Seal of the Worm

Forty-Three

Stenwold woke up.

For a moment, standing there, he had a sense of a great whirl of sound and motion, nearby and yet unseen, as though it was in a further room, in some space separated from him by the thinnest of membranes and yet utterly invisible, undetectable.

He was in Myna. He remembered now.

Before him the gates rose solid and whole, and he felt waves of memory wash over him. He remembered watching them through a telescope while they shuddered under the impact of the Wasps’ ramming engine, but that had been a long time ago, in a world now lost. Those gates had fallen, and then the wall . . . years after, when the Empire had come again . . .

He looked left and right, seeing that remembered wall intact now, re-edified and restored to be the perfect mimic of the way everything had been, before it all started.

There was nobody else there, just Stenwold before the gates of Myna.

Again he sensed a wave of commotion just beyond his reach, the clatter of metal, a woman’s voice – a woman he knew? – making demands. Atryssa? Arianna? No, another woman he knew and loved. A face ghosted brokenly through his mind, of a woman who looked like a Spider-kinden but wasn’t, not quite.

Besides, they were dead, the others. The thought seemed obscurely wrong. As he stood here before those unbreached gates, how could they be dead? Time had respooled itself, surely. All the pieces were back in their box.

He turned from the gates slowly, feeling the city about him blur slightly each time it moved, as though his image of it took a second to catch up. Myna rose up before him in its tiers, towards that top airfield where . . . Again those layers of memory interfered with each other.

There was nobody else in sight. He had the city to himself.

The Consensus building was in its proper place again – no sign of the hideous ziggurat the Wasps had replaced it with after they took the city the first time, nor the mess of scaffolding that was all the second Consensus hall had amounted to before the Empire had knocked it right back down again.

Is this a second chance? he wondered. What happens if I just walk away? If I open those gates, what will I see? A Wasp army? Or just the view out towards the hills of the Antonine?

Or nothing?

Instead, he set off into the city slowly, uncertainly. Each step seemed to be over the edge of an abyss until it landed. The Myna of his memories shivered and danced, always on the point of fracturing.

Here there was only silence. Somewhere else a woman was crying.

Hokiak’s Exchange was still there, although he felt somehow that the geography had been twisted in order to lead him to it, the city’s layout subtly corrupted by his imperfect recall. The old sign swung gently in a wind Stenwold could not feel.

If I go in, will I find the old man there? And then a sharp memory. But he’s left. Last time, he was gone. And the Consensus was in ruins and then the walls . . . the walls came down. For a moment the image threatened to overwhelm what he was seeing, buildings become vacant, decaying shells; the skies alive with fighting orthopters; incendiaries from the greatshotters unfolding their bright blooms, Sentinels on the streets. The ground beneath him shifted, and he knew that way dissolution lay.

He clung to the peace of his past, that moment before Stenwold Maker the idealist scholar had become Stenwold Maker the driven statesman, chief of all the enemies of the Empire. Rather keep Myna like this, before the Wasps came. He was too tired and too old to go through all that again.

He walked on through the still and soundless city, searching for a way out that had nothing to do with the city gates. He let his feet lead him where they would.

A townhouse stood within sight of the gates. He remembered it well: far better than he remembered many more recent things. Where it all started. For a long moment, for a time that he could not measure, he stood before it while, just a hair’s breadth away, there was such panic and shouting, hands dragging at him, the clatter of surgeons’ tools.

He went in.

Seda stood up slowly. Tynisa watched her.

The Empress of the Wasps stared about herself at the terrible enclosing dark, barely kept at bay by the lone fire that Tynisa needed in order to see. Below them, past the great huddled mass of non-combatants, the thin line of armed slaves surged back and forth, still desperately trying to keep the Worm from breaking through. The slaves yelled and screamed, cried out in shock and agony, shouted encouragement to one another. The Worm remained silent, incapable of words.

‘What have you done?’ Seda demanded.

Beside Tynisa, Che did not answer. I don’t think I really believed that would work, said the expression on her face.

The Empress was backing away from her, though there was precious little space – not far to go without climbing a sheer wall or approaching the Worm. ‘What have you done, you stupid child?’ she cried out. ‘My ritual—’

‘I could not allow you to complete it,’ Che told her simply. ‘I could not be a party to such magic. I hope that, in dragging you down here, I have saved at least some of the lives you sought to squander.’

‘Squander?’ Seda shouted at her. ‘I was saving the world from the Worm.’

A fragile smile made its way on to Che’s face. ‘And I was saving the world from you.’

For a moment Seda just stared at her, face twitching with shock and incomprehension, and then fury gripped her hard enough that her entire body jolted, and she thrust out a palm at Che to burn her from the face of the world.

Tynisa lunged forwards – ready for this moment she had known must come – and her rapier’s point opened up the Empress’s hand, severing two fingers. The appalled Wasp fell back with a cry that owed more to outrage than to pain, and Tynisa drove in to finish the job.

Her blade struck steel that deflected her thrust, and she dropped back immediately, making space and keeping her sword between her and the newcomer. For, of course, he was here.

Tisamon had come to the aid of his mistress.

In the poor light he was just an armoured shadow, his claw a crooked extension of his barbed arm. As Seda hunched backwards, cradling her ruined hand, the revenant of Tynisa’s father stepped closer to her, protectively.

There was so little space to fight in, here at the top of the slope. They had discussed this chance. Che would be trying to get her mind into Tisamon, to prise him apart and disperse him, creation of magic that he was, but Seda would be opposing her, move for move. They were locked together, each the other’s equal in strength and skill, but while they struggled silently, magic to magic, their Weaponsmasters fought the real duel.

Tynisa lunged in, angling her blade to take Tisamon under the arm, then circling the point over his arm as he brought it up to parry her, pushing next for his throat. He swayed back, just enough to be out of her reach, inviting her to overextend.

She took a pace back, saw him follow her up, darting inside her reach and going for her throat, always his favourite strike, but a poor choice against a skilled opponent. She passed back and to her right, feinting at his eyes, at the cold, pale face within his helm. He was dead, long dead, but there was magic in her arm and in her sword. A killing blow from her might not destroy him, but it would be enough to bring him down. After that she needed only a moment to bring an end to Seda, and that would free her father forever.

Abruptly he blurred into motion, striking high towards her head, then stepping around her parry, steel claw darting for her shoulder, her side, her injured hip. She felt no pain from her old wounds, the sword sustaining her as it leapt almost joyously to her defence, matching move to move and always the point directed to him, so that each parry was nothing more than the most economical shifting of her hand, only the angle changing, never the intent.

She struck against his shoulder, then his side, scraping mail both times, and never opening herself up. She was inside his shorter reach most of the time, but her own blade was constantly holding the centre line, standing in the way of his strikes. He was relentless in attack, near perfect in defence but, try as he might, he could not hook his claw around her guard to get to her.

She knew him. He was her father and she had fought him so many times, for practice and for blood. When they had first met they had nearly killed one another. They had crossed blades in the sewers beneath Myna, in the Prowess Forum of Collegium, in the darkness of Argastos’s domain in the Netheryon. She retained that connection with him, that understanding of his style and his limits. Dead, now, he had lost his feel for her, locked inside his armour and cut off from the man he had been.

He lunged for her hip again, trying to exploit an injury that did not slow her, and she twisted aside deftly, caught his blade when it flicked up for her face and bound it back behind her, punching him across the jaw with the edged knuckle-guard of her sword. She contacted only metal, but he staggered with the blow, and a moment later she had stepped around him, leaving her sword behind to catch his following strike, and Seda was before her, backing up frantically.

Then a blazing white agony struck through Tynisa, surging out from her hip, and she fell to one knee with a screech of pain, sword dropping from her hand with the utter, unexpected shock. Tisamon would not hesitate, she knew. His blade would be descending even now. She tried to fling up a hand to ward off the blow, in a hopeless, futile gesture.

It never came. She looked back wildly, trying to find him. He was gone. The deadening influence of the Worm had rolled over them, a momentary gain in ground by the attackers, and Tynisa’s magic had been snuffed out. As had Seda’s. As had Tisamon.

Tynisa gave out a rasping cry and reclaimed her sword – no Weaponsmaster’s call to have it instantly to hand, but just fumbling it from the floor with shaking hands. Seda’s face was stricken – how long had she been relying on her magic, and now it was gone, as though she had never been special at all.

Tynisa limped forwards, teeth gritted, willing herself to finish this.

A moment later and the pain was gone, her sword flooding its strength back into her. And she turned instinctively, bringing her hilt up so that the diagonal of her blade intersected Tisamon’s darting strike. The revenant was back.

The slaves were fighting harder than they had a right to, was Thalric’s assessment. Even with all their dependants at their back, and nowhere else to go in the world, he would have thought they should have crumbled by now. Instead, the Worm had rushed them again and again, and the volleys of slingshot had beaten into this attacking force, slowing them, tripping them over their own dead, so that when they reached the first line of slave-held swords the speed of their charge had been checked. There were mounds of the dead, now – dead from both sides – whole charnel barricades for the Worm to clamber over. It was all mounting up, impeding the enemy, making them slow down and wasting their numbers.

Of course, it’s still a hopeless fight, Thalric acknowledged. I’m not exactly going to get a chance to go around and tell everyone ‘Well done,’ am I?

He had been leaning heavily on his Art: aloft much of the time and battering down on the Worm with his sting – each shot just a tiny effort, but he was feeling the drag of it now. There were just too many of the enemy, and they didn’t care if they died. Or perhaps the problem was that there was only one of the enemy, and they could kill these husks forever and still not win the war.

The Mole Crickets were proving surprisingly effective, too, he considered. Of course he knew them back from his Empire days – big, slow, dull brutes, fit for mining and with a surprising turn for artifice, but seldom much use as warriors. Then, again, they were scarce in the world above, but here he had them in the hundreds, a hulking second line armed with clubs and hammers and the great reach of their long arms. The swordsmen in the front row were just concentrating on staying alive and fending the Worm off, whilst the big Moles reached forwards between them and hammered and crushed and slapped.

But we’ll run out of sling stones soon, I suppose,Thalric reflected. How ridiculous, to be trapped in this hole in the ground, and yet meet your end because there aren’t enough stones in the world.

He let himself drop down again, trying to conserve his strength. Below, down the slope, the lines shifted and wavered, and still the wretched slaves somehow held – the slingers thinning out the Worm even as they came so that what reached the defending lines was just manageable. There was a simple mathematics, though, of attrition and exhaustion, neither of which appeared to be problems the enemy suffered from.

It’s been an education, Thalric admitted. But they’re still slaves all the same, and when that line breaks there’ll be no recovering from it.

With that in mind, he began working his way back, keeping an eye on the ebb and flow of the fight. It was not from some desperate need to preserve his own skin, but he wanted to be closer to Che. When the inevitable worst happened, and these doomed defenders were overwhelmed, he wanted to get her out somehow. They would trust to their wings and risk the White Death and the carnivorous stars, and they would find some way out of this place, just the two of them.

He looked back up the slope, and saw fighting there too. For a moment, by the light of their single fire up there, he could not see who was crossing blades with whom, and he let his wings lift him up and carry him over, utterly bewildered. Then he saw them: who else could it be, really? After all, the world had ceased working to comprehensible rules some time ago, so why not these players acting out this scene one last time?

Tisamon, Tynisa, and the appealing thought: I could just go, right now. I don’t have to get involved in this little knot any more.

But he did. He did if he wanted Che. He let his wings carry him towards them. He launched himself forwards and a sling stone from the Worm’s ranks struck him solidly in the shoulder and brought him down.