Seal of the Worm

Twenty

‘First,’ said the Hermit, ‘we must prepare.’ He stared into Che’s eyes, as though trying to startle into the open the fear he plainly thought should be there.

She met his gaze evenly, if only because his eyes were relatably human. They had less of the Worm’s taint than his other features.

‘You cannot just go to the Worm. You cannot see what the Worm is, not a stranger like you,’ he went on. ‘The Worm knows its own, yes, it does. And you are not. You will be—’

‘But you have a way,’ Che cut him off. She was very aware of her companions watching all this. Despite the gravity of the situation, she was beginning to feel slightly ridiculous with this man prattling on.

Abruptly there was a knife in his hand, a curved blade most of a foot long, and he had latched on to her wrist, dragging her close again when she tried to pull away. He was stronger than he had any right to be.

Hearing the sudden scuffle, she knew that Thalric would have one palm thrust forwards, with Tynisa’s rapier whispering from its sheath. Her eyes were on the knife, though, and she could not work her throat sufficiently to tell them to stand down.

Instead, it was Orothellin’s voice booming, ‘Wait!’ the echo of it rolling about the cave. ‘It must be this way.’

Che felt the tension waver in its balance, because the old Master of Khanaphes did not command that sort of authority, and the Hermit’s expression offered no reassurance at all.

Her heart was hammering, but she studied the old man, his pallid skin cicatrized with those twisted spirals. ‘The mark of the Worm,’ she got out.

His smile was vicious. ‘As you say. Are you regretting your decision yet?’

Yes. Because what she did here now would mark her permanently, and not just her flesh. She was being inducted into a terrible mystery, the touch of which would stain her forever.

The Hermit’s grin was spreading as he saw her falter, and sheer obstinacy did the rest.

‘Do it.’ She bared one arm for him, right up to the shoulder. This is the price I pay, or the first instalment of that price. I have set my course and I shall follow it, come what will.

He rested his blade on her skin, pausing a moment as though working out the precise movement in advance, and then drawing the keen edge across her skin with a twisting circular motion of his wrist.

She hissed pain through her teeth, eyes clenched shut against it, suppressing the cry. The sickness inside was worse, though: the corruption that bled in just as her blood welled out, and she knew she had consented to a terrible thing. But she wanted knowledge, and every tale of the Bad Old Days made clear that knowledge was only had for a price – and at least she had known beforehand what coin she would be paying in.

Then the Hermit was swabbing at the wound – which hurt more than the cut – and considering his handiwork.

‘Not quite, no, not quite,’ he muttered, and she felt Thalric’s hand in hers, giving her something to clench on as the Hermit picked and cut shallow hatches and lines, and then as he rubbed something gritty and stinging into the bloody gashes, his fingers wet to the knuckles with her blood. The burning pain of his work seemed to go on forever, and reach right to her core, the actual wound itself a mere abstraction.

‘It mustn’t heal. You’ll have it for life, yes indeed,’ the Hermit muttered. ‘And, even then, it won’t last you for long. This doesn’t make you one with the Worm. You’ll not walk in its shadow for long, with just this little scratch, no, no.’ Another vile grin. ‘Though you’ll have this to remember us by, oh yes, you will.’

She could see more than a dozen such scars on his own skin, and that counted only those parts of his dirty, pasty hide that were exposed.

‘Now you’re ready, eh?’ And the grin had become a glower, as though he had been forced to do all this at knife point. ‘Now you’ll see – and you’ll be sorry.’

‘Old man,’ Esmail broke in, ‘give me a scar to match hers.’

‘I’m not taking two!’ the Hermit spat.

‘Perhaps I’ll walk that way on my own,’ the Assassin replied.

The Hermit chuckled bitterly. ‘This one, I’ll take her, but if she strays from my heels, that little mark won’t save her. She must be marked, yes, but even then her life is bound to me. I was born of the Worm, at least. She can hide in my shadow. You will not pass for the Worm without me.’

Esmail considered this, his face a closed book to Che. Then he blinked and nodded. ‘I have made a livelihood of walking where I was not wanted, seeming what I was not. So, there is no magic here, and my old tricks won’t work, but the bulk of my training does not need a magician’s touch, and I’ll take whatever I can get. Cut me, old man.’

The Hermit’s eyes sought out Orothellin, who shrugged, plainly uncertain, but in the end Esmail endured the same ritual, gritting his teeth against it as the Hermit worried away at his arm. If he felt the depth of the taint, he did not show it. Perhaps it was only a little more darkness in an almost starless sky.

‘What will you do?’ Che asked Esmail, after it was done and he was nursing the wound.

He shrugged with his unmarred shoulder. ‘If you intend to accomplish anything here, and if I am to be of any use to you – if we are to see the sun again – then I play by whatever rules this place admits to. If there is an Emperor of Worms, I will walk into his palace and cut his throat.’

At that, the Hermit cackled, eyes bulging. ‘You’ll . . . aha no, no, you won’t. She’ll tell you, if she comes back. She’ll see, and she’ll tell you just why you can’t. Now come on, girl. It’s time we were gone.’

‘Orothellin has told me we were magicians, once.’ The Hermit had a surprising turn of speed for an old man, moving swiftly over the uneven ground, clambering here and there with the sureness of his Art, making Che work to keep up with him. ‘No more, though.’

‘I had thought you . . . or the others like you . . . the men with scars . . .’ she began uncertainly. ‘Are they not . . .?’ Ahead her eyes could make out the random clutter of the city of the Worm she had looked out over before. Until it had come into sight, the Hermit had just hunched alongside, practically ignoring her. Now it was as though the sight of his kin had opened a door within him, and the words came out.

‘No, magician is not the word for what they are, or for what I was,’ he grunted, hauling himself over a ledge, his staff clattering against the stone. He was making no attempt at stealth. ‘But we must keep clear of them. That mark on you, as well as my presence, these will let us pass the segments of the Worm – but the head has eyes, yes? The Scarred Ones, they will see you, and know you for an intruder, and then you will die. I will die, too, if they know me. We must avoid them.’

‘If not magicians, then what?’ Che demanded, out of breath with the constant scrabbling and climbing and bursts of flight.

He stopped abruptly. ‘You must not think in such terms. It will not help you where you’re going.’

‘So give me some new terms. Just tell me . . . I mean, what do you believe of magic? Are you Apt? Do you just think it’s nonsense?’ It struck her that here, where the magic just drained away like water out of cupped hands, it would be very easy to be Apt.

‘Magic is irrelevant. The work of the slaves, their devices and machines, that is irrelevant,’ the Hermit pronounced. ‘None of it matters in the face of god.’

Che stared at him, and the smile that broadened across his colourless face seemed only just this side of madness.

‘And the name for what they are – for what I was – is priest.’

‘I . . . don’t understand,’ she confessed.

‘No, you do not and you cannot, just as I cannot understand when Orothellin talks of magic. But I can show you, and then you will understand—’

‘And regret, yes,’ she finished for him testily.

They travelled in silence for a while, as the broken city expanded to fill the dark land ahead of them, but the Hermit kept glancing back, still trailing the threads of their conversation, and at last he said, ‘Orothellin told me we were magicians.’

‘So you said.’

‘But magic failed us. We fought our war, and lost, and came to this place, as you – so wise, yes – as you know. But magic was not enough, and we were imprisoned with our enemies, so many of them, our own slaves among them. And we needed some kind of strength that was not the strength of magicians nor the strength of slaves. So we found god. You’ll see.’

They were approaching a caravan of beasts: great armoured woodlice and millipedes burdened down with cages and sacks. The soldiers of the Worm were everywhere around it, but she saw slaves there, too, some bound, others walking freely alongside, no doubt to assist with the unloading. Why do they not resist? she found herself thinking, but she had seen this too many times before not to know the answer. Because collaboration spares them the whip or the tax or something similar. How cheaply lives are sold when slaves make their own shackles.

If she was to accomplish anything here, that collaboration would be her greatest foe: the habits of a thousand years of indenture would not be broken easily. Or perhaps at all.

As they crossed into the shadow of the buildings, the Hermit’s pace had become more cautious, and he was looking out for other Scarred Ones, holding her back whenever he saw one, skulking by walls, creeping across open spaces, every clumsily underhand movement seeming to scream out to Che that here they were about some clandestine business. And all the more surreal because the Worm was all around. Its foot soldiers thronged the city, many of them heading inwards to join that great and spreading spiral. But whatever power lay in the Hermit’s scars, it shielded them from that collective vision entirely.

In her head, where for a long time had been only the echo of her own thoughts, she heard a faint, deep susurration, the muted, distant sound of some great voice, and she shivered. Other than that imagined noise, the city had only a single sound: a thin, constant keening, high and painful to hear, so that she wondered if the Worm, the destroyer, was itself in constant pain.

‘These scars—’ she started, but the Hermit waved her back, and the two of them hid, crouching beside a wall, whilst another of the Scarred Ones – the priests – passed in the distance.

‘They are necessary. Without them, my kinden are just loops and segments of the Worm. Our stigmata, they spiral and they spiral, and they lead the Worm’s attention away so that the mind may be kept free. The scars bind us to the Worm, but keep us from its domination – just enough to be useful, yes. And you hear the Worm’s voice, don’t you? I know you do.’

She could see ahead a broad open space – a market square in any other city perhaps, but amongst the Worm there was nothing bought or sold, only taken. There were pits there, the same circular shafts she had marked from afar – too broad simply to be wells – and she realized with a start that the wailing sound originated there, and with that she knew what it was. The Hermit turned sharply away from the pits, dragging her with him when she paused to stare.

‘You must stay with me!’ he hissed. ‘Step from my shadow and every eye here shall mark you.’

‘I wanted to—’

‘That is not the way.’ There was something agitated, almost furtive in his manner as he pulled her away from the pits. ‘We do not, we do not . . . here, we will enter the earth. Come. Everything will be explained.’

He had found a smaller shaft, and Che watched a string of soldiers exit from it, coursing from the narrow shaft without hesitation. The reverberation in her head seemed louder, as they closed with that aperture, and the image of it as a mouth in the stone was unshakeable.

‘Orothellin says . . .’ the Hermit told her again, ‘but, no, you will sense it yourself. I feel it myself. We go to the cavern that all roads lead to. History is thick here. The way we were, my people, when first we were sealed down here, you will feel it. I have come here and known just how it was, for them.’

He ducked inside, and she could only follow him, hauled unwilling in his footsteps for fear of the Worm recognizing her as a trespasser.

‘You cannot imagine it, you who have always had your sun. What desolation they must have known, seeing themselves so humbled, so trapped. How they sought within themselves for some means to survive.’ He was picking up pace now, forcing her almost to run after him. Half the time he was on all fours, scrabbling and scuttling. She wondered what would happen if they met a Scarred One, here where there could be no hiding.

‘Do you feel it?’ he demanded, far too loudly. ‘Do you feel my ancestors searching for their purpose? Do you feel their terrible despair?’

And she did. It was like a sour taste in her mouth, the anguish of an entire civilization locked away to rot. Looking back, the Hermit must have seen it mirrored in her face.

‘Those feelings are still here, all the images and the emotions that my kinden divested themselves of. When they found the Worm within them.’

‘But they were always the Worm – or the Moths called them that . . .’ Che objected.

‘Oh, the Moths and their clever insults. How could they have known that down here we would find the Worm in truth?’ the Hermit hissed.

Then he would answer no more questions, but led her down, ever downwards, through cramped tunnels, steep slopes, and always that wordless voice waxing in her mind – a constant urging, an incessant dirge like no sound she had ever heard before.

And then the Hermit had stopped, and she was looking out into a vast cavern from a high vantage point. We must have gone as far down as this world allows. But she had no idea of how the metaphysics and the geology would work, and the sight before her gave the lie to her thought, because the rock below was riven by a chasm that descended further into the depths, into a darkness beyond even her eyes’ ability to pierce.

Approaching that plunging drop she saw a handful of figures and flinched back when she identified no fewer than three of the Scarred Ones, the Hermit’s former brethren. They had some of the Centipede soldiers, too, but the most prominent figure was surely a slave, a hulking Mole Cricket man who looked as though he should be throwing his captors about the cave. Instead, he stood with head bowed, arms by his sides, utterly resigned to . . . what?

Will they throw him into the rift? was her initial thought. The Hermit’s hand clenched on her shoulder painfully as he crouched beside her, and she saw a bizarre war of expressions on his face: disgust, fear and a dreadful hungry anticipation.

There was something coming, and with it came the voice. That colossal echoing murmur was growing and growing inside her head, strengthening into an incoherent ranting, the colossal demands of something infantile and hungry and almost mindless. The soldiers of the Worm and their scarred priests were falling back from the slave, where he stood on the very lip of the chasm.

‘What is it?’ Che got out, feeling that monstrous ascent within every fibre of her being. ‘What’s coming?’

‘God,’ breathed the Hermit in her ear, and then god came.

It uncoiled from the depths. Perhaps it was the depths. Che’s eyes, which knew no darkness, could not see it, only the cold stark night that radiated out from its great articulated body. It reared high towards the roof of the cave, and a wave of crushing despair washed over her. It was a hole in the world in the shape of a centipede, from its flailing whiplike antennae and the hooked poison claws that crowned its head to the rows of clutching, pointed limbs. Screaming horror seethed visibly off it like dark steam, even as that roaring voice reached an incomprehensible crescendo in Che’s mind.

And still it came, segment after sightless segment thrusting that head up to sway over the gathering below.

And Che beheld the Worm.

She forced herself to stare at it, to encompass it within her understanding, to reduce it to something she could name. Just a centipede, she told herself desperately, but how far from the truth! It was a wrong made physical. It was a devouring tear in the substance of the world, a writhing, many-legged door to somewhere that made this cavern world seem verdant and filled with life in comparison.

It was not utterly lightless. Small pale specks seemed to swim in its depths, or across its carapace, and Che sought them out, hoping to find something there she could understand.

She found it, and she wished she had not. The substance of the Worm was swimming with faces. They were faces of many kinden, rising and submerging, contorting into plastic screams that only added to the Worm’s ranting chorus. And Che remembered what Maure had said, that there were not even fragments of the dead here in this underworld. Now she saw. Now she was witness to where the dead went, both whole and in fragments. They went to the Worm, to drown in its freezing depthless body and be devoured.

‘Under the sun, perhaps my people could not have found god,’ the Hermit whispered, ‘but here, buried in their own despair and self-hatred, they reached within themselves, and this was what they called to. You see it? You see god?’

‘I see . . .’ Old College lessons were rising to the upper reaches of her thoughts. ‘What did they do? What did they call?’

And that swaying head, boiling with a darkness so intense it was harder to look at than the sun, had risen twenty feet or more over the gathering below and, with most of its body yet confined to the depths, had gone very still.

‘Our essence, the heart of our kinden, the perfect form of the Centipede, from which we draw our Art and our identity,’ the Hermit breathed. ‘We reached into ourselves with all our rage and spite, and ripped out all that we were, all of the human, and gave form to what was left, our base nature, our totem as seen through the mask of our bitter defeat: our god.’

The doctrine of perfect forms . . . Of course she knew the theory, how each kinden had a perfect exemplar, a theoretical ultimate from whence all Art was drawn. It was only a theory, though. She was not supposed to be able to look at one.

‘What does it want?’ she demanded.

‘Want? It wants nothing but the Worm. It wants what the Worm – my people – always wanted. It wants to be alone in the world, to have a world that is nothing but segments of the Worm, replicated over and over. It has no other desires, no thought, no reason to exist save to continue to be, and to grow greater, and to destroy all that is not of itself. What else could be the result of all of our despair and horror but this insensate, pointless god of ours?’

With that, the god of the Worm struck – savagely swift for something so large – and she saw those puncturing claws seize on the Mole Cricket, who screamed at last, writhed in their grip even as they crushed his body between them. Che listened for some change now to that constant hungry mantra, but there was nothing except that litany of mindless desire, over and over again.

‘Why does it want slaves?’ she wondered numbly.

‘It does not,’ the Hermit told her. ‘You think god cares? But the priests will sacrifice nonetheless. It gives an illusion of control, but it is only an illusion. This is what you propose to fight, Beetle girl. This is the source of my kinden’s dominion – over this world, and soon over the sunlit lands as well. This is the Worm that will eat up the world. Now you see. Now you share our despair.’

She watched the shape of the great hooked mouthparts treading over the ruined corpse of the Mole Cricket, each curved claw a hole in the weave of the world that stretched longer than her body: the blindly working mandibles of god.

‘The Worm knows only enough to know that there are things it cannot accomplish. In order to live and last, in order to replenish its numbers and arm its warriors, there is thought and planning needed,’ the scarred old man went on. ‘That is why I exist. That is why the Scarred Ones exist. They think themselves priests down there, giving homage to god, but god doesn’t care. God permits us our petty freedoms because we advance its cause, and its cause is to consume everything, to be everything. When god has devoured the sunlit lands and made all the world like itself, it will have no need of Scarred Ones. When god has eliminated all who are not of the Worm, it will have no need of warriors. It will consume and consume until this thing you see will be the entire world.’

‘And the Scarred Ones know this?’ Che whispered.

‘We do, and yet we serve, because even that conscious servitude is better than becoming a thoughtless segment of the Worm.’

‘But . . .’ Che shook her head. ‘Just existence for existence’s sake . . . what could be the point?’

‘Why do you think I listened to Orothellin,’ the Hermit said grimly, beginning to retreat down the tunnel. ‘My poor kinden . . . myself, those scarred wretches down there, we are all that is left of our people. This is what the Moths wrought when they bound us down here. We are what they left us.’

The Hermit was keen to be gone, but Che turned back suddenly, staring down towards the cavern to which all paths led, the seat of the Worm.

Could she possibly destroy it, and destroy all of the Worm? Could she, right now, assassinate the Centipedes’ god, and release the world from their curse?

But all the strength she ever had would not be enough to pierce that lightless carapace. The very thought of drawing upon herself that colossal attention sapped her ability even to think about it. As she searched desperately for some possible weakness, it seemed to grow stronger and stronger in her mind. Even if she could bring an army before it, the army would be help-less. The crushing denial of the Worm would stifle the best weapons of the Apt, would see the magic of the greatest magicians fade to a mere dream. The greatest of Weaponsmasters would not have the courage to raise a blade against it.

What, then, could the slaves of the Worm accomplish? What would they have left to them? The strength of their arms, their Art, their skills. Could those possibly be enough to overcome what she had just seen? The Worm did not conquer as the Wasps did, by bettering themselves to overcome the advances of their enemies. The Worm dragged everything down to its own primal level. The Worm did not believe in Aptitude or Inaptitude. The Worm believed only in itself.

I will do this. But her thoughts seemed muted and tiny against the constant rush and rumble of the Worm.

They emerged again into the city, amid that wordless seething of the Worm’s human bodies. The Hermit crouched in the tunnel mouth, eyes alert for his former brethren.

‘Now you have seen enough,’ he declared. ‘Now you regret coming here. Now we go.’

‘I don’t,’ she insisted, but inside her was something dying and near dead, the fires of her hope dimmed to an ember.

They were halfway clear of the city when she heard it – shrill sounds piercing the constant murmur and scuff of the Worm’s movements. A new consignment had arrived. The Worm had been exacting its tax.

She stopped, and the Hermit dragged at her sleeve, but this time she stood firm, watching a train of warriors course between the walls of the city, bearing cages crammed with screaming infants. They were heading for the pits, as she had known they must be.

‘We must go!’ the Hermit insisted fiercely, but she could not – not until she knew the full scope of what was done here.

She saw the cages opened at the pits, the squalling captives hauled out, one by one and dropped in almost gently – as if to be kept alive for something. Something that likes live prey?

‘What are they feeding those children to, Hermit? Is it the Worm?’

He managed a sickening, wretched laugh. ‘Yes. No, no. They feed them to nothing. Come, we must go!’

The insincerity on his face was hideous. As a Scarred One he had never needed to lie, save to himself.

‘I’m going to see.’

‘No, you mustn’t. I’ll leave you here.’

Looking into his pale eyes, reading the twitchings and spasms of his expression, she shook her head, and set off for the pits. Instantly he was at her heels, begging her, clutching at her, and yet unable to prevent her progress.

She passed like a dream through the purposeful bustle of the Worm, all those enemies seeing only a Scarred One’s shadow. She came to the lip of the pit, the sounds of wailing, terrified children louder in her ears, the air below reeking of death and excrement.

What will I see? Is this the Worm’s stomach? Are these the pens where its beasts fatten themselves? What is the last piece of the puzzle?

She looked down.

Maggots.

That was her first thought, seeing those countless bodies writhing and clawing helplessly over one another, smeared with their own filth, turning their faces towards her to shriek out their need, to demand the human care and comfort that they had been torn from. Not maggots, though. Children, infants, carpeting the floor of the pit. Infants of all kinden, twisting and knotting and fighting, and here and there just lying still, already dead. Many of them were blankly silent, but some – probably the newest arrivals – were wailing at the tops of their voices, demanding their lives back, their parents, that fragile little slice of love that they had known. Their voices, that chorus of loss and loneliness, raked claws deep down inside her.

The Hermit was still trying to pull her away, but she had become immovable, nailed there by sheer horror and revulsion.

‘You must go,’ he mumbled. ‘This was always the way.’

At that intervention, she could break free some fragment of her attention for him, enough to lash out and take him by the throat with a strength she had not known she possessed. ‘What do you mean,’ she demanded, ‘“This was always the way”?’ For this was exactly what he had sought to keep her from, she realized. Not to protect her but to protect himself, the memory of his already-accursed kinden. He was ashamed.

‘Orothellin says . . .’ he whimpered. ‘He says this was why the Moths and the others warred against us. This . . .’

I should hope so . . . But it did not explain anything. It did not make sense. Her legs were shaky as she stumbled over to the next pit, although her grip on the Hermit did not weaken.

She had expected to witness the same scene, but the children here were older, larger. They struggled and fought with one another, and it was as beasts fought – in sudden confrontations just as suddenly abandoned. Again, some were dead, and there was a curious look to the rest that sent her hurrying on to the next pit, revelation curdling in her gut. They made no sounds here. Because they have learned it will do them no good, was the inescapable conclusion.

‘Orothellin . . .’ The Hermit’s voice came to her. ‘He says that my people ever sought to make the world in our image. That was what the others could not forgive – what our efforts showed them, of how the world truly worked. Our intolerable truths.’

And the bodies in the third pit were older still, looking not far from grown, pallid and lanky and all too similar to one another, save that here or there she could see some mark of ancestry: darker skin, a larger frame, a Moth’s blind eyes. But they were the Worm, all of them, or would be soon. They were the foot-soldiers of the Worm.

‘What am I looking at?’ she whispered. ‘What does Orothellin say this is?’

‘That we found a way, long before the war, to break the bonds of kinden. That we took the children of our enemies, and we made them into our own. So that when others fought the armies of the Worm, they knew that they would shed their own blood, make themselves kinslayers, every blow they struck. We called them the New Soldiers, Orothellin says. In those days it was just to supplement our numbers, to swell our armies. He says.’

She wanted him to stop then, but she had called the Worm from dark recesses of his mind and it would come forth, segment after segment, whether she wanted it to or not.

‘But now we are the Worm, in truth. Now my people have become a mindless appendix to our god. Only we Scarred Ones can even sire or bear children, the rest are just . . . segments. Segments is all they are. Sexless, mindless, hollow shells they are. But the New Soldiers, oh, that is easier, far quicker than once it was. It took so long to grow a mind to the fullness of intellect. But to grow a body to strength is short work. No wonder they tax the slaves. They will tax them until their wombs are barren. The Worm needs soldiers to swallow the world, to empty all the lands under the sun. The Worm can spend the futures of its slaves, for there are a million new recruits in the wider world. Already they are being carried down here, the children of your kin. The Worm grows ready to hatch from this place. It will consume everything here, and it has no patience for things it no longer needs.’ That divide within the man, his present self-knowledge warring with the thing he had once been, was blazing on his face.

And beyond him rose another face, like a brother to his own, and twisted with its own individual rage. Another Scarred One.

Che was moving in that instant, barging past the Hermit, almost knocking him into the pit where the soulless things below would surely have torn him apart and devoured him. Her sword cleared its sheath with the effortless ease she always imagined Tynisa must feel when her rapier leapt to her hand. She was inspired, driven. She had purpose.

The cicatrized priest had his mouth open, the first howl against blasphemy escaping his lips. The enormity of what he saw had rooted him to the spot. He made no attempt to defend himself or step clear of her lunge. She killed his voice within his throat, all the force she could muster driving that sharp point up to the hilt in his neck, seeing that pallid face contort with agony and outrage, and for a moment attain a sort of humanity.

The Scarred One staggered and dropped, twitching, but now she became aware of a wider disturbance that centred on herself.

The Worm was awakening to her presence.

All around her, all throughout the city, the warriors, the segments, had stopped their concerted bustle. They stood like men waking from a dream, and then their heads began turning towards her. The same eyes looked out from a hundred faces, a thousand, searching for this imperfection in the heart of the Worm.

She caught her breath, the Scarred One’s blood on her sword, because what could follow now but utter extinction?

Then the Hermit had seized her wrist, hauled her towards him, and in his other hand was his long knife. For a moment she thought he had suffered some change of heart, fallen victim to the Worm once more, abandoned Orothellin and humanity in one brief step. Then the blade licked across her forearm, scoring a twisting line of pain and blood, a jagged spiral to join the blood-matted gouge on her upper arm.

For a moment after that, absolutely everything in that city of the Worm was still.

The multitude of the warriors blinked, all at once, as though caught in mid-thought and forgetting what they had been doing. They then returned to their busy labours, and she saw that more and more of them were joining that great spiral – that it was growing to encompass the whole city around them, thousands of the Worm’s bodies threading through the streets, marching inexorably on that vanishing centre.

Clawing their way towards the sun.

‘We must go,’ the Hermit insisted. ‘More Scarred Ones will come. They will know something is wrong. We must escape.’

This time she did not resist him.

When they had put the city behind them, with its buried god and its child pits, he turned to her. ‘You regret now, do you not? You wish you had never asked.’

‘I do not.’ She faced up to him without flinching. ‘Because I know more than ever that it must be destroyed, all of it. You have given me purpose, Hermit.’ Perhaps this buried chasm was no proper soil for hope to grow in, but that did not preclude a purpose. She defied anyone to see what she had seen and not take purpose from it. She felt herself on fire with a rage that burned as bright as the writhing silhouette of the Worm had been obscure.

And in the back of her mind she explored what had been returned to her when she had got far enough from the city to escape the deadening hand of the Worm: some faint recollection of magic had crept back into her. She had felt that bond, that tenuous link to the outer world that had always been there, but so faint that only by having it taken away and then restored could she know it was real.

Are you seeing this, Seda? she demanded silently. Do you understand now what you have done?