Seal of the Worm

Eighteen

What does it mean?

What can it mean, that she saved me?

The question turned over and over in Maure’s head like her very own unquiet ghost.

She had been in that dark place, that terrible place of no escape. Che had been conducting her ritual. Maure had given her all – that little all she had to give. She had felt the others, from each according to their ability, and at the end she had sensed Che’s desperation and despair: Not enough! Not enough, though it was all the power they had in the world. Maure had resigned herself to defeat, even then.

And, somehow . . . this.

She had felt the curtain tear, just for one moment; the world around her had twisted and tensed, furiously unwilling to let even one of its multitude of captives free. But she had been sprung free, nonetheless. Che had freed her.

She had been the only one. She was enough of a magician to know that. No chance that the others had made it out, too, only to be scattered to the four winds. The Weaponsmaster, the Assassin, Che and her Wasp lover, they were all condemned to the dark.

But me she freed. And why?

Maure could not imagine. She had been nothing to Che, not sister, not lover, not even a friend, truly. Merely an acquaintance, an unasked-for follower.

Looking on the sun, now, she wanted to weep. The tears did come, a little, and not for the first time. There is no sight more beautiful than this. And that was true despite the fact that her Moth eyes could pierce that lightless abyss. After what she had seen below, blindness down there might be considered a mercy.

So what does it mean? Because that was always the curse of the Inapt: everything had meaning. Nothing was pure chance. The world fell the way it was because human thought nudged and interpreted and read it. Divination saw the web of the future and wove it at the same time, the seer’s vision collapsing all the myriad paths the world might take into fewer and fewer, until the truly gifted magician might look towards autumn and know where every leaf might fall. In theory, anyway. It was true that the science had decayed somewhat since the revolution, the toys of the Apt tearing holes in that predictable web with their mechanistic cosmos that was, paradoxically, so much harder to foretell.

But Maure was a child of the old days, of the Commonweal and other places where divination was still a tool to live by, not a sham to gull the foolish with. She searched for meaning. Why me? Why here? Why him? There must be reasons.

There was a town ahead, or perhaps just a collection of shacks crouching on the shore of the Exalsee. Her companion, Totho, had put on an extra stumble of speed, fixing his eyes on it, ignoring Maure, making it plain that she was just an unwanted woman trailing his footsteps.

He had spoken to her precisely twice since their first meeting. The first time had been to ask what she was eating, as she started gnawing something grey and fibrous left over from the supplies that Messel had foraged for them. Maure had scrutinized the unappetizing fare and confessed she was not entirely sure. For a moment Totho had just stared at her, and she had thought that he would say something more, as though some great revelation was just on the tip of his tongue. Her expectant expression had frightened him off, though – he had seen Che’s name written there and had shied away from it, turning his shoulder and stomping off once more, trying to leave her behind.

The second time, not long after that, he had rounded on her without warning and just demanded, ‘Why are you following me?’

Maure had blinked at him. ‘For a lot of complicated reasons,’ she told him; then, as he was turning away once more, she found herself desperate to keep him talking in case she could prise that meaning from him. ‘And one simple one: I don’t have the first idea where I am. Following you’s better than nothing.’

‘You’re by the Exalsee,’ Totho had spat back.

‘Good.’ She had nodded, desperately earnest. ‘What’s an exalcy? Is it like a principality?’

He had just stared. ‘It’s this.’ A gauntleted hand waved across the water that ran all the way to the horizon. ‘It’s basically the thing people know about this part of the world. How can you not know this?’

‘I was never here before!’ she snapped at him, feeling the keen unfairness of it all – she, who had counted herself well-travelled once. ‘I come from the Commonweal, understand? I have not the first idea where any of this is!’

For a moment she thought that he might even be sympathetic – but, no, it was just that she had now furnished him with an excuse to explain her away. ‘What, you’re an escaped slave? The Imperials brought you here?’

‘No, I told you. Che—!’

He had snapped, lunging for her – she had skipped back out of his way the first time but his armour didn’t slow him half as much as she expected and, on the second try, he had one of her wrists in his metal grip.

‘You don’t know Che!’ He had bellowed into her face. ‘Shut up about Che! You don’t know her and you don’t know me! I’ll . . .’ Looking into that incandescent expression, it was easy for Maure to finish that bitten-off sentence: I’ll kill you if you say her name again. He must have seen something in her frightened face – a woman only a few years his senior, and just as lost as he was – and he had just flung her hand away and marched on, bunching his shoulders against her inevitable, unsheddable presence, now dogging his heels like some part of his shadow that had become detached but would not just go away.

Totho had been walking for too long, and each step he took just emphasized the fact that he was going nowhere. He might as well tread round and round the Exalsee’s vast circumference like a clockwork toy, until he wound down forever. With that thought, the woman’s constant trailing acquired a sinister connotation, as if she was patiently waiting for him to drop so that she could rob or dismember his corpse. Certainly there seemed something of the dead about her, impossible to put his finger on, but just as impossible to ignore.

Now there was something ahead that spoke of other people, after what seemed an eternity of lonely journeying with only the maddening, unwanted company of this inexplicable woman. Totho had never been fond of people, as a general rule – a trait born out of their general lack of feeling for him. Nowhere in the world loved a halfbreed.

Or, no, there had been one place, but it was gone.

Just now he felt he needed company: company that was not hers. For company could supply him with something to ease his pain, in exchange for the coins he had in his purse. That was the function of company, if it was not to be the company of his peers.

He saw mostly Bee-kinden there, some outpost of Dirovashni with a couple of piers extending into the Exalsee and a living based on fishing. There was a taverna, though. That was enough. It was a rough, unfinished sort of place – no tables and nowhere to sit but empty kegs. Three Solarnese were playing a game of cards in one corner, and a Spider sat by herself, clad in armour of silk and tarnished scales, a rapier sheathed at her hip.

The taverner was a squat Bee woman, blind in one eye, and she regarded Totho nervously, already sensing trouble brewing.

‘Wine.’ Totho threw a coin at her, close enough to make her duck. It was gold, though – a central from the Helleren mint. It would keep his bowl full for a while.

His halfbreed follower was still loitering at the door, but Totho was waving for a refill before she deigned to find a patch of ground to call her own. The taverner assailed her immediately – even the dirt on the floor was for paying customers only.

She had no coin. Perhaps she was someone’s slave, after all. That made so much more sense than anything involving Che. Just another halfbreed slave cast adrift on the shores of the Exalsee. He wanted her to have some commonplace unhappy story, and all the rest of it to be mere delusion.

‘Oi, woman,’ Totho waved another coin at the proprietor. ‘Let her drink. Why not?’ He was desperately hoping that if he treated Maure like a deranged beggar for long enough, she would turn out to be nothing more than that.

That settled that, and he took the chance to drain his bowl and hold it out again. He was not much of a drinker. He had never had the means when he was a student, and later there had always been his work. A drunken artificer was a creature of little use to anyone. Drephos, of course . . . oh, Drephos never touched a drop. He was . . . he had been drunk on his own brilliance.

Totho felt the cracks start, inside, where the armour could not protect him.

A beautiful abomination, Drephos had been: never to be repeated or to be equalled. A man who cared nothing for kinden or the purity of blood, but for merit only. He had put Collegiate Masters to shame with his egalitarian attitudes. If you could, if you were a brother or a sister of the engine and the gear train, the refining vat and the forge, then you had worth to Drephos, no matter what else.

And, in the end, even the Empire had broken its rules for him. Firstly in creating the rank that he had borne, and secondly in storming an entire city for fear of him.

Totho drank because he had been told that men drank to forget, or for consolation, or to dissolve away all those rational, soluble parts that knew guilt and regret. Each fresh mouthful only brought all those things to the fore of his mind, though. He found no oblivion waiting at the bottom of the bowl.

‘That’s fine armour you have there, friend.’

He looked up to see a trio of Bee-kinden there, soldiers from the look of them – all too similar to the vermin who had marched into the streets of Chasme and never marched out again. They had snapbows slung over their shoulders and axes at their belts, typical unimaginative sorts without an interesting innovation between them. He had no words for them, and his eyes slid back to his wine.

‘Where’d a halfbreed get armour like that, I wonder,’ the Bee went on.

‘Only one place, I reckon,’ one of his companions suggested.

Totho looked up at them again, recognizing that familiar mail of Dirovashni make, that industrious city that had nonetheless always managed to fall behind both Chasme and Solarno, never quite good enough.

‘Never quite good enough.’ Until he saw their expressions, he had not realized he had spoken aloud.

‘We’ve just come from a city, halfbreed,’ said their leader. ‘Plenty of halfbreeds there, or there were. A whole nest of them. Burned out now. If it were day, you could see the smoke from here.’

Totho shrugged.

‘Some of them got clear. Vermin always do escape. You have to hunt them down or else they breed.’

So, this is it, then. Totho reached within himself, feeling how unsteady he was. Even the prospect of action made his head swim. The unassailable confidence of the drunk seemed to have utterly passed him by. Perhaps it would be best if I just let this happen.

‘Pissing Iron Glove bastards,’ the Bee went on. ‘I lost too many friends to your kind when Chasme burned.’

And Totho lurched to his feet, empty handed, snapbow still on the floor with his overturned wine bowl. He was smiling as he said, ‘Not to my kind. To me.’

The Bee struck him, a mailed fist striking his cheek and knocking him back against the wall. Then the man had punched downwards, trying for his head again but bruising himself against Totho’s pauldron, the force still enough to knock Totho off his feet.

Then they were all on him, kicking and stamping, while he cradled his unarmoured head in his arms, feeling the Bees achieve a rhythm between them, unintentional but mechanical, almost comforting as they tried to destroy him, to stomp him into the dirt of the floor.

They could not hear beneath their own shouts and grunts, but he was laughing. He was laughing because he could barely feel the blows through his magnificent armour, kick as they might.

Then there was a new voice, and he realized to his dismay that the woman had got involved.

She was trying to call them off, and they turned on her, and she had no armour, but she too was a halfbreed. Foreign to Exalsee politics, she would not understand why that made her even more fair game than usual.

But she was speaking firmly, almost desperately, and Totho craned up and saw them listening. First she spoke to one of the subordinate Bees, words too soft for Totho to hear, but the man shook his head, frowning in bafflement, taking a step back. Then she was addressing the other, and he heard her say, ‘Would your mother have wished to see you like this? Was this what she meant when she said that she would always be proud of you?’

The look on the Bee’s face was stunned. ‘My mother’s dead,’ he got out.

‘And she would still be proud of you, if you let her,’ the half-breed woman declared.

She turned to the last man, their leader, her mouth open to speak, and he struck her across the face, then lunged forward to grab her even as she fell, hoisting her up and throwing her across the taverna, spilling her in amongst the gamblers. She came up with her shortsword drawn, one hand bloody at her mouth.

‘Now we’ll see what you’re made of, bitch!’ the Bee spat.

Then Totho said, ‘Hey, you.’

He had prepared himself better, this time. He had his helm on, his world narrowed to a slit, and he had his snapbow in his hands.

To his credit, the Bee was quick. He had his own weapon off his shoulder and aimed towards Totho even as he stumbled back. The whole taverna had gone horribly silent.

Totho had his weapon levelled, as did the Bee. The other two were frozen, reaching for their bows, eyes flicking between their leader and his former victim.

‘Go on,’ Totho got out, though his words sounded a little slurred even to him. He was aware that he was swaying slightly. ‘Go on, shoot me. We’ll make it a game.’

The Bee’s eyes were very wide.

‘A game, you and me,’ Totho went on. ‘You shoot me, and then I’ll shoot you after. Give it your best. Go on. I lost friends in Chasme, too. I lost more than that. I lost everything. So let’s play our game.’

He shifted his aim slightly, down and to the side. The Bee’s teeth were bared, his hands shaking a little, suddenly on unfamiliar ground.

‘Shoot me, you turd!’ Totho screamed at him, and the man brought his snapbow to his shoulder and loosed it at a range of only a few feet.

He had been aiming for the throat but had hurried the shot. The bolt struck the cheek of Totho’s helm, snapping his head round and sending him reeling back into the wall for the second time.

He heard a jubilant yell from one of the other Bees that choked to nothing halfway when Totho did not fall, but just levered himself back on to his feet with his snapbow still levelled, one-handed, the barrel weaving enough to threaten just about everyone else there.

He had their full attention, all of them.

He felt he should say something arrogant and heroic, like My turn! or something similarly witty, save that he had known true heroes, men for whom killing was an art form and livelihood and reason for being, and they did not quip as a rule. Instead, the words that came from him were an artificer’s.

‘Not even a dent,’ he told them, and their eyes strayed helplessly to the fluted steel of his helm, the Iron Glove’s finest metallurgy and smithing in perfect harmony.

The man on the left broke first, barrelling for the door, and when the snapbow inevitably swung wildly to follow him, the others were running as well, and the rest of the taverna’s occupants after them, including the taverner herself. Only the halfbreed woman was left, well within the compass of Totho’s roving aim.

‘We should be moving,’ she suggested. ‘No doubt they have more friends, and you seem to be a wanted man.’

‘We? What we?’ he demanded of her. ‘Why are you doing this? Why won’t you leave me alone?’ He had a horrible moment of disconnection when he wondered if she was actually real, or just some guilt-spawned product of his mind. But the Bees were talking to her, weren’t they? Or were they?

‘I can’t tell you, because you wouldn’t – couldn’t – understand, and it wouldn’t make any sense to you. And, anyway, I’d have to mention—’

‘Che. Che who you can’t know.’

‘Her, yes.’

His hand twitched, but he managed to fight his finger away from the trigger. ‘Let’s go,’ he told her. ‘We’ll go. We’ll find somewhere.’ He wanted to take more wine, but the sheer logistics of trying to transport a keg defeated him. ‘You’ll tell me . . . I don’t care what. Just tell me. Tell me about Che.’

When Maure had finished the whole sorry story, Totho found himself just shaking his head. They were by the lakeside still, but well beyond the Bee village, amid a grove of willows with the light of a half-moon filtering through their branches.

He felt that if he had drunk less he would have made out more of her actual sentences, and yet still not have understood. It was as if someone had told him some bizarre old story, some ancient Moth legend, but substituted names he knew for its original mythical characters.

‘You make no sense,’ he complained weakly.

‘I told you that you wouldn’t understand.’

‘But you make no sense,’ he insisted. ‘How can there be some underground world that isn’t actually underground? How can a whole kinden, and all those others, just have been lost to history – and now come back? How was this Argastos . . . what was he? How can that possibly even be a . . . a metaphor, even? What does it mean?’

‘You’re Apt. I have no words that you will comprehend,’ she said sadly. ‘To think I used to seek out Apt men . . . but I never needed them to understand me before. All of it is a metaphor. None of it is a metaphor.’

‘Besides, Che’s Apt too.’

‘She’s not.’

He scowled stubbornly. ‘She’s Apt. She was . . . confused, in Khanaphes. She’d lost people, she wasn’t thinking straight. I know . . . knew her, though. She’s—’

‘A magician.’

At that he just laughed, hearing an edge of desperation in his own voice. ‘Don’t be stupid, woman. Fine, you obviously do know Che and Tynisa and . . . but you’re Inapt and you’re cracked. I don’t care whether you were born that way or fell on your head, but . . .’

‘She is a magician.’ And this time she was standing, staring down at him as he sat with his back to a tree.

He found one hand creeping towards his snapbow, for all that she could not possibly be a threat to him. ‘Sit down.’

‘She is the most powerful magician I have ever known, Totho,’ Maure insisted. ‘She says she was crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes, and I believe it. She is raw, untrained, but she has power . . . she had power.’

‘Khanaphes,’ Totho spat in contempt, and abruptly a vision came to him, a memory he tried to keep locked in darkness, of a great wall of water descending, obliterating an army, defying rational explanation. ‘She’s not . . . Che’s not . . .’ He stared into Maure’s face, recognizing utter certainty there, for all the gap in Aptitude that lay between them. Something clicked into place within him, an escapement that had been waiting for its moment for years. ‘He did it. He did it to her.’ His voice sounded very cold even to his own ears.

Maure backed up a step. ‘Who . . .?’

Abruptly Totho was on his feet as well, snapbow in hand. ‘The Inapt bastard . . . the Moth boy.’ For all that the boy had been older than Totho at the time. ‘He corrupted her somehow. He took her from me and he changed her so that . . . he spoiled her.’

‘I don’t think—’ Maure started and then the snapbow was directed at her face, its aim far steadier now than before.

‘Pissing Inapt!’ Totho snapped at her. ‘Always you pissing Inapt ruining my life.’ He knew he was still drunk, but here was that grand confidence in the rightness of his actions that he had always been promised. Here was the courage to do what must be done. ‘If I could – if I could invent a machine for it – I’d kill every pissing Inapt bastard in the world! Piss on the Bee-killer, I’d make a Moth-killer and I’d use it. And the world would be a better place!’

She was frozen, staring at the weapon.

‘And you know why? Out of your own mouth, that’s why!’ He was fighting to order the words. ‘Either you’re such pissing ridiculous liars that every word you say is suspect, or . . . can you imagine what I would have to think if I believed any of it? If any of it was true? How you Inapt have screwed the world over and over, fighting stupid wars, burying whole kinden, sitting around and turning into the living dead? Even if it were true, how much better the pissing world would be if we’d never had any of you!’

Eyes wide, she looked at him down the length of the snapbow. ‘I suppose that’s probably true.’ And then, after a strained pause: ‘Do you shoot me now?’

He blinked at the snapbow, which had seemed so very necessary a moment before. ‘It was just . . .’

‘A metaphor?’

He scowled down the tentative smile appearing on her face. ‘Don’t you joke with me. I am not in the mood.’ With that, he felt as though his strings had been cut, and he slumped down beside the tree again. ‘I should have brought that wine after all. Why me, eh?’ He hadn’t wanted to return to the question, but the mere mention of Che, her reintroduction into his life, even by proxy, had kindled a horrible spark in him, for all he tried to extinguish it. Sometimes hope became the worst enemy.

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘I saw you in Che’s mind, back in her past. I know you were a friend of hers. When she sent me back here, when she sent me out, I don’t think she could dictate where I went but . . . there is meaning.’

‘Or your bad luck.’

She shrugged. ‘You Apt believe the world is so random, and so you build your machines to control as much of it as possible. To me, there is so little actual chance in the world. Its patterns are capable of prediction, and so it is not a matter of controlling so much as planning ahead.’

That came so close to making sense to Totho that he just nodded and let her continue.

‘She sent me here to you,’ Maure concluded. ‘What else is there? Not to Khanaphes, not to Collegium, not to the Commonweal where she and I met. No – here, to you. The line that connects the two of you was strong enough to guide me.’

‘There is no line, not any more,’ Totho announced harshly.

He saw her expression, clearly wanting to speak but fearful of doing so, and waved her words on.

‘Only if you promise not to shoot me.’

‘I won’t shoot you.’

‘I am a necromancer. I can see the ghosts that haunt people, that hang about them – both the dead and the living. I look at you and I see Che there, right there.’ And he actually looked around to where she pointed, craning past his pauldron to see what was so very evident to this woman.

He did have a brief moment of wanting to shoot her then, if only to eradicate this incomprehensible knot that his life was caught in. The realization that he had nothing else left, that the knot was the one thing holding him from plunging into the abyss, stayed his hand.