Song of the tyrant worm, p.1
Song of the Tyrant Worm, page 1
part #3 of The Worm and His Kings Series
Song
of the
Tyrant Worm
The Worm and His Kings, Book Three
Hailey Piper
Manuscript Copyright 2024 Hailey Piper
Logo Copyright 2022 Off Limits Press
Cover Photo Copyright 2024 Cassie Daley
Interior Design by W. Dale Jordan
Edited by W. Dale Jordan
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Praise for The Worm and His Kings trilogy
"The Worm and His Kings breaks all the rules, and this lawlessness is precisely what thrills us. Fresh, fantastic worldbuilding and a story as bold as its author. The announcement of a new voice in horror, bellowed from a cold, cosmic quarter."
- Josh Malerman, New York Times best-selling author of Bird Box and Daphne
"With a masterful balance of bleakness and hope, Hailey Piper's stunning conclusion to her Worm trilogy makes you feel like the most insignificant speck in an endless string of worlds, and yet you matter. Song of the Tyrant Worm brims with imagination and god-sized ideas from one of the best voices currently writing horror and fantasy. An unforgettable story of friendship, sacrifice, love, and understanding that truly burns bright against the darkness."
- Brennan LaFaro, author of Noose
"A story of transcendence in a way Lovecraft's work should have been. One of the best cosmic horror novels I've read in eons."
- Mary SanGiovanni, author of Thrall, The Hollower, and the Kathy Ryan series
"Song of the Tyrant Worm is the mind bending culmination of Piper's epic cosmic horror trilogy, tying together a storyline that reveals its depths as she guides us once more to the Sunless Palace. With a gift for prose that brings beings beyond the stars to eye level, I gasped in the airlessness of frozen moments, a vista shining bright and timeless. The humanity, the empathy Piper manages to conjure with every phrase is nothing short of masterful. It's no secret I'm a Piper fan for life, and this book illustrates exactly why: her words pierce beyond the universe, into the deepest heart of horror and humanity. Stunning."
- Laurel Hightower, author of Crossroads and Below
"Eerie and visceral, Piper combines the supernatural with the deeply human in a novella that explores the many faces of horror, at once haunting and familiar, yet utterly new."
- A.C. Wise, Nebula Award-nominated author of Catfish Lullaby and The Ghost Sequences
“Absolute poetry.”
– Sara Tantlinger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil’s Dreamland
"a cosmic transcendence … The ending almost breaks your mind."
- Cemetery Dance
"Goes harder than Lovecraft himself ever dared."
- SFF180
"Everything you’d want in a horror novel … a genuine story about human struggle."
- Dark Matter Magazine
"There’s something so delightful about the feeling of impending cosmic doom that only Piper can effectively evoke in her brand of horror."
- The Line-Up
“I am your god, and I create you
in my image—scarred and wicked.”
– Sara Tantlinger, “The Filth in You”
Table of Contents
One: Manhattan 1990
Two: The Sounding
Three: Night City
Four: The Traveler
Five: Islands of Time
Six: Winter
Seven: A Universal State of Mind
Eight: Descent
Nine: The Ceremonies
Ten: The Outside
Eleven: Alone
Twelve: Engine
Thirteen: Superstitious Species
Fourteen: The Bridal Gambit
Fifteen: Temptation
Sixteen: The Song That Pierces the Universe
Seventeen: The Empty Place
Eighteen: A Cry in the Dark
Nineteen: Nightly Ceremony
Twenty: The Lost
Twenty-One: The Usurper Worm
Twenty-Two: All of Time Conspired
Twenty-Three: Win. Die. Destroy.
Twenty-Four: The Fade-Out
Twenty-Five: Pangaea
Acknowledgements
About the Author
One: Manhattan 1990
There was an art to the act of abduction. Maybe no one else knew that, but the Gray Maiden did.
The faithful inside and beneath Empire Music Hall thought taking someone had to be easy for her. She was big, humans were small. It made a sort of sense.
But they didn’t understand the dexterity needed to pounce from the shadows and then fade back into them. Or the care Gray took with her manhole lid-sized hands in grasping these little creatures’ chests to constrict their breath. Too much force would crush their bones and lungs. Too little, and they would keep screaming, draw attention. And she had to grip each woman long enough for her to pass out, but not so long that she would die.
Gray had practiced this art, but not quite to perfection. Once-squirming bodies now and then became limp dolls in her hands, and no amount of nuzzling with her beak-ended snout could rouse them. She had even tried sticking them with the tips of her talons, or her feet’s sickle claws. In case they were pretending.
But dead was dead. And if they died, she stuffed them into subterranean crevices, never to be found.
For all Gray knew, her target had been among these failures. She might have already killed the Bride of the Worm, and she’d been stealing these other women for nothing. But what else could she do? This was her task, and the time hadn’t come for sleep yet.
The time had come for abduction.
Gray clambered up from the subway tunnel, gently loosening and replacing a crosshatched steel grate. Her hunt carried her through the city’s shadows, where lakes of darkness often encircled islands of flickering light.
A burn barrel danced with flame where two wire fences met, forming a sparsely populated corner. Blankets and plastic bags dressed the asphalt here and there. A rusted husk of patchy metal lay to one side in dead-animal decay, its insides eaten away by insects. The fire’s odor choked out the smell of the river, often suffocating in summertime, and its light cast the seven gathered figures in yellow, orange, and black.
Gray focused on one woman’s lengthy black hair. Her thinness. The faded red belt in her jeans. Humans weren’t always easy to tell apart, but Gray’s instructions aimed her at a woman with dark hair, bones that showed beneath the skin, and red garments.
This could be the one.
Gray tensed her long legs, each bending back at the middle joint, and then lunged off one foot, the other swinging forward.
She’d once watched a hawk near the river dive and fail to grasp a squirrel. Even the failure was graceful—sleek brown feathers folding against the hawk’s body, her legs flexing as they planted and then launched her skyward, her wings catching the wind.
Gray could be just as graceful. She swept into the burn barrel’s glow on one firm step, leaned back as she grasped the red-belted woman in both hands, and then rappelled from the firelight, into the shadows. She never rose on the wind, but her stride was swift and massive.
It wasn’t like anyone here could easily chase her. Not unless they’d expected her. Gray Hill got another, they would whisper without giving chase, as if names mattered. In the end, they would hardly know what had happened.
That went for the Maybe-Bride in Gray’s hands, too. She’d have no clue what had taken her, only that she couldn’t suck in breath. She hadn’t even inhaled enough to scream.
Abduction wasn’t easy, and this was the hardest part, what none of the faithful could conceptualize. Gray’s clutching hands kept the writhing Maybe-Bride from expanding her chest, but her terror grew infectious. Letting her go would be easier. At least then Gray wouldn’t have to feel like a monster.
Within two blocks, the woman slumped unconscious in Gray’s hands. Her grip eased as she kneaded encouraging motions into the chest. Time to breathe.
She turned her head to one side and raised the Maybe-Bride to her black hood, listening for shallow breath—yes, there it was. Gray hadn’t killed this one, her art successful. She could take this Maybe-Bride home.
The same grate that had released her from the New York underground now swallowed her. Occasional lights flashed above, cast by passing subway cars in adjacent tunnels, but the city’s past stretched down into the earth and back in time, with much of it forgotten below the bustling surface. No matter how many wires and bulbs these creatures fitted under the asphalt, they could never entirely banish the secrets from this subterranean blanket of darkness. Old train lines. Neglected subway tunnels. Shafts as deep as skyscrapers were tall.
And what lay beneath Empire Music Hall.
Silver had taught Gray the safety in keeping herself secret. You are a miracle, my dear Gray Maiden. And not everyone can accept a miracle. No one could know about her outside of the Worm’s faithful. Those who did were never seen again.
Gray didn’t surface until she neared Empire Music Hall. She knew this patch of the city better than anywhere else. Its shadows hid her presence the way her enormous hooded cloak hid her body, and if anyone caught a g
Gray eyed Empire’s white stony steps, tremendous pillars, and dark doorways, and then she chased the unlit alleys and shadows between buildings until she circled around the music hall’s back and into the neighboring alley. Her journey took her crawling down a dank basement. Through halls built too short for her. She could only stand again when she came to the next main staircase and greater halls leading to the grand elevator. She never used the box, too small for her, but Silver had ensured shafts were built to either side decades ago, letting Gray descend into a network of tunnels.
And then the vast open cavern of the Sunless Palace.
I know it looks strange, but it’s like you, Silver had said when Gray was small. A refugee from a time now dead.
But Silver had it backwards. She’d raised Gray in the underground. The rocky tunnels were her blacktops, streets, and grass. Empire Music Hall’s lower floors were her apartment. Many years had passed before she ventured to the surface and looked on the bleak skyscrapers, flashing neon signs, lazy river, and brick buildings with their white-box air conditioners and tangled black fire escapes.
For her, this great dome of black glass and starry reflections was normal. Its circle of curving spires made more sense than the Statue of Liberty.
The tunnels came alive with clicks and scratches. Not the surface noises of construction work or subways that sometimes thundered down the cavern. These were closer, and familiar.
Other Pangaeans. Gray sometimes spotted them creeping over walls or drinking from the subterranean lake. Each looked like a human-sized version of herself, beaked and clawed and hidden in ragged garments. One of them liked to mimic her movements as if she were Gray’s miniature reflection. Gray ignored their sounds and kept moving.
Damp, cool air slid under her hood as she approached the cliff’s edge overlooking the Sunless Palace. A firm bridge once passed between the glass-and-stone spires to the palace’s dome, but it had rusted away over time, and she didn’t trust the rickety wooden bridge the faithful had slapped together in its place. Safer to scale the cliff in a clumsy descent and then carry the Maybe-Bride through the tall grim doorway below.
Its height told her without any words that this place once belonged to her kind. That they were meant to grow as large as she had. Perhaps larger. The other Pangaeans had to be younger.
They might as well have been members of a separate species. Only in recent years had they seeped through the cross-timeline calamity, emerging from the Chamber of Old Time with toadstool randomness. Each had been about the same size they were now. They understood each other, but they didn’t understand Gray, and she didn’t understand them. She’d crossed over decades ago, still inside her egg, hatching not long before Silver found her and began to raise her. The smaller Pangaeans never climbed to the streets, whereas Gray stalked the outskirts of human life. She knew where she belonged, and it was not with her people.
The Worm had seen to that. As if he’d chosen her especially for suffering. She could guess why, but she didn’t want to think about that here.
She had an appointment with the king.
Sleek hallways of grim stone and black glass led her through inner entryways until she reached the great wooden doors of the throne room. There was another level beneath this one, but she tried not to descend that far if she could help it. Not since Silver’s death.
And especially not since it had snared the newest king. What if the Worm chose to snare Gray alongside her? Even death couldn’t free anyone from that fate.
High windows glared like dark eyes at the room’s peak. A balcony jutted from the mid-level, its firm tongue forever sticking out where Gray entered the room. Blue-green fungi glowed down the black walls to the lowest level’s slender doorway, through which kings entered but could not leave until dismissed. Their lengthy stone table took up the floor’s center, its far end broken off in a jagged wound where a seventh king might’ve sat, in a time when the Worm believed in possessing seven kings. At its head stood his ornate brass throne. Behind that stretched a black wall dotted with bioluminescent growths in imitation of a starry night sky. That wall of stars forever felt like it was watching.
The dead sat on both sides of the table. Nearer to the balcony, two skeletons wore dark uniforms, and a third wore furs, an axe buried in the floor to one side. Two more skeletons sat across wearing dusty suits, one with a hat on the table. Featureless silver masks hid every desiccated face.
And among them sat the only living king—Donna Ashton.
She wore a suit like those beside her. Shoulder-length hair formed a dark halo around her pale face, except where it had gone silver above her ears. Her features looked little different from most humans, but a determination flared in her bright blue eyes that was sometimes beautiful, some-times intimidating, often both, as if the sky lived in her gaze and threatened to fall if you didn’t follow her every command.
She clapped a book shut as she glanced up at Gray. “It must be evening.”
“Ooh,” Gray crooned in acknowledgment.
Donna set down her tome among the table’s volumes and dishes. “Show me.”
Gray raised the Maybe-Bride above the balcony’s lip. She had brought Donna one woman every night since the hunt began in April.
She always sighed out the same disappointment. “No, that isn’t Monique Lane.”
Gray lowered her arms. She’d expected this.
“But I appreciate your effort. Bring this one to Bouchard, like the others. If we’re lucky, she’ll join us.” Donna offered a hollow smile. “I know you’re unhappy, even if no one else does. I promise, things will be better for you in the new future we’ll make.”
Gray tucked Not-Monique to her chest and retreated through the balcony doors, the Sunless Palace, up the cliff and tunnels and shafts leading to Empire Music Hall’s underside.
If they were lucky? No, the luck would have to be with this woman, and it would have to find her fast. Few of the Not-Moniques had joined the faithful.
“Oh Gray, you’re back!”
Gray had scarcely emerged from a beside-elevator shaft when Lady appeared in the gleaming white hall. Her creamy blouse flowed like her boundless red hair. She made an awkward “Ooh!” noise that said nothing. Gray’s calls had meanings she’d given them, severed from the language of her kind, but Lady echoed them the way humans meowed at their cats.
“Another almost?” Lady asked, her cheerfulness infinite. “That’s too bad, but don’t forget, every night you go out looking for the Bride, you embark on holy pilgrimage.”
Not-Monique began to rouse. Gray curled her free hand near her eye, scarlet beneath her hood. “Awake,” she signed.
But Lady went on chattering about the Worm, the Bride, initiations, ceremonies, oblivious to the limbs twitching over Gray’s digits, or to Gray having used a hand to speak. Lady never noticed Gray’s gestures, couldn’t recognize them for language. Gray hardly bothered anymore, but now and then, the impulse possessed her to try.
White halls and a short staircase led them to Bouchard’s office, its surfaces wood-paneled, its corners towering with steel filing cabinets. Missing posters peppered a corkboard at the back wall. Bouchard was a bald, muscular man dressed in a white suit. He hurried past his desk, alerted by Gray’s click-click footsteps. Two other men in suits braced his sides.
Not-Monique’s head lolled from left to right as Gray laid her on the hard floor and stepped back. Her nearness might send the woman shrieking. It had happened before.
“It’s already summer,” one of the suited men said. “She’s been down there almost three months, and nobody the Gray Maiden’s brought back has been this perfect Bride.”
The other man nodded. “We should consider we got it wrong.”
Bouchard raised an open palm. “The Worm doesn’t get things wrong. Three months is nothing. Think of Camelia, working to find a king since the Depression. Our time nears. And look—already stirring. I suppose we won’t need the ammonia. Either she’ll join us soon, or she’ll join the Worm now.”
“Yeah, all’s well,” Lady said, clapping her hands as she leaned over the woman, red hair eclipsing red belt. “Everyone serves the Worm in their own way.”
