Seal of the Worm

Eight

Capitas was filled to bursting with soldiers. The entire Imperial war machine was on the move, and the Third Army and elements of the First were thronging the streets, trying to resupply while waiting for their orders.

To General Brugan, watching from the Imperial palace, it all had a random, mindless air to it, the mad scurrying of insects whose nest has been turned over. He had a horrible feeling of doubt in his own perceptions. Was it always like that, and I just fooled myself that I could see any patterns?

He was the general of the almighty Rekef. He had plotted and schemed for it, done away with rivals, raised conspiracies. He should have been the most powerful man in the Empire, with the Empress under his complete control. That had been the plan.

Yet he could not have guessed what the Empress was. Even now he did not know, save that she was not human, not natural. When she looked at him, or thought of him in a certain way, he loved her, lusted after her. When she forgot about him, he found some place out of her sight and lived in dread of the moment that his name would enter her mind again. None of it made any sense.

He wanted to be mad. If he was mad, and it was all his own madness, then at least that would leave the rest of the world sane. But he knew it was true and he was sane, and everything he had ever believed in now made as little sense as the scurrying of the soldiers below.

She had been gone for a while: some whim of hers taking her westwards to where the Eighth had been fighting. She had not told him why, and he had not dared ask, where once he would have demanded. For some short time his life had been his own, even though the Red Watch men strode through the palace with decrees somehow direct from the Empress’s mouth. He believed that as well. He was becoming painfully adept at believing the impossible.

And now she was back, and it had all started again. Half the time he felt that even his own body was somehow running his commands to it past the Empress before allowing him to move his limbs.

Last night she had sent for him again. The lovemaking had been hard enough, torn between the helpless need she generated in him and her own hunger that devoured another part of him every night they grappled together. Afterwards, though, when he had lain exhausted and blood-dashed by her side, there had been no sleep. He had trembled and clenched his eyes shut, hands to his ears as Seda, Empress of all the Wasps, fought with her own nightmares.

There had never been nightmares until her return. Whatever she had done, whatever had been done to her, it had ended badly. Before her journey, she had been the cool, fierce Empress that the Wasps had grown to love: ruthless, elegant and deadly. Now Brugan alone was witness to something new, an undermining of her nature. As she slept, she twitched and cried out, moaned in horror, screamed sometimes.

‘I’m sorry,’ she had said, last night. Words he had never thought to hear from those lips.

And all through it, the coupling and the torment, her bodyguard Tisamon had watched on, silent and menacing, in the very same room. She would not be parted from the man. Or from whatever lurked within that metal shell.

‘General!’

He turned sharply to recognize General Marent of the Third Army. The man looked angry, and it was unthinkable that anyone could address Brugan with so little respect. A Rekef rank overrode a regular army one, as everyone knew. Brugan should draw himself up and stare the man down, enforce his indomitable will on this jumped-up infantryman.

He reached into himself for that certainty and self-possession he had known of old, but it had rusted under the Empress’s caustic regard, leaving nothing for him to draw on.

‘What is it, Marent?’ he asked, horrified to hear a trembling in his own voice.

The army general’s eyes widened, and Brugan saw that he would far rather have been shouted at, dismissed, threatened even, because that was the way the world worked. He had come looking for reassurance, and had found only Brugan.

Marent had been a battlefield colonel whose record during the revolt of the traitor governors was such that the choice was either to promote the man or to have him disappear. Right now Brugan was wishing it had been the latter. Marent seemed to storm through life constantly angry with the inefficiencies of everyone and everything else, but that resentment had never quite dared to light upon his superiors until now.

‘My Third is still sitting idle, General,’ the man reported. ‘We were supposed to head for the front two tendays back, but the quartermasters have been feeding me excuses, I haven’t any Engineer Corps, siege train or air support, and today . . .’ His hands were clenched into fists at his sides as the man forcibly restrained himself. ‘Today your cursed Red Watch comes to me—!’

‘They’re not my Red Watch!’ Brugan’s words were supposed to match the man in rage and volume, but there was a terribly plaintive edge to them he could not control. ‘They take orders from the Empress – only the Empress.’

‘So they said,’ spat Marent. ‘And so I asked for an audience with her, to hear it from her own lips. The Empress—’

‘The Empress is not seeing anyone,’ Brugan finished for him. Not true. She sees me. Oh, she sees me.

‘And so I have nonsensical orders to sit here, with thirty thousand men clogging every barracks and garrison and camped outside the gates, without even the basics of a support corps. Because – and I quote – I “may be needed”. What is that supposed to mean, General?’

‘It means you may be needed,’ Brugan replied hollowly. ‘If she says it, that is what she means. Don’t question her.’

Marent stared at him, and for a terrible moment Brugan thought some kind of pity would fight its way onto the man’s blunt features. ‘What is going on?’ Marent demanded. ‘Is this what we fought the traitors for? Orders that make no sense, commands from the throne that are vaguer than an Inapt prophecy –’ if he saw Brugan’s twitch at that, he did not let it slow him – ‘a war on two fronts, for no reason that anyone’s saying. And the Eighth . . . how did the Sarnesh destroy the Eighth so thoroughly, Brugan? What aren’t they telling me?’

He was so self-righteous, buoyed by his own war record and his youth, that Brugan should destroy him, remind him of the Rekef’s power, break him for the sheer disloyalty of even questioning the way things were.

But he’s right, the Rekef general knew. He could only shake his head, sagging against the stone rail of the balcony, whilst beyond him the city bustled and struggled in a hundred different directions, and achieved nothing.

‘What happened to you?’ Marent said, his voice at last losing its anger in the face of the inexplicable, but Brugan only shook his head further and turned away.

Wasps lost their tempers, it was well known. Every officer had been forced to discipline soldiers who let that temper fly. Every occupied city had learned the dark side of Wasp temperament, to tread carefully and not provoke the Lords of Empire. Each Wasp conquest had paid for its resistance in killings and rape after having sparked the frustration of the invaders. Few from outside the Empire realized the amount of effort that went into directing and controlling that innate rage, from their rigid upbringings to the Imperial expansion itself, a constant channel for a kinden unwilling to be idle and quick to take offence, and whose every adult member could deal death through their Art.

Soldiers and the lower ranks could afford to let loose their anger occasionally – earning a flogging perhaps, but little more. Those who sought promotion must learn to curb their excesses, though. The Empire had no use for a colonel or a general who could not keep a level head, no matter what.

And what of an Empress?

She had been so careful. All those years spent in the executioner’s shadow during her brother’s reign, and then the careful – oh, so careful – conspiracy to bring him down. And then the frustrations of the war against the traitor governors who would not accept her rule, and her discovery that her privileged position as Great Magician amongst the Apt had to be shared . . . her quest to the broken hold of Argastos, her contests with Cheerwell Maker, her unwanted sister . . . None of these had sufficed to breach her calm.

And then it had seemed that her rivalry with the Beetle girl might become something else, that Seda could now live in peace with her, that they could even combine their strengths. She had entertained such hopes.

It had been that, she thought, that had broken her resolve. Not the betrayal itself, for under other circumstances she would have been expecting it, ensuring her response was deadly but proportionate. She had laid herself open, though, cast off her armour. She had fallen victim to hope, and then the girl had turned on her.

And Seda had struck back, with all the might that she could muster. She had broken the Great Seal beneath them all and condemned Cheerwell Maker to the cold dark below. And all the Seals, all those locks that chained the Worm down in its light-less prison, they had cracked across in that same moment, and she had doomed the world.

Not all at once, not a sudden pent-up flood of squirming evil vomiting forth onto the world’s surface, but the Worm was now pushing at the gates, squeezing loops of its substance through the cracks and forcing them wider with its blind persistence. It struck in darkness and left no trace behind, nor path whereby it could be followed. It was growing bolder and it was strong in some way that Seda could not fathom. She knew what it was that had destroyed the remnants of the Eighth Army, but she did not know how. Her attempts to scry or divine the truth encountered only a fog.

The Worm, the Centipede-kinden of old, had been magicians, but this was something other. They had transformed themselves into something even worse during the long ages of their banishment.

And she could not forget what she had done. Every night was a reminder. When she could cling to wakefulness no longer, when sleep rose from the stone darkness to claim her, that link opened up once more. The same bond with Cheerwell Maker that had led Seda to the Masters of Khanaphes, and thus to power, was a constant fount of nightmares. In her sleep, Seda saw the domain of the Worm, suffering through it as Che suffered. She would wake screaming out, ‘Just die! Leave me alone and die!’ because that was surely the kinder path, for the girl to meet a swift extinction in that terrible place.

But Beetles endured. Even that fate, they endured. Somewhere in that cold prison, Cheerwell Maker struggled on, her enemy and her sister.

‘I’m sorry!’ Seda had heard the echo of her own voice, as she started awake. And now, back in Capitas and with her arch-rival consigned to the pit, she truly was sorry. I would bring you back if I could, but she knew the girl could never hear her.

If only she could drag Che Maker from that fate, then perhaps, just perhaps, the two of them together could have repaired the Seal.

Now she could look out over her city, her Empire, her world, and know that it was ending. The attacks of the Worm were slow and tentative still, but she knew that their numbers were vast and they were getting bolder.

They seek to make everything like them: that had been poor dead Gjegevey’s belief. A world of the homogeneous, an endless writhing carpet of the Worm.

In locking the Worm away those centuries ago, the powers of the ancient world had only bequeathed a worse terror to their descendants. Now Seda was desperately trying find some way to follow in their footsteps, because that was all that was left to her. The Moths and their allies had performed a ritual not seen before or since; it had been the highest and most terrible moment of the Bad Old Days. They had possessed a skill and understanding that Seda had not been given the opportunity to develop. She could only rely on what she had.

So what do I have? What can I do that will put things right? What is my magic good for?

Each night, each morning, the same questions. She was the Empress of the Wasps. Every difficulty would yield to her will, to the might of her armies, to the strength of the magic she had been an unwilling recipient of. I will not accept that I am helpless.

All the while she gave those orders that she saw might help, she could not waste her precious attention on trivial matters. Her Red Watch carried out her bidding but understood nothing. Her soldiers and her citizens were growing worried, this she knew. They could not see what she had seen, and if they could only know, how thankful they would be that the horrors that visited her were hers alone. She was the shield between them and her people.

Only she could save the world.

She mourned the loss of her Woodlouse adviser Gjegevey. The old man had infuriated her but, now that he was dead, his absence hurt her more than she could bear, and his guidance was what she now needed most. But he was gone, and the turncoat Tegrec was gone – the only other Wasp magician that she knew. She had only her limited understanding of magic to call upon.

She had dredged up all she had read, all she had seen or been taught. Everything the old Woodlouse had patiently explained to her, everything she had sieved from decaying Moth records. Everything vouchsafed to her by her original master and co-conspirator, Uctebri the Sarcad.

He had been a man who had known the uses of power. His people had a rare and terrible understanding, honed over those long years of hiding after the Moths brought them low. Denied their place as rulers, they had learned how to gather power in other ways. They would not have dared to attempt what was in her mind now, though. The sheer scale would defeat them. Gjegevey would have begged her to find another way.

But there was no other way, and there was so little time. Somebody had to save the world from the Worm. With Che lost, there was nobody else but herself.