Wyrms (novel)

Plot introduction

The primary protagonist is Patience, a fifteen-year-old girl and only daughter of the rightful king, the Heptarch. Her father, Peace, lives as a slave to the usurper King Oruc, serving as a diplomat and assassin while ensuring Patience learns skills for future rule through her tutor Angel. She becomes fluent in dozens of languages, trained in diplomacy and assassination, and taught to be guarded. At thirteen, Patience learns of an ancient prophecy: as the seventh seventh seventh daughter of the Starship Captain, the first human on Imakulata, she is destined to give birth to Kristos, who will bring eternal salvation or destruction. An entire religion has formed around the Starship Captain's legends, with thousands of Vigilants ready to aid her.

Plot summary

King Oruc controls Patience and Peace by allowing only one to leave the castle at a time. When Peace falls ill, Patience cuts into his shoulder to retrieve a crystal globe hidden under his skin. Peace calls it the scepter of the Heptarchs and warns her never to let a gebling know she has it. After Peace dies, Oruc sends an assassin, whom Patience easily dispatches.

She visits her father's preserved head in Slaves' Hall, where headworms keep the heads of the wisest alive and coerced to speak truth. Patience forces Peace to reveal his darkest secrets: since her birth, he fought a compulsion to bring her to Cranning, home of the geblings. The Cranning Call drew the world's greatest thinkers to make a pilgrimage there, never to return. Peace says the source is the Unwyrm, summoning Patience.

Outside the castle, Patience feels the Call and decides to go to Cranning to challenge the Unwyrm. She chooses her own routes in defiance. Joined by Angel and a river woman named Sken, she meets Ruin and Reck, twin gebling siblings who are together the king of the geblings. The Cranning Call cancels the repulsion that had kept them from Cranning, allowing them to travel with her.

Will, a silent human who lived as Reck's slave, joins them. They stop at a house advertising ANSWERS, where a dwelf named Heffiji explains Imakulata's genetics: every native plant or animal derives from a single black segmented insect, the wyrm. Heffiji also reveals that the scepter is the mindstone of the gebling king, stolen 300 generations ago. Surgically implanted in the brain, it transfers memories of previous owners to the host. Ruin, a skilled surgeon, agrees to insert the crystal into Patience's brain.

The fictional world of Wyrms

The novel is set on Imakulata, a far-future planet colonized by humans thousands of years earlier. Ore for hard metal is extremely rare because the Starship Captain destroyed most deposits while his ship was still in orbit. The genetic code of species on Imakulata is malleable, allowing dramatic evolutionary changes in a few generations. As one character notes, every creature's genetic molecule obeys the slightest command to change.

Species

Geblings, called goblins by humans, are intelligent, furry, stunted humanoids with long, forked, mobile tongues. They communicate telepathically, have near-perfect recollection, and are always born as twins. Their brains contain a mindstone, a crystal globe storing important memories; children eat their dead parent's mindstones to absorb cherished memories. Dwelfs are smaller, with half-size heads and tiny brains, giving them poor short-term memory and the mental capacity of a human child. Gaunts resemble lithe, beautiful humans but have no will of their own; they respond telepathically to the strongest desire of those around them and are often employed as prostitutes.