Seal of the Worm

Ten

They came again to confront Tactician Milus, finding him this time on the walls of Sarn, apparently supervising the placement of artillery. It was a sham, of course. Linked to the artillerists, Milus could have directed and advised his soldiers perfectly from anywhere in the city. His presence there in person was intended to focus the minds of the Collegiates, and other malcontents, on the danger to Sarn.

Expressions did not come naturally to Ant faces but, when Milus looked down to see Eujen and Balkus at the foot of the steep steps, there was something that clearly had hold of him. Straessa reckoned it was probably amusement rather than pity. She had wheeled Eujen here in the chair, and he hunched there like an old man, no support save a simple walking stick clutched in his hands.

Well, Milus loves to put on a show, and there’s more than one way to make a point here. ‘You’re ready?’ she asked the pair of them.

Balkus was looking somewhat concerned at the climb, but Eujen just squared his shoulders, and even managed a small smile for her. And who would ever have thought he was such a fighter?

Behind her, Kymene shifted restlessly, wanting to be done with the talking so that she could act. The Collegiates wanted their home back, yes, but they were a habitually patient people, well used to waiting and planning. The Mynans, meanwhile, were virtually in outright revolt at being denied the chance to go off and shed Wasp blood. In contrast, the citizens of Princep Salma, as represented by Balkus, just wanted to go home, seeing that most of them were here in something disturbingly close to slavery at the insistence of their ‘allies’ in Sarn.

Straessa made an abortive attempt to take Eujen’s arm but restrained herself as he braced his hands against the chair arms and then levered himself to his feet.

There was a hiss and a clack from his brace as it took the strain, and she heard the intricate clattering as the gearing at his knees measured the pressure and added its support. Without even putting his hand out to steady himself, Eujen ascended, step by step, with a ticking of mechanisms.

Many artificers had been smuggled out of Collegium, as Sarn had been only too glad to acknowledge. They had been at work on more than just orthopters and weapons of war.

Tactician Milus’s face changed only slightly, but Straessa had been watching closely for his reaction, and the suggestion of surprise there was gratifying.

Balkus had no such artificial aids, but his wounds had been less serious and he had been pushing himself almost every day to regain his strength. Adopting the measured pace of Eujen, he tried the stairs next, leaving the two more able-bodied women to follow.

All the Ants up on the wall were now watching as the delegation reached the top, and Eujen had their undivided attention. Sweat was beading on his brow but he kept his pace steady all the way, his progress punctuated by the hiss-clack of the mechanical brace and the tap of his stick.

‘Well, now,’ Milus said, with a smile, ‘you look well, Speaker.’ He had begun calling Eujen that recently, possibly to try and strengthen opposition within the Collegiate ranks amongst those who were not fond of the man. After all, Collegiates chose their leaders, but nobody had cast lots to select Eujen as their ambassador to their Sarnesh hosts.

If that had been his intention, it had backfired. Somewhat to Eujen’s annoyance, the title had become widespread amongst the Collegiates themselves. The best he had been able to achieve with any disavowals was to have it amended to ‘acting Speaker’ in his earshot.

‘Thank you, Tactician,’ Eujen replied, and Straessa could hear the catch of breath as he spoke. He was leaning on his stick, but only a little. Balkus, beside him, had a hand on the wall top, but it was merely a light touch. The two of them were far more the men they had once been.

I’m still waiting for a new eye, though. There were limits to even Collegiate artifice, but by now Straessa was almost used to her new field of vision. Focused, that’s what I am.

‘You had something you wanted to bring before me?’ Milus asked him.

‘We wanted to thank you, Tactician – to thank your people.’

The Ant went still for a moment, no doubt reaching out to his kin, trying to second-guess where this conversation was going.

‘You have taken us in,’ Eujen pressed on mildly. ‘You have proved yourselves good allies.’

‘This is the preamble to another request to march on Collegium, I take it.’ But Milus was nevertheless off balance, and therefore so was Sarn.

‘We understand that you must look to Sarn’s defence first.’ Eujen gestured at the walls, seizing Milus’s own rhetorical ammunition. ‘But we will be marching south shortly.’

Another pause for hurried redeployment of the tactician’s thoughts. ‘Define “we”.’

‘Those Collegiates who will take up arms for their city’s freedom,’ Eujen explained. ‘It is time we started acting on our own behalf. Kymene has agreed to bring her Mynan contingent to our aid as well. I suspect that some of the Princep fighters may join us.’

‘This is a strange game you’re playing, little Speaker,’ Milus growled. ‘We both know that you could barely raise two thousand under arms, and many of those no real soldiers. Even if your people still within the city tried to rise up – which I doubt – you would not have the strength to retake your home. So, is this your ultimatum? That I commit soldiers to march with you or . . .? Or what? What will you do if I say that nothing has changed?’

‘You mistake us,’ Eujen told him, with eminent calm assurance. ‘We will march. We ask nothing from Sarn. You have given us shelter and food, a home away from home when we needed it. We are grateful, and we do not wish to impose upon you any longer.’

Balkus tugged at Straessa’s sleeve covertly. The renegade Ant had a small smile, and she guessed that he had caught something leaking from the edges of Milus’s composure that amused him.

‘I will consider your position,’ Milus stated, just as though Eujen had made a formal request of him.

‘I imagine we will be ready to depart within a tenday,’ Eujen informed him. It was as though the two were holding entirely separate conversations.

After they had descended the walls – Eujen making heavier going of that than he had the ascent – they returned to the Foreigners’ Quarter to meet with the Fly-kinden – with one Fly-kinden in particular. And who would have guessed that kinden would become the threads that bound this venture together.

A modest square of garden was the closest she had to freedom here in the heart of Sarn. The walls that overlooked this little space of green – so meticulously tended that it felt as artificial as a gear train – were patrolled by two Ant soldiers at all times, with half a dozen others ready to jump should the alarm be raised. Escape was not an option: their eyes were on her always. These guards were not to protect her from attack, or even to prevent rescue from the outside, for what help could reach her when she was so deep in their domain? Instead, they were looking inwards always. They had locked gloves to her wrists that were of some cloth that would only smoulder sullenly and not burn, and they had her secured in Fly manacles that wrapped across her back and stifled her Art. But she was dangerous, and Tactician Milus was no fool.

This was where he came whenever the demands of state loosened their hold on him. Not to visit family, not to lose himself in the company of his own kind. Milus was a singular Ant in a culture that normally held singularity in disdain. He played the conformity game well enough to pass muster, and his particular strain of independence had allowed him to walk the treacherously narrow path to a tactician’s rank: more an asset than a liability – just.

She looked up now to see him enter the garden. She had been sitting in one corner, in the shade, her back against a window-less wall, and she noticed the two guards diplomatically move to the far end, so that she and Milus could talk without being overheard.

She had no idea what the other Sarnesh made of this little ritual, this privacy that their war leader insisted on. But she knew that he had come to need this outlet, this time spent with her, as a way of expressing that part of himself he did not share with his siblings.

Perhaps the Sarnesh just wrote it off as a necessary evil. After all, she was Milus’s prisoner and nobody much cared what happened to her. When he decided that he would question her about Imperial protocols and practices, they let him get on with it. When he put her through torture by freezing again, on the pretence that he was not satisfied with her answers, they reacted likewise. Perhaps in peacetime an eyebrow would be raised, but this war was a direct threat to Sarn, and Milus was the man they needed to conduct it.

She had lived her whole life flitting from faction to faction to maintain her freedom. Even the Empire had not mastered her, not quite. She had enjoyed a life free from conscience or consequence. His idle tortures did not hurt her as much as being denied the chance simply to walk out of here, and he knew it.

She had become adept at reading him, from bitter necessity. This time she judged that he would just talk – with her as his audience whether she liked it or not. That was preferable to so many alternatives.

‘Lissart,’ he addressed her pleasantly.

‘Good morning, Tactician,’ she replied, as meekly as she could make herself say it. She saw a spark of annoyance in his eyes, because he preferred a little defiance so that he could break her of it.

‘I have a question – something I was hoping you would help me with.’

‘Anything, Tactician.’

‘First, though, tell me – when you came to me, you were masquerading as an expert on the Inapt and their ways. Was there any truth in that?’

Lissart considered her answer carefully before replying. ‘I have some training. I am Inapt. I’ve worked for Moths and Spiders.’

‘There is . . . a weapon,’ Milus said. His voice was hushed, and she started as she realized that this was not a game, after all. She had caught him in a rare moment of uncertainty. No wonder he wanted his guards out of earshot, and no doubt he was keeping his thoughts securely locked within his head. Prisoners, just like me.

‘It seems to strike at random. People disappear. It strikes the Empire and my own people equally. My artificers and scholars cannot explain it.’

‘You think that . . .’ You think that it’s magic. But of course he could not think that, although Milus had shown himself an unusually open-minded man when he had been dealing with the Mantis situation.

‘I think that my artificers cannot explain it,’ he repeated, with a glint of irritation. ‘I think that I do not trust the Moths and the Mantids. I think that the Apt powers of the world are currently fully committed against one another, and I know my history books. The Moths were tyrants, in their day, and it’s a habit not soon unlearned.’

‘Tell me of this thing, this weapon,’ she encouraged him, and he did so, giving a concise flavourless report, details without any interpretation: disturbed earth, missing bodies, no witnesses.

Lissart had an esoteric training but she was no magician. Some old stories might have elements of what Milus described, but these were tales to scare children with, down in the Spiderlands where she had grown up. ‘Sounds like centipedes to me,’ she told him with a smile, and he took her by the throat with one iron hand. For a moment she thought he was going to snap her neck.

Her gloves scrabbled at his fingers, moving them not one inch, and all the while Milus was staring into her face. ‘The beasts were seen at several of the sites. At one there was the body of a creature more than ten feet in length, hacked and burned by stingshot. What do you know?’

She choked, and he loosened his grip slightly. ‘Just stories,’ she got out.

‘I will send paper and ink. You will write down everything.’ He straightened up, releasing her. ‘And, yes, the gloves stay on. You’ll just have to manage.’

She watched him depart, and it was not lost to her that the two guards were watching him, too, as he left. It was perhaps the first moment of complete privacy she had been gifted with in tendays.

But still the manacles and the gloves were keeping her here. If only there was some other chance at freedom . . .

‘You heard all of that, of course,’ she murmured from the corner of her mouth.

‘Oh, I heard it.’ The whisper issued from the carefully pruned greenery in this shaded corner of the garden. ‘And, believe me, it’s happening all over. I may not like the man but he’s worrying about the right things.’

‘Laszlo, there’s only one thing that’s concerning me.’

‘I know, I know.’ He had come to her immediately before Milus, slipping adroitly past the guards, but she knew him of old. He was not quite the skilled infiltrator he might take himself for.

He had tracked her here on a path of rumours. Some of the Collegiate artificers in Sarn were aware that Milus had a Fly woman prisoner, a woman with red hair. She was distinctive enough that she had stuck in their minds.

‘I don’t think I can get you out right now,’ he confessed. ‘Not with the guards – and those manacles look well made.’

‘So much for you, then,’ she said, trying to sound nasty about it, but her heart wasn’t in it. She was fighting very hard to avoid showing how much hope had leapt in her, just knowing she had not been forgotten.

‘No, listen, I’m working on it. I’ve kind of got mixed up in some other stuff as well, but, believe me . . .’

‘Laszlo, just . . .’ To have a jagged piece of hope thrust into her hands and then torn away so swiftly was unbearable. ‘Just do something,’

‘I will. But you need to make sure Milus takes you with him when the Sarnesh march out. And that’ll be soon. Things are happening. Just be with him.’

‘Oh, he’ll take me.’ There was a wealth of tired pain in her words that left him silent, and for a moment she had mad thoughts of him putting an arrow into Milus, stabbing the man or getting killed while trying, and then where would she be? Milus was her jailer, but at least he had an interest in keeping her alive.

Then Lazlo said, ‘You’ll get your chance, I swear to you. I’ll get you out and then you’ll never need to see Milus again.’

I’ll see him one more time after that, she told herself, but that was more than Laszlo needed to hear. So she moved over to the brighter end of the garden, drawing the soldiers’ gazes after her, so that he could creep away.

It was a Fly-kinden war.

The machine that ghosted to a silent landing north of Collegium was a fixed-wing, and Taki never liked flying fixed-wings. If a Wasp combat orthopter had caught her in the air, she would only have speed to trust to in her escape. Actual fighting would be out of the question.

It was quiet, though, her machine, and, most importantly, it could glide for long distances with its propellers stilled. She had kept up high on the trip south from Sarn, riding the winds whenever she could to conserve fuel, she and her passengers muffled in scarves and overcoats against the chill of the upper air.

Once touched down, she listened intently for the engines of Wasp fliers, but the night was keeping its secrets. She twisted in her seat, looking back at the others.

‘Your stop.’

There was little space in the body of the fixed-wing, but enough for two Fly-kinden.

‘You know what you’re looking for?’ Laszlo prompted her. Beside him, Sperra shifted, still half asleep, and leant into the man.

‘An army’s a hard thing to miss,’ Taki told him contemptuously. ‘You just concentrate on doing your own job, whatever that actually is.’

‘Top secret,’ he insisted, and not for the first time. ‘I’m a spy, remember.’

‘A piss-poor one, if you keep telling people,’ she retorted, and was surprised to see a slight twinge of pain come into his smile at the reproach.

‘You just remember your job, mistress aviator.’

‘Aviatrix.’

‘Whatever.’ He untangled himself from Sperra, who made a complaining noise and then woke up with a start as Laszlo unlatched the hatch.

‘Already?’ she demanded.

‘Winds were with us,’ Taki said. ‘That, and the fact that you have the best pilot in the world.’

Laszlo snorted. ‘Good luck in the city,’ he told Sperra.

‘I thought you were coming in with me.’

‘Got other places I need to be, and better roads to take me there.’ He hopped down to the ground and then put his head back through the hatch. ‘Good sailing, both of you.’

He was gone even before Sperra replied in kind.

‘You too,’ Taki urged her. ‘Come on, out. I want to be on my way west before the Wasps decide we’re overdue for a fly-by.’

‘He’s quite a character, isn’t he,’ Sperra said, in a thoughtful tone of voice.

For a moment, Taki couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. Then: ‘Laszlo?’

‘Do you think he really used to be a pirate?’

Sperra and Laszlo had been talking earlier on, but due to the rushing of the wind and the softness of their voices, Taki had caught not even one word in ten. Now she regarded the other woman doubtfully, deciding with uncharacteristic tact to let her own opinions remain unspoken. There was a hope on Sperra’s face that was just ready for some jovial bravo like Laszlo to step on. ‘Pirate? No more than he’s a spy,’ was all that she said.

Sperra looked put out at that. ‘He’s doing good work.’

‘So am I. So should you be. Come on, move.’

Still Sperra hesitated. ‘You think . . . what they were saying in Sarn, Leadswell and the rest. This is going to work, isn’t it?’

Taki shrugged. ‘Wasn’t really listening, except for my bit.’

Sperra was unhappy with that, but Taki finally got the woman out of the hold and did a few quick calculations as to how much room she was going to need to get airborne. The fixed-wing was a flimsy little thing, though, light as anything she’d ever flown. It only took a little lift to get it away from the ground and into the arms of the wind.

The summons from Milus came just a few days after Eujen had bearded him on the wall. This time it was a map room in the Royal Court, the unspoken subtext being: Look how seriously we are taking you.

The tactician regarded him without expression as Eujen stood there under his scrutiny, the brace and the stick taking his weight between them.

‘We’ve fought the Wasps about ten miles east of here – the former Collegiate garrison force and some of the First Army,’ Milus announced. ‘Mostly a skirmish of scouts and automotives, but a fair-sized engagement.’

‘I assume congratulations are in order,’ Eujen advanced.

‘The result was inconclusive, but the Wasps have been pushed further back. We think that we can control any attempt to reconnoitre our city, save for a full-scale assault. The reports from the officers in charge suggest that they will not be in a position to make such an assault in the immediate future.’

‘That is good news.’ Conversational pleasantries, obviously marking time until Milus got to the point.

‘I am aware of how many Collegiates you can put under arms, little Speaker. There is clearly nothing you can accomplish in Collegium, even with that woman’s Mynans at your back.’

‘And yet we are going,’ Eujen confirmed. ‘Perhaps we, too, wish to test the enemy’s strength.’ Wondering all the time, And what else have you heard? The plan was full of big secrets, sliding into place like blocks of stone, and Milus must have spies and agents listening out for their movements.

‘Our recent gains against the Wasps here, however, mean that I can spare at least a nominal force to accompany you south.’

Eujen waited.

‘Five hundred men, some light artillery, some war automotives.’

‘A thousand would perhaps better demonstrate the leading role that Sarn is taking in the fight against the Empire,’ Eujen stated.

For a long time Milus’s eyes bored into him, hunting for the awkward, injured student he knew was in there somewhere.

‘Very well.’ So very grudgingly, and Eujen could see a flare of that un-Ant-like temper, that erratic nature that marked Milus out from his fellows.

‘Thank you, Tactician,’ he said graciously, thinking, I have an enemy there. Once this is done, I will have to be careful.