Seal of the Worm

Twenty-Eight

I should have stayed with Che.

Thalric had been a battlefield officer once, long ago, before the Rekef had recruited him. He remembered enough about the soldiering trade to know that quality of troops counted for more than just about anything. He had never seen a worse band of warriors than the rabble he was trying to marshal now. Military historians would have to invent whole new words for how appalling the slaves of the Worm were in war.

Of course this is hardly textbook stuff: the hopeless against the mindless. He had seen quickly enough that standing toe to toe with the Worm was not a game these people could win. Even wielding the weapons that they had made for their masters, they lacked all training and coordination – lacked all virtues, in fact, except for a desperation that turned too readily to panic and fear. Thalric had heard that some people believed sheer rage and righteous fury would win a fight, and he could only assume that those people had never been in one. In a massed battle, training and discipline would defeat random flailing every time, however righteous or angry.

Of course, training and discipline were not exactly what the Worm had, but what they did have would serve. Watching them fight made him feel ill – and his varied career had instilled a strong stomach. The way they moved together, the many limbs of a single presence, was utterly unlike soldiers, unlike humans. It served, though. In close combat the Worm was ferocious, unflinching, never retreating, swift and savage and unhesitating. A part of him watched that dreadful will to slaughter and thought, perfect shock troops, even whilst the rest of him was trying not to retch.

But Che wanted these hopeless victims to fight, to make their extinction costly enough that the Worm would leave them alone. After all, the driving force behind those human puppets did not understand vengeance or hatred any more than it could know of love or hope or happiness. If they could bloody the enemy enough, then it would draw back from them through sheer expedience. That was Che’s plan. Thalric did not believe it, now. After all, the bastard’s down here, isn’t it? Somehow it’s at the centre of this place – wherever you go, you reach that city, that’s what Messel said. So is it really going to give its slaves the run of the place while its armies are away? Thalric was bitterly afraid that Che had miscalculated – but not in guessing that the Worm would dispose of its entire slave population, the other kinden that had shared its banishment. No, that was patently the case, but he was less and less sure that either running or fighting would save these blighted failures from the blades of the Worm.

He wanted to tell her he had no sympathy, that those who bent their backs to the lash had chosen their place in life and deserved no more. He wanted to tell her that he and she – and Tynisa and Esmail, if she insisted – should simply find some place to hide that was as distant as they could find from any tendrils of the Worm, and there they should wait until all the slaves were devoured. Perhaps, having gutted its world, save for the four of them, the Worm would seek elsewhere for its nourishment. He wanted to say that this was the only real use that they could find for this host of useless subhumans.

He had said nothing of the sort to her. In his mind’s eye he saw the reaction in her face, the disapproval, the knowledge that, by her impossible Collegiate standards, he had failed some test of morality. But you can’t save the world, you can’t! Sometimes it’s all you can do to save yourself.

The time would come when this doomed venture turned sour, and even Che would have to admit defeat. Until then Thalric would play her game and hunt for a battlefield on which the Worm could be even mildly inconvenienced.

There had been tactical exercises when he had graduated from sergeant, about pitting an inferior force against one larger, swifter, more skilled. None of them had been quite this hopeless.

Light had been the first problem. Most of the native combatants on both sides could see in the dark. He himself could not, and a blind general was not someone the history books had ever had cause to sing the praises of. He had spoken at some length with Che, and then with his troops, gauging the nature of their sight. Chiefly this revealed that actual light – fires, lanterns, whatever – did not leap out at their eyes if they relied on their Art. And the same would go for the Worm, so that he had a whole chain of beacons up the route of retreat, for his eyes, and to remind the wretched slaves where they had to go.

‘They’re here! They’re here!’ A Moth woman hurtled overhead and disappeared back into darkness, and Thalric’s troops began milling and trembling.

‘Remember what I told you!’ he shouted at them, just one step away from, Do what you’re told, for they were little better than children, at war, and he had no time to explain his logic.

There were no bows in the whole extent of the under-earth, as far as he could work out. The people here did all sorts of clever things with fungus fibres and rock and coal, but there was no wood, and no substitute for it. They had no crossbows, either, and it had been something of a vertiginous revelation that they had been trapped down here since long before anyone thought of that quintessential Apt weapon.

And of course, with that whatever-it-was that the Worm did to peoples’ heads, perhaps crossbows would be no great asset anyway. Another thing that your general here doesn’t understand – and what do I recall about tactical decisions made in ignorance?

What they did have were slings, which Thalric reckoned to be surely the least efficient ranged weapon after just throwing things. He had to work with what he’d got, though.

‘I’m going to give them something to think about!’ he called out to them. ‘As soon as they’re in range, you start on them. Make every stone count.’ If you can even actually aim a sling. He was unsure about that, and he had no real grasp of their range, not in this dark place where his sense of space was hopelessly compromised.

The host of the Worm was approaching.

He let his wings carry him lightly towards them, lifting higher, hoping one of the appalling hunters of the cavernous sky didn’t choose this moment to complicate his life. His furthest fire was just casting its light on to that onrushing tide: a sinuous, weaving inroad of the Worm, the green-blue flames glinting on bronze mail and steel blades.

Neither of which they’d possess without their slaves. How can people connive at their own impotence like that? How could they even give up their own children to the bastards?

The Worm, much like Beetles and other ground-bound kinden, did not look upwards half as much as they should.

He was no strong flier, but he did not spare his sting, soaring across the face of the Worm like a stormcloud, hands crackling with fierce gold light. He had no need to aim, with that dense column rushing below him, and he just let his hands work, a dozen blasts in as many seconds, each one tearing into a target, cutting a jagged wound across the mass of the enemy.

There was no confusion: they knew him immediately, and some of them had slings, too. Not so many, though, compared to how many bodies advanced down there. He kept moving, and he guessed they did not get much practice against a flying target – if these vacant segments did anything as human as practise.

Another staccato burst from his hands, curving back above them, and of course they were not waiting for him, were still rushing towards the hapless mob of his own followers. The dozens he struck down were nothing, less than a scratch on the body of the Worm.

Then the air was alive with hornets. One clipped his foot as he pulled up, and he saw a ripple pass across the face of the enemy, the leading edge of their charging column fraying and coming apart as three score sling stones pelted into them. Those weapons he had dismissed as weak were cutting apart the front ranks of the enemy by sheer numbers.

The slaves here did not go to war, but they must hunt and defend themselves from the savage beasts that had been locked into this asylum alongside them. Slings were all they had, and the animal foes they used them against were also armoured.

Emperor’s balls! Thalric thought, seeing that initial salvo, because the entire front line of the Worm advance had just disintegrated. Surely, only around one in five or six stones had achieved anything, but there were close on a hundred slingers stacked up the raked incline where he had placed them, and they were already loosing their next shot.

Had an Imperial advance hit such unexpected resistance, then Thalric reckoned a regroup and redeploy would have been in order, but the Worm needed no such devices and simply pressed on, trampling the discarded bodies of its own fallen whether they were dead or not.

For a handful of seconds, as his own hands kept busy, he thought they might achieve something. It had seemed as though the slingshot was tearing down the Worm as swiftly as they could advance. Then reality asserted itself, and he saw that the enemy were still advancing – advancing swiftly, even – and that the attrition was insufficient to achieve anything against an enemy that had such immense numbers and no concept of personal extinction.

He let his troops loose and loose again, though, because each dead enemy surely counted for something, and then he was skimming over his own lines, calling, ‘Fall back! Fall back! Remember the way!’ The Worm were really coming on swiftly now and, as soon as the sling barrage stopped, they would become swifter.

Some of his people had already been inching away, and at Thalric’s order – or perhaps it’s my permission – the whole mob of them were scrabbling and running up the slope away from the enemy, and at least a sling was easier to run with than a bow and a quiver. He saw some of them stumble, even fall downslope, and they would certainly die, and there was nothing he was able or willing to do about it. The majority had good Art for climbing, though, and they were hurtling upslope almost as fast as the Centipede-kinden were pursuing them.

Thalric thanked his parents for giving him wings and overtook the lot of them, rising to where the rest of his force – the non-slingers – were waiting.

‘On my mark,’ he alerted them. He wondered if the insensate nature of the enemy would mean this sort of set-up would keep working, or whether the Worm would adapt to it.

It doesn’t matter. Let it work as often as you like, but we’re still pissing into the hurricane.

The Worm was beginning to catch up with the stragglers now, each wretched victim overcome in a knot of struggling figures and rising blades.

‘Go! Now!’ he shouted.

‘There are still—’ someone objected and he shouted them down.

‘They’re dead. If they’re in the way, they’re already dead.’ He dropped down and put his shoulder against one of the great rocks they had piled up here. In all honesty, he barely shifted it, but then one of the Mole Crickets followed his lead, and then others were pushing and prising and levering. And, with barely a prequel, there were tons of stone in sudden movement, descending on the body of the Worm. Some of his followers would be caught under that, but the majority were already clear. By Thalric’s book that was a considerably better outcome than they were due.

‘Now move!’ he snapped. ‘No going back for them, no sitting around spectating! Get your legs moving, come on. They’ll be after us quick enough.’

Che was learning about a chain of command.

The slaves had been trickling in for days, but word was spreading. Some came because Messel or others had warned them to flee, others because the Worm had descended on their villages, taken their remaining children and begun killing the rest. Nobody could say how many communities had nobody left to speak for them, wiped out without witnesses, their lights put out forever.

There were a handful like the Moth, Atraea, who had been headmen and headwomen of their own communities. These Che set to work in organizing the rest. They pooled whatever food there was, found places to sleep, reunited families. Others, those who could move swiftly and surely in the dark, were set to foraging – young Moths and the blind Cave Crickets of Messel’s kinden particularly. They ranged further and further, hunting with their slings and gathering fungus and lichens. Some of them did not return.

Darmeyr Forge-Iron and a few others were responsible for recruiting more warriors. None of the slaves had any prior experience, but many were willing, in return for having their dependants fed and looked after. There were plenty of Worm swords, and there was a little armour, and anyone who could use a sling was always welcome.

But there was no time for training. Anyone who could demonstrate to Darmeyr and the others that they had the will and an able body was sent on to wherever Thalric was going next, in the hope of rescuing more from the jaws of the Worm.

The Worm had not found them yet. Che suspected the Worm had not even begun to appreciate what was going on. At some point it would realize, in its blinkered, hungry way, that things were not going as they should.

She did not know what they would do then. No ideas had come to her.

Now she strode through the camp, aware of the attention fixed on her: the woman from the other world whose eyes had seen the sun. Some seemed to treat her with a reverence she found uncomfortable; others scowled at her. Still more did not care, concerned solely with their own well-being, their own fears.

Orothellin had walked amongst them earlier, to calm them. Everyone seemed to know the ancient Slug-kinden, and to call him Teacher. He had been a calming influence in the often-disruptive life of the camp. Now he was gone, though, to help bring in more of the lost, to try and thwart the predations of the Worm. Che was left to manage on her own.

Not on her own, quite. She had Tynisa as her constant shadow, though after her failure on the way to the Hermit’s cave the Weaponsmaster was riddled with doubts about whether she would serve any useful purpose when the Worm arrived. She had the Hermit, too, although the ragged old man stayed out of everyone’s way, by mutual consent.

Tynisa worried Che, if only because the less credence the Weaponsmaster put in her own abilities, the more she seemed to defer to her sister. She dogged Che’s footsteps as though the Beetle was the only spark of hope in the whole underworld. As though Che knew what she was doing.

And I’m still working on that one. No guarantees.

Che stopped to receive the latest news: more arrivals in, word from Messel, movements of the Worm. She did her best to listen, to take it all in and end up with a coherent picture of what was going on. She was terrified that vital information was slipping through the cracks in her mind.

‘What will you do if you win?’ Tynisa asked her suddenly.

Che almost replied, I don’t think that’s very likely, all very self-deprecating as a polite Collegium girl should be. But that was not what anyone wanted to hear. Instead she hedged, ‘Win?’

‘If you defeat the Worm.’ Tynisa, who had not seen that darkly shining abomination beneath the stone city, sounded almost optimistic about it. ‘These people have never known anything other than this. They’re slaves born.’

‘Nobody’s a slave born.’ It was pure polemic but, as she said it, Che realized it was true in a way. ‘The Worm didn’t feed these people, or house them or clothe them. Take away their masters and they will live and thrive.’ Easier here than in the Empire, if only the Worm could be resisted as the Wasps can. ‘The Worm is a parasite on all of them, on this entire world. It takes, and gives nothing – not even the tyranny of order. If we can defeat the Worm, or outlast it or exhaust it, then these people will live very well in its absence.’ She glanced up at Tynisa, seeing her frown. ‘You doubt me?’

‘It’s just . . . what then?’ the Weaponsmaster finally managed to say, apparently wrestling with the question herself. ‘And will this place be cut off forever, or will it join up with what we know, or . . . I mean, if we fit back with the world we came from, what happens when the Wasps come down here and enslave everyone, or Helleren magnates realize there’s a whole nation of cheap labour, or . . .’

‘You have been thinking this through,’ Che noted, as if she was a proud College Master. ‘Well, perhaps I will have them cast lots and form an assembly of the underworld. Perhaps it will be they who venture into the lands of the Wasps and Beetles, rather than the other way round. Perhaps everyone will finally learn to live with one another and there will be no more war. Only, let us just find a way to beat the Worm first, Tynisa.’ She heard her own voice tremble a little with the words. ‘There’s no sense in planning for tomorrow when we haven’t secured today.’

They thought Esmail was mad. He himself wasn’t sure whether the whole exercise was just stupidity or a failure to adapt. His discipline was unknown here in the underworld, though. If he did not test his limits, how would he ever know?

He was being forced to improvise: conditions were adverse.

There had been a community here in the darkness by the name of Old Aderax. Enough Moths had lived there that he wondered if the name was an echo of Dorax, the Moth hold that still existed back in the familiar world. He and Orothellin had gone there to spread the word, lunatic missionaries crying out that the end really was nigh.

By that time their enemies – or perhaps Enemy singular, by Che’s version – had become aware that something was amiss. The response had been fierce. Locals, using their Art wings and the dark-seeing eyes of their kinden, had reported a host of the Worm descending on them. Fighting to win had been out of the question, whatever Che might have wanted. Fighting to give the bulk of them a chance to escape – the non-combatants, the few remaining children – had become a necessity.

Old Aderax had been a layered city, a strip mine that people lived in, descending in broad tiers into the pit of its own workings. Esmail had been hoping that the Worm would just swarm them, as blunt and simple as the force Che had claimed possessed it, but the horde of bodies sent against them instead split into snaking columns, each accompanied by a seething foam of their sinuous beasts. The armed defenders who had hoped to delay them had been flanked almost immediately.

That was when Esmail had seen it: of course there were minds directing the assault – not the blind and oblivious Worm-god but the Scarred Ones, the priests, those who had betrayed humanity to buy themselves back from oblivion.

He had identified the one column that would be quickest on the trail of the fugitives and dispatched the defenders to intercept it. The miners of Old Aderax were strong and determined, and many of them were huge Mole Crickets, but he knew they would die, and he knew that they themselves had not quite appreciated this. It was a cold decision, but he made it quickly, without hesitation. Regret he would save for later.

He himself had gone hunting.

His small magics had almost vanished after they had been banished here, but he was still sensitive to the fluctuations of his meagre personal power. When the Seal had broken, as Che claimed, he had sensed a little heightening of his strength, perhaps as magic began seeping in from the wider world beyond. Whenever he was close to the foot soldiers of the Worm, however, it was gone entirely. The power they had tapped into was a primal, mindless, pre-human archetype that knew and understood neither Aptitude nor magic, and so denied them both, potent enough in its ignorance to enforce the same on all who came into contact with it.

Nevertheless he wanted answers, and most of his training needed no magic, and he had crept and lurked through the near-abandoned galleries of Old Aderax, listening to the fates of those few who had been too slow or too stubborn to leave.

It had been a nerve-racking business, because Esmail could not see in the dark as well as his quarry could, but he was clever and careful, and eventually his moment had come. Secure in the knowledge that the Worm’s human bodies had scoured Old Aderax of life, one of the Scarred Ones had gone wandering.

Esmail had struck, descending on the robed figure, dealing a blow that sent the priest insensible to the floor, then pausing, waiting. He had been sure that, had he tried this with one of the husks that formed the army of the Worm, he would even now be running for his life as their entire force came for him, each individual body just a segment of the angry whole. How separate were the Scarred Ones? That had been the test.

A slow count of five as he had crouched against the stone, and no instant backlash. He had shouldered the unconscious body and stolen away with it, avoiding the many-limbed coils of the Worm as it thrashed and clawed at Old Aderax, executing the few it could find there and carrying their bodies away.

There would come a time to feel horror, Esmail knew. Even he, whose heritage should have steeped him in blood, could not go into a place like this creature’s mind and remain unmoved. Esmail had listened to every word Che said, and he knew that the Scarred Ones were about something unspeakable, beyond mere tyranny or cruelty. He clung to his humanity, embraced it. Once he had done what needed to be done, he might face the memories, but until then he must entertain nothing but professionalism.

Orothellin had led the refugees into the darkness, keeping the majority safe by sacrificing detachments of men and women, sending them to lead the Worm’s questing tendrils away – and to die, surely, Esmail thought – and Esmail had caught the rabble up eventually. When they saw what he had brought them, they had wanted to tear the priest to pieces. When he told them he had a use for the creature, they had begun to suspect a madness in him.

But he was not mad. He was desperate. He was inventive. He was going to see if his discipline, all that vaunted training, could subvert the will of the Worm.

The refugees from Old Aderax had made a wretched and temporary home out of a scar in the rock, but they would be moving on through the pitch-dark landscape soon. Orothellin had been telling them that they must keep ahead of the Worm, though Esmail was not even sure if that was possible. The Slug-kinden had very clearly decided that anything resembling an organized defence was a lost cause. He was hoping to keep people on the move until the Worm had sent the bulk of its forces elsewhere – meaning to the lands under the sun, the Old World, Esmail’s home.

Esmail had thought about that, coldly and clinically as his training required, and decided that, even if he liked the idea, it wouldn’t work. He had listened when Che had spoken of the terrible beast below, the avatar of the Centipede-kinden whose blind hunger possessed and drove the legion of bodies that comprised the Worm. It was an impossible thing, a terrible thing that the Centipedes had called up and turned into, at a time when it was either that or extinction.

And Esmail, the assassin, considered his chances. What would happen to the Worm if he was able to kill god?

Had he been given free rein with his particular brand of magic, he would already be walking freely through the foot soldiers of the Worm, seeking his chances, but his old trick of taking on the face of another would now fall away the moment he got close to a single human segment of the beast, let alone to the colossal creature itself.

But not, apparently, the priests themselves. There was humanity enough left in them that they could still become his victims.

This one was a woman, he noted, although he had not realized before. She was pale and lumpen and her skin positively boiled with spiralling scars. Taking that pasty face of hers would not serve, but Che and the Hermit had showed that there was another way.

First, though, he needed to understand.

His remaining little handful of magic, which he had sheltered like a candle down here, would finally see use. The Scarred One snarled at him and spat, and called down curses on his head as he reached for her mind.

She sensed him, and her defences were remarkable, walls after walls, all slamming into place about her, fending him off, turning him away. She was as defended as a magician, and for a moment he was thrown, unable to force his way into her, his strength venting itself against the barriers of her brain.

How has she learned to do this? Why should she need it?

And, with that, he understood. She did not need to fend off roving assassins who might want to pillage her brain, but every day of her life she must shield her mind from the thing that was her god. Mind was the very quality that it abhorred, that it denied in its tools and subjects. The higher things of mind were blotted out even in the presence of its servants. If it detected the decaying human thought left in its unasked-for priesthood, then it would obliterate them entirely.

Knowing that, Esmail attacked again, drawing upon not strength but sheer finesse, not the hammer but the needle, to pierce through all the little gaps in her armour that the bludgeon of her god could not have penetrated.

He was in . . . and in that moment her whole mind, her history and her nature, were spread before him like an abattoir.

Afterwards, the horror came, and he abandoned the corpse that he had made of her and found some place out of the sight of humanity and shook and shuddered for all the dead in Old Aderax, and for all that he had since learned.

He had seen how they lived, the Scarred Ones: the last true Centipede-kinden. Priests and leaders, as they styled themselves, servants of their insatiable god. But he had seen through their eyes. He had seen how they scratched a living inside the city of the Worm, maintaining their fragile identities against the constant eroding tide of the godhead. He had seen how they were permitted to direct the armies of labour, to organize and provision and supply. He had seen how they were suffered, an irritant that salved the sore it had caused, and so lived on another day. They had become parasites in the corpse of their own history, and they knew that one day the Worm would not need them. The perfect unthinking monstrosity that they had called up in their time of need would consume them, just as it would consume everything else.

They comprehended all of that, did these scarred priests, and yet they did nothing. They cringed and served, and they sacrificed countless lives to an entity that only grew and consumed and made everything like itself, just as the Centipedes had always done, every child of every kinden becoming just a new segment in their composite body. Only now even they would be the victims of their own work, and the only victory they could hope for was that they would be the very last, when all else was gone.

Later, when the trembling had subsided and he had come to terms with what he had learned, he took his Art to his own flesh, keener and more precise than any knife, drawing red, raw sigils to complement the mark the Hermit had already laid on him. He gritted his teeth and illustrated his skin with careful spirals. His magic would fail him, but those marks, and his understanding, would serve to let him pass beneath the notice of the Worm. Or, if they would not, he would die, but it seemed to him that the Worm meant the death of everything, above and below, sunlight and darkness.

He had failed to kill the Empress of the Wasps when the chance had been given to him, but he could make up for that. He could kill the Worm god.