Seal of the Worm

Thirty-Two

He had a lamp. The lamp was life.

It gave out a harsh, greenish-white chemical glare, and it would last for a long time but not forever. That indicated Totho’s deadline, his allotted time to find Che and get her out of this black and unnatural place.

He was not sure what he had expected, but this was not it. He had thought of caves, winding tunnels where the monstrous Worm-men walked. He had thought that he could catch and question one of them, perhaps. He had thought that all roads would lead him to Che.

In this, he recognized, he was guilty of thinking as the Inapt must think, that there was some pattern directing life, so that these things worked out.

The caves were a world in themselves, vast and overarching. The stone sky was filled with stars in some way he could not understand. Moths battled through the air, and also terrible things, great albino shadows he glimpsed at the very edge of his light. Here was not a warren of narrow passageways that he might search methodically until one of them was found to contain Che. He had thought to find her in some prison, at the mercy of a villain that Totho could slay. He had come to rescue her, after all. Poor, helpless Che was always getting herself captured. It was almost endearing, save that those enemies who caught her seemed thereafter to become the target for her mercurial affections: Moths, Wasps, vile and deceitful kinden all.

But the caves remained a world that was vast and unplumbed, and he knew she must be here somewhere but he had no way of finding her.

He had seen some of the Worm-men. When they had come within the reach of his lamp he had been petrified at first by the fear that the thing he clung to must make him a beacon to the whole of this dark world. Later he had come to realize that their eyes worked backwards: they saw in the darkness, but they could not see his light. It meant nothing to them.

He had killed them initially. He had intended to confront them, or to capture some straggler, but he had forgotten the skin-crawling way they moved all together, the utter inhuman detachment that was in their every look and motion. Revulsion had risen within him instantly on seeing them – the simple fact of having them within sight was more than he could deal with. He had ambushed them with his snapbow and emptied a precious magazine into them, striking down half a dozen instantly at long range and before they knew he was there.

Then they had seen him, and something terrible had happened. He had stood there with his snapbow – he was up on a jutting rise and had been shooting down at them – and his hands had lost their way. The very logic of what he was doing, that deep, ingrained understanding of mechanism, of cause and effect, had gone. His finger had been on the trigger, and had even twitched on it, spitting a single bolt uselessly off into the dark. It was not that the weapon had jammed. It was that he himself had.

They had come for him – were already coming for him – and he might have stood there until he died if they had not been so repulsive and unnatural. That instinct to get away owed nothing to those higher parts of his mind that had come unmoored. Clutching his useless snapbow and his lamp, he had fled them and escaped.

Later, hiding in a cave after driving out the pallid long-legged spider that was its previous occupant, he had tried to understand what had happened. He had panicked, he told himself. The sight of the Worm-men had unnerved him. It had been a human failing, and therefore one that he, Totho the Apt, could overcome.

He had seen things in his life that he had fought to explain away and he had succeeded in each case. Time and the dulling of memory had allowed him to conquer even the sight of the river Jamail in Khanaphes, stirred to sudden flood and scouring one bank of the invading Scorpion-kinden whilst leaving the locals on the other bank untouched. In his Apt heart, he could look back on that sight and know that there had been a rational explanation because he himself lived in a rational world.

When he remembered confronting the Worm, though, he found his powers of self-deception were insufficient to the task. He could deal with attempts to add new and intolerable experiences into his life, but this was an absence, a theft. When the attention of the Worm had turned on him, he had been stripped of all those things that made him him.

He ate sparingly of the food he had brought – another constantly encroaching limit to the time that he had. He was suddenly convinced that he would not be able to find his way out of this place if he did not find Che. His journey only went one way. No retreat.

He slept, dreading what dreams would follow. When he awoke again, adrift in time in a strange, cold place, he turned out the lamp and forced himself to face the darkness.

There was other light, aside from his chemical lantern and those distant, mobile stars. Something out there was ablaze. To Totho, fire meant the work of human hands, and he had nowhere else to head for.

He could see people, when he drew closer. Because of the lamp, some of them had already spotted him. In this dark-mirror world, that meant that they were not the enemy. Or not necessarily the enemy. Not the enemy that he feared.

But they were a horrible ragbag of creatures, nonetheless. He had the snapbow ready, and he nearly killed the first of them that he saw. They were Moths. Of all creatures other than the Worm, Moths were those he most did not want to see.

There were others too, he saw shortly afterwards, and the Moths were their advance scouts, their fliers. As he strode into their community in his dark mail, with his lamp in one hand and his snapbow over his shoulder, they stared at him as though he had come from another world or another time. Which he had.

There were Beetles there, and Mole Crickets, and a weird dark-grey velvet-haired people whose Art let them throw nets of gluey strands at their prey or their enemies, and pallid men and women with no eyes at all, who saw through their feet and their long fingers. Confronting them, seeing them study him with just the same wariness of the familiar facing the alien, he felt that he had taken the final step out of a sane world and into some ancient folk story.

They were in the process of leaving, he understood. They were the slaves of the Worm, and the Worm was consuming its slaves, burning them like fuel so that it could make its grand assault on the world that Totho knew. He gained this understanding in fragments and pieces. They were all scared of him, so none of them was particularly coherent. He learned first of all, though, that the Worm was coming: their common enemy.

He asked them about Che, without much hope – did they know a Beetle girl from the surface who had become lost down here? Would they know if she was a prisoner of the Worm? For a long time, none of them realized who he was talking about.

Then, with the Moths floating back in to warn that the Worm was almost upon them, and the evacuation still ongoing, the people of that nameless place fleeing into the dark, one of the blind men approached Totho warily.

His name was Messel, he said. And, yes, he did know Cheerwell Maker.

Esmail walked amongst the Worm.

He hadn’t been sure that it would work and, even now, he couldn’t know how long he could pass amongst them in safety. He was limiting his exposure.

The sheer geography of this realm had begun to make his mind hurt. Che had spoken of the Worm’s city, and he had thought, It must be just one of many, surely. But no, there was just the one, from whence all the Worm sprang, and all roads led towards it. It was the centre of this prison world, and the Worm itself – the physical form the Centipede-kinden had given to it in their desperation – was the centre of that, ergo the centre of this entire world.

He could not imagine how it worked, how everything would have to curve and funnel in to make that true. Perhaps Che could, or some Moth Skryre with a far greater understanding of the world than poor Esmail.

The breaking of the Seal had sent slow shockwaves through the Worm’s domain, Esmail surmised. This had been a part of the larger world once, and it was trying to be so again. These caves and caverns, this lightless place of many kinden, had simply been another power in the old Inapt games of state, until the Worm’s practices – their aggression, their conversions, their taking of children and repurposing them for their own cause – had caused that great and almighty war of antiquity. Now the underearth was striving to return to its proper place, and Esmail could see cracks and damage, fallen buildings, entire shattered districts of the great stone city. But of course the Worm needed no buildings, no cities. The Worm had been born out of the Centipede ideal and from the depraved desperation of its people with one need only: that there should be the Worm, forever and forever. The Worm was the centre of its own world. The only things it permitted to exist were those that furthered the existence of the Worm. It needed slaves because they produced new life to become segments to graft on to its extended body; because they toiled and mined to arm and equip its mindless host of soldiers. For a long time that uneasy stasis had been maintained by the Scarred Ones, who had the human intellect the Worm lacked. They had preyed and preserved all at once, keeping a precarious balance of feast and famine.

The breach of the Seal had ended that. Now the Worm, which had been coiled in readiness for a thousand years, was striking upwards at that great mass of the sunlit world, not because it was some manner of birthright from before the war, but because it was different to the Worm. Because it was a world that the Worm was not the centre of.

That was the thought that obsessed Esmail, for what he had gleaned from the scarred woman’s mind had suggested that Che had underestimated how the Worm would conquer. Not merely casting the bristling loops of its body up into the wider world, but by warping that world’s very nature, simply by its presence. As its armies funnelled into the lands above, so the Worm would twist the very weave of the world around it, dragging at the centre until all the world, and not just this barren prison, led to its jaws. And by then the Worm would need no others, not soldiers, not priests, not slaves. There would be just the Worm.

Esmail had killed, in his time. He had served evil causes. He was well acquainted with the sort of motives that drove the Wasps to send out their armies or drove Moths to intrigue against one another. He understood evil. The horror of the Worm was that it was not evil. Evil implied a choice. The Worm was what it had been made to be, as innocently destructive as a machine.

The Scarred Ones, though . . . they were evil. He was happily killing any that he could creep up behind and cut open. They had been given the choice, and they had made it.

Here in their city he possessed no magic, but he remembered with a professional clarity just how a Scarred One’s mind had thought, and he remembered the Hermit’s reluctant blessing, and he had cut himself again into the exacting patterns of their mystery. He had taken every word of Che’s account and analysed it as a spy should, and now he walked amongst the bodies of the Worm and they did not notice him. Or, if he felt a ripple of unease run through them, he would add another scar to his flesh and quell their suspicions. He avoided the Scarred Ones themselves, who would know in an instant he was not one of them. It was hardly textbook fieldcraft, but it had kept him alive and undetected so far.

And he had seen it all. He had not realized that he came here only because Che’s story had seemed too bizarre to be believed, but now his eyes had been opened: it was true in every word.

Or every word but one. He had yet to see that final inner secret. He had yet to confront the Worm inside its den.

The child pits had nearly finished him. He had been a hard man once, but having children, loving children, had fractured some part of his inner armour. He had stared down at the terrified, lonely infants, seen them look up at him beseechingly as though he could do anything for them. He had come so close to trying to help, even though all he would have accomplished would have been to destroy his own cover.

He had looked in each subsequent pit, witnessing each group of children one step further removed from their roots, from their individuality. He had seen, stage by stage, the Worm consume everything that they had been, and leave nothing but its hollow casts behind.

It was after that that he had started murdering the Scarred Ones whenever they gave him the opportunity. He desperately wanted to kill somebody for it, and they were the only ones to whom it was even possible to attach blame. If it had been feasible to go backwards somehow and kill all their ancestors as well, all the great magicians of the Centipede-kinden when they had first thought up this madness, then he would have done that, too.

Not long ago he had made a surprise discovery: he had found out where the Scarred Ones lived. There was a nest of caves beneath the city, unconnected to the tunnels leading to their god. There the true remnants of the Centipede-kinden clung to their precarious existence, hiding and breeding like vermin, like parasites in their own places. He saw them there, and their children – already scarred to keep them from the wrath of the mindless host all around them. He could have stalked in and butchered them, but found that it was not in him, quite, to do so. Besides, they did not all sleep at once, but operated some kind of staggered rota, so that some were always vigilant. At first he imagined that they feared some intruder such as himself. Then he realized that they feared the end of their immunity, that their god would suddenly realize that it had no need for them. Such feeble sentries could not have kept that tide out, but still they watched. It was not quite enough to engender sympathy in him, but it came close.

He had no idea how Che’s own work was going – her attempts to gather and organize the slaves. He had been out of contact now for unknown days and uncounted moonless nights. All he knew was that there were prisoners being brought into the city on a regular basis, but no clue as to whether they were captured in battle or were just part of the Worm’s attempts to consume its human chattels here to fuel its assault on the world above.

That there were prisoners at all was because of the priests, he guessed. The Worm would have no use for living slaves to be brought to its city, any more than it had a use for the city itself. The priests, though, had concocted their insane, all-denying religion around it, and told themselves that their practices earned them its blessings, and their sacrifices protected them from its wrath. Esmail could see, with utter clarity, that there were no blessings and likewise no wrath.

The priests killed their prisoners fairly quickly. Many they killed themselves in lesser rites – and the bodies went to feed the Worm’s own growing mass, or to load the tables of the priests themselves. Far more were being taken down into the chamber that Che had spoken of – the true final point of all roads within this stone nightmare. The Worm was hungry.

He had been steeling himself to follow one such expedition. He needed to view his enemy with his own eyes before he brought this whole edifice down.

In the end, his hand was forced. He would never know if, unassisted, he might have possessed the courage to make that journey deeper into the earth.

He saw the latest band of prisoners brought in. Amongst them was a familiar face.

The big man stood in the centre of this ragged band of slaves, hands extended over them as though still trying to protect them in some way. Orothellin.

Esmail watched that huge, haggard figure even as the Scarred Ones came for him, weaving through the constantly busy throng of soldiers. The big man had mustered a certain dignity for the occasion, and Esmail badly wanted to make himself known in some way: to let Orothellin know that he was not alone in these last moments.

Then, of course, the soldiers were separating the giant out, for who was a better offering to the Worm than this man, this veteran of a thousand years and a symbol of their captivity?

They took him away, Orothellin moving slowly, almost as though he was still half asleep, with the people of the Worm milling around him like children.

The thought suddenly made Esmail sick. Of course, like children. They were all somebody’s children. Generations of children stolen and hollowed out and sent to tyrannize and kill their own kin. And no wonder the ancient world had stood together against the Worm.

This time, he followed when they took Orothellin beneath the earth. This time, the Scarred Ones did not delay. There was a dreadful excitement about them. They know who he is. They have been hunting him for a long time.

And it will buy you nothing from your god, save that the wretched man is perhaps a larger morsel than most.

He crept in their shadow using the skills of a long life in the trade – no magic, but his expertise had always counted more than mere magician’s tricks. There were many of them, and soldiers too – had there been fewer Esmail could have won Orothellin a moment’s freedom, for all that they were in the heart of the enemy’s domain. As it was, natural caution won out and he merely watched. What else, after all, was a spy for? Today he was a spy.

Tomorrow an assassin, he fervently hoped.

They led him, all unknown, to the lair of their god, that same great rift that Che had described, and there the Worm came for Orothellin, and devoured him and his thousand years without thought or appreciation, and went away again.

Immediately afterwards, Esmail left the broken city and found himself some hidden nook in the stone to creep into, and he trembled and stared at his hands in the darkness.

He couldn’t do it. He saw that now. Even if the thing was not a god, then it was still too vast, too dark, too terrifying. He had no Art or skill or useless, useless magic that would permit him the hubris of attacking the Worm. His courage went only so far. It could not be done.