In the House of the Worm by George R. R. Martin Page A

wore were black tatters that hung on him like a mushroom farmer's foul rags. His face was bare, without so much as a domino, and that set the guests to muttering, since the time of unmasking had not yet come.
    Very soon they had more to mutter about. For Annelyn, this strange, changeling Annelyn, stood silently in the door, his eyes jumping from one mask to another. Then, still silent, he walked across the gleaming obsidian floor to the feasting table, seized an iron platter piled high with fine white grounflesh, and flung it violently across the room. A few laughed; others, not so amused, picked slices of meat from their shoulders. Annelyn went from the room.
    Afterward, he became a familiar figure among the yaga-la-hai , though he lost his flair for dress and much of his fine wit. Instead, he spoke endlessly and persuasively of forgotten crimes and the sins of bygone eons, painting deliciously dark pictures of monster worms who bred beneath the House and would one day rise to consume all. He was fond of telling the worm-children that they ought to lie with grouns, instead of cooking them, so that a new people might be fashioned to resist his nightmare worms.
    In the endless long decay of the House of the Worm, nothing was so prized as novelty. Annelyn, though considered coarse and most unsubtle, wove entertaining tales and had a spark of shocking irreverence. Thus, though the bronze knights grumbled, he was allowed to live.
    Chicago
    February, 1975

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