Seal of the Worm

Seven

Darmeyr Forge-Iron lurched outside, dropping down a level. ‘Hide them!’ he shouted.

‘No!’ Atraea the Moth snapped back. ‘Do you think they will not take all of our people one by one until they find them? They are here because of these renegades. Messel and his dreams have brought this upon our heads. Here! They are here!’ She was calling out into the great chasm, even as Che craned her neck, trying to see what was going on.

Thalric leapt on the Moth and threw her to the ground, and when she opened her mouth again he slapped her across the face, hard enough to whip her head about. He had his palm out to her in threat, but it was plain she did not realize what he meant by it. Before Atraea could denounce him, before she drove him to kill her, Tynisa had the point of her blade to the woman’s throat.

‘No more sound from you,’ she warned, and the Moth’s white eyes glared at her and the Wasp, but she said nothing.

The chorus of wails and cries was passing down the length of the scar that was Cold Well, gathering in volume as more throats joined it. Not pain, Che thought. Not panic or even fear, but grief, sheer grief and loss. She had never heard anything like it, and the rebounding echo of the rock walls made it all the worse. She felt as though this was the cry of some great beast that was approaching, a creature it would be death even to look upon.

Her Art shouldered aside the darkness, and she saw the Worm.

Just men, of some unknown kinden, save that nothing about them said ‘human’ apart from their shape. They moved in bands of a dozen or two dozen, and they were swift when they were not completely still. Each body of them was pale, no taller than she and narrower at the shoulder. Their hair and skin were all of the same colourless hue, their eyes so pale that the white shaded into the pale grey of the iris, the mid-grey of the pupils, without any hard distinction. They wore armour of overlapping plates that left their limbs mostly bare and low helms with jagged cheek-guards. For weapons they had swords a little longer than she was used to, but still unremarkable except that most of them carried two. She saw no shields, no bows, no spears, though a few had slings dangling from their long-fingered hands.

She realized that she could not tell their gender, for they had nothing to their faces or their spare frames to tell her one way or another. Even that was a trivial thing: watching them as they coursed in their groups across the levels of Cold Well, the wrongness in every motion cried out to her.

They do not move like humans of any kinden. They did not move like humans at all. They walked on two legs, held blades in their hands, had eyes to see with, but the unavoidable impression was that these were not men: that these human figures were the puppets of something utterly other that was rushing them this way and that. No – rather that the entire group was a single puppet linked invisibly, the slaves of one alien mind.

She felt ill, sick to her stomach just to see it, and Maure was clutching at her arm, swaying.

‘It is the tax!’ Darmeyr boomed. ‘They are not seeking our guests, Atraea. The tax is come!’

Che glanced back at the pinned Moth, seeing her head shake, despite the razor point of Tynisa’s blade there.

‘It cannot be,’ she got out. ‘Too early. They have been here already! We have paid our tax!’

‘What do we do?’ The huge Mole Cricket sounded utterly impotent. ‘What can we do? That is what they are demanding. Look – I see the priest. He is coming this way.’

‘Priest?’ Che demanded. ‘What’s . . .’ The word was familiar from her studies, a holdover from ancient, primitive times: beliefs that even the Inapt would not consider these days. Except . . .

‘He is coming here,’ Darmeyr said, shaken. ‘He will want you to give the order.’

Tynisa made a judgement and stepped back, and then Thalric allowed the Moth woman to get up. Her unguarded expression was piteous to behold.

‘We need to get out,’ the Wasp said, but Esmail protested, ‘They’ll see us. They’re all over this place.’ He hissed through his teeth. ‘I should have seen them sooner, but they move so fast.’

‘And we need to move fast, too. How far does this go? Can we hide back here?’ Thalric demanded.

Atraea was staring at them, and perhaps she was wondering whether this ‘tax’ of theirs could be offset by handing over the strangers.

‘If they find them here, they will blame you,’ Messel put in, plainly sensing the same.

‘Then hide,’ the woman spat, almost in tears. ‘Hide, and hear, if you are truly outsiders.’

Che fell back into the cave, retreating further into its depths until they were out of sight of the entrance. In moments they heard the rapid patter of bare feet as the Worm arrived.

‘Speaker,’ snapped a hoarse voice, an old man’s voice.

Atraea’s reply was meek. ‘Scarred One.’

And Che could not stop herself. She inched forwards, despite Thalric frantically plucking at her sleeve. She edged and edged, quiet as could be, until she could put an eye round the corner and look.

A single unit of the Worm soldiers was entering Atraea’s domain, half of them still outside but a chain of men already coiling inwards. None of them looked at the Moth, or at anything else. Che had no sense that they had any actual presence as individuals at all.

She identified the male speaker at once, though. He was of that same kinden as the rest, but he wore robes of chitin scales stitched into that hardwearing cloth they all used here. He was old, and his features were sufficiently distinct from those of his underlings that he might almost have been of a different race altogether. Most striking were the scars, though: long, curling, puckered lines that had been scored across his face and down his forearms, then left to heal badly, so that the skin had cracked into jagged darts on either side of the original mark, and the whole resembled . . .

And she saw it then, at his feet, a long, sinuous, weaving shape. It must have been five feet in length, and she felt an instinctive revulsion as soon as she saw it. The world was full of venomous creatures, but none had a reputation as bad as this sort, so that sane people killed these creatures wherever they found them. But why? Let the academics of Collegium argue as they would, nobody could say just why. Except Che, right now. She understood why the mere sight of a centipede sent shudders down the spines even of the Apt, and why there were so many stories casting them as deadly killers.

It was the Worm; they were remembering the Worm. The beast there, with its whip-like antennae and curved claws full of venom; the ridged scars that ornamented the old man’s hide; the very line of soldiers, just segments of a greater whole, undifferentiated and mindless. Symptoms of the same ancient disease.

‘This is too soon,’ Atraea quavered. ‘You cannot be here for the tax.’

‘You will have your people present their tribute,’ the old man – the Scarred One – informed her. He sounded bitter, human, and he regarded Atraea with the contempt of an owner for his slave.

‘But you were here . . . I have marked the time faithfully, I have!’

‘The Great Lord demands,’ the Scarred One said. ‘Do not believe that scratching marks on the wall allows you to guess the plans of god. Do as you are told.’

‘But what has changed?’ Atraea begged him.

‘Do not tempt a further tax of Cold Well.’ The Scarred One sounded almost bored, like a College bureaucrat dealing with a student who had filled in the wrong papers. The threat plainly went straight to the heart of Atraea, though, for she was bowing and nodding, practically kissing the man’s filthy feet.

‘I will, I will,’ she promised. ‘It will be as the Great Overlord commands. Please . . .’

But the old man was turning aside, stepping back past his men. Che shivered to watch them follow him, the entire line of them moving like a single living thing. The centipede itself remained a moment, its front segments lifted from the ground, its trident of a head casting from side to side as if sensing that all was not as it should be. Che froze, fearing that it had sniffed her out somehow, but then the beast dropped back down and coursed fluidly off after the priest.

Atraea was already gone, but they could hear her thin, hopeless voice crying out beyond: ‘We must do as they say! Do not defy them, or we will suffer all the more! Please, my people, please!’

‘Cold Well goes hungry this season, then,’ Thalric murmured. ‘I’ll admit I’ve seen the same in the Empire on occasion.’

‘You have not,’ Messel told him flatly. ‘You do not understand. Of course you do not understand.’

There was something in his voice, some dead echo, that affected Che. ‘Then make us understand,’ she urged. ‘Tell us. Show us.’

He crept past her, fingers brushing the stone as he moved to the cave’s entrance. ‘Then see,’ he told them. ‘And see what you have been sent to save us from. See the Worm at work.’

They moved to the entrance of Atraea’s cave cautiously, but it was Che alone who went so far as to put her head outside, so that she could witness what was going on.

Work at the foundry had stopped. All the people of Cold Well were standing out in the open, as the chains of Worm soldiers passed between them. There seemed to be some manner of census going on, or at least Atraea seemed to be flying here and there, trying to account for people.

Che expected to see goods being brought from the forges: weapons or armour or metal ingots, such as Messel had mentioned. Or else food: Atraea had been worried about something more than simply not making quota, surely? Was Cold Well going to starve in order to load the tables of the Worm?

‘Cages.’ Esmail was beside her, crouching low; she had not realized he was still at the cave mouth until he spoke to her. She saw what he had seen: there were Mole Crickets and a few Beetles up at the lip of the cliff, overlooking the whole of Cold Well, and they were lowering angular lattices of chitin struts on ropes.

‘Containers, for the tax,’ Che corrected, desperately. ‘Not cages.’

There was activity from further away down the chasm of Cold Well, where the cages had already descended. It was coming closer. She could hear the sobbing and crying start up again.

‘Cages,’ repeated Esmail grimly.

‘But they’re so small . . .’ Che started, and at last her eyes could hide it from her no longer. She watched as a Beetle woman held up a child of no more than two, tears running down her face. A soldier of the Worm snatched the infant from her and passed it back down the chain towards one cage, in which another two children already crouched, crying, arms thrust through the gaps towards their helpless parents.

‘They’re just . . . handing them over,’ Che whispered. She saw plenty of reluctance, even some fights between parents before the inevitable surrender, but as the Worm passed through the people of Cold Well, they were making that impossible choice. Each family was selecting its least favourite son for the cull, offering up its own flesh and blood to the Worm.

‘How can they? They’re . . . it’s monstrous,’ she got out.

‘A thousand years of defeat and resignation.’ Esmail the killer, the assassin by birth, sounded just as sick and shaken as she. ‘They are shackled, body and mind.’

She saw Darmeyr Forge-Iron, who could have broken any of the Worm soldiers in two with his bare hands and hurled the pieces into the chasm. She saw him stare down at them, and his great frame trembled. There was a woman behind him – his mate, no doubt, and as large and powerful as he – and they had three children clustered close at their feet, a girl and two boys, hiding their faces in their mother’s skirts.

‘No,’ Che whispered, but the Worm was demanding, through the scarred priest its mouthpiece, and huge Darmeyr was turning to his children, his expression fixed and dreadful.

His hand fell on the youngest of his sons, and his wife was shaking her head, but it was plain she had no answer to his blunt question: What other choice?

So many children here – and so many of the women already growing round again with child, now she looked for it – and yet so few of four years or more. Cold Well had another resource for the Worm beyond weapons or smelted ore.

The chasm was a cacophony of screeching infants separated from all that they knew, of children just old enough to realize what they had lost in being taken from the hands of their parents and shoved into jagged cages by the soldiers of the Worm. Che did not even ask herself what this was in aid of, what need the Worm had for such a sacrifice. There were no reasons that she could ever want to know.

She saw Darmeyr take his son in his hands and hold him up, looking into the child’s screwed-up face, and she could not stop herself.

In the aftermath of her cry, which had cut through even that loaded and busy air, she now had the attention of the Worm.

‘Go!’ Esmail hissed, about to take off along the wall back the way they had come, but the Worm were there also – all of them roused in that one moment, all of them coursing up the sides of Cold Well towards them. ‘In!’ the assassin decided, pushing Che back into Atraea’s cave mouth. ‘In, and hope these tunnels go somewhere useful.’

But that’s mad; we’ll just get lost or— But there was Messel ahead of them, beckoning urgently. An expression had appeared on his eyeless face at last, screamed out by the set of his grimacing mouth: fear, terrible fear. His words of defiance were utterly gone.

‘Lead us!’ Thalric demanded, and the blind man shrugged past him, disappearing into the rear reaches of the cave and beyond, down into the warren of the mines.

‘No light.’ Esmail warned. ‘Hold to Maker, she can see. Beetle girl, you must go first.’

Logic roused her from her horror and she went rushing after Messel, terrified that he might already have taken one turn too many and be beyond her reach. He was waiting, though, and she caught up with him quickly, with Thalric hanging on to her shoulder, and Tynisa and Maure behind him. A hurried glance showed Esmail bringing up the rear, hands extended like weapons.

‘Quick quick quick,’ insisted Messel, and then he was gone again, and at a run that Che knew her stumbling charges could not match. She hauled them on at the best pace she could, and every time she thought that she had been abandoned, there the blind guide was waiting for her, his face twisted in fear.

She recalled the speed at which the soldiers of the Worm moved, how long it would take them to return to Atraea’s cave and how swiftly they would follow into the tunnels.

And where can these tunnels possibly lead us?

She knew she would barely even hear them approach before they caught up with Esmail, and the thought of even being that close to the Worm, with its horribly vacant human faces, made her weak with fear and revulsion.

Then there was a clatter and a thrashing, and she almost cried out at the sound.

‘One of their beasts,’ came Esmail’s tight, controlled voice. ‘Keep moving, whatever you do!’

‘They’re coming,’ whimpered Maure. ‘Oh, Che . . .!’

Was that a plea, or recrimination? You should not have followed me from the Commonweal. I have doomed us all.

Magic – surely I can find some magic . . . but it was like trying to wring water from stones, and the approaching Worm’s mere presence seemed to drive from her mind the faintest understanding of how she might even accomplish what she thought of as magic. That whole sense, that she had grown so accustomed to, had been put out like an eye.

Except . . .

One star remained in that sky, the thinnest thread back to that old life led under the sun. Seda, the Empress.

Her enemy, her sister and bitterest enemy, but the Worm was closer and closer, swifter and more sure than they could be in these confined and uneven tunnels, and Che would take anything at all now – anything to save herself and her friends.

She pulled, reaching across that immeasurable distance for aid of any sort, and it was given – a reflexive gout of strength, like a cup of water spilt on the desert sands.

Che took it in her hands and cast it at the Worm, anything to delay them, to buy another few moments without their attentions.

And nothing. Even as she cast it out, she lost the thoughts that would let her make use of it. Wasted – all that borrowed power, all she had; the simple presence of the Worm had deadened it to nothing.

Then she fell. Messel had descended a near-sheer drop of twenty feet without stopping, just crawling down the rock by his Art without ever thinking to warn her. Her wings snapped out as she dropped, and Thalric’s too, and the pair of them spiralled down, clutching at each other, into a wide mine gallery.

There were lights here – made of twined fungus like Thalric’s, and dim. The miners were all gone, though, summoned above to pay their tax to the Worm.

Messel was crouching, looking up. Maure had flown down, but Che saw Tynisa being supported by Esmail on the lip of the drop. Neither of them could fly.

‘Climb!’ she shouted, but she knew the Worm would climb down faster, and Tynisa seemed injured.

‘Just drop!’ Thalric shouted, and then he was kicking off, wings surging him upwards. Che saw him recoil as he reached the top, saw Tynisa’s blade out, the Worm surely almost on them. Then Thalric had grabbed the Weaponsmaster about the waist and just yanked her off the ledge, straining to slow their fall so that they crashed down almost at Che’s feet, bruised but alive.

‘Esmail—!’

But the assassin was already with them, falling on his feet, knees almost to his chin to absorb the shock of it, then turning to see the Worm moving down the cliff, descending almost as fast as they could run on level ground.

Gather, said a voice, and only a moment later did she realize it spoke directly into her head. It was a man’s voice, a tired voice but a strong one.

‘To me!’ Che hissed, and she dragged Esmail back even as he was weighing a throwing blade in one hand, then she clutched Maure closer with the other hand. The little knot of them drew close, defiant, blades out against the Worm.

A sense of calm touched Che, utterly incongruous in the circumstances but she saw that Maure felt it as well, and even Esmail.

‘Very still now,’ said that low, deep voice, in words they could all hear. A huge figure had joined them, stepping out from who knew where. Che’s eyes were fixed on the Worm as they reached the ground, those slack faces unreadable. She saw one huge pale hand from the corner of her eye, though, bearing a staff of black wood etched with countless tiny glyphs.

Messel’s Teacher had come, after all.

The man’s other hand, empty, was on the far side of them, so that their entire group fit within the curve of his arms, and Che could sense a vastly focused power at work – not strong but applied with a finesse and skill that could make her weep. It was not turned against the Worm, but focused inwards, drawing the darkness around them, turning the light away, until even the most dark-adapted eye would miss them.

The Worm had stopped, though nothing in all its faces or its bodies betrayed any emotion. Then it set off a little way, and halted once more, then back, as if making tentative searches for an enemy that had apparently been snatched away from it.

Che could hear the laboured breath of the giant newcomer, and she saw the hand holding the staff begin to shake. Without thinking, she placed her own there, and even though she had nothing she could give, the huge man seemed to take strength from that gesture.

Then the Worm was gone, its human segments retreating up the wall as quickly as they had come, heading elsewhere in their determined search.

The staff drooped, and their benefactor let out a sigh as big as himself. ‘We must go now. They’ll be back here very soon, searching for the trail. Oh, I have given too much, drunk a cupful out of a thimble.’

Thalric was already staring at the man, backing off slightly, and Che turned to see what had so startled him, craning upwards.

He was as big as a Mole Cricket, but without that broad strength, his frame instead a vast, sagging bulk within his patched and ragged robes. He was sickly pale, too, haggard and grey as though he was near death. Once upon a time his pouchy face would have radiated majesty. Che knew it – she could almost see him as he had once been, because she and Thalric had both encountered a great deal of his kin beneath the ancient city of Khanaphes. He was of their Masters, the Slug-kinden who had a claim on civilization to predate all others, who had beaten back the wilderness, raised the first cities, taught the younger kinden about law and craft and magic. Or so they claimed.

Having witnessed what he had just accomplished with so very, very little, she believed that.

‘Master . . .’ If a little reverence had crept into her voice, she felt she could be forgiven.

‘Ah, no,’ he said gently, ‘not “Master”, not from you. We are ill met in this benighted place, but I know a crowned head when I see it. But we must leave here. Please, come with me.’ He levered himself upright again. ‘No place here is truly safe, but at least I will take you away from the Worm.’