Seal of the Worm

Forty-Six

Milus stared out across the rapidly disintegrating battlefield, stepping from mind to mind as his officers in turn relayed to him what they were seeing. There was a constant chaos of reports, an army’s worth of shock and bafflement. In the back of his thoughts his pilots were screaming as they died.

The ground before Capitas had just caved in, as though undermined. In fact, he had even prepared a plan to sap the walls if more conventional means failed to take them, but this . . . Their walls were bowing forwards, the foundations rotten and eaten away. Men and engines were tumbling from the top as the great curtain of stone swayed and then cracked across, immense sections of masonry just falling away. He watched the enemy’s capital city simply opening up to him like a flower. He had never seen a city’s defences fall so swiftly.

His officers were asking him for instructions, and there was a rising tide of fear trying to force its way through his army. Something incomprehensible had swept over them: the use of all their weapons – snapbows, automotives, even crossbows – was suddenly denied them, whole sections of their brains just failing to connect. The more level-headed scouts were reporting that the Wasps seemed to be suffering under the same impossible effect.

Be calm, he instructed them. He himself was calm, and that helped. He was not seeing a violation of the way the world worked. He was Milus, and he had different eyes to the bulk of his kinden. He was seeing an opportunity.

He studied the Wasp response – they were pulling back to the broad gap in their walls, seemingly stripped now of all discipline and order. It was a fighting retreat because the broken earth was swarming with bodies, a ravening horde of some kinden Milus had never seen, laying into everything nearby – which meant the Wasps themselves.

Sheltered back here, he could consider carefully. A tactician had no business being on the front line, and no need either. In his mind the concepts of Aptitude were therefore still strong, but whenever he tried to communicate with his engineers and his artillerists he was met with blank incomprehension, a desperate reaching for an understanding that never came.

No matter. We’re still the best soldiers on the field. Sling your snapbows and draw swords.

Orders, Tactician? came from a hundred minds, but they were steady now because he himself was steady.

They wanted to go in, he knew. They wanted to get inside the Wasps’ city, but also to clear the way of that crawling mass of intruders erupting from the earth. There was something about them that made the skin crawl: they had a human shape but it was animated by something else entirely.

Hold, Milus decided.

There was some surprise at that, some resistance even. He rode out the backlash of queries and demands, eventually just bludgeoning them with his authority, I have been given command here! repeated over and over until he had beaten them all down. He knew that there were parts of his army who were not happy with some of his decisions and some of his priorities, but he knew that they would do as he said. Out here, beyond the reach of the Royal Court, he constituted Sarn. Anyone who disobeyed him was a renegade to their city, and that was a door that only opened one way.

Our enemies are fighting one another, he told them with some satisfaction. I don’t care what these things are. Let them kill Wasps. Let them kill all the Wasps they want, and let the Wasps kill them back. Whoever’s left standing will answer to us.

Tactician, they’re still coming out of that hole, one of his scouts reported. No end to their numbers. They’re spreading this way.

Then kill them once they get close enough. Keep your shields up and interlocked, and turn them back towards the city. Channel them, but no more than that. They’re just a weapon, like any other.

But, Tactician, from another officer, what’s happened to us? Our bows . . .?

Metaphysics can wait, Milus replied sternly. Shields up and hold, and let them shed blood for us.

Tynan did not want to hear casualty reports just then. He reckoned that perhaps a third of his ground-bound troops were still out there fighting to get clear of this new foe. He had lost dozens of wall engines . . . but what matter when his own artillerists seemed unable to use them any more? The sky, by now, was completely swept clean of orthopters from both sides.

It’s the end of the world. In his head, a mad little voice was saying that this was something out of the old Inapt legends, back from the myth days of monsters and magicians. Impossible things were happening and, worst of all, they were happening to his city.

The Light Airborne had fared best – already in the air and mobile enough to get wherever they wanted. Their officers had made the right call and pulled them back from their attack on the Lowlanders to throng the breach with bodies, on the ground itself and all up the jagged edges of wall on both sides. Beyond them, the infantry and support of the Second and Third armies was in headlong rout, fleeing for the compromised safety of the city.

And the enemy . . . the enemy? Tynan had thought these must be some new Lowlander ally at first, but the foe that he had been expecting to fight was not taking advantage of the sudden disintegration of the Wasp position, and instead looked to be keeping well clear of whatever was happening here. The earth-kinden – whatever they were – just kept erupting out of the ground, a great boiling host of them like maggots pouring from a wound.

Like worms, said an old, old part of his mind steeped in the stories they used to frighten children with.

They threw themselves at the retreating Wasps with a shocking speed and savagery, and no sense of self-preservation at all. Their beasts, that scrabbling tide of centipedes, were underfoot everywhere, the smaller lunging upwards to sink venomous fangs into legs, the greater ones rearing up to coil about their victims, rending armour, driving down at men’s faces with claws agape.

By now enough officers had contacted him that Tynan could start giving some kind of orders but his mind was still scrabbling for what orders he could possibly give. His mouth was getting the words out, though, as decades of military experience took over, shunting his stunned surprise to one side.

‘Get me a perimeter across the wall!’ he snapped. ‘Use all the infantry you can, spears and heavy armour.’ Why did we let them take away our Sentinels? Not those useless machines but the elite heavy troops who would have stood off this tide until dusk, if they’d had to. ‘Airborne, get yourselves over them – I don’t see them flying, and I don’t see them with bows. I want a storm of stingshot into their heads as they come in, and I want strong stingers flanking the breach and backing up the infantry. Consortium!’

‘Sir!’ Some clerk or other, but coming at his order.

‘Get into the city. Get every man of our kinden . . . get every adult of our kinden, men and women, everyone who can sting. Everyone comes to defend Capitas. Go get your people to spread the word.’

The clerk stared at him, wide-eyed, but was off into the city the next moment.

The breach was meanwhile filling up with heavier troops, freeing up the Airborne who had seized it first. Tynan saw a great solid block of Vesserett Bee-kinden – solid armour, axe and interlocking hexagonal shields – take up their positions and brace, with Wasps stationed ready to sting over their heads. Ernain’s lot, he thought suddenly. Stab me, but I’m glad we’ve got them.

‘They’re still coming, sir!’ Major Oski dropped down beside him. ‘The ground keeps just pissing them out and pissing them out. There’s no end to them.’

Thank you for your contribution, Tynan thought, but before he could actually say anything, one of the Airborne dropped down beside him.

‘General, they’re climbing the walls. We’ve got stingers up top, but not enough.’

Tynan nodded, looking back into the city. Sure enough, here came the first wave of stunned-looking Wasp-kinden – artificers, Consortium book-keepers, intelligencers, factory overseers, wives, mothers, surgeons, whores – all the little cogs that made empires and armies run.

Well, today they’re all soldiers. ‘Go, get any Wasp not in uniform up on the walls and sending stingshot downwards. Men, women, slave, free – I don’t care.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Sir?’ It was Oski again, and when Tynan rounded on him he shrugged helplessly. ‘Sir, I don’t seem to be able to do my job, with the . . . with the . . .’ He waved his arms towards the surviving wall artillery that was sitting idle and devoid of meaning. ‘You need a messenger or something?’

‘Good man, Major.’

The surging tide of earth-kinden and their sinuous beasts went crashing against the breach, barely held in check by the Wasps and Bees stationed there. The air above them crackled and sang with a storm of stingshot.

And Oski was right: they were still coming.

‘Sod me, just look at them,’ Straessa breathed, horrified. To say that she had never seen anything like it would be sheer understatement. The sight of the soldiers of the Worm venting up from the earth, clambering over one another, a great coiling mass of human bodies driven by one hungry purpose – it was not something that anyone should have to see.

‘Tactician says to hold,’ the Sarnesh man told her.

‘Oh, no fear,’ she assured him. ‘I don’t see me wanting to go any closer to that, thanks.’

‘Antspider.’ The voice was Gorenn’s, though it took Straessa a moment to recognize it. Something completely unfamiliar seemed to have gripped the Dragonfly woman.

‘I know,’ Straessa assured her.

‘No, you do not. This is wrong,’ Castre Gorenn insisted.

‘You don’t need to tell me. I never saw anything more wrong in my life,’ Straessa agreed, increasingly aware that she and the Dragonfly were speaking at cross-purposes.

‘What is going on?’ A new voice – that of Balkus forcing his way through the Collegiate troops to get to her. ‘What are those things?’

‘Why would anyone expect me to know?’ Straessa demanded of the world in general.

‘Listen, Antspider.’ Balkus looked frightened – in a way that even the wrath of his fellow Sarnesh hadn’t made him look. His nailbow hung on its strap, a useless deadweight. ‘Most of my lot are saying that we either run away or we charge.’

‘What?’

‘My Inapt, which is most of us Princep lot – Roaches, Moths, Spiders, all that – they’re going crazy. They want out, or if there’s no out, they want to get stuck in.’

‘Orders are to hold,’ came the emotionless tones of Milus’s mouthpiece.

‘Sounds good to me,’ Balkus admitted, ‘but I’m not joking when I say that my lot won’t just sit still for long.’

‘Orders are—’ the Sarnesh started again, but Gorenn cut across him.

‘Straessa, we have to fight them.’

‘Are you insane?’ the Antspider demanded.

‘You don’t understand what you’re looking at,’ Gorenn insisted.

‘No, I don’t, which is why . . .’ Straessa tailed off, looking past Gorenn at one of the Mantids, one of those whipcord-lean old women who seemed to make most of their decisions. ‘What does she want?’

‘She wants us to attack, because it’s our duty,’ Gorenn explained, as though everything was so very self-evident. ‘Orders—’ the Sarnesh intoned.

And Straessa snapped at him, ‘Will you just shut your yap while I work out what’s going on? Gorenn, please?’

‘Officer, those out there –’ the Dragonfly’s tremulous gesture took in all of the seething mass heaving its way clear of the earth – ‘they are the enemy. The real enemy. The true enemy. The only enemy.’

‘How can you know that?’ Straessa wanted to know.

‘How is it that you do not?’ Gorenn shouted back in her face. ‘How blind are you Apt, that you cannot know in your bones, in your hearts, in your . . . everything that you must oppose what we see there?’

Straessa just stared at her thinking, Yes, you are right. All of me is saying just that, except for my brain, which has the casting vote. The brain just doesn’t know what the pits is going on, frankly.

‘I’m going,’ Gorenn informed her. ‘I’m going, and the Mantids are going, and if your people want to come, Balkus, then they won’t be alone.’

‘There are thousands of the bastards,’ Straessa said weakly. ‘You’ll be pissing into a storm.’

‘At least we’ll be pissing somewhere,’ Gorenn declared, and the bizarre discrepancy between her furiously sincere tone and what she had actually said was the final straw for Straessa. It was official: the world was either mad or ending. Either way, why not?

‘Let’s go!’ she bellowed, in her officer’s voice. ‘Pikes front, swords out, trust to your mail. We’re going to kill some what-ever-the-pits-they-are!’

‘No!’ the Sarnesh liaison protested. ‘Orders—’And then Balkus punched him in the face, as hard as a big Ant can punch, and the man went down.

‘I’ll get my lot.’ He drew a pair of shortswords from his belt and weighed them in his hands. ‘Maybe that turd Milus will die of apoplexy as a bonus.’

‘Right.’ Straessa looked past Gorenn towards the Mantis woman. ‘I’m trusting you pissing Inapt bastards,’ she warned. ‘I seriously don’t understand just what is going on right now, but you’re telling me we have to fight because it’s the right thing to do? Well, Collegium’s played that card enough times in the last few years. So, fine, let’s go at it.’

In his command carriage, Milus stood up suddenly, watching the left flank of his army ripple and bulge and then break forwards, in a weird mirroring of the Capitas wall. Then they began marching – the Collegiate maniples pulling closer to one another and presenting a bristling face of pikes towards the earth-kinden that were already spilling their way.

His liaison had been struck down! And what were the Beetles doing? Had the loss of their Aptitude stripped away their reason as well?

And then the Mantids were on the move as well, setting the pace and bringing the Collegiates to a steady jog to keep up. And the whole left side of his battle order was abruptly operating on its own recognizance, and no longer under his control.

He swore fiercely, his displeasure crackling across the face of the Sarnesh force.

All others hold! he insisted, aware that there were those amongst his own who dearly wanted to attack as well, moved by some urge, some revulsion at what they were seeing that they could not account for and yet could not deny. Milus’s hold over his army was weakening, so he browbeat them, he forced his mind upon them: You are mine! You have no say! You are just bodies who march to my plan, or we lose everything!

Then the Vekken went. Through the eyes of his soldiers he watched, open-mouthed, as the dark-skinned Ants formed up into that same solid block of shields that he had been trying to dissuade them from all the way from Collegium. Suicide, of course, to march that kind of close-packed formation directly into enemy shot and artillery. Except that there was no shot or artillery, and this traditional Ant fighting formation was perfect for taking on superior numbers in close combat. Milus stared as they set off, keeping a brisk pace to catch up with the Collegiates.

Hold! Have the Tseni hold! There was a furious argument going on between his liaison and the Tseni commander – the woman demanding to know what Milus was doing and expressing a growing lack of faith in her allies.

Milus smelt smoke.

His head snapped up, his mind abruptly returning to the interior of the carriage. Smoke . . .?

There was a wisp of it coiling about the carriage ceiling. Yet the carriage itself was detached from any automotive, and there was no machinery that might have overheated or caught light.

The smoke was rising in leisurely coils from the wooden floor at one end of the carriage – and now he was reminded just how much of his surroundings were just wood, after all, and therefore flammable. He stepped a little closer, hunching down. Yes, between the planks of the floor there was a dull red glow.

‘So this is your revenge, is it?’ he murmured. Lissart, of course. The little firebug had not fled, after all. ‘More fool you for staying around.’

Wood would burn, but not fast, and the fire had only just started. He stormed towards the door to the carriage and flung it open.

There was a brief tug of resistance halfway through the motion, as of a broken thread.

Facing him was a placard nailed to the carriage rail, hastily painted white letters stating, ‘A present from Despard.’ His eyes had time to register those words, though not to understand them, when the explosives went off virtually underneath his feet, flinging him back into the carriage.

A second later, the fire Lissart had set hit the fuel barrels the Flies had hidden beneath the carriage, and the resulting fireball lifted the entire carriage off its wheels and tore it – and Milus – apart.