Seal of the Worm

Nine

In the absence of clear direction from the throne, the Imperial forces fought on as best they could. Armies marched south down the Silk Road against the Spiderlands, to be met by inexhaustible enemy troops, treachery, poison and falsified orders. Tynan held Collegium and ground his teeth in frustration, whilst Colonel Brakker held his ground east of Sarn as he waited for the Ants to stir from their city.

And yet around the Exalsee there might as well not have been a war on.

‘Colonel, you have a most impressive complex here,’ Lieutenant-Auxillian Gannic complimented Drephos. Although he had been insistent about his own inferior rank, he would promote the master artificer to full colonel every time he addressed him.

He had been all attention as they showed him round those workshops and forges that Totho and Drephos judged fit for outside eyes. Plainly he was knowledgeable about the Empire’s previous commissions for the Iron Glove, discoursing in a familiar manner on the Sentinels and the greatshotters. He had done his best to demonstrate an artificer’s knowledge, but Totho had caught his partner’s eye partway through, and Drephos’s covert nod had signalled agreement. Gannic was no simple engineer.

They had brought him at last to one of the bigger foundries, where steel ingots shipped in from the Spiderlands were being resmelted into stronger alloys. The noise was tolerable, the machinery going about its practised routine with a hiss of steam and a ratchet of gears. Gannic barely had to speak up at all to be heard.

‘Of course, people back home have been taking notice, seeing how fast you’ve built up your fiefdom here,’ he explained. ‘Everyone knows how much you’ve helped in the war effort.’

‘Even so.’ Drephos’s voice was guarded.

‘And you’ve not forgotten your old friends in the Empire, Colonel, so everyone says,’ Gannic went on. His eyes flicked between the two of them, his smile pleasant and easy. Three half-breeds together, it seemed to say, so we should be friends. Totho had known at first sight that the man had been chosen for this role because of his heritage: there could not be many of mixed blood to have attained Gannic’s rank.

Drephos held up his steel hand. ‘We’ve already had enough embassies and trading missions and diplomats, Lieutenant-Auxillian,’ he observed. ‘And spies, for that matter. But you appear to be something new. Perhaps now is the time to set out what it is you’re here for.’

Gannic nodded companionably. ‘Between you and me, Colonel, you scare them, back home.’

Drephos regarded him expressionlessly.

The lieutenant shrugged. ‘There honestly aren’t many individuals who have the reputation you do, and now you’re out in the world, and at any moment the latest Iron Glove creation could march out of the Sarnesh gates – that’s what they’re thinking. After all, it’s all good stuff, what we’ve had from you, but who knows what else you have on the drawing board, or waiting in the hangars.’ That bright grin broadened. ‘The Empire’s a little scared of you, I think. The Engineers certainly are.’

It was said so flippantly that Totho snorted, and was about to make some slick rejoinder – about how maybe the Empire should be scared, something like that – when a sharp gesture from Drephos’s real hand silenced him.

‘What is your mission here, Lieutenant-Auxillian?’ the master artificer enquired flatly.

‘Ah, well.’ Gannic crossed over to one of the foundry fires, watching the low-guttering flames as they slowly cindered the last of the coal. The red light touched on his face, the solidity of Beetle-kinden there but also something of a Wasp’s hard coldness. ‘The Exalsee has been – literally – a backwater for generations. The Spiders never knew what they had here, so left the place as a playground for their failures. And, all the while, what an artifice was born on the shores of this lake! Yes, you two and your Iron Glove have built on it, but where would we be without the innovations of Chasme and Solarno, which they put together all by themselves?’

He looked back to catch Drephos’s eye, and the Colonel-Auxillian nodded.

‘But backwater no longer: the wider world caught up with a lot of places during the last war. These lands are on everyone’s maps. There is even something that in Capitas they call the “Exalsee question”.’

‘And what is the answer?’

‘The preferred answer involves you and your operation here, Colonel,’ Gannic said frankly. ‘It involves you coming back into the fold, resuming your rank in more than name, and serving the Empire as more than a mercenary tinker.’

‘Not an option we are willing to consider.’ Drephos’s real hand landed unexpectedly on Totho’s shoulder, startling him, but now drawing him into the conversation.

‘You’re concerned about General Lien and the Engineers shackling your creativity? Believe me, Lien knows he can’t control you. He hates you, that I’ll admit, but if you’re with us, you’re with us. You could even become the General-Auxillian, if you wanted that badly enough. And you wouldn’t have to leave Chasme and all you’ve built here because this would become an Imperial city, under your governance. I don’t think an offer this generous has ever been made in the Empire’s history.’

Drephos’s grip was becoming painful, and Totho was only glad that the pressure was from the man’s living hand. His metal hand, still hanging by his side, would have broken bones by now.

‘The Empire’s changing, in a lot of ways,’ Gannic went on. ‘Whatever you remember from just a few years back, believe me, it’s not the same. And you can see the opportunity you’d have to demonstrate the fruits of your craft.’ His eyes seldom left the master artificer’s face. ‘Far more than now, in fact. Everything you’ve wanted to test out could be put to real use in battle. You’d have a hand on the tiller of the war. You’d want for nothing.’

‘I see,’ was all Drephos would say, and then a pause. ‘And no doubt, in return, everything of mine would be tested in battle, whether I wished it or not. Everything that the Empire believes I have to offer.’

This cannot all be solely for the Bee-killer, Totho thought, and surely there was a core of truth to the absurdly grand offer, for the Empire had been leaning on the Iron Glove too much recently, and no doubt it would want to control the maverick artificers whose inventions it found so useful. But it was plain that the city-slayer weapon, that lethal chemical, had lodged itself in certain imaginations in Capitas. They wanted it, and they wanted to use it.

And Drephos did not. Why not?

‘The offer is there, anyway.’ Gannic shrugged. ‘Think about it, at least. Sleep on it. Weigh it up.’

As confidently as if he owned everything he saw, the Lieutenant-Auxillian walked out, with Drephos’s pale eyes tracking him all the way.

The next morning, before dawn, one of the junior artificers came banging on Totho’s door, sending him kicking and grappling over the edge of his bed. He had been dreaming of Collegium, and for a moment he thought that he was late for classes there.

Drephos, when Totho joined him, was looking out over Chasme, over the Exalsee, at the first faint touches of dawn.

‘What is it?’ Totho demanded, still half asleep and feeling off balance and irritable.

‘He’s gone,’ Drephos pronounced.

‘You mean you’ve—’

‘I’ve nothing. He’s gone.’

Totho stared blankly at the great expanse of water. ‘It’s early,’ he pointed out. ‘How do you know? Did you . . .’ send men to kill him? went unspoken.

Drephos’s lack of answer was reply in itself.

‘So he wasn’t waiting for our response, then.’

‘I suspect he could see it in our faces as he asked the question,’ Drephos replied acidly. ‘Whatever Iron Glove forces we can put under arms, we should do so now. Distribute snapbows and whatever else is in stock to our people. Ready all assembled engines for live testing, and gather anything that can be made to work.’

‘You’re serious?’ Totho queried, for those orders meant essentially shutting down their normal business. The Iron Glove stronghold was no fortress, and there was a limited amount of ordnance that they could call on at any time, most of their grander projects being built to order. Beyond their compound, Chasme was so loosely knit as to be indefensible, but at the same time it was full of hard lawless people at least nominally operating under Drephos’s banner. The more Totho thought about it, the more he couldn’t see the Empire making an attempt. ‘The Spiders would gut them,’ he pointed out. ‘Whatever line they’re walking in Solarno can’t last long, anyway, before they come to blows there.’

‘Get us ready, Totho,’ Drephos insisted, still staring north towards Solarno, towards the Empire.

And in Solarno itself, in a grandly appointed room of a townhouse in the Spider half of the city, Merva the governor’s wife was speaking to the enemy.

She and her husband Edvic had been so careful. Securing the governorship had been a joint effort, he fighting for elbow room in the upper echelons of the Consortium, she visiting the wives of senior officers and casting her net: bribes, threats, favours deployed as weapons to get them the jewel they were after. Solarno was considered the crown of the Exalsee; Edvic had taken the governorship, and there had been that accord with the Spiders, and everything had been golden.

Then it had all fallen apart, and for a while it looked as though Solarno was going to become the South-Empire’s prettiest war zone.

They had worked so hard, she and her husband and all the minor Aristoi who had become their opposite numbers. A battle for Solarno would serve nobody: not the Empire, not the Spiders, certainly not the Solarnese.

And then the Engineers – the Engineers! – had uncovered the plan, just as if they had been lifting the housing from some machine to see why it wasn’t working as expected. For a moment everything had begun unravelling around Merva, all her plans falling apart. Then smooth Colonel Varsec had told her simply that, yes, she and Edvic could keep it all, and why not? Except for one thing. The Empire was asking a price to avoid dragging Solarno into the fighting.

This was a large room made for elegant, mobile Spider gatherings, and right now it was almost full. Just across from Merva was a delegation of Spider-kinden – and not just factors and surrogates, but many of the little Aristoi who ran the lower reaches of Solarno. They were young and tough, all of them used to fighting to keep a social station that greater nobles would see as one step from the gutter. The elimination of the Aldanrael had suddenly given them their place in the sun, if they could only hold on to it.

Giselle of the Arkaetien headed their delegation, she was the one who had rescued Merva from Gannic before. She was a girl who seemed barely twenty, dressed in glittering bright armour of chitin and silks that should have made her seem a fop, and yet a simple change in the way she stood and she became a dangerous duellist, the rapier at her hip far more than just for show. At her back stood her peers, into whose uncertain care Solarno had been given when the alliance with the Wasps had met its grisly end. Nobody had expected anything from them save blood.

There were others there too: two or three Solarnese Beetles rich and influential enough to ape Spider fashions and mannerisms; a pair of well-dressed Fly-kinden merchant magnates; a handful of squat, plain-dressing Bee-kinden from Dirovashni; even a gaudy Dragonfly noble from Princep Exilla, one of Solarno’s traditional enemies. They had all just heard what Merva had to say. None of them had walked out. None of them had sneered. They exchanged glances, murmured amongst themselves. Evident in their many disparate faces was an admission of the possible.

‘Let me tell you what we think,’ Giselle stated. ‘We know of the Iron Glove. We know of Chasme. That place was a thorn in the side of our kin here in Solarno long before your Empire’s halfbreed traitor made his home there. The Solarnese have always dreamt of taking up arms against them.’ Some nods from the Beetles there. ‘Now you say your Empire, in the midst of its war with our people, has achieved some manner of civic responsibility concerning the pirates and renegades there.’

She smiled prettily before continuing. ‘I think you’re scared that they’ll sell to us. Or to the Lowlanders. I think they’re – what was it? – loose artillery. Who knows which way they’ll point with each shot? And, if I’m advised right, this man Drephos loves war and the Apt toys of war. A fight between Spiderlands and Empire on his very doorstep would let him sell his toys to all the children, and so make the fight that much the bloodier.’

Merva shrugged. ‘The Consortium and the Engineers want rid of him, I know only that much. But I think you’re right. He’s grown too great, too dangerous, and he cannot be controlled.’

‘And these merchants and tinkers can bind the Empire? I hear no mention of the Empress’s writ in this.’

The Wasp woman kept her face level. Given their facility with spies, the Spiders almost certainly knew by now that Imperial writ was suddenly in short supply. ‘These days the merchants and the tinkers represent a great deal of power at Capitas. There is no more of the Empire available to treat with but this. On the table now is the best deal that Solarno – meaning the Exalsee – is likely to get.’ She looked from face to face, and not just at the Spiders, seeing the wheels turning there, seeing the unexpected balance of power. Giselle was their spokeswoman, but there were a lot of interests represented in that room, none of whom had any wish to see the continued growth of Chasme as a new power on the shores of the Exalsee.