Seal of the Worm

Seventeen

They were heading upslope, struggling over ground riven with crevasses, littered with plates of shale that slid from underfoot like the loose pages of stone books, a half-dozen suddenly shifting and clattering away to smash below, all hope of stealth gone. That was when the Worm found them.

It was Messel who gave the alarm, Messel whose light tread, advancing on all fours as much as on his feet, had not dislodged so much as a pebble. Abruptly he was turning in the fickle light of Thalric’s torch and pointing behind them. ‘Beware!’

Tynisa turned, catching her balance on the treacherous stone, and then having to drag her rapier from its scabbard. She had felt the minute twitch as the bond between them had reached to bring it to her hand, and then nothing, as the deadening air of the Worm descended on her.

Thalric cursed nearby, casting his torch down to gutter on the canted stone, and lighting a second bundle of fungus with a flare of his sting. She had already lost sight of Esmail in the gloom.

Orothellin’s voice boomed out, ‘We are almost there. Onward still!’ And Che’s reply: ‘What good will that do us, now they’ve found us?’

‘Keep moving’ won’t suffice this time. Tynisa’s eyes had wrung all they could from Thalric’s light, and she spotted those scurrying forms rushing at them from the gloom, far faster and surer of foot than anyone not born down here could be.

‘We will hold them off,’ she declared, speaking for she knew not who.

‘If we can outdistance them . . .’ Orothellin tried, and then, ‘The Hermit, he will be able to lead them off, even make them forget, I swear it! Only . . . drive them back, slay such of them as are here, and we may find sanctuary! Cheerwell, please!’

From that last plea, and the following shower of sharp-edged fragments, Tynisa realized her sister was descending to help – if help was the word.

‘Che, you get up there,’ she snapped over her shoulder.

‘But—’

‘Not this time, Che. We’ll deal with them and catch you up, but go!’ And then, to Thalric, ‘How many, do you think?’

His own eyes had picked them out now, and the flash of his sting seared the corner of her eye. She saw one figure fall, burning, and then another stagger, armour glowing with its own molten fire. For a moment the Worm coiled about itself, and Tynisa remembered that she had not seen so much as a bow down here. Then one of them was whirling something about its head, and she cried, ‘Slings, Thalric!’

He cursed, and then was gone, kicking off into the dark air to make himself a harder target. Which left only her.

She reckoned there were between a dozen and a score of them, and a handful had held back to spin stones at her, too small and fast for her to see or react to in this gloom. The rest were surging forwards, fanning out. They carried shortswords, two apiece, and their pale, slack faces sent a shudder through her.

Thalric’s sting exploded amongst them again, striking one down from their midst and momentarily lighting up the rest – and she leapt.

Footing would have been a problem had she been aiming for those shifting plates of stone, but she struck with both heels against the chest of one of her enemy, sending the man skidding downhill on his back, legs kicking. Then she was following him, propped on hip and one arm, ripping her keen blade across two sets of hamstrings and bringing it up in time to fend off the single sword that was quick enough to reply.

Their formation flowed and then they were after her, which was a relief as she had planned to stop there and hold them, but the flurry of broken shale was carrying her further down towards the slingers. Again Thalric’s sting lanced down, striking wide . . . then again, flaring at the stone.

She fell into darkness, too far from the dropped torch to see, a drawback the Worm would not have.

‘Thalric!’ Most unlikely of allies, given their past enmity, but he was casting his second torch ahead of her so that she scrabbled to a halt in its pool of light, lurching to her feet, blade first, to meet them.

A sudden movement at the back of that chain of bodies and their end segment was a corpse – all too fast for Tynisa to follow but she knew it must be Esmail. For a moment the Worm recoiled, its many bodies reforming, and then she had half a dozen pressing her, the rest hunting off into the dark.

Thalric was overhead now, but his stings were lancing beyond her, trying to kill the slingers who remained the only threat to him. She was on her own.

She had the advantage of reach, and it nearly killed her. She took the initiative, expecting defence, but killed one of them straight off and was immediately swamped by the rest – no holding back, no fear of death, and yet a mindless discipline to them, so that every set of blades sought to drive her onto the points of their comrades.

In that moment she took a couple of cuts, shallow but survivable, and drew strength from her blade to ignore the pain, cutting another throat as she did so, falling back to keep them at the point of her blade.

For a second they were stilled, as whatever mind lurked behind those faces readjusted, and then pain assailed her, got its jaws into her and would not let go.

The crippling injury that she had taken in the Commonweal, which dropped from her as soon as she had need to draw her blade, was abruptly again an inseparable part of her, as impossible to deny as her Weaponsmaster’s magic was to believe. The hand of the Worm fell upon her, and she could draw no support from the blade in her hand. It was just a sword, a thing of craft and steel. She was just a swordswoman, and the badge she wore was just an ornament.

She fell back a step and the tightness of that scarred wound caught at her, till she fell.

They pounced on her, but the broken ground came to her rescue, sending her slipping and slithering away from the light faster than they could follow, hunched about the pain of her overstretched hip.

This isn’t how I die! But, amid that agony, she could only wonder how she had lived so long. The blackness around her was almost total. She could hear the quick patter of their feet but realized she would never see the killing stroke.

Then there was a flash, like lightning, imprinting those rushing figures on to her eyes – Thalric’s sting, gone very wide but still a moment’s vision for her, and she cried out, ‘Again!’

He obliged, the flash and flare of his stingshot dancing about the oncoming soldiers of the Worm as though he were an artillerist trying to find the proper range. In the second of those brief gifts of light, she saw Esmail in the midst of them, bare-handed, the severed halves of a sundered sword blade spinning away to either side of him as he plunged his fingers through one enemy’s breastplate as though it was not there.

Another ran straight onto her blade, and then she was moving and scrabbling as best she could to get out from underneath their blows, but there seemed only a handful now, and at last Thalric was catching them, using each blast to light the way towards the next, missing Esmail by inches.

And they were gone. No more Worm, and she heard Thalric hiss her name as he landed, all three of them once more utterly blind.

‘We must move now. Those that came for me are still out there somewhere,’ Esmail stated calmly. ‘Take my hand.’

She expected to feel something edged and deadly, but when his fingers found her they were flesh and blood, and she leant heavily on him as he hauled her up.

‘You’re hurt?’ from Thalric, hearing her curse.

‘I’ll live. But what now?’

‘Look up,’ Esmail told them.

Far above them, across an insuperable void of darkness, was one of Thalric’s dropped torches.

‘We go up,’ Thalric agreed, and then the two of them were helping her as they all clambered desperately for the higher ground.

It fell to Messel to lead them to where the others were: Che, Orothellin and the Hermit, and none of those three needed a glimmer of light. Tynisa allowed herself one uncharitable thought: If her eyes were like mine, then she’d be out under the sun and Maure’d still be here.

‘This Hermit, or Cursed One, or whatever,’ she heard Thalric growl. ‘What is he? Why’s he so important. Why do we trust him?’

‘I do not trust him,’ was Messel’s reassuring reply, and then, ‘but we are here.’

‘Last torch,’ the Wasp remarked philosophically, ‘and I don’t reckon this Hermit has the makings of a fire.’

‘I’ll find something for you to burn,’ the blind man offered immediately, and then he was gone, leaving them in the utter dark before anyone could call him back.

‘What . . .?’ Thalric asked plaintively.

‘I suspect not because he suddenly feels the cold,’ was Esmail’s dry observation.

‘He is right not to trust me.’

A lot of silence followed the sound of that new voice.

‘How are we supposed to take that?’ Tynisa enquired levelly. ‘Che, are you there?’

Her sister answered, but Thalric spoke over her. ‘Now for the torch.’ And then his sting flashed and flared.

Tynisa’s eyes were only for Che, seeing her safe there with the towering presence of Orothellin behind her. Thalric saw the new addition first, and he dropped Tynisa instantly, springing backwards into the air with a hand extended.

‘Thalric, wait!’ Che told him.

‘He’s one of them!’ he yelled back.

Tynisa was leaning heavily on Esmail, gingerly feeling out how much weight her hip could take. She could stand again, now, but lodged like a splinter in her mind was the understanding that her body could fail her at any moment.

She looked at the apparition before them. Thalric was right: he was of the Worm.

She saw that same pallid skin and grey-shaded eyes they all possessed. He was old, though, and he bore those spiralling scars she had seen on the Worm’s spokesman at Cold Well. His colourless hair was long and dirty, hanging past his shoulders, and he wore a ragged robe of many stitched-together pieces of hide and fur and chitin, its poor fit making his body shapeless. Moreover, a human animation possessed his face, though in a weak and sickly way. He looked ill, like a man pining for some drink or drug.

‘What’s going on?’ Tynisa asked. Their shadows swooped around them as Thalric touched down behind her, no doubt his hand still directed at the stranger.

‘He can keep the Worm from finding us, because he is of the Worm already,’ Esmail stated. ‘Explain, quickly.’

Orothellin sighed. ‘He the only one I know who has turned from the Worm.’ He shrugged broadly. ‘Either you will come with us and talk, and have some trust, or you will go.’

There was a scattering of exchanged glances.

‘I’m with Messel,’ Thalric grumbled, but it was plain that Che had already made up her mind. After all, how better to learn about the Worm than from this creature here?

The Hermit dwelt within a cave that stank of him: a thin, sour reek, the taint of an unwashed body that was not quite human, even though it had come a long way towards that goal. That the place seemed hostile to human life merely placed it alongside almost everything Tynisa had seen down here so far. It was an oppressive thing to look out of the cave mouth and see a darkness that cared nothing for night and day, enlivened only by those false, murderous stars.

Messel laid a fire, with plenty of nervous glances at the cave’s owner, who sat on a rock staring at nothing, as though trying to wish all his uninvited guests out of existence. Orothellin was the only one his small pupils lit on, ignoring all the rest as if they were hallucinations until Thalric had kindled the blaze with sparks from his steel lighter.

The Hermit stretched his hands out carefully, as though rediscovering how close he could bring them to the flames. For a long time further he just stared at nothing, his Worm’s face set into a faint frown that was nevertheless a library of expression compared to those of his kin that they had just fought.

At last: ‘Someone, say something,’ from Thalric.

‘I don’t seek visitors.’ The voice of the Hermit was surprisingly strong, a College master or military officer turned gravelly with age, but not lacking in authority.

‘Not even visitors from the Old World?’ Orothellin prompted. He and the Hermit, sitting near to one another, had a curious sort of commonality, Tynisa decided. A pair of freaks with no place in this freak-show world.

The Hermit made a disparaging sound. ‘Is that so?’

‘Place them for me, then,’ the Slug-kinden challenged him mildly. ‘Where are they from?’

‘Do I care?’

‘Excuse me, Master Hermit,’ Che, of course painstakingly polite. ‘What are you to the Worm?’

At that he turned to her, seeming to acknowledge her presence for the first time. ‘A loose limb it doesn’t realize it’s missing. What are you?’

Che opened her mouth, and Tynisa saw quite clearly that she had no answer any more. The ready responses that she would have owned to under the sun outside had been stripped from her.

‘She is a scholar of Collegium.’ The words came to Tynisa quite readily. ‘A freer of slaves, caller of ghosts, speaker of words.’

The moment teetered on the edge of solemnity before Thalric put in, ‘Too many words, mostly.’

‘And the rest of you?’

‘Her followers,’ Tynisa stated, and Esmail said, ‘Her creatures,’ at the same time, prompting a surprised look from the others.

Esmail faced up to them boldly. ‘I have had many masters in my time. I want to return to my home, to my family. I see no way to do so, but she does. If we must fight the Worm to do so, then so be it.’

Che glanced anxiously to see the Hermit’s reaction to that, to see if he had some residual loyalty to the people – or the entity – he had apparently abandoned. For a moment his pale face screwed up, then it relaxed, lines of character springing away into nothing.

‘I have lived free of the Worm this long by avoiding its notice, just as Orothellin has. The Worm need only glance my way, recall that I was once a segment of its body, and I do not know if I would have the strength to refuse it a second time.’

‘We do not come to ask you to fight. We ask you to teach us. We need to understand the Worm,’ Che told him. ‘I know that your kinden were not like this when they were sealed here.’

‘Oh, you know, do you?’ The Hermit stared at her. ‘And what do you know, Beetle-kinden?’

‘They were a power of the Old World,’ she replied. ‘They were magicians. They sought to remake the world in their image, somehow. That much I know. The other great kinden united against them and defeated them, and such was their fear that your people might return to contest possession of the world again, that the Moths and the others made a terrible choice.’

‘Feh.’ The Hermit spat into the fire. ‘You know more than I.’

‘But what I have seen here is not the Worm of those memories,’ Che insisted. ‘I need you to tell me.’

‘Do you?’

She glanced at the Slug, who seemed halfway to dozing off. ‘Orothellin says—’

‘Does he? And what is she to you, Orothellin. Why bring her here? What’s the point?’

The huge man opened one eye. ‘Is that a new version of your asking me why I’m still alive?’

‘If you choose.’

‘I have hope still. Even after so very long, I have not lost hope.’

Another derisive sound from the Hermit.

‘And I will help her, help all of them, when they go to fight the Worm. When they go to my poor people here, the slaves and the victims, I will speak for them.’

The Hermit was looking into the fire again. ‘And you will come to the notice of the Worm at last, old fool.’

‘It seems likely.’

The old man spat and turned away – from Orothellin, from Che, from the world.

Later, when the others were sleeping, Che found herself awake, staring at the ceiling of the cave, calling on her Art to see, then banishing it again, swapping between a world of black and a world composed of shades of grey.

Their host was not with them, she realized. Thalric lay beside her, and Tynisa a sword’s length beyond him. Esmail was a curled shape across the fire from her, still keeping his secrets. Towards the back of the cave, Messel lay with his blank face turned towards her; impossible to know if he slept or not.

And yet she heard the murmur of voices, and where now was Orothellin’s great mounded form? At that, she knew she must have slept a while, because the big man could not have crept past her unobserved when she was awake.

Careful not to wake Thalric, she inched towards the cave mouth, straining her ears to catch their words.

‘You had no right,’ she heard the Hermit say.

A sigh from Orothellin, but no words.

‘I have been beyond its notice for so long. I do not know what I may become if I do this.’

‘I have faith in you,’ the Slug-kinden murmured.

‘What you are asking . . . I have no words. I would have to take her . . . How else can I make her understand that what she seeks cannot be done?’

‘Do you instead fear that perhaps it can be done?’ Che heard Orothellin prompt gently.

A fraught pause between the two unseen men, and then the Hermit was saying, ‘If I come to the attention of the Worm, if I cannot pass beneath its gaze, if the other Scarred Ones recognize me . . .’

‘You have often said that you have lived too long.’

‘Easy for you to say!’ An old man’s bitter curse.

‘That’s well – for that is what I am saying.’

Hearing those words, Che did not understand what Orothellin meant, but it was plain that the Hermit did. The silence that followed had a different quality, until eventually he said, ‘You cannot mean it. You intend to remedy that drawn-out thread you call a life, do you?’

‘If not for this, then what?’

‘For this girl? This Beetle child?’

Another enormous sigh from Orothellin, and Che had the distinct sense that he knew she was eavesdropping. ‘The greatest failure of my people was ever their refusal to acknowledge this: that all things end. And this place, this prison for the Worm, it ends too, and the Worm plans to be outside, and what it leaves behind here will be picked-over corpses in the hollow scoured-out shell that it has hatched from. What have I preserved myself for? Life for its own sake, or a life with meaning? If any of my works are to have meaning, then this is the time . . . the time to give everything.’

‘You could at least have the decency to outlive me!’ Che heard their host snap. ‘You made me, you fat waste of breath. You taught me to be this useless thing I am now. You took me from the Worm . . . I am your whim, your experiment.’ The Hermit had looked the older of the two, but Che was forced to remind herself that, of course, the former Master of Khanaphes predated this entire world that they were trapped in.

She had it then, their relationship. Only confusion over their apparent ages had misled her.

‘It was unforgivable, I know,’ Orothellin said gently.

Another long, melancholy silence from the Hermit, until: ‘Why can’t you just leave well enough alone?’

‘The great failure of my kinden is that we always think we know best. Will you do this, for me?’

She pictured the two of them sitting in the darkness, side by side, those two men, and neither with anything similar to them in the whole of this closed-off world: the bloated father; the withered son.

‘I will take her. I will show her. And then she will beg me to remove the knowledge from her mind.’ The Hermit’s tone was suddenly fierce. ‘I will bring her to the Worm in all its glory. She wants to understand? I will make her regret her curiosity tenfold. I will kill her hope within the Worm’s coils. I will smother it in the pits.’

‘If it dies so easily, it cannot truly be hope,’ was all Orothellin would say.