Seal of the Worm

Forty-Seven

Stenwold glanced back at the silent vacant city as he paused in the doorway of that remembered Mynan townhouse. The sky above, which he had assumed to be morning, was greying over to evening already. He could see no sun up there, only a uniform layer of ragged clouds.

Bad weather on the way. But, if he was true to himself, he knew it was not that, not really.

He shivered. If he listened very hard, he could just discern distant voices, and hear that woman, whose name he could not quite bring to mind, calling out his name.

I’m sorry, he thought. She sounded further away than previously, blown on the wind. He could only just make her out.

Paladrya. That was it. I don’t think I can come back to you.

He pushed at the taverna door, half expecting it not to give way, for the entire building just to be solid stone, preserving its secrets from him.

But it swung open, and he stepped into that remembered taproom. For a moment his mind supplied the bustle of a Mynan taverna of two decades before but, no, it was as abandoned as the rest of the city. Abandoned but clean and intact, as though the Wasps had never arrived.

Here was where the soldiers of his Ant friend Marius had sat awaiting the start of the siege.

But I wasn’t here. I was upstairs with my glass, staring out at the gates. Not knowing we had been betrayed. Not knowing that day would hammer me into shape like a smith. What would I have become, if I had not been there? What would the world have become?

A worse place, I hope. But, at this point, he realized that he had no guarantees. They named me War Master, an old Moth title from the Bad Old Days. Surely I only ever wanted to prevent war? But his mind was loose on its bearings, and he could not swear to that, after all.

Stenwold went up the stairs to where it had all started.

He was waiting there, sitting at one of the tables just as when their little band of fools had made their plans. Dead fools now, all of them, Stenwold’s oldest friends, and none older than this one.

‘Hello, Tisamon,’ he breathed.

The Mantis was looking him over, a curiously unreadable expression on his face that at last resolved into the smallest of smiles.

‘Hello, Sten.’

Stenwold went to take a seat across from him, noting how dark it was, already, out of the windows.

‘You’re looking well,’ he ventured awkwardly. It was true and it was not true. Here was the young Tisamon, lean and deadly, but with the old Tisamon clearly visible beneath the skin: the lines of care, of soured hope and self-recrimination all traceable there like veins. And beneath even those was the shadow of the skull, telling of the death that had claimed this man and not let go.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ the Mantis said, and Stenwold was startled to see tears glint in his eyes. ‘It’s been so long, but I knew you’d be here, eventually.’

‘Here . . .?’ Stenwold glanced around, still trying to come to terms with what he was seeing. The room seemed to blur as his memories fought to impose themselves on it. Surely there was a Wasp army out beyond the gates, about to attack. Or was this occupied Myna where Kymene’s resistance was on the streets? Or just a bombed ruin again?

‘I don’t understand,’ he admitted at last, sounding lost even to himself. ‘Why am I here?’

‘Sten,’ Tisamon said softly. ‘It’s always been Myna for you, surely you can see that? Ever since that first time, when you saw the Wasps capture it. Myna made you. For you, it’s always been about Myna. Where else would you go, when . . .’

When . . . ‘There is no when,’ Stenwold declared, feeling an unnameable emotion begin to rise inside of him. Is it grief, if the person you’re mourning is yourself? ‘There’s life, and there’s death. There is no . . . this.’

Tisamon’s smile grew fond. ‘Then perhaps this is just you, in the end . . . in your mind. Does that make it any less true for you?’

‘I . . .’ The Apt part of Stenwold told him he should argue, but it seemed like a lone voice at the Assembly. ‘You died, Tisamon.’

The Mantis nodded. ‘I know.’

‘A long time ago, now. They say you killed the Emperor.’

‘I didn’t, but it pleases me that they say so.’ A rare smile appeared, cut right from Stenwold’s happier days.

‘So why are you here? Myna was never anything special to you.’

Tisamon was looking at him, still smiling, his eyes bright with old pain. ‘Sten,’ he said, ‘you didn’t think I’d go on without you, did you?’

For a long time, Stenwold just sat there, looking at his friend, then he looked down at his hands, which had built and destroyed so much, and at the last he smiled back.

‘I suppose not,’ he conceded, and pushed himself heavily to his feet. ‘Shall we?’

They descended the stairs together and stepped out into the night-silent street. Up there, further up the layered tiers of the city, there was an airfield. Where else would they be heading, but somewhere that promised an infinity of destinations?

Stenwold clapped Tisamon on the shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ He felt twenty years younger.

Above, the stars were coming out.

This time, when the Worm ebbed away again, the crippling pain did not go. It took a step back, like a duellist itself, assessing her condition and ready for its next strike, but when Tynisa lurched to her feet and fended off Tisamon’s immediate strike, she still felt that stabbing hurt deep within her.

Her own time, as opposed to everyone’s collective time, was running out.

She feigned a retreat and twisted inside his guard, gripping the lip of his helm with her off hand and trying to wrench it free, to expose some part of him that she could pierce, to look upon her father’s face. He went with the motion, dragging her into the spines of his arm, which scored red lines across her body. Then his claw was driving back towards her, crooked underhand like a dagger.

She blocked the thrust, forearm to barbed forearm, then grappled at his wrist, getting a hold for long enough that she could drop back on her good leg, turning his attack into an over-extension, smashing him across the helm with her knuckle-guard twice, back and forth, then driving the point of her pommel in between shoulder and neck. She felt the fine mail there give slightly, and for a moment Tisamon was down on one knee, but then he had driven his arm-spines into her side with all the force he could muster, knocking her over and following up instantly, so that she had to roll over the jagged ground to avoid his first thrust, then backwards into his legs to dodge the second. He stumbled over her, and she was slithering out from under him immediately, jabbing back at him and feeling her sword’s tip scrape metal yet again.

She forced herself to her feet – her sword dragging her up more than anything, and saw him stalking her sidelong, assessing her condition just like the pain itself was doing, clearly planning his next attack.

She realized that she was between him and Seda.

He must have grasped it at the same time, breaking from his carefully poised stance in an almost awkward rush for her, but she had already passed out of his reach, just one halting step ahead of him, leading with her blade towards the Empress.

Then the pain returned and she crashed down with a wrenching cry, one hand to her hip to find that old wound torn open again, the blood soaking into her leggings. She flailed at Seda, but the Empress was just out of reach, staring at her in fear and rage, hand out and trembling.

Tynisa lurched towards her, just as the crackling bolt of gold fire scorched down her leg. The rapier – leaden in her grip now that the Weaponsmaster’s bond had been severed – lanced the Empress’s calf, toppling her backwards. This time, Seda’s scream was pure pain.

Then Tynisa’s agony made its measured retreat once more – though barely far at all now – and she rolled onto her back bringing her blade up, trusting that it would seek out Tisamon’s attack.

He stood directly over her, right arm drawn back to administer the blow, left hand extended forwards to slap her blade aside. But his head was cocked as though he was listening.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Seda demanded. ‘Kill her! I command it!’ Again she thrust her arm out towards Tynisa, fighting furiously against all Che’s efforts to stop her.

Tynisa inched out from under Tisamon’s shadow, waiting for him to move, wondering if she now even had the strength to make a strike at him that would have any chance of piercing his guard and his armour.

Then he stepped back, in a single neat little motion, and lowered his blade. It was a movement almost unbearably familiar to her from all those practice bouts. Tisamon had concluded his lesson.

As she watched – as they all watched – he reached up and pulled off the helm. Beneath, his face was pallid and bluish, but still him. Whatever those pale eyes looked out on, though, was not his daughter or any other thing in that buried world.

His lips moved slightly, though no words came out.

‘Kill them!’ Seda yelled at him desperately, and his eyes focused, seeing not the Empress, but Tynisa.

He smiled slightly – in benediction? Who could say? Then he turned to go, and was nothing but a fragmenting pattern of shadows, gone as if he had never been.

Seda let out a scream of anguish, of lost control, and Tynisa forced herself onto one knee, trying to get her legs beneath her before the Worm regained the initiative and destroyed her with that pain. She locked eyes with the Empress, and spotted the very moment that the raging Wasp woman cast off the shackles Che had been trying to lay on her.

The stingshot punched solidly beneath Tynisa’s ribs and slammed her back to the ground.

Thalric partly crawled, partly ran and was mostly hauled on by Messel, pushing through the panicking, milling non-combatants, catching fleeting, clashing moments of what was going on ahead. Che simply stood there, seemingly doing nothing, and Thalric could not follow the duel between Tynisa and her father at all, save that every time he saw her, Tynisa seemed weaker and weaker, whilst the armoured behemoth that was Tisamon never changed.

And then for a moment, just as he and Messel broke free from the crowd and lurched out onto that shrinking patch of clear ground that the refugees had given Che, he saw Tisamon leave for good. No uncertainty there: not just dancing in and out of sight as he had before. The man turned, and the light of some other place and time played across his face, and something seemed to drop away from him – no, something returned to him, some innate part of Tisamon that even Thalric could tell had been lacking.

And he was gone, and Tynisa was levering herself up.

Thalric saw Seda kill her.

Che was shrieking her sister’s name, and Thalric saw the Empress’s uninjured hand turn towards her.

Now or never, he thought and, shouting his body’s objections down, he called up his wings no matter how badly it hurt, and hurled himself like a missile, to knock Che clear.

The stingshot struck him in the chest, but he had his Commonweal mail on, which scattered the fire away so that he felt only a solid impact. Then he was up, with Che squirming out from beneath him, and his own hand was directed straight at his Empress. His shoulder was a festering knot of raw pain and the whole miserable underground world was wheeling about him, fit to make him sick. But I’ve had worse, he knew. Ask all the bastards who’ve tried to kill me if I’ve not had worse.

He looked into the face of Seda and spat, ‘Die.’

‘No,’ she said. Her smile was manic, too wide, unhinged. ‘You are mine, Thalric, and you cannot kill me.’

And she was right. Looking into her face, that beautiful, delicate face, he fought to send his Art against her, and could not. She was the Empress of all the Wasps, and he had shared her bed, and if she could not win him to her cause, she could still master him enough to be safe from him forever.

Then something punched into her leg, close to where Tynisa had stabbed her, and Seda dropped to the ground with a hoarse yell of incredulous pain. Her hands spat fire – a searing bolt clipped his shoulder and sent him skidding away from Che. A second stingshot burst near Messel, driving him back even as he was reaching for another sling stone.

Messel. Thalric already had the plan in mind as he saw the man. The eyeless cave-kinden was an unlikely saviour, but he had one advantage over the rest of them.

Thalric threw himself forwards – yet another jolt of bone-jarring pain, but who was counting? – and spun himself about with a jagged flourish of his wings so that he ended up feet first in Che’s fire.

Three quick kicks was all it took to rain its burning pieces down on to the cowering slaves below, and plunge them all into unrelieved blackness.

He heard Seda’s voice lifted in terrible fear of that all-consuming dark, and then her sting was flashing, lighting brief slices of the underworld and looking for enemies. Thalric only hoped that Messel was bold enough to stand up and take a shot. He himself was too busy dragging himself downslope for the little cover that might grant him. And please, Che, be smart enough to do the same!

She was not.

He saw none of it, only that one moment Seda was lashing about herself in a frenzy of stingshot, and the next moment the Empress of the Wasps keened out a last hideous sound . . . and then there was neither Art nor answer from her.

The battle below surged on, and Thalric could hear it getting closer. Then people were stepping on him, and he clawed his way back upslope, calling out Che’s name.

‘Here.’ He heard her, and because he had to see, because he had to know, he loosed a handful of stingshots up into the air, piecing the scene together from the after-image left by those flashes.

There was Che, cradling Tynisa’s still form, her shortsword dark with blood. Beyond her, sprawled like a toy, lay the corpse of the last scion of the Imperial line, Seda the First.

Thalric crawled over to her, groping blindly until Che took his hand.

‘I forgot you could see in the dark,’ he got out.

‘It’s just about all I still have,’ she told him, pulling him close.

‘Tell me what the battle looks like,’ he asked.

After a moment’s pause, she said, ‘It doesn’t look like a battle any more.’

He stared blindly out into the darkness that held the end of them both, now, and everything else besides. ‘Ah . . . Well, then, I have a few complaints about the way this whole business has been handled. When should I take them up with you?’

She was holding him very tightly and trembling now, whether for dead Tynisa or for what she could see before her. ‘Can it wait for tomorrow?’

‘Surely.’ With his next ragged breath he let go of something he had been holding on to for a long time. It might have been hope. ‘Che?’

Her lips found his.

The Worm carved its way closer, filling the sightless black with the screams of its victims.

Totho stared up into the face of god.

He stared at the night-black silhouette of that vast pronged head, seeing its antennae scour the edges of the cavern. It chewed over its current victim, mouthparts rending and tearing that ragged fragment of humanity between them with unthinking, destructive hunger until the face-swarming pitch of it had overwritten it all, all that its victim had been, now simply absorbed to become one more tormented visage floating on the surface of the void.

There seemed to be a lot of room in his mind for thought. Normally Totho’s brain was clogged with Aptitude, but now it had been hollowed out, all thoughts of importance were crushed by the weight of this . . . this thing before him.

A writhing wound at the world’s heart. Almost blind, mindless, ignorant, and so much the very centre of its expanding kingdom that it could abide nothing but its own ignorance. And it was an ignorance that it forced on all those in its presence; that it sent out along with its human puppets, for them to carry to the ends of the earth. He had witnessed this monster’s servitors venturing out into the world he knew. The blind man Messel had told him that the Worm was moving out from its lair into the wider world.

He could not now grasp the delicate thoughts of an artificer, but he could understand that here before him was the death of all Aptitude – and of magic too, if magic actually existed – the cessation of human thought, a despot of conformity and blinkered tyranny that could not brook anything challenging its monotonous, meaningless world.

One of the priests reached out for him, and Totho casually backhanded him, smashing his gauntlet into the man’s scar-ravaged face. The warriors closed in, swords levelled, and he let a couple of them strike at him, watching the blades scrape off his mail, before he just pushed his way through them.

He looked up again at that eye-twisting divinity that had robbed him of everything he had believed in. Its reach was finite, though, for it could not rob him of the things he had never believed. Staring up at the fathomless dark of its substance, he knew it could not be what it seemed. There was no magic, and the world ran by firm rules – even if he could not bring them to mind any more.

He continued studying the segmented shape that towered over him, looking past all the boiling darkness that seethed out of it, taking in the rippling legs, the hooked fangs. He held firm to his long-nurtured loathing of the supernatural, his deep-ingrained faith in a mechanistic universe, and his eyes pierced the veil that cloaked the god of the Worm. Strip it to its base shape, and there was nothing remarkable about it but its size. It’s nothing but a big centipede.

‘Is this it?’ he demanded, his voice ringing unnaturally loud throughout the cave. ‘This is your master? I challenge it! I set my armour against it.’ He rounded on the aghast priests. ‘I cannot tell you how this metal was made, but now that it is made, it goes on working. You cannot deny it. You cannot dent it with your stupidity. It is not subject to your belief.’ He saw their baffled expressions. They could not understand what he meant.

He stepped forwards, and the slight shift in the monstrous centipede’s swaying motion showed that it was aware of him.

He looked over at Esmail, seeing the man creeping closer. There’s a time for subtlety. This is not it.

The priests were crowding him now, shoving him forwards towards the lip of that chasm. He let them. One hand drifted towards his belt. There was something very important about his belt. He knew it, he knew it, and yet he could not quite understand it. Something was there, and had there not been a plan . . .?

Then Esmail was amongst the warriors of the Worm, shouting for Totho to get clear. His hands carved them apart, shearing through flesh and armour, dropping three in that first surprise rush. The others turned to fight him, swift and relentless, and he led them about the enclosed confines of the cave, cutting their swords in two with bare-handed parries, or darting in beneath their blows to hack at their bodies. He was outmatched swiftly, but he never let them catch him.

‘Go!’ he was shouting to Totho. ‘Run!’

At the same time, someone barrelled into the priests, striking out at them with a staff. It looked just like one of their own, and Totho could make nothing of that – the intruder seemed almost berserk, though, smashing randomly around and scattering them, freeing Totho up for a moment. Perhaps he, too, expected Totho just to run.

Totho’s thumb found the string at his belt. He could not remember what it was for, only that it was important.

He remembered his conversation with Esmail, back in the prison.

It’s as simple as pulling on a string.

Why had he said that? What would that accomplish? He could no longer remember. Pulling on a string did sound simple, though. One hardly needed to be Apt for that, surely?

His hand was on that string, just one pull required, and yet he could not do it. The necessary link between impulse and action had been broken. He was betrayed by his own Aptitude, which had guided everything he had ever done. Now that its crutch was gone, such a simple move was beyond him.

That vast head struck down, blotting out his entire world, but it seemed confused by the struggling melee before it, instead hammering at the rock, smashing one of the priests into a pulp, then drawing back.

Esmail was coming back round, the warriors right on his heels. ‘Go! Go!’ he was shouting, but only because he did not understand how important all this was. Not for Che, not for Collegium, not for freedom, but for artificers everywhere. This obscenity must go.

Then the Worm lunged again, and this time its hooked claws pincered his body and lifted him up.

The mail held. For a few impossible seconds, the god of the Centipede-kinden strove against the metallurgy of the Iron Glove and could not break it, though Totho felt his cuirass twist and groan, felt the latching between breast- and backplate snap under the force. And still his hand was at his waist, paralysed by ignorance. The dark radiance that the Worm blazed with enveloped him, but he felt the solid physical clutch of its fangs, and knew he was right. The lord of the underworld, the god of sacrifice and slavery, was no more than a vast beast.

Then someone was clinging to him, and he looked down into Esmail’s stricken face as the other man brought the lantern down across the Worm’s head, flaming pieces shattering across its broad carapace, which burned for moments like flaming oil on water before the darkness began to conquer the flames.

In the guttering light of that fire, Totho locked eyes with Esmail and saw understanding there – at last someone who understood. And Esmail had never been Apt: those parts of his mind that this monster was stifling had nothing to do with the urgent instructions Totho had coached him with.

To Esmail, it was just pulling on a string.

The Assassin caught the ripcord that dangled from Totho’s belt, which Totho had carefully fed through all his little devices there, in that tiny corner of the prison where he had last been able to think.

He let go of Totho, falling away back towards the ledge, the cord ripping free. Totho stared down, seeing him vanish into darkness towards that unseen shelf.

The mandibles of god increased their grinding pressure and he felt the two halves of his armour shear, each of them still intact despite it all, but the pressure of their displacement beginning to tear him apart.

The Worm lifted him high towards the cave’s ceiling, fighting against the resistance of the armour, the products of artifice that it could not suppress.

The thing about artifice, was Totho’s last thought, is that it works whether you believe in it or not.

The string of grenades that looped through his belt erupted all at once and tore him in two, killing him instantly and ripping apart the head of the Worm.