Read In the House of the Worm for Free Online

am something less than a groun. I am the first of the Third People. The yaga-la-hai decline, as do the grouns, but I go among both and plant my seed”—he looked at Annelyn—“in those like Caralee, and in the groun-women. Soon there will be others like me. That is why . And to know. I know more than your Manworm, or you, more than the Great Groun. You live lies, but I have seen and heard all who live in the House of the Worm, and I believe none of it. The White Worm is a lie, do you know that? And the Manworm. I think I even know how that came to be. A pleasant tale. Shall I tell you?”
    “The Manworm is the living flesh of the White Worm,” Riess said in a shrill, almost hysterical voice. “The priests shape him in that image, purifying, making him more fit to lead.”
    “And less fit to live,” the Meatbringer said. “Until the pain drives him mad or the surgery kills him. You, Groff? Do you believe that? Or you, freethinker? See. I do recall you.”
    Annelyn flushed and brandished his rapier. Groff was a fierce bearded statue of bronze-made-flesh. “So it is in the lore of the bronze knights,” he said, “and we remember things the Manworm has forgotten.”
    “It shocks me that the Manworm remembers anything,” the Meatbringer said. “But I have talked to knights, too, learned their ‘secret’ lore, listened to stories of a long-ago war. The grouns remember better. They have legends of the coming of the yaga-la-hai , who changed all the high burrows. The grouns are the First People, you know. The worm-children they call the Second People. I was a great puzzle to them at first, with my four limbs and my eyes that see, neither First nor Second. But I brought them flesh and learned their tongue, and so taught them of the Third People. You mock groun secrets, and in truth they are as rotting as you, yet they know things. They remember the Changemasters, their great enemies and the greatest friends of the yaga-la-hai , who wore the theta as a sigil, and in times long gone made the spiders and the worms and a thousand other things. Here, where I live, was where they sculptured and shaped the stuff of life, so the yaga-la-hai might live. Here they fashioned the blood worms that still afflict the grouns, the light-hunger that drives them upward to their deaths if they catch it, and the huge white eaterworms that multiply and grow more terrible every day. You, all of you, have forgotten these things, but the Changemasters were gods greater than your White Worm could ever be. Grouns flinch before the theta. With good reason. The yaga-la-hai do not remember this room and the grouns had forgotten where it was, but I found it, and slowly I learn its secrets. I learned about your Manworm here. After the grouns had brought darkness to the burrows and killed most of the Changemasters, one was left. But he had lost all the runes, and he despaired. Still, he was the ruler. The yaga-la-hai followed him. And he remembered how worms, a thousand kinds of worms, had been men’s best weapons against the grouns, and he knew how worms flourished better down here than men. So the last Changemasters trained the surgeon-priests in a few arts and had himself made into a great worm. Then he died. You see? He wanted to fashion the Third People. He was a Changemaster, but a poor one, an animal. Since then, all the leaders of the yaga-la-hai are fashioned into worms. But no Third People exist. Except for myself. As I learn more Changemaster secrets, I will shape the Third People, and they will not be like the Manworm.”
    “You will shape nothing,” Groff said. He started forward, and torchlight ran up and down the sharp-honed blade of his ax.
    “Oh?” said the Meatbringer. And suddenly he reached out, and seized the two great doors on either side of him, and swung them shut behind him, ducking beneath the whistling blade of Groff’s ax in the same fluid motion. The doors came together with a great rending clang.
    Darkness.
    And