Seal of the Worm

Forty-Eight

Straessa backed off, her blade sliding out of a corpse that was suddenly, horribly, not the figure she had just stabbed.

The fighting had stopped, all in that very same moment, and now the Collegiates around her who were not concerned with the wounded were drawing back from the sight before them. A grim hush was falling, broken only by the moans of the injured.

Across the field, on the far side of that choked rift, she could see the Wasps were falling back too, recoiling in revulsion from the mess of bodies that now clogged their breached wall.

‘Gorenn, tell me . . .’ She did not mean, What am I looking at? She knew what she was looking at, and yet she desperately needed some clarification, some comforting lie that would let her address this sight, categorize it and turn it into something she could put behind her. ‘Please, tell me . . .’

The Dragonfly stood stock still, staring out at that massed atrocity with a fixed expression. She had no arrows left in her quiver, Straessa noticed. In her hands was the same Collegiate shortsword that almost everyone there had ultimately resorted to.

Gorenn had no words, no words at all.

The enemy had just dropped, all at once, like manikins with their strings cut, across the whole of the battlefield, so that the chasm they had been surging from in such numbers was now glutted and blocked with the tangled mass of dead. But not their dead.

‘Get me a Sarnesh here!’ Straessa pleaded. Please, someone tell me what we do now. ‘What does Milus say? Is he seeing this?’

It was a strained, ghastly minute before an Ant-kinden woman staggered over, her eyes full of the sight before them. ‘Milus is dead,’ she got out.

‘Lucky bastard,’ Straessa said, with feeling. ‘So where does that leave us? What do we do?’

By now she could see that the Wasps were returning to defend their wall, albeit reluctantly. At the same time she became aware again that the snapbow slung over her back was something more than just a weight of metal: it was a weapon, fit for her hands and her mind.

But nobody was yet moving across that hideous charnel field. Nobody had the heart. The Sarnesh woman was shaking her head. There were no orders.

Before them lay a carpet of fallen children.

There were dozens of different kinden among them – Beetles, Woodlice, Moths, Mole Crickets, and some Straessa could not even name. Not one of them looked to be more than eleven, and most were younger, far younger. They lay still amongst the wreckage of arms and armour crafted for far larger bodies. There were thousands of them; tens of thousands. They were uncountable.

Straessa felt something within her close to breaking point. At no time before had she ever wanted less to be in command of anything, or to bear any kind of responsibility than now, facing this.

She could not even understand it. She could not know what the sight meant. She thought Gorenn might, from her expression, but the Dragonfly was not putting it into words.

So what the pits happens now?

‘We’ve got it all back?’ she asked the Sarnesh woman. ‘Auto-motives, artillery, all that?’

The Ant nodded numbly.

So what? Do we just . . .? We came here for a reason, didn’t we . . .?

It was the thought of trampling across that vast mass of dead children, of grinding them beneath the tracks of the automotives, of climbing that mound of small corpses that had banked up before the breach.

I don’t know if I have it in me to do that, or to order anyone else to do it, but someone has to issue some sort of order. We can’t just stand here till we starve.

What would Eujen do?

The thought was inexpressibly calming. Eujen would know exactly what to do.

‘Fetch me a messenger. I need someone to take word to the Wasps.’

‘I’ll go,’ Gorenn volunteered immediately, but Straessa shook her head.

‘I think sending a Commonwealer over to them would give entirely the wrong message,’ she decided. And, when the Dragonfly made to protest, she added, ‘It’s not you. I just don’t want any dumb Wasp having flashbacks to what you did to them in the Twelve-year War, right?’ It was the world’s weakest joke, and Straessa could barely muster the ghost of a smile, but Gorenn returned it, in just about the same degree, and nodded in resignation.

In the end, it was Sperra who went. She had not fought in the battle but arrived afterwards, seeming a strange mix of defiance and misery. But when Balkus explained what was going on, she volunteered. She had run enough messages between cities before Collegium was liberated, after all. What was one more?

And at least she could fly. Nobody was about to tread that body-cluttered distance lightly.

By then, Straessa had the full attention of all the Lowlander contingents: Sarnesh, Vekken, Tseni, Netheryen, Princep and Collegiate. Staring round at them all, she thought, How mad are you all, that you’re going to let me do this? Don’t you know who I am? They didn’t make me chief officer even when I was the only officer left in the entire Coldstone Company – that’s how unreliable I am.

‘Go and tell the Wasps,’ she said, her voice stumbling over the words, ‘that the army of the Lowlands will offer them terms . . .’

And in the dark of the underworld the sounds of fighting and massacre went abruptly silent.

‘What is it?’ demanded Thalric. ‘What’s happened.’

Che held him very tight, so that he could feel her shaking. She had no answer for him.

Then the wailing started as the slaves surveyed what had become of the enemy, and began recognizing faces.

Esmail was left in pitch darkness after the flash of Totho’s explosives had blazed across the cavern above him. The force of the blast was enough to knock him flat, and everyone else as well, but he was prepared for the onslaught of dark-adapted Centipede warriors descending on him, taking advantage of his blindness.

Yet they did not come. Only silence came, and silence and darkness were, for a stretched-out moment, his only companions.

Until at last the cries began, fearful and incredulous. They started as a terrified murmur and rose to shrieking denial, to rage, to utter babbling madness. At least one voice rushed past him, and then receded as it pitched over the brink, surely at the owner’s intent.

And then his name was called: ‘Esmail!’

‘Who . . .? Hermit?’

‘Come here. Come here, man.’ There followed the sound of a solid impact. ‘Not you! Get back!’

Esmail limped over, feeling half broken by his fall. ‘I need light. Can you hold them off?’

‘Easily,’ the Hermit grunted, which surprised Esmail at the time because he still expected the Worm’s warriors to be present.

He had tinder with him, and some dry mushroom stalks, and flint and steel, but it took him a long scrabbling time in the dark to get anything ignited. There was meanwhile the occasional whack of the Hermit’s staff, and the babble of distressed voices did not let up, but no pitched battle flared up. Esmail was utterly bewildered until he finally got the torch lit and cast a look around.

He saw at once that the Hermit had herded a little knot of Scarred Ones together, and was keeping them hemmed in under the threat of his staff. But of the warriors . . .

He saw the bodies, and what they had become. He understood.

Totho . . .

There was no sign of the Lowlander, just as there was no sign of the Worm, but these corpses gave testament as to its fate. Artifice had triumphed in the end. The new world had undone the follies of the old.

Esmail felt weak, and then another thought struck him: what he would see when they ventured above into the city. So many . . .

But there was no other way out. He could either subject himself to that or go blind and let the Hermit guide him, and it was the thought of the old man’s scorn at such cowardice which decided him.

‘What about these?’ he demanded, staring at the Scarred Ones, because he dearly wanted to kill them all. He held them responsible for their own actions, and for the actions of all their kin back into the depths of history. His own kind was now but a memory, a footnote, poised on the very brink of extinction, but if ever a kinden deserved complete annihilation, it was the Worm, for all they had done, and for all they had brought into and taken from the world.

But the Hermit was of their kind, too, and when he said, ‘Leave them. What do they matter now?’ Esmail deferred to him. He felt he owed the old man that much respect for having been able to break those bonds himself and thus become something resembling a human being.

Or at least as much as I do, anyway. Weary, hurting, disgusted, Esmail led the way back up to the city.

It was just as he knew it would be. Every street, every space, had been taken up by that vast spiralling progress: the warriors of the Worm off on their crusade to master the wider world. The sight made him sick, that slew of the half-grown, the ultimate victims of the Worm’s madness, extending as far as his torchlight could reach in every direction, and then everywhere he went.

But then his head jerked up in surprise, because that vast stone city was not silent.

For a second he stopped, heart hammering, trying to work out what it was that he was hearing, that shrill, drawn-out, squalling sound from the centre of the vast maze of stone. Then he locked eyes with the Hermit.

‘The child pits.’

And they were there, of course, the most recent taxes that the Worm had exacted, the last few crops of children who had not yet lost their kinden and been turned into the Worm. The pits where the final phases of metamorphosis had been penned were still and corpse cluttered, but the youngest still lived – though for how long, if Esmail could not do something? He stared down helplessly, seeing that seething vat of need and hunger and despair, and just trembling at his own utter lack of power. What could he do?

Then he knew what he could do.

Soon after that, he had rounded them up – the other survivors. He was surprised at just how many there were, despite the toll the Worm must have taken on them towards the end. He had all the surviving prisoners, those who had not been led down for sacrifice. More than that, he had the Scarred Ones, the last enclave of the Centipede-kinden – old and young, adult and child, men and women – standing in a frightened, unruly group before the child pits, staring with loathing at Esmail and the Hermit.

‘Get them out,’ Esmail ordered. ‘Get them all out. Feed them. Carry them if you have to. Keep them alive.’

When one of them stepped forward to question why they should do what he said, Esmail killed him with a single blow of his hand.

‘Listen to me,’ he told them, without a grain of mercy in his tone. ‘I hate you all. I would gladly see each one of you dead, and you deserve it, each one of you. What? No warriors to kidnap and kill for you? No great army to live in the guts of, and perpetuate, and pretend you had no choice? The man standing beside me is living proof that you had a choice. If you do as I say now, this one token act of atonement, then perhaps – just perhaps – your miserable kinden might be permitted to survive. Defy me and I will kill each and every one of you myself. And I can. And I will. Just give me an excuse.’

Slowly, fearfully, the former priesthood of the Worm began to move. They moved stubbornly, bitterly, and yet they moved to his bidding. In a way he was disappointed that he was not able to make more of an example of them.