi killers waiting at the other end.

But the alternative was Tarsis. And Tarsis was a slow death dressed in boredom.

"I'll need supplies," he said. "Water, rations, a new axe. Mine cracked in Velos."

"Already arranged."

"And I'll need people. Not just us two. We need someone who knows the Waste, and we need another fighter."

"I have someone in mind for the Waste," Syra said. "A guide named Sefi. She's desert-born, knows the Cinder Waste better than anyone alive. She has her own reasons for wanting to reach the tower."

"What reasons?"

"Her brother led an expedition there a year ago, following a different copy of this map. He never came back."

Drustan grunted. That was either motivation or madness, and in his experience the two were close cousins.

"And the fighter?" he asked.

Syra spread her hands. "That's your department. I steal things. You kill things. I assumed you'd know someone."

He did, as it happened. He'd been trying not to think about it, because the man in question was someone he'd rather not see again—not out of dislike, but because seeing him would mean acknowledging a debt that had gone unpaid for too long.

"There's a man," Drustan said. "Harl Oxhand. We fought together in Vashak. He saved my life at the Stonegate—pulled me out from under a dead horse while the enemy was still charging. I owe him a blood debt."

"Can he fight?"

"He's the size of a barn door and twice as hard to move. He fights like a landslide. Last I heard, he was working the quarries outside Tarsis because he lost his family's farm to debt collectors."

"Perfect. A man with something to fight for."

Drustan didn't like the way she said that—too calculated, too precise—but he let it pass. He'd spent his whole life working with people he didn't entirely trust. It was the natural state of his profession.

"When do we leave?" he asked.

"Dawn. Dree has four days on us, but we travel lighter and we know where we're going." She rolled up the map and slid it back into the tube. "Meet me at the south gate. Bring your man."

She stood, dropped a silver coin on the table—enough for ten more cups of the Broken Antler's terrible ale—and walked away without looking back.

Drustan picked up the coin. Turned it over in his scarred fingers.

Then he ordered another drink, because a man should finish what he starts, even if what he starts is a slow night of bad decisions.

He found Harl the next morning.

The quarries outside Tarsis were carved into the limestone bluffs east of the city, great stepped pits where men broke rock under the sun for wages that wouldn't feed a dog. Drustan walked the rim until he spotted the man he was looking for—impossible to miss, even among the other laborers. Harl Oxhand stood a full head taller than anyone around him, with shoulders like a yoke beam and hands that could palm a man's skull. His skin was weathered dark from years of outdoor work, and his arms were roped with muscle that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with swinging a pickaxe twelve hours a day.

He looked up when Drustan's shadow fell across him, and his broad, blunt face went through a complicated series of expressions—surprise, then wariness, then something that might have been hope, quickly buried.

"Drustan bloody Vessark," Harl said. His voice was like gravel in a drum. "I thought you were dead."

"Not yet."

"That's what you always say. One day it won't be true."

"One day it won't be true for anyone." Drustan crouched at the edge of the pit. "I need to talk to you."

"I'm working."

"You're breaking rocks for a man who pays you in scraps. That's not work. That's punishment."

Harl's jaw tightened. He set down his pickaxe and climbed out of the pit with the careful deliberation of a big man who knows his own strength and doesn't waste it. Up close, Drustan could see the toll the years had taken—the deep lines around Harl's eyes, the grey threading through his close-cropped beard, the slight favoring of his left knee where an old wound had never healed right.

"I heard about the farm," Drustan said.

"Then you heard enough. Debt collectors took it. My wife went back to her father's house in Korst. Took the children." Harl's voice was flat, reciting facts he'd rehearsed until they'd lost their sharp edges. "I'm earning it back. Slowly."

"I have a faster way."

He told Harl about the tower. About the Heart. About the Zheshi killers and the sorcerer and the burned map and the woman with the quick hands and the quicker smile.

Harl listened without interrupting, which was one of the things Drustan had always valued about him. When Drustan finished, Harl was quiet for a long time, staring out across the quarry at the other men breaking stone.

"It sounds like a good way to die," Harl said finally.

"It is."

"And you're going anyway."

"I am."

"Why?"

Drustan considered lying. Considered dressing it up in noble language about adventure and glory and the thrill of the hunt. But Harl had pulled him out from under a dead horse while arrows fell like rain, and a man who'd done that deserved honesty.

"Because I've got nothing else," Drustan said. "And neither do you."

Harl looked at him. Then he looked at the quarry, at the picks and the dust and the slow grinding erosion of a life spent doing nothing that mattered.

"I'll need a weapon," Harl said.

"There's a woman buying supplies. She'll have something."

Harl nodded. He walked to the quarry foreman's shed, said something Drustan couldn't hear, and came back with his bedroll and a leather satchel that held everything he owned in the world.

"Let's go," he said.

They met Syra and the guide at the south gate as the sun climbed above the city walls.

Sefi was not what Drustan had expected. He'd pictured a weather-beaten desert rat, sun-dried and silent. Instead, she was young—late twenties, he guessed—with sharp features and sharper eyes, her skin the deep bronze of the waste-born peoples. She wore layered desert wraps in faded indigo, and her dark hair was braided with small bone beads that clicked when she moved. She carried a recurve bow across her back and a pair of curved fighting knives at her hips, and she looked at Drustan and Harl with the frank, assessing gaze of someone who was used to measuring men against the desert and finding them wanting.

"You're the swordsman," she said to Drustan. Not a question.

"And you're the guide."

"I'm the reason you won't die of thirst before you reach the tower. Whether you die after that is your business." She looked at Harl. "You're big. Big men drink more water. That's a problem."

"I'll manage," Harl said mildly.

Sefi made a sound that suggested she'd heard that before and hadn't been impressed then either. She turned to Syra. "The water caches I buried last month should still be intact. If we move fast, we can resupply at the Broken Pillar waypoint on day two and reach the tower by day four."

"That puts us a day behind Dree at most," Syra said. "But we'll be inside before he finds the main gate."

"If your map is right."

"It's right."

Sefi's expression said she'd believe that when she saw it. She adjusted the straps on her pack and looked south, toward the haze that marked the beginning of the Cinder Waste.

"My brother went this way," she said, to no one in particular. "A year ago. He had a map too. He had good men with him. He had supplies and knowledge and experience." She paused. "He didn't come back."

"We know," Syra said, not unkindly.

"I'm not telling you for sympathy. I'm telling you so you understand: the Waste doesn't care about your preparations. The tower doesn't care about your plans. If we're going to do this, we do it with our eyes open." She looked at each of them in turn. "And if I say we turn back, we turn back. Agreed?"

Drustan nodded. Harl nodded. Syra hesitated, then nodded too.

"Good," Sefi said. "Then let's walk. The Waste is waiting, and it's not patient."

They left Tarsis through the south gate as the morning heat began to build, four figures moving into the shimmer and haze of the borderlands, heading toward a tower that had been dead for three centuries and was now, impossibly, alive again.

Drustan walked at the rear, his hand on his sword, his eyes on the horizon.

He didn't look back. There was nothing behind him worth seeing.