Seal of the Worm

Thirty-Eight

There was one corner of the world left where Totho could think.

He was packed into this cave with the slaves, jostling shoulder to shoulder in the lightless, airless press of them. He had fought with his blade until it had been ripped from his hand. He had fought on with his gauntleted hands, but they had dragged him down. When they could not kill him, battering at his mail with their crudely forged swords, they had dragged him to their sightless city and thrown him down here with the others, those wretches who had been caught but not yet killed. The only way out was the same shaft that he had been dropped down.

Nobody was fed. Nobody was given water. Several had died already.

Totho had allowed himself to be buffeted back and forth, sometimes almost falling over save that the constant sway of bodies kept him upright, until he had found this corner, this last black outpost of understanding. A nook at the far back of the cave, as far from everything else as he could ever get.

The Worm’s deadening influence did not quite stretch there, as though it was so deep into the rock that it was thrust into some other place where sanity still reigned, and Totho could crouch there with his armour scraping against the walls, fending off the moaning, weeping mass of composite humanity, and think Apt thoughts.

Only wedged there into that corner did he have options. They had not taken his mail, so they had not taken his weapons. He had one last trick, if only he had the final courage to use it. His belt of grenades remained, and it had been easy enough to feed a single pull-cord through them all. One bold wrench and the privations of this place would be gone. He would not have to worry about them any more. He guessed that the blast would kill just about everyone else here, too. It would only be a shame that his captors would not die as well, though perhaps the contained force might crack the rock, tumble down some part of their domain into the pit that his explosives would create.

He thought about it further. Over and over, he thought about it, but he did nothing.

Where are you, Che? He had been so sure that he would find her, but he was a prisoner, and she was not here beside him. She was dead, perhaps. Or she was free.

If he had known what the Worm would do to his mind, he would never have come down here. With his Aptitude intact he felt that the world was his to face and to master. But here . . . crammed into his tiny space, throat and nostrils choked with the sweat and excrement and fear of all those doomed souls, all his Aptitude could give him was a way to die.

And he knew, horribly, that if he took one step forwards, even that would be gone from him. He would have nothing.

His thumb found the cord, hooked into the metal ring there, tensioned it. He had linked the triggers to all the grenades: the simple mechanical exercise had been almost calming. Just one solid pull.

It was safe to say, he reckoned, that this was not what he had been looking for in coming down here. But, in all honesty, after Drephos died he had become unmoored in the world. Che had been the only landmark left for him to steer by, but what a treacherous course that had proved to be. She had never been any good for him.

He looked up, eyes wide against the darkness, and spotted the light. It was merely a faint, pallid luminescence, but it was light. A few of the slaves appeared to have seen it too – he could make out the odd face turned upwards, the dim radiance touching them fleetingly. The rest seemed blind to it, as though it did not exist for them.

But then he remembered Drephos – who had possessed eyes like a Moth’s – telling him how his vision had adjusted to darkness, leaching the colours from things, but sharpening the shapes, seeing the world in greys by some medium that owed nothing to light itself – the dark-adapted eye saw no light or radiance, torches and lanterns did not betray their owners to it.

Someone up there had a light, and Totho knew that it could not be any of his captors.

He lurched forwards, feeling doors slam shut in his mind, but in that moment not caring, shouldering his way into the human morass, fighting through it as though it were quicksand, shoving and kneeing and striking his way through the whimpering, unresisting throng.

‘Here!’ he shouted. ‘I’m here!’ as though the glow was for him, as though it could possibly be for him.

He saw a man there, crouching almost upside down at the mouth of the shaft, held there by the Art of both feet and one hand, with a kind of lantern held out into space – little more than some burning embers in a metal cage.

Some of the other slaves around him were staring mutely, although many were just ignoring everything, eyes empty as wells, denying what they heard and anything they might see.

‘Tell me you’re Totho,’ the lamp-bearer said. He was an odd sort of man, of no kinden Totho could immediately identify.

‘Yes,’ he answered.

‘Cheerwell Maker sent me.’ The stranger peered down, studying the dense mass of bodies below.

‘Get me out.’

‘I . . .’ The man glanced up the shaft. ‘I’m not sure that I can. Up above the city’s crawling with them. They’d see you the moment you got out of here. I need to think. Now I’ve found you, I need to think.’

‘They come here,’ Totho said. ‘The creatures that rule here, they come and take people. I’ve not been here long and I’ve seen more than a dozen go already. They just climb down and seize on victims at random.’ There was a moaning starting up, amongst the slaves, as though even speaking those words might incur the next visitation. ‘They can climb well – even on the ceiling. They get everywhere. How much thinking time do you need?’

‘I really don’t know if I can get you out. I’m sorry,’ the lamp-bearer admitted. ‘I promised Cheerwell I’d try, though.’

‘Can you come down here?’ Totho heard his own voice shaking. The dreadful sound the other slaves were making was swelling in a wordless, inhuman chorus of fear, of people who had been robbed of everything, their hope last of all. ‘I need . . . I need . . . Please, there is something I need to tell you, to show you. If it comes to the worst. Please.’

The stranger ducked his head back, and for a moment Totho thought he would just go, abandoning all attempt at a rescue. Then he was back, and his Art seemed to be almost as strong as the bodies of the Worm, because he crouched flat against the ceiling, creeping in jerky, awkward motions, following as Totho pushed and cuffed his way back towards his corner, hunting for it with the inner senses of his mind that told him when he was reaching that tiny pocket where the world again made sense. Where he could explain.

He looked up, and started away from the man’s upside-down face. The dirge of the slaves was rising into a full wail, and they were pushing and fighting not to be directly beneath the shaft.

‘The Worm’s heard that racket,’ the lamp-bearer guessed. He made no move to put the light out. Apparently he had come to the same conclusion as Totho about the limits of the Worm’s sight.

‘Or they were just coming anyway,’ Totho replied. ‘To do . . . to take us . . . wherever they do.’

‘Oh, I know where they’re taking their captives,’ the stranger hissed. ‘The Worm and its warriors, they don’t care. They don’t have any use for live prisoners. Up above, there are some scarred old men, though, some filthy, cowardly creatures who live in the Worm’s shadow. And the Worm is their god, and they give it offerings because they hope it will spare them. But it won’t. And neither will I.’ The quiet venom in his words was startling.

Now Totho saw the shadows as the Worm’s creatures crept out, clinging to the sheer stone and staring downwards, here at the behest of the stranger’s ‘scarred old men’, apparently. Sacrificed to a god, though? Is he serious? What does he mean?

‘Stranger,’ he hissed.

‘Esmail,’ the man told him.

‘Esmail, then. You’re Apt?’

The man looked at him, baffled. ‘No. Not that it matters. If I were anywhere else you’d call me a magician, perhaps, but that means nothing here. I’m living on pure skill and self-mutilation.’ This close, Totho could hear a quaver in the man’s words that matched his own hollow fear.

‘There’s something . . .’ He was watching the warriors of the Worm pick their way overhead. Every so often one would strike down, snagging a slave, and then half a dozen would converge to draw the struggling, shrieking individual up between them, whilst the rest of the host remained silent now, not wanting to draw attention, not wanting to be the next chosen. ‘If they come for me . . . there’s something I need you to do. An Apt thing.’

‘Well, that makes two reasons why I can’t do it,’ Esmail hissed.

Totho told him anyway. He explained it as simply as possible. He said nothing about mechanical principles or about the chemistry of the efficient little explosives. He focused on the simple physical action required. It’s as simple as pulling on a string.

‘Then you do it.’

Totho shook his head urgently. ‘You don’t understand. You can’t. One step . . . one step forwards and I lose it. I can’t . . . I won’t be able to . . .’

Then the creatures of the Worm were retreating, taking their chosen sacrifices with them, and Esmail was backing off.

‘Forget all that,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll get a rope. I’ll find some way out, if there’s a way to be found.’ Then he was carefully making his way back across the ceiling, one limb at a time, teeth gritted with the effort, following in the trail of the Worm.

There was no forced marching of the slaves of the Worm. Many were injured or ill, or simply weak from hunger. Some – the lucky few – had children to slow them down. The great mass of them crawled across the barren and bleak terrain, torches and lanterns scattered randomly amongst them. They were making the best time they could, but it was painfully slow. Originally, Che had been using whatever Moth-kinden were willing to act as her eyes, spying out the ground ahead and to either side, wary of the approach of the Worm. That had not turned out well. The great mass of movement, the constant comings and goings in the air, had attracted the attention of the monsters they knew as the White Death, and several Moths had been snatched in mid-flight. Now Che was having to rely on scouts on the ground – anyone with good enough eyes for the pitch dark and who could run fast. Still most of her volunteers were Moths; it seemed almost surreal that their people – so isolated and haughty up above – were some of her most willing helpers here.

She had no idea of the level of the Worm’s awareness, whether it was relying on the eyes of its creatures, or whether the sheer movement of so many would communicate itself through the stone to the creature as it lurked down in its hole. The topography of this realm was baffling, and she knew that a simple straight journey must in some way also follow a curve to accommodate the simple fact that all roads led eventually to that blighted city. The very thought made her head ache.

Then the scouts began returning, some of them running, some risking a dash through the air. The Worm was on its way, a great snaking column of its human segments, following the path of the refugees and gaining on them with every step.

‘How far are we from these caves?’ Che demanded of Messel.

‘At this speed? Many hours,’ he told her.

‘Lorn detachment?’ Thalric suggested. ‘Whip the rest into a decent pace, and some poor bastards’ll have to stay back and do what they can. Messel, we need terrain we can use. Find us a slope, some useful overhangs – let’s get some rockslides set up.’

The blind man nodded rapidly, and then he and the Wasp were off, trying to round up fighters out of the mass of moving people.

‘They’re not going to get much faster,’ Tynisa murmured in Che’s ear. ‘Not without leaving people behind.’

‘We won’t leave anyone behind.’

‘You can’t save everyone.’

Che glared at her. ‘You’re starting to sound like Thalric.’

‘Maybe he makes sense sometimes. Che, there’s only one way to slow the Worm, and it involves people dying.’

A sacrifice to the Worm. Che shivered. ‘It won’t come to that,’ she insisted hollowly. And meanwhile she had kept driving her mind ahead, hunting options, trying to feel out what she herself might be able to accomplish.

So little magic here, but more than there was. What can I gather? What is my strength worth?

If the worst came to the worst, she would use it all up, every grain, in the hope that she could break through. In the hope that it was possible for her to create her own doorway. She had had a moment’s doubt as the great mob of slaves set off. Should she just have them hold still while she tried to exercise her powers? Could she not simply tear apart this stone world and let them out into the sun?

She had conceived an image then, as though it was a vision of the future. An image of herself, Che, kneeling and fighting with this intransigent, uncooperative nature of the world, surrounded by starving, desperate slaves, as the Worm arrived. With no idea if she could ever achieve what she sought, she chose to keep moving. At least it offered the illusion of progress.

Thalric sought her out later. ‘Che, I need your help.’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I need your eyes.’

The scouts had identified an ambush point up ahead, where there seemed some chance that a few stragglers could delay the pursuing Worm. Thalric himself did not trust their assessment, because he had no respect for any of the former slaves.

‘I’ve been all over it, but it’s like looking at a picture through a keyhole. I can’t keep track of the lie of the land properly. I need you to tell me I’m right.’

She flew ahead with him, leaving Tynisa in nominal charge of the great shambling mass of travellers. What the scouts had found was a path that ran between a rock-strewn slope on one side and the upcurving edge of the world on the other: a jagged, fractured cliff that offered a handful of sizeable ledges.

‘So we get people up on the ledges, we get the Moles to fetch rocks up to them. That’s our deadfall for when the Worm soldiers arrive. We have some fighters stationed up the slope – slingers and swordsmen. They’ll get charged, but the footing’s poor and the Worm’s going to have a lot to worry about. So, tell me, have I got the right of it? Only it’s like trying to fix an automotive while blindfold, doing this.’

‘You’d trust my judgement?’

‘Don’t get too excited. I just trust it more than theirs.’ But there was a fond humour in his tone.

‘I think it will work. But we’ll need to get everyone through before the Worm can catch us,’ she decided.

‘Then we need to get them to hurry, don’t we?’

As his wings ghosted into life, she put a hand on his arm. ‘Thalric.’

Wings still out, a barely visible film in the air about his shoulders, he waited.

‘Thank you,’ she told him.

‘For sticking alongside you? Not as if I had much choice.’ But, still, not said bitterly.

‘For everything.’

‘Che, what is it?’

And now she was scaring herself, because a sense of dread was upon her, unaccountable, irresistible, rearing its head within her mind. Her fear had communicated itself to Thalric. She saw him go tense, and his face twitch with tension.

She pulled him to her, held him tight. Still there was nothing, only that unreasoning feeling, that certainty of doom. The magic is seeping in. Unasked prophecy. Unasked and useless.

But there they were: she saw more scouts returning, could read the panic on their faces.

They gabbled out their news as soon as they located her, as though desperate to be rid of it. There was another column of the Worm, ahead of them, and closing in.

It took them far too long to gather all the fugitives together, and then Che could only tell them one thing: that they would be going no further. For there was nowhere else to go.

When Thalric had chosen this place, he had picked it as a good point to mount a brief stand, an attempt to gain time for the fugitives by making the Worm pay a little, by providing a distraction. The Worm was hungry and, despite the best efforts of the Scarred Ones to direct it onwards, an offering of a few tenacious defenders should occupy its attention for a little extra time.

That was no longer an option. The Worm was closing in on all sides. Mindless or not, it had sensed its prey.

The rise that Thalric had picked for his putative defenders was now under Che’s command, heading up the slope as far as she could go with the non-combatants, the injured, the young. The rest of the slaves were below, preparing for their last stand. Thalric assumed that they would buckle almost instantly, would beg their former masters for mercy. If that happened, then the massacre here would see hundreds dead in the first few minutes.

Already some of the slaves had just abandoned them, heading off on their own in the bleak hope that they might evade the enemy and escape the coming slaughter. The Hermit had been amongst them, leaving without a word, just heading off into the dark. He, at least, would be able to walk past the forces of the Worm. The rest . . . well, perhaps their chances were still greater than for those staying here.

Having led them all into this hopeless trap, Che could hardly begrudge the desertions. Thalric had railed, but only because he reckoned that those with the initiative to run would probably also prove the most spirited fighters once backed into a corner.

They were all backed into a corner now.

They were doing what they could. They were breaking rocks and hauling them up on either side. Several hundred Mole Crickets were using their Art to shape the stone, creating obstacles, walls, hoping to funnel the Worm’s advance and to slow their charge. Moth scouts were keeping track of the enemy’s steady, relentless advance. There was so little time.

‘If you have anything, now’s the time,’ Tynisa told her. Che glanced at her in surprise. Had her foster-sister sensed the fickle gains that magic had made here since the breaking of the Seal?

No, she was just desperate, and in her desperation she had turned to Che. Somehow, clumsy, awkward Che had become the last forlorn hope even of Tynisa, who should know better.

But she’s right. If it can be done at all, then now’s the time. Once the Worm gets here, I can’t say if its influence will reach this far up. All my hopes might be snuffed out the very moment they arrive.

So here she sat, surrounded by the fools that she had gathered here, by the industry of those who had faith that somehow they would survive what was coming. Here she sat with Tynisa beside her, whilst Thalric marshalled his slingers and his makeshift soldiers and the strong but otherwise useless, who would be pushing rocks down onto the enemy.

Che opened her mind as best she could, penetrating the parched drought of this place, through her own fear, and called out to her other sister, to Seda the Empress.

At first: nothing, just the echo of her own thoughts and the unmuted cacophony of those around her, their frightened words, their cries – adults and children both – and the crack and slam of rock on rock, Thalric’s barked orders . . .

Seda . . .

And, distant, almost inaudible, and yet in no way drowned by the real sounds around her, Che caught the response.

I am here, Che. The faraway voice sounded strained, as if under as much pressure as Che herself.

Seda, I need your help. I need to break out of here. The Seal is gone, so it should be possible. Please . . . Even as she expressed this thought, Che was doubting herself. She could not think through the logic that would allow such a violation of this place, and now that its mundane relationship with the wider world was being restored, such a piece of magic would surely become less and less possible. The opening of one door meant closing another.

Che, you cannot, Seda insisted. Che, I would save you if I could. I know you must hate me for casting you into that place. I am sorry. If I could bring you out from it, then I would. But I must think of the world, the whole world. Che, I need your help.

The suggestion dragged a wretched laugh out of Che, startling Tynisa beside her. What help could I possibly give you?

Your power, all your power, everything you have. It should have sounded false, coming from the Empress of the Wasps, but Che heard a terrible sincerity there. Che, I have damned the entire world by breaking the Seal, but I can put it right. I can put it all back where it should be. I can banish the Worm.

Che clutched at the stony ground to steady herself. It cannot be done.

It can. Believe me, I have spent so long constructing the ritual, but it can. The Moths did it once.

You intend to . . .

I must restore the Seal. I must separate the worlds again.

Che looked around her, at the great mass of humanity that had followed her this far, and no further, who even now were choosing to believe that she, Cheerwell Maker, had some last-moment plan to save them. There are people here, hundreds, thousands, whole kinden.

I know. I have seen them, through you. The expected Wasp invective did not come, only regret. I am sorry, Che, but there is no hope for them. There is only hope for the real world, the true world, and only then if I can gather enough strength to force this ritual into being.

The Moths had far more, a thousand years ago, than we do now. There isn’t enough strength in the present-day world, Seda. And Che was aware that, with that thought, she was conceding something: that Seda’s plan had merit. That the sacrifice of Che and Thalric and Tynisa, of Messel and his whole kinden, of all the thousands here, would still be the correct response. The world was wider than their existence, after all.

There is. The steely resolve in Seda’s words startled Che. I have found a way. It can be done, and I will do it, with or without you. But they are cheating me, Che. They are denying me the strength I need, destroying my plans with their idiot sentiment. I need you. I am asking you to help me save the world, Che.

And the Empress’s mind opened further, and Che understood.

In the throne room at Capitas, Seda had banished all others save for General Brugan. The Rekef general crouched at the doorway, as far as he could get from the throne itself, where Seda slumped. His agents came to him, whispered their reports and then fled. There was something about the air in that room that made even the Apt fearful: it twisted and crackled as Seda fought to keep hold of the power she was amassing.

And still the deaths come rolling in, and still the tower builds higher. But not enough, not enough. She could feel cracks in the foundations, inevitable when she was forced to rely on others. Tisamon was on his way back from clearing another camp, but the orders she was sending to the Slave Corps were not being obeyed, the bloodletting that she was demanding was not happening. They were strangling her. How dare they question?

‘I am the Empress,’ she insisted to the cavernous space around her. She heard her own voice: just a frightened Wasp girl’s after all. ‘I am the Empress!’ she shouted, challenging the echo. She saw Brugan twitch and cringe, desperate to go and yet unable to leave without her permission.

She had sent Red Watch men out to teach the recalcitrant slavers what it meant to obey. Of all the vile wretches under her command, how was it that the Slave Corps should suddenly decide to grow a spine and a conscience?

Well, it was too late for them to interfere. She had sent soldiers headed by her Red Watch to every camp, for all that their departure leached some of the strength from Capitas’s defence. Her chosen would await her order; they would hear it like a spur in their minds. They would ensure that she had her blood, her death, the currency of her magic.

Che! she called into that howling void that separated them. I need more. Even now they challenge me, they snatch lives from my grasp. I cannot do this alone any more, please!

You . . . how can you even consider condemning so many people to death? In Seda’s mind the Beetle girl sounded stunned.

Che, I have no choice. Where else can I draw power now but from the blood, the lives? If there was any other way to stop the Worm, don’t you think I’d have tried?

But she could sense the condemnation as clear as if the girl was in the room with her – Collegium’s daughter seeing only the usual Imperial excess.

No, Che, believe me. I do nothing lightly, but we have to stop the Worm. Do you think the magicians of old did no worse, when the need demanded?

I cannot believe it. Che sounded shaken, sickened. Not the Moths, not the Spiders. Not even the Mosquito-kinden themselves. They did not even think on such a scale.

There was more magic then, Seda reminded her sadly. And, even then, you know they did terrible things. And if some Moth Skryre had needed the power, to preserve their world, they would have snuffed out your city and all your people . . . all their slaves. You know it.

A long pause, then: No, said Che. I do not. Because when my ancestors rose against them, that was the time. Before the great days of magic had quite ended, they could have ruined the world rather than lose it, and now they are in their mountain retreats, and we are our own masters. So I believe they chose not to, at the last.

Seda could feel herself shaking with some emotion. She thought it was anger at first, perhaps even shame, grief, horror at what she was even now setting in motion. For a moment she felt that she might see herself in Che’s mirror, as the monster she had become. And yet she had no choice, she reminded herself. The Worm was her responsibility. All emotions, whatever they might be, were banished back to their cage. She had no time to indulge them. Che . . . but she had lost her connection, and she went reaching down and down, hunting for that one fugitive mind that she could reach: her nemesis, her sister . . . the only one who could help her. The only one who could understand.

Then Brugan let out a mewling sound of fright, and she knew Tisamon was back, striding over to her side with his blade still dripping blood. She would have to send him out again, she knew. The deaths must keep coming, and he was the only one she could rely on.

She could feel the worlds grinding against one another, and she began to apply her pressure, using all the finesse and skill she could muster, committing the vast reserves of tainted magic that she had accumulated in the hope that there would be more to follow. A ritual that the Moths would have envied even in their glory days was what she was about: a magic from the old times, to remake the Seal and bury the Worm.

‘Majesty.’ Brugan had taken another message, it seemed. ‘The army.’

‘What?’ she demanded through gritted teeth. ‘Just report, General. You can still make a proper report, can’t you?’

‘Generals Tynan and Marent are ignoring your orders, Majesty,’ Brugan told her, his voice shaking in case her wrath might light on himself, even in passing. ‘They remain beyond the gates. They will not be summoned.’

I have no time for these irrelevances. But they betray me. They already betray me. With so much magic, fragments of prophecy were clouding the air like gnats – all the futures save the one thing she needed to see. Will I succeed? Will Che lend me her strength?

‘Majesty.’ Brugan stopped because he did not dare to contradict her, and so what use was he as an adviser?

‘Tisamon,’ Seda sighed. ‘It must be you, it seems. The general has lost all claim to call himself a man of my kinden. Go forth and kill Tynan and Marent and all they conspire with. Bring their blood. The blood of generals will surely have more power than that of ordinary men.’

And then she heard the faint scratch of Che’s voice. Seda? Do you hear me?

Che? Tell me, Che. Tell me you see that this is necessary.

And that distant, bitter response. Yes. I see what must be done. I will do it. I will help you.