Seal of the Worm

Forty

Che looked out, with eyes that knew no darkness, and saw the Worm.

Had I ever realized they were so many, would I have done this differently?

Because, of course, this was not all the Worm’s bodies. Far more than this were now funnelling inwards through their city, climbing the gradient leading into the wider world above, seeking to bring the Worm’s gift to all the world.

The Moths did an evil thing when they sealed this place away. She wondered if they had ever known – when Argastos and the rest forged the Seal – just what abomination they were opening the way for. Had they any idea what the desperate Centipede-kinden would do, cut off from the outside world and desperate for any means to survive?

And they had failed, in the end. Save for pathetic remnants like the Scarred Ones, they had given themselves over to something that cared nothing for them, and it had merely hollowed them out and consumed them.

Now those shells that were rushing towards the slaves’ prepared positions were not even born of the Centipede. They were the children of the Worm’s slaves, the stolen generations remade in their old masters’ image, force-grown, hollowed out and sent to butcher those who had brought them into the world.

The first sling stones were flying on both sides. Che saw the twin heads of the Worm’s advance ripple with casualties which the main body just moved on over. They barely slowed.

She was here at the highest point of all, the last place the Worm would reach, once all her followers were dead. She was here because this was where the magic would last longest. Here where she might have been able to accomplish something. Here where she had found the limits of her Inapt strength.

There was not enough magic in the whole of the Worm’s world simply to open a door where she pleased, but even if there had been, she could not see her way to it. She could not find the logic unique to ritual that would bring such a result about. She was not enough of a magician, anointed heir to the Khanaphir Masters or not.

She looked back over the host of those who had followed her here – the fighters who were even now bracing themselves against the onrush of the Worm, slingers, rock-pushers, the untrained and awkward who had been given swords and told to stand. She looked over the far greater number who hid behind them: the weak, the young, the old, the desperate. She felt so very, very sorry.

There seemed no other option now, no better use she could make of her power and her time. She could not save these people. They would die, and nobody in the world beyond would ever know that they had even lived.

But there was something she could achieve while she still had time before the Worm took her. There was yet a cause she could give herself over to.

She understood Seda’s plan now, the terrible details, the ocean of blood the woman would drown herself in. She understood why – the inexorable logic to save the world from the Worm.

And I know the horrors of the Worm, of all people. Seda had called on her, all enmities put aside. What little Che still possessed, she needed.

Seda, she sent out, do you hear me?

And the distant response, Seda’s voice strung as taut as a bow. Che? Tell me, Che. Tell me you see that this is necessary.

Che felt sick at what she must do, the betrayal of so much, but what else was there? There was a point when all pretence was stripped away, and she could see herself just as she was, and know the limits beyond which she could not go. Yes, I see what must be done. I will do it. I will help you.

There, I’ve said it. Had she doomed herself and Thalric and Tynisa and all these people, or were they doomed already? I think that this graveyard of a world is the one place that even I cannot make worse with my mistakes.

Esmail was a planner by nature. He was used to having time to prepare, absorbing all the information he could raid from the minds of his victims, then to plot his entrance, his exit, his fallback. He was also used to having his magical abilities to hand, and to facing an enemy that acted and reacted in something like a human manner.

He winced as he sliced a new scar on his arm with one finger. The locals had started to notice him again.

And the city was still crawling with them. Despite the host that was pursuing Che, and the army still spiralling its way out of this world up to the sunlight – and surely even now mustering in some unthinkable halfway place for its grand assault – the city still seethed with the silent host of the Worm, amidst whom paced the huddled, fearful figures of the Scarred Ones, masters and prisoners all at once.

He could not get Totho out. He had kept watching for an opening that would never come. If he tried to extract Totho from that pit, then every eye in the city would be turned on them, and every blade shortly after. Esmail was barely maintaining equilibrium by passing himself off as a Scarred One, using the mindset he had stolen, using the scars he had copied, but only because he was doing everything possible not to draw attention to himself. A single slip would undo all his work.

He had considered waiting for Totho to be dragged out and ambushing the priests as they led their new sacrifice towards the caves. It would be an ambush in the midst of a great host of enemies, though, sheer suicide that no amount of skill could save him from. And surely that moment of truth was coming – Totho was still within, but the hall down below must be emptying rapidly. The Scarred Ones had not been slow about their sacrifices.

He did not want to return to Che admitting failure, but he was a professional, an agent’s agent. Sometimes a job simply could not be done. She would have to understand.

The bitter part was that she would understand. She would not rail and shriek and demand that he do better, as some employers had. Her disappointed misery would be harder to bear.

Then he felt a change in the crowd about him, and realized that his introspection had closed him off dangerously from keeping track of his surroundings. Through that throng of vacant bodies, a single man was making a direct line for him: one of the scarred.

Discovered! But, if so, the Centipede-kinden had not yet alerted the host of warriors all around him. Esmail considered running, but none of the Scarred Ones ever ran. The bodies of the Worm were constantly rushing, as though appalled by what they had become, but the priests maintained a sedate pace. To flee would be to announce that he did not belong.

So kill him. He could slide his cutting-Art fingers into the intruder’s belly as they approached each other, then help the corpse to sit down, robes bunched about the wound to soak up the blood. He could only hope that the murder would not register in the attention of the Worm, so that he would have a chance to get clear before the death was discovered. It would not be the first time he had pulled just such a trick.

Just moments before he sent himself striding forwards into that fatal clinch, he realized that he knew this man. It was not just some old Scarred One about to meet a well-deserved end; it was the Hermit.

Seeing him there, after the man had refused to accompany Esmail to the city, brought the Assassin up short. Has he changed sides? Is he about to betray me? Those were the instant thoughts, followed by, So I should kill him, anyway. But the same logic prevailed: if the man had rejoined the Worm, then he would have a hundred swords already within striking distance of Esmail, and no need to risk himself.

The Hermit stopped at what he probably thought was just outside striking distance, though Esmail could still have cut his heart out if he had risked a full extension of his arm. Eyes half buried in wrinkles studied the Assassin dispassionately.

‘You do it well,’ he murmured. ‘I didn’t think it was possible, but you carry yourself just like them – just like us. I never even knew we stood like that, until I see you doing it now. You’re an artist, truly.’

‘And you’re my audience, apparently,’ Esmail replied softly. The Scarred Ones were always murmuring. None of them seemed to dare speak as loud as the Hermit was right now. ‘Why are you here?’

The old man looked insulted at first – after all, surely this was his place more than it could ever be Esmail’s – but then something else descended on his face, some weight of shame, and he muttered something, losing the words entirely. Only when Esmail leant closer with an exasperated hiss did he get out, ‘For him.’

‘Orothellin.’

The Hermit nodded unhappily. ‘He believed in her. He wanted to help her, the Beetle girl, and he’s dead now, the fool. After so long, he finally risked too much, and let them catch him. I should hate her for that – without her he’d still be alive – but it just goes round and round in my head, the way he wanted to help. So in the end I’m here because of him, because what else have I got?’ A tear was tracking through the grime, finding the path of least resistance down the lines of his face.

And Esmail saw it, and cursed himself for not thinking quicker, because abruptly he had a plan: he had now the tool to accomplish the task he had been set.

‘You can do it,’ he said. ‘You’re what I need, to get this man out that Che wants.’

‘You’ve found him?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s stuck in with a load of others, and they’re emptying the pot fast, but if we’re faster we can get him out. I’ll need you to do to him what you did to Che – cut him up like you did her, then keep close to him until he’s out. I can’t do it – even at my best. Without my magic I just can’t be one of you. But you . . .’

‘And he’ll just let me carve him up, will he?’ the Hermit demanded, a little of his old fire returning.

‘I reckon he’ll take what he can get,’ Esmail shot back. ‘Now, come on . . .’

And he was already too late, even as the plan had finally become possibly, because here he was. Here came Totho, hauled from the pit by a knot of struggling Worm soldiers, with a handful of other prisoners alongside him.

‘How quickly can you do your work?’ Esmail hissed. He was thinking through permutations – attacking, holding the assembled might of the Worm off somehow, then trusting to his heels whilst the Hermit somehow got Totho clear. ‘I can win you maybe a few minutes, if I’m really, really lucky.’ He was watching the prisoners being hauled away between the crumbling vacant blocks of the city, calculating where he could make best use of the ground to win as much time as possible for the Hermit to . . .

‘Esmail, you remember,’ the old man said wearily. ‘That first marking, it cannot be done quickly or it will fail. There will be no time.’

‘No, it . . .’ Esmail was already moving, shadowing the soldiers of the Worm and their prisoners, noting the placement of the scarred priests as they led the convoy. He could see Totho fight one arm clear, saw the hand poised near the captive’s belt helplessly for a moment. Something to do with pulling on a string, he said. Whatever it was, the knowledge of it had evaporated along with Totho’s Aptitude.

‘Esmail, there’s no way.’

‘Then they’ll put them somewhere else before they . . . We’ll have our chance . . .’ Esmail tried desperately.

‘You know where they’re taking those poor wretches.’ The Hermit sounded almost gleeful. ‘You know the only use they have for live adult bodies here.’

The sight came back to Esmail: that vast, blinding questing head, the segment upon segment of clutching legs, the poisoned claws the size of a man. He had looked upon the thing the scarred priests worshipped and he had known that he could never do so again. He had never truly known fear until he had beheld the Worm.

And now he heard himself saying, ‘Then we go after him. We ambush them on the way down, or . . . we take him from the Worm’s jaws, if we have to.’

He glared at the Hermit, and saw a wondering, pitying expression on the old man’s face.

‘Oh, lead on,’ the turncoat Centipede advised. ‘You go ahead and show me what you’ll do. At least someone will know, after you’re gone, just how mad you were before the end.’

And at the last, the work was done, and all the prisoners were returned to the pit.

Sartaea te Mosca stood there, just able to see because most of the rest were too tired to stand when the slavers weren’t actively whipping them. She stood proud of a sea of slumped shoulders and bowed heads, and watched.

The engineers had finished laying their fuses: that had been a complex and delicate job, and she had been given plenty of time to observe their faces. Unlike the slavers, they did not wear full-face helms to make themselves creatures of anonymous fear. They were young, many of them, and they were frightened. One of them had been weeping, even as he worked. None of them had wanted to look at the prisoners.

They had known what they had, in those great metal drums. The Bee-killer was to the Empire what a hero of the Days of Lore was to the Mantis-kinden: everyone knew the name; everyone was familiar with the deeds. And, just like those Mantis heroes, the Bee-killer’s deeds were death, the death of vast numbers in such a brief time.

Why don’t the others rise up? Te Mosca wondered. There were so many prisoners, and the channels cut into the edge of the pit should make escape even easier. We should rush them! Someone should yell out some battle cry, and we’d all go surging out and knock down all the Wasps, and be free. Why doesn’t someone do that?

And she stood, a tiny figure, knowing herself to be so small as to be helpless before the Wasps. She knew whoever might give out such a cry would die for it. She knew the stings and the blades and the sheer physical strength of the Wasps – she felt them like a razor at her neck, like a knife close to her eye. And she said nothing. And they all said nothing. Starved, beaten, half-naked, sick, dying; there was no will left for defiance amongst the slaves.

Te Mosca wanted to call to the Wasps: I am a Master of the College! I trained in magic with the Moth-kinden! I have healed wounds and saved lives! I am someone! I matter! But, standing in that great assembly of the doomed, she was less and less convinced in that last article of faith. She was only valuable to the world in one way: one more life to be snuffed like a candle.

Then Metyssa was speaking again. Her voice shook and trembled: she was hunched in on herself, hugging her bony knees, head down, and yet somehow her voice still floated free. She began to tell them about the end of the war.

She told them how it came to pass: how the great Imperial war machine came to be dismantled; how peace came to all the lands of the kinden. She told it as though it was some fable from long ago, just the sort of story the Inapt grew up on. No rooftop chases or derring-do now, but a gentle story of a world grown sane. A story where soldiers put away the toys of war and went home to their wives and mothers and lovers. In her story, Collegium and Myna were rebuilt in their old glories, and the Commonweal was free of the shadow that oppressed it. Rival Spider families clasped hands as friends, and Ant cities spoke of treaties and shared works for the benefit of all. And it was magic, te Mosca knew. She had never realized that Metyssa had any magic in her, but she felt it stir in the Spider now. It was a strange, weak storyteller’s magic, released at the end of all things as if it could change the world.

But the world had grown old and turned away from such childish things as magic. Even te Mosca could not find much belief in such things within her breast. Captivity had made her like one of the Apt, seeing nothing in the world but their cold and inexorable mechanisms. Metyssa spoke on and on, until her words seemed to be the only sound in the world, but it made no difference. None of it made any difference any more.

Then another voice cut across her, ignoring her as though she was nothing. ‘Now’s the time,’ the Red Watch man snapped, like someone late for an appointment. ‘She needs it all now. Ready with the detonator?’

A handful of the engineers had been at work on some mechanism a short distance from the pit – te Mosca had seen it when the digging was going on. Now she became desperate to see it again. It had abruptly become the most important thing in her world. She tugged and nagged and badgered Poll Awlbreaker until he let her onto his shoulders, and from there she saw the instrument of all their extinctions.

It seemed a very little thing: just a box, really. A box with thick cords that issued from it, leading to all the canisters. Poll had said there would be firepowder within them, and charges at the barrels, all timed to break open at the same killing instant.

The Red Watch man stalked to the lip of the pit and looked in: to te Mosca’s knowledge it was the first time he had actually set eyes on the people he was arranging to murder.

‘Remarkable,’ he declared, in tones plainly intended to carry all the way across to the cages. ‘It’s hard to think they could have any value at all, isn’t it? And yet they have one use left . . .’ And he was left frowning, because he had obviously anticipated an attentive audience, of slavers and slaves both, and only those within arm’s reach – and te Mosca – were really listening.

For Metyssa was still talking, ignoring their tormentors – ignoring the whole Empire and all written history to date, it seemed – and spinning her hopeless, impossible fable of some world where things had happened differently.

The Red Watch man made a start on another few platitudes, for apparently this was an occasion worthy of a speech to him, but he petered out each time, and at last he demanded, ‘Shut that woman up!’

‘What does it matter?’ the lead slaver asked him in a low growl. ‘Let her talk, why not? It won’t change anything.’

The man with the red pauldrons stared at him. ‘I do not want to hear her voice. I do not want to hear any of their voices. They are not permitted to mar this moment. Silence her.’

For a long moment the two Wasps stared at one another, and then the slaver dropped into the pit with a handful of his people, and they kicked and slapped their way to Metyssa. That was surely the moment to take them, if there ever was one, but by then even te Mosca had stopped believing in it. The Wasps were so fiercely full of vitality, the slaves so feeble and wasted.

The lead slaver stood over Metyssa, and even in his shadow she kept talking.

‘Do it!’ the Red Watch man shouted at him. But the slaver just stared, and the story rambled on, telling of homes and hearths, of better days and bluer skies. And then the Wasps were on the wing, back out of the pit without a blow struck.

‘Just do what you came for,’ the slaver spat. ‘Piss on your speeches. Just get it over with.’

Red Watch ground his teeth and flexed his fingers at that, but it was plain that the mood of the slavers was frustrated and ugly. They had always been the least disciplined branch of the army, and te Mosca understood that accidents had happened before, with officers who had pushed them too far.

And so the moment of truth narrowed to a single point in time, and the Red Watch man snarled, ‘You do it, then. I give you the honour. Fire the detonator, the Empress commands you.’

The lead slaver kept staring at him for a few heartbeats, and then sloped over to the detonator, scattering the engineers. ‘What is this for?’ he demanded. ‘I’ve carried the whip for twenty years. I know my trade. What could this possibly be for?’

‘When you donned that uniform,’ the Red Watch man told him flatly, ‘you swore to obey. I am the voice of the Empress. You do not get to pick and choose which orders you follow because you disagree or do not understand. Now make it happen!’

And te Mosca was struck by a strange certainty that he himself could not work the machines – that the fog of the Inapt mind was on the Red Watch man. Which meant that all of this was magic: not Metyssa’s petty little magics of wasted words, but the greatest magic of all.

She could almost see it in her mind, what they would all be a part of: just as the fuses led to the cannisters, so this and a host of other massacres led into the Empire, to fuel . . . to fuel . . .

She supposed that it did not really matter to her, what it went to fuel. Her consent was not being asked.

And yet she was not dead, and the detonator had not been triggered, and when she looked again at the lead slaver, he was staring at the Red Watch man and saying something. Behind the mask of his helm there were no lips visible to be read, but it might have been as simple as, ‘No.’

The Red Watch man went storming over, shouting at him, ‘I am the voice of the Empress!’ over and over, bringing his hands up to unleash his sting. The slaver ducked away and a scatter of gold fire danced about the detonator, catching one of the cords and sending it flaring and crackling, a trail of sparks snaking away towards the lip of the pit.

Then one of the engineers lunged forwards and drove a dagger down past the Red Watch man’s collarbone with a strangled cry, forcing him to his knees. And once he had stabbed, the engineer stabbed and stabbed again, his face a mask of hate and despair.

With a distinct and solitary bang, one of the canisters sprang open, slave to that single lit fuse, and a seeping yellow death began to unfurl lazily into the pit. In moments people were choking and retching, scrabbling over each other to get away from it.

The lead slaver lost one second of contemplation staring at them all before he gave the order.

‘Get them out! Get them all out!’

Seda stood in her throne room, preparing to muster her power. Poor cowering Brugan would be the sole uncomprehending witness to the greatest act of magic of the post-revolution age.

In a way, it was an unparalleled act of self-sacrifice as well as the far more overt sacrifice of so many others that she had planned and partly accomplished. She had felt the billowing surge of magic after the Seal finally gave way, and knew that the unravelling of that monstrous knot in the silk of the world had gifted back so very much. She, Seda the Empress, could be the foremost magician in a second dawn, challenging the Moth Skryres in their mountain halls, beating the old world at its own game. She was weaving all that power back into its knot. She was tying it where neither she nor Che, nor any other magician, might unpick and steal it. She was dooming herself to be no more than Seda the Empress, the Inapt ruler of an Apt nation, whose magic amounted to a scattering of tricks and sleights of hand.

But she knew her duty – both to her people and to the world. She would relinquish her bright future to accomplish that task, and she would extinguish the futures of as many others – Apt and Inapt, slaves and free – as it took.

Tisamon had gone stalking off to kill the latest band of conspirators to rise against her. She was used to that – ask Brugan if she was not used to that! – and if Tynan was a tool that had broken in her hand this last time, well, the Empire had got its full use out of the man. She was tempted to spare his family, after his death, but that would send a poor message to other would-be rebels. There would be no insurrection of the traitor generals, and Tynan’s blood, and that of all who got in her way, would feed her grand ritual.

Speaking of which, now was her time. She could feel the Worm closing in on the world, with all its stolen numbers. Time to put you in your place.

All around her, her plan was falling into ruin, her subjects rebelling against her use of them, even the reviled Slave Corps shying back from what she needed them to do. For every faithful servant, another handful were betraying her commands. Did they not understand that she was trying to save the world?

It was no good: she could not do it alone. Perhaps she could not do it at all, but there was that one faint last chance.

Che, she called out.

A resigned reply came back: I am here. Poor idealistic Beetle girl, but at least she had recognized the way of the world at this late stage, when Seda needed her.

We must be strong now, Che. We must be strong together.

I know. The girl sounded so sad that it physically hurt Seda.

You would have killed me once, the Empress reflected. I would have killed you, too, if I could. Before Argastos . . . There had been that brief, utterly unexpected, handful of moments when the two of them had joined forces against the old Moth sorcerer. For Seda it had been a revelation. Her siblings had all died years before, save for her tyrant of a brother who had threatened her with execution every tenday until she and her Mosquito magician had done away with him. She had not expected to find a living sister so late. Che had been her rival, her opposite. Who could have known that, now the girl was lost to the underworld, Seda would miss her?

I wish it could be different, came the faint whisper of Che’s thoughts. There were a number of things she might have been referring to, but Seda chose to believe that the Beetle’s thoughts ran along the same lines as her own.

Me too. Are you ready?

I am.

I will remember you, when this is done.

I don’t have much time. Make the connection.

Seda could sense a battle unfolding behind Che’s thoughts, the sort of fight for survival that could not be won, which was being waged only because the drive to live was stronger than reason.

She reached out, drawing up the power that Tisamon had already reaped for her. Other atrocities were being enacted across the Empire – far fewer than she had wanted, but when she had Che’s power, the other half of her whole, perhaps she could still accomplish what she intended, despite the treason of the white-livered Slave Corps, despite Tynan and Marent, despite all of them.

She drove through to Che, past the layers of earth and magic and impossible geometries, and made the link.