Wyrms

"Ask me again. Ask me anything."

They did, and he told them. No resistance at all.

Intimate things, terrible things, secrets of state, secrets of his own body. Patience listened in disgust. She had been prepared for her father's pain, but not for his quick capitulation.

They thought he was resisting them when he said he didn't know where Patience was. But Patience knew that he had held nothing back. Perhaps he had known he would break this easily-perhaps that's why he had prepared so well for her escape. He must have known his own weakness, though he concealed it from everyone else until now.

"I knew that you'd ask me, and so I made sure I didn't know. I told Angel a year ago to make plans with her, and tell me nothing of them. Then when I felt death was coming on, I sent Angel away-I knew they'd kill her bodyguard first. Patience is on her own until she can meet him. But Angel and I trained my daughter carefully, gentlemen. She speaks every language that I speak, she is a more accomplished assassin than Angel himself, and she is cleverer by far than any adviser to the king.

You will never catch her. She's probably gone already."

The headkeeper finally believed him. "We'll tell the King you're ready now."

"Will he come and talk to me?" asked the head.

"If he wants to. But no one else ever will. With the things you know, there's no chance he'll put you in a public room. Who knows? Maybe he'll install you in his private chambers." The headkeeper laughed. "You can watch every intimate moment of the King's life, and he can get your advice whenever he wants it. There is precedent, you know. Your grandfather-"

"My grandfather was a twisted wreck. King Omc is not."

"You hope," said the headkeeper.

"King Oruc is a great Heptarch."

The headkeeper looked at him suspiciously. Then he smiled. "You really do mean it. And all this time everyone thought you served Oruc because your daughter was a hostage. Turns out you really were loyal. A weakling."

The headkeeper slapped him lightly on the cheek. "You were nothing, and now you're less than nothing."

He doused the lights and left.

As soon as he was gone and the brass key turned in the lock. Patience lifted the grating and dropped into the room.

"Hullo, Father," she said. She fumbled in the darkness until she found his breath bladder. Then she pumped air so he could speak.

"Go away," he said. "I already taught you everything I know."

"I know," she said. "Now I want you to tell me everything you fear."

"I don't fear anything now," he said. "Right now I'm voiding my bladder, which I haven't done without pain in three years. Go away."

"You have neither bladder nor urine. Father. It's just an illusion."

"The only reality a human being ever knows, my darling girl, is what his nerves tell him, and mine are telling me that-oh, you vicious and ungrateful worm of a girl, the headworms are torturing me again because I'm resisting you."

"Then don't resist me, Father."

"I'm not your father, I'm a piece of dead brain tissue kept alive by the probing tendrils of the gools and stimulated by trained worms."

"You never were my father." Was that a catch in his throat? A tiny gasp of surprise? "You always made speeches to me, for the servants to overhear. Angel was the only father I had."

"Don't waste your time trying to hurt me. I'm past hurting."

"Did you ever love me?"

"I don't remember. If I did, I certainly don't love you anymore. The only thing I desire now is to urinate forever.

I would gladly trade a daughter for a decent prostate."

She found the matches where the headkeepers had set them down, and lit a single lamp. Her father's eyes blinked in the light. She smiled at him. "You're going to tell Oruc everything, but you're going to tell me first. All my life you've been able to keep secrets from me. But not anymore."

"You don't need to know any of the secrets. I saw to it you knew everything. I thought you were intelligent enough to know that every word Angel spoke to you came originally from my lips."

"He told me that you would willingly let me die if it would serve the best interests of the King's House."

"What would you rather? That I tell you that I thought your life was more important than the whole world?

What sort of egomaniacal monster are you?"

"A human being," she said.

"The worst kind of monster," he said. "We're all monsters, living in utter isolation, sending out words like ambassadors that beg for tribute, for worship. Love me, love me. And then when the words come back, 'I love you, I worship you, you are great and good,' these monsters doubt, these monsters know that it's a lie.

'Prove it,' they say. 'Obey me, give me power.' And when they are obeyed, the monster grows hungrier. 'How do I know you aren't manipulating me?' cries the monster.

'If you love me, die for me, kill for me, give all to me and leave nothing for yourself!' "

"If human beings are all monsters, why should I sacrifice anything for them?"

"Because they are beautiful monsters," he whispered.

"And when they live in a network of peace and hope, when they trust the world and their deepest hungers are fulfilled, then within that system, that delicate web, there is joy. That is what we live for, to bind the monsters together, to murder their fear and give birth to their beauty."

"That's as mystical as what the priests babble about."

"It is what the priests babble about."

"You have sacrificed the possibility of power, you have made us strangers all these years, and all for some invisible, nonexistent co

"You're fifteen. You know nothing. Go away."

"I know your life has been a deception and a disguise."

"And when I dropped the disguise and told you what I have lived for, you mocked me. The babble of the priests!

Do you think that because something is invisible, it doesn't exist? There is nothing but empty space between the infinitesimal pieces of matter; the only thing co

Do you think that you can ever serve your own interest without also serving theirs? Then I should have killed you in the cradle, because you aren't fit to be Heptarch."

She saw in his face the same fervency she had seen in Prekeptor. Father, too, was a believer. But she could not believe that this was a belief that anyone could sacrifice for. "Was this the secret you hid from me all these years? Was this what you would have said to me if for one single moment we could have been alone and honest with each other? Was this what I yearned for all my life?" He had taught her how to show devastating contempt, as a diplomatic tool. She used it now: "I could have learned as much from any teacher in the School."

His face went slack again, went back to the neutral expression that he cultivated when he wished to show nothing. "If you don't get out of here at once, before Oruc or his men get here, you're quite likely to be with me in loving proximity for the next thousand years, getting sucked out by gools in a bowl of soup. I don't like you well enough to want your company. I used to think you were a well-behaved child, but now I see you're a selfish, inconsiderate brat."

"No," she said. "There are things I need to know.

Practical things, that I can use to survive."

"Survival I taught you from infancy. You'll survive.