Seal of the Worm

Thirty-Three

Everyone had questions, but Eujen had no answers, not real ones. When are they coming back? was the one he heard most often. So many citizens of Collegium had marched off with the Sarnesh, and people wanted to know when they would see their loved ones, their relatives, their business partners or drinking mates. Worse, there had been that airship which had escaped ahead of the Second Army’s retreat. Nobody had realized at the time just what had been going on – not even the general of the Second, apparently. Only after the dust had cleared did anyone realize that the Imperial Slave Corps had simply floated away with several hundred citizens.

Everyone was mourning someone: dead or missing or marched off with the army. Whole sections of the city were running short-handed. There weren’t enough hands to rebuild or to reorganize. Collegium was merely limping through the days.

When are they coming back? people asked about the Merchant Companies. Eujen himself wanted to know that. What news he received from the troops showed that nobody there knew, either.

And there was that other trouble – the attacks under cover of darkness that scoured isolated farms and mills and villages and left no witnesses – or sometimes left a row of houses untenanted without warning or explanation. Everyone had somehow been assuming that it was some game of the Wasps, some pastime of Tynan’s Second, but the Wasps were gone, and it was getting worse, and so they came to Eujen and asked him what he intended to do about it.

He had not been appointed the leader of the city. There was no real Assembly. That sad rump that the Wasps had permitted to ‘advise’ had since been disbanded, and those who had sat on it were all doing their best to explain that, really, they had been given no choice, and of course they had worked against the Empire in so many, alas invisible, ways. At the same time, nobody was about to say they needed another governor to rule the city with a tyrant’s rod. Their intricate system of government had been taken apart, and nothing brought in to replace it.

Eujen, a student who could walk only through the intervention of artifice, had been the de facto Collegiate Speaker in exile in Sarn. Now he found that people were still looking to him for leadership, when there was so very little he could do.

So he did the little that he could. He found other people who themselves could only do a little. He got them together and talking to each other. He combined all those small contributions, building one on another until he had something that looked as though it would at least keep the wheels turning for now.

He started with his friends and associates, with a keen realization of, So this is nepotism, then. He found people who had been useful in Sarn, College Masters, his parents. He moved on to people they knew, for his parents had their mercantile contacts; scholars knew other scholars, who in turn knew someone who . . .

Eujen himself did nothing save point people at other people, and point people at problems, and he waited for someone to look at him and demand to know what gave him the right.

When the people he was pointing at each other had differences or came to blows, he intervened. To his lasting amazement, they listened to him bluster, nodding soberly. If he voiced a thought, that opinion of his seemed to manifest almost as a physical thing, with weight and impetus.

Nothing was working. Everything was still falling apart. Except, each morning, it was all still falling apart just as the day before, barely any worse at all. He was a dam against the entropy that would lead to collapse, anarchy, starvation.

He had no militia, of course – the Merchant Companies were off with Stenwold Maker, what was left of them, and his own Straessa had gone with them. There was a contingent of Tseni Ant marines on the streets, though, and one day they just started doing what he said, their leader apparently recognizing in him some authority that was otherwise wholly fictitious.

Then the Spider ship had sailed into harbour, as civilized as anyone could have asked for.

There had nearly been a fight over that – not even involving the Tseni so much as the locals who remembered the Spiderlands’ armada and alliance with the Empire, however that had turned out. There was only one ship, though, and it put ashore a single ambassador, an elegant woman who wanted to speak to Stenwold Maker. Of course to Stenwold Maker, who else?

She would have to make do with Eujen Leadswell, she was told.

Their meeting was strained but cordial. Eujen the student had sat there, pretending to be the important Collegiate diplomat whilst wincing at the spasms of pain afflicting his back and legs, and the Spider woman had apparently pretended to take him seriously. There had been an offer, in the midst of all the talk, and Eujen’s scholarly mind had cut through the expressions of mutual need, of shared history, of regrettable recent developments, to see that the Spiders wanted a truce, a safe port, perhaps even an alliance in due course. He had heard that the fighting down the Silk Road was fierce, and more than that, he had heard that the vast reaches of the Spiderlands were beginning to show the strain of current times. There had been catastrophic earthquakes in Skaetha, the golden city at the heart of the Spiderlands’ web. He had heard of a high death toll amongst the highest echelons of the Aristoi, divisions between the families, an inability to address the Empire’s encroachments. Their pragmatism in coming to Collegium was almost disarming.

He would have to consult the Assembly, he had told her, and they both pretended that there still was such a thing, rather than merely a large group of people Eujen knew distantly who could each make small things happen. He would offer her and her crew accommodation in the city, but there might be some wait before she received word of any decision.

He saw the tiny wince in her expression, suppressed just a moment too late. Time was a precious commodity along the Silk Road.

Minutes after the meeting, Eujen was hurrying through a letter to Straessa because, resent it as he did, he really needed to know what Stenwold Maker thought.

His letter caught up with the Lowlander army at the gates of Helleron. The rail lines from Malkan’s Folly eastwards, which the Imperials had used to send in their reinforcements, were intact, and the entire force was able to close the remaining distance to the Lowlands’ eastern borders in remarkable time, using auto-motives rushed in from Sarn. Straessa had wondered if destroying those rail lines, if the worst came to the worst for the Wasps, should have been the job of the Auxillians whom Milus had apparently suborned. Certainly it seemed an obvious way to slow the Lowlands down and yet nobody had done it. More cracks were showing in the Imperial facade.

By the time they reached Helleron, the Empire had already abandoned the city, plainly all too aware of the place’s shifting loyalties. Everyone had been expecting sly Helleren merchant lords appearing to swear smoothly that the Wasps had been their guests under protest, but a whole district of the city was in ruins, and the faces of the citizens looked stunned, unsure whether this was liberation or just a new invasion.

When the magnates did come, Milus kept them waiting, and then presented them with his demands: ammunition, fuel, supplies, automotives – with no suggestion of paying for any of it. Those who demurred, he had arrested. At the same time, Stenwold was sending Collegiates into the city to make contact with lower-level merchants, men and women who would normally wait for the nod of their betters before dabbling in this sort of politics. Enough of them were sufficiently quick off the mark to ensure that supplies were quickly rushing in on credit, because on credit was still better than free, and because being friends with Collegium and Sarn suddenly looked good.

Even now, after a pause of just a few days, Milus’s people were getting ready to move out.

Eujen’s missive was carried there by a civilian pilot with a swift fixed-wing who had tracked the Lowlander army by simply following the rail lines. Finding Straessa in that throng should have been harder, save that – just like Eujen himself – she was looked on as the solution to every problem, large and small, and so everyone knew where to locate her.

She took the missive eagerly, because it gave her an excuse to shake off the little mob demanding her attention. About time, Eujen, she thought. Beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.

The seal broken, she found the contents were not exactly as personal as she had hoped, but still she found herself smiling fondly, skimming over Eujen’s patient setting-out of the Collegiate situation, as orderly and clear as if he thought he would be graded on it. Given that he had marked the contents for the urgent attention of Stenwold Maker, she wasn’t sure why he hadn’t simply bypassed her altogether. Perhaps he still felt too wary of the man to approach him directly, even in writing.

And then, just as she was despairing of Eujen entirely, came that last paragraph:

I badly want to hear the news that Maker and Milus, between them, have brought the war to some manner of satisfactory conclusion. Every child of Collegium, of whatever kinden, is badly missed and badly needed. I miss and need my Antspider most of all. I will muddle on here, and do what can be done, but I am waiting each day for the news that you are coming back to me, and most of all for you to bring that news in person.

And this letter is to go before Maker, apparently, she considered with a wry smile, picturing him losing his thread, forgetting the chief purpose of his writing. He never did remember to read things through.

She excised that last paragraph deftly and went in search of the War Master.

He was to be found with his pirates – or that was what Laszlo had claimed the pack of Fly-kinden were. Straessa had her doubts, principally because the thought of being cooped up on a ship with Laszlo for any period of time felt like the prelude to homicide. The pack of them had seemed just a vagrant band of travellers, save that they had the ear of Stenwold Maker. Now, as she approached, she saw them in a different light. Maker was sitting at their fire, discussing something in earnest, and there seemed no suggestion that he was just handing down orders to them. Instead, from their cautious nods, their thoughtful looks, it seemed they were assessing some sort of proposal he was putting forward – but something with no guarantee of acceptance. After that, she also noted just how well armed they all were, and began to wonder, Pirates, really? And if that was the case, what were they doing here?

And there were others, too, she saw. Sperra was there, whom Straessa had met before the liberation, and that big renegade Sarnesh from Princep as well, and that weird pale Sea woman who seemed to be at Maker’s elbow much of the time, and all of them apparently conspiring over something, thick as thieves.

She waited awkwardly at the edge of their circle of firelight – when she tried to take a step closer, which might have allowed her to make something of their low murmurs, one of the Fly women gave Straessa a filthy look and shifted a crossbow slightly, so that it was not quite directed at her. The message was clear enough.

But I’m an officer in the Coldstone Company with an urgent message . . . only she felt that wouldn’t count for much with this crowd. Perhaps not with Maker either, right now.

Then she could hear distant shouting from across the camp, and a moment later another Fly – one of the Collegiates whose name Straessa should really know – dropped down right in the middle of Stenwold’s gathering, almost getting herself killed several times over. She was urgently insisting, ‘War Master! You have to come now!’

Stenwold stood up immediately, and a moment later he was following the Fly as she set off, Laszlo and his crew of pirates trailing after them.

Hearing a clatter of steel, Stenwold quickened his pace, feeling a multitude of old wounds tugging at him. He was keenly aware of Paladrya at his elbow, unarmoured and almost unarmed, horribly vulnerable if the camp erupted into fighting. Is it the Wasps? But he knew it was not. He was pushing on between the Sarnesh tents, and the Ants were not forming up, not rushing to repel an assault. They were all alert, though. Whatever drama was playing out was in all their minds. He sensed their eyes on him, the word of his approach rippling out ahead of him.

In front he saw a brief flurry of motion, heard more swords clash – a shout of pain, raised voices. One was a woman’s, louder than the rest. A voice he knew.

‘Hammer and tongs!’ he swore and started running abruptly, lumbering along with the dumb force of a ram, hoping Paladrya could keep up. Behind him, Laszlo’s people whirled in the air like a trailing tail.

Kymene! Then he saw her, held by half a dozen Sarnesh, wrestling with them furiously. There were a lot of Mynans there with drawn blades, facing off more Ants, and more arriving moment to moment from both sides, save that Sarn had so many more to draw on. Kymene was spitting, shrieking like a madwoman at – yes, at Milus. Of course, at Milus. The tactician was standing aloof, a few paces away from her, his own sword still in its scabbard. His expression was one of mild, almost scholarly interest.

‘What is going on here?’ Stenwold demanded, finding a pair of Ants moving to block his path. He slammed into their shields, but they braced against him and fended him off with that surprising strength of their kind.

‘Stenwold!’ Kymene shouted, and then got out something more that he missed, save that it was to do with her city.

Then the Ants were letting him through at some unheard order from Milus, and he stumbled forwards, aware that the Tidenfree crew was now holding back and, he hoped, Paladrya along with them.

‘Release her!’ Stenwold demanded. ‘This is insane!’

Milus gave a wintry little smile. ‘I am afraid I cannot allow attacks on my person, War Master – whether from enemies or supposed allies.’

‘Attacks?’ Stenwold looked at Kymene, seeing her scabbard empty – disarmed by the Ants or had she actually drawn on the tactician?

‘Stenwold, Myna is rising!’ Kymene shouted. ‘We have to march for Myna, now!’

He blinked at her. ‘Well, of course—’

‘That is not the plan,’ Milus pronounced. ‘I have one destination for this army, Master Maker, and you know that. It is Capitas.’ The cool boldness of that statement was sobering. ‘We will cross into the Empire south of the Darakyon. We will not detour north for the Alliance lands. When the Empire is on its knees, all its cities shall then be free. I play no favourites.’

A good speech. Stenwold had to admit that it was compelling logic. If Milus believed Capitas could be taken, then the Empire could be shattered all at once. Unless the garrisons from the north head south to take us while we’re committed . . .

‘Stenwold!’ Kymene insisted. ‘My people are taking to the streets now! There is an uprising in Myna now! You know how large the Wasp garrison there is – if we do not go to aid them, they will be slaughtered!’

The horrible twisting feeling inside Stenwold was nothing less than impotence, because Milus’s logic still held. There would have been a time for the Mynans to throw off their chains, but this was not it. ‘Kymene . . .’ he said helplessly, and she read the thought on his face.

‘Ask him!’ she spat, fighting with her captors again, almost breaking free. ‘Ask this flat-faced Ant bastard what he’s done.’

Milus’s expression admitted nothing, but Stenwold sensed the mass of assembled Mynans reaching the point where they would just lay into the vastly greater number of Sarnesh to get their leader back and, at all costs, he had to stop that.

‘Enough!’ he yelled out, using his Assembler’s voice that had silenced dissenters in the Amphiophos for a decade. ‘Release her. She’s hardly about to attack anyone with her bare hands.’

The pause that followed was plainly Milus weighing the options, and then abruptly Kymene was free, shaking off her captors, her eyes still glowering bloody murder at the tactician.

There was something in Milus’s face, something that all the Ant stoicism in the world could not quite hide. It was an admission that there was more to this business than his smooth words might suggest.

‘A messenger arrived, half dead, from my city,’ Kymene hissed between gritted teeth. ‘He came in a heliopter that had been riddled with shot, and almost crashed it coming down. He told me that my people were rising against the Wasps.’ She drew a ragged breath. ‘He was asking where we were. Why we weren’t at the gates to help them.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘Help me, Kymene. What’s going on?’

‘He sent people to Myna.’ She jabbed a finger at Milus, as though it could kill. ‘While he was making deals with the Auxillians to sell their Wasp masters, he sent men to my city. He said that his army was coming, and that now was the time. Ask him, Maker! Hear him deny it, then come listen to my poor aviator’s tale.’

Stenwold glanced between her ravaged features and Milus’s infinitely composed ones. But why would he . . .? came to his lips and was instantly banished, because he thought that he was starting to see.

He settled on simply ‘Tactician?’

The Ant met his gaze without a shadow of guilt, surrounded by tens of thousands of his kin who would implicitly understand and approve of all he had done. ‘It was necessary to clear the way to Capitas.’

‘Because of the garrisons in the Alliance states,’ Stenwold filled in for him. ‘You needed them occupied.’

‘And any other forces still positioned north of our route. I am hoping for widespread revolt across the Auxillian cities as we near Capitas, too. The aim of this war is to win, War Master. The Wasps are a formidable adversary, you must admit.’

‘And Myna is our ally,’ Stenwold replied heavily. Kymene was shuffling from foot to foot ever so slightly, as if counting every minute in the blood of her people.

‘The Mynans will win their freedom eventually, whether now or after the Wasps are defeated,’ Milus explained dispassionately. ‘I will not allow the Empress more time to strengthen her defences, nor divide my forces to attend to secondary objectives.’

‘You think the Mynans will fight for you now?’ Stenwold demanded.

Milus shrugged slightly as if in a brief token of regret, not for what he had done but at being inconveniently discovered. ‘There are not so many Mynans. It is unfortunate, but apparently unavoidable.’

Stenwold eyed Kymene. Milus was correct: there were simply not so many free Mynan soldiers with the army. Enough to save the people of Myna from the Wasps’ wrath? Probably not.

He remembered all his promises to Kymene before the war, regarding solidarity and unity. He himself had stood beside her when the Empire came to knock down her walls and bombard her city.

When the Empire had come against his own city, she had stood beside him. She had led her people against Tynan’s Second Army. They had died to keep Collegium free, so that they in turn might be freed. Their pilots had kept his city’s skies safe. Their soldiers had shed blood before the walls, and then on the walls. They had never even asked him for sworn promises, because Kymene had trusted him to keep them.

He remembered Myna long, long ago, that distant day when the Wasps had first arrived. The day he and Tisamon and the Sarnesh renegade Marius had learned about the Empire the hard way. Where had Sarn been then, apart from disowning its only son who had tried to warn them about what was coming?

And indeed it was coming. And had it not been for Myna, I would never have known.

‘You will march without the Mynans?’ he enquired, for clarification.

‘Apparently,’ Milus confirmed.

‘Then you will march without Collegium.’

Milus studied him for a breath. ‘Reconsider,’ he snapped.

Stenwold was very aware of the many, many Sarnesh gathered around him. Many of them might well be shocked and disappointed at their leader’s strategy, but they would even now be subsuming those feelings into a core of loyal obedience. They were still Milus’s to command, any fugitive personal feelings notwithstanding.

‘You have sent to Myna, inciting an uprising on the pretence that you will come to relieve them. You have given them false hope, without which they would surely have bided their time. You have killed thousands as surely as if you had held the blade yourself.’ He reached desperately for the sort of arguments that would sway Collegium. ‘How will people speak of Sarn, after this?’

‘As the victor!’ Milus declared. ‘For once, Maker, cast aside that blinkered College philosophy. The Wasps will spare nothing to defeat us, so we cannot spare ourselves any trick or advantage to beat them. What did you think, all those years ago, when you started rattling swords against the Empire? Did you think that you could lecture the Wasps into surrender? Did you think that they – or anyone! – would look over towards your sanctimonious city-state and fall to their knees in awe of your moral superiority? Victory is all that matters, Maker. Why have you been fighting to keep them out of the Lowlands for so long, if you didn’t want to beat them?’

‘What I have been trying so hard to keep out of the Lowlands is right here in front of me!’ Stenwold spat, the words outstripping any ability he might have to check or tailor them.

‘And yet I am what you have!’ Milus shouted back, his thinning mask of calm cracking apart. ‘Who beats the Wasps for you, if not I, Maker? Who brings down the Empire you have been preaching against for years? How will that war be won, if not by my strategy? You need me, Maker. You need me more than you need Myna. You need me because you need to beat the Wasps. That has always been what you have wanted. You will not throw it away now.’

Stenwold stared at him, and he was aware, just for a moment, of a brief shiver that seemed to run through the assembled Sarnesh forces, as though Milus’s thoughts had abruptly yanked them viciously back into line. All those ‘I’s and ‘me’s and not a single ‘us’.

‘I will go to Myna,’ he said, finding that, now the Ant had at last lost his temper, Stenwold himself was able to be quite calm.

‘Then you concede the war to the Empire!’ Milus hissed at him, and abruptly the Sarnesh were closing in – many of them evidently unhappily, but still they were all closing, ringing Stenwold and Kymene and the Mynan soldiers, and at that moment it was anybody’s guess what the Ants were about to do.

‘Will you prevent us diminishing your ranks by simply killing us all?’ Stenwold asked quietly. ‘And will you still hope to hold on to the Collegiate detachment then? And the Vekken? The Sea-kinden? The Tseni?’

Milus’s expression was murderous, but he summoned up restraint from somewhere. ‘Regarding the other Ant cities, Maker, you are too far behind the times. Believe me, we understand each other.’ That was an unwelcome revelation. ‘But of the rest . . .’ He paused, lips moving minutely as though testing out the words. ‘If we lose before the gates of Capitas, then Myna cannot hold anyway, even if you take your soldiers there now and cast the garrison out.’ He was smiling now, and that was even more unwelcome. ‘It’s true, Maker! Fault my logic: Myna dies either way!’

Stenwold opened his mouth, glancing sideways at Kymene, trying to weigh numbers and odds and realizing that he simply did not have enough information to make the call. Every warrior he took from Milus’s army was one fewer sword against the Wasps, even as it was one more towards the salvation of Myna. If there was some perfect solution to the equation it was beyond his ability to recognize.

And what of my own kin, the people of Collegium. Would they even agree? Surely most of them would back Milus, because they need to defeat the Empire. They do not need to free Myna.

But then: ‘Stenwold,’ Kymene hissed, and he knew: I need to free Myna.

‘I will take Rosander’s Sea-kinden, if they will follow me,’ he said into Milus’s face. ‘I will take Maker’s Own Company. That will have to be enough. The rest will remain in the command of their officers with your force.’

He sensed Milus at the tipping point, angry enough to give rash orders that Stenwold would not even hear before they were carried out, yet at the same time he remained a rational, pragmatic man. Stenwold could not hope that any better nature would win out, but merely that what he proposed would be recognized as the tactician’s best chance at overall victory. And what a mess we’ll face when this is over, if it ever comes to that.

Milus’s nod was small, but the Sarnesh were abruptly stepping back, no longer crossing swords with the Mynans. The Ant leader’s face was stony, but then wasn’t that what his kinden were known for?

Stenwold caught a glimpse of Laszlo, though, as he turned. The Fly was staring at him desperately, and only a short while before Stenwold had been passing him assurances about the fate of Lissart, Milus’s prisoner. There is nothing I can do. No matter how hard we try to do the right thing, we still do wrong things alongside it. I am sorry.

A company soldier was pushing forward then – the Antspider halfbreed, the officer from the Coldstone. ‘Master Maker, there’s a message from Collegium,’ she was insisting. ‘It needs . . . you can’t just. . .’ She was thrusting the partly torn scroll forwards, virtually into his face, and he took it from her automatically, letting his eyes skip listlessly across it, before shaking his head.

‘They’ll just have to sort it out for themselves,’ he stated flatly. ‘I don’t think I’m in a position to speak for Collegium any more.’