Seal of the Worm

One

It was cold down in the bowels of the earth. The darkness was not the same hindrance to her that it was to her companions, but the cold she could do nothing about.

Worse than that was the absence. Born Apt in Collegium, she had no precise words for it. Perhaps the Moths might have done before her ancestors had thrown them out. To a magician, every place had its own feel. There was some additional sense thus engaged that the Apt could never guess at, and that she herself was still learning how to use. Travelling from her home city to the halls beneath Khanaphes, from the great wild expanses of the Commonweal to the tortuous knots of the Mantis forest, all these places had touched her and informed her, even if she had not realized it. There had been a constant voice, and now it was gone – at best. At worst, when she strained that unnamed sense of hers to the utmost, she could hear something else.

A chanting, a susurration from the stone depths. The voice of the enemy. The voice of the Worm.

They were all in the realm of the Worm. In her rage, the Empress Seda had broken the Seal holding that common enemy in its prison domain for a thousand years. Che and her companions had been cast into that dark closed-off place.

It was still closed off, like a woodlouse clasped about itself, but uncurling now, slowly but surely. There would be cracks showing already, weak points that the Worm could pierce to cross, experimentally, into the wide world beyond. Che had thought to do the same, at first. So simple, to exercise her powers as a great magician in this magic-forged place, where surely power was concentrated and free for the taking. She would find out where the fractures were, and she would leave the Worm’s realm before its denizens ever realized new guests had arrived.

But that sense, that ability of hers, had fled. She could not breathe water. She could not walk through rock. The medium of this place was inimical to her powers. She, crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes as inheritrix of the ancient ways, had been cut off from her throne and from her inheritance. She was denied the Aptitude that was her birthright, and also the magic that was its replacement. Without those crutches, she fell.

Only one lifeline remained to her. She yet held on to one faint and tenuous connection back to the world, as if fate had considered her exile not cruel enough. Seda was still her sister, in some perverse, bitter way. They had been crowned at the same time. They were linked. Sometimes, unbidden, Che sensed her.

She knew, from this bond, that the doom that had befallen her and her fellows had not touched Seda. Seda was free, still out in the world.

Seda had won.

Faced with that realization, something had broken inside Che. She was aware that she had been down here now – if down was even a meaningful word for where she was – for some time, for days, tendays, months even. She was moved, goaded to her feet and forced onwards from place to place. The hands that shoved at her, that grabbed at her and pulled and would not let her just sit down and give up – they belonged to her friends. She remembered them, distantly. She had brought them to this fate, led them here to their banishment. She would not have blamed them if they abandoned her in the dark, just left her behind. Possibly she would have preferred that, but they would not let her be.

They brought her food. It was horrible, uncooked and slimy, breaking into brittle, dry pieces in her mouth. They would not leave her alone until she had eaten. They brought her metallic-tasting water.

Sometimes she was aware that they were hunted, and then they hustled her along from hiding place to hiding place. In the depths that she inhabited – her own personal prison – she could not raise sufficient curiosity to care who pursued them, or why.

Let it be the Worm, was all she thought. Let it make an end of me. For surely that hideous, all-consuming monster of legend was more than equal to the task.

In those moments she listened too hard and heard that chanting, ranting echo of it, so distant and yet so potent and hateful, she knew it could do more than make an end of her: it could make an end of all the world. The Worm was a thing apart from Apt and Inapt, from mere kinden and kin. The Worm would devour the world, and Seda had given it the chance to do so.

After unknown ages, there was fire.

Che had lived with the cold and the dark – within and without – for so long that at first she did not understand what it was. The feel of warmth on her skin, the light – so brazen, such a lure to all the dangers of this place – it was like a distant beacon to her, calling her back from the lonely places where she had become lost.

She, who could see in darkness, only realized how blind she had become to her surroundings as she began to return to them.

How long. . .? But she could not know. Some part of her, some internal regulator that marked the hours and days, had ceased to function once she was cast down here. The land of the Worm had no sunrise, no phases of the moon. Timeless, undying, it had lain here for an age beneath an unchanging stone sky. It was beyond the sun, therefore beyond time.

Her eyes were already open, but she opened them anyway, beginning to see rather than just stare vacantly.

She remembered her companions, her friends, fellow inmates of this final asylum. What could be worse than being a lone prisoner of this dungeon? Being responsible for the imprisonment of others. She found their faces as the fire lit them, one by one.

There was Tynisa, her sister in upbringing if not in blood, Weaponsmaster, Tisamon’s daughter. Tynisa, whose revenant father was now a slave to the Empress, bound by chains of magic. The girl had always run ahead through all the years of their shared childhood, with poor clumsy Che stumbling in her wake. So how did it come to this, that she has followed me even to this place? Che could feel all the sharp points of the Mantis breaking through Tynisa’s Spider-kinden facade, and all it told her was how fragile that combination really was.

Thalric next, her enemy, her captor, her victim. Thalric, whom she had wrested from the Empress, transformed from Imperial consort to renegade lover of one Cheerwell Maker, dysfunctional Beetle magician. How could he cope in the realm that she had come to? His limited ability to accept or understand magic must have broken him, surely . . .? And yet here he was, still sitting beside her. The hand that cradled hers was his. She knew its callouses and its lines, the touch that warmed her, the heat in it that could kill.

Further from her: Maure, the halfbreed magician from the Commonweal, no doubt fiercely wishing she had stayed there. She lacked Che’s power but far surpassed her in understanding. Seeing her, Che found hope: surely Maure could help her. The woman was a survivor. She must have some way of wriggling free from the bonds of this place.

And last of them: the unexpected, the unasked, the assassin. Esmail, his name was, and he had travelled in the Empress’s company. He had tried to kill Seda, and he had succeeded in putting an end to the ancient Moth magician, Argastos. That success and that failure together had led to him being by Che’s side when the Empress had unleashed her wrath. But he was a killer by blood and by training and by deed. He had surely earned his place in this realm of the damned.

Her hand clenched suddenly on Thalric’s and he started. She heard him speak her name, soft and almost in her ear, as though wanting to keep her only to himself.

The fire leapt in her eyes, dancing in unnatural hues of violet, blue, corpselight green. The colours glinted on the enclosing walls: a cave? Of course a cave, but she had a sense that they had previously been travelling through vast spaces, caverns whose ceilings were high beyond guessing. Her residual senses recalled waterfalls, lakes that were almost seas, the far constellations of distant cities.

There was a smell of food – of meat cooking – and abruptly Che felt hungrier than she had ever been. On cue, Thalric drew her hand towards a flat rock on which strips and shreds of something pallid and stringy were laid out.

It looked awful, but it was meat and it was hot, so she ate with vigour. Chewy but almost tasteless, it was not what she had been living on since . . . since whenever.

‘Someone tell me what’s going on,’ Che said at last. ‘What’s happened since we . . . Since whatever. I don’t care who, but someone tell me.’

‘Now there’s the Che we were looking for,’ Thalric remarked drily. ‘Always with the useless questions.’ His sardonic smile was leavened by something uncharacteristic, though: worry. Worry for her.

‘We’ve been on our own down here for a long time,’ Maure declared, her voice strung taut with fatigue and nerves. ‘We’ve been avoiding other people for most of the time. We . . . this place is huge, a whole world locked away. There are strange kinden here . . . we didn’t know, none of us, what they would do with us. So we’ve been living like vagrants for . . . time. A long time. We wanted just to strike out. I thought I could . . . find a way out.’ Her voice shook. ‘I can’t . . . I have nothing left of my skills. Thalric says they were never real, and I . . . sometimes I think he must be right. This place has killed them, eaten them. And out there, in the true dark, there are things . . . and so little food, so little of anything. And you . . . at first we thought you would come back to us and tell us a way out, but you just . . . there was nothing . . .’

‘I . . .’ Che’s mind thronged with excuses, mystical nonsense about seeking answers, fighting some higher battle. She knew, wretchedly, that they would probably believe her: even Maure, who should know better. The words were in her mouth but she swallowed them down. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t . . . It was too much, and I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But you . . . you’ve kept us together, all of us. You’ve found . . . something?’

‘People,’ said Esmail quietly. ‘We found the people who live here.’

‘We lived in the wilderness at the start,’ Maure explained. ‘But it’s hard out there. There’s just rock, darkness, mushrooms and lichen. When we couldn’t last any longer, when we were starving, we had to go to where the fires were. We’ve been chained to where the people are, since then, where the food is. But never meeting with them, hiding ourselves. Stealing. We’ve been living by stealing. Esmail, he crept in and took from them, their food, their water . . . It was the only way.’

‘But the Worm . . .’ Che whispered. This name – and it was not even that ancient enemy’s true name, just the Moths’ insult for them – had been unspeakable and erased from history, but here . . . what was there to lose in saying it? ‘You can’t just walk up to the Worm and steal from its table, surely?’

‘Slaves,’ from Esmail. ‘Those we saw, those we took such care to avoid, for fear of their terrible power . . . They’re only slaves of the Worm. We have seen the Worm since.’

Che took a deep breath, feeling that her hold on the here and now, rather than the dismal wastes within her, was suddenly failing. Too much, too soon, and yet she had to know. She had to understand. ‘What’s changed? The fire . . . the food . . .’

‘Someone found us,’ Maure told her.

‘He’d been spying on us for days,’ Thalric interjected, in what sounded like a jab at Esmail’s ability to remain unseen. ‘Messel is his name. He’s a . . . a renegade, of sorts, but there’s a place near here where he has kin. He won’t talk about it, but he’s not exactly an exile and he’s said he returns there sometimes. A slave village.’

Another deep breath. ‘You have a plan?’

‘We need to know where in the pits we are,’ Thalric explained. ‘Next, how to get out. This man, this Messel, he had a sort of a laugh when I first said that, but when he realized that we’d got in somehow, he shut up real fast. After that, when we asked him again about talking to more of his folk, he was a lot keener.’

‘Does your plan go any further than that?’ Che asked.

‘Why, yes, the plan is: find out how, get out, never mention this place again. Needs fleshing out a little, though. We need intelligence first,’ said Thalric, the former agent. ‘We’re in somewhere completely alien, but there are people here. That means common ground. That gives us something to work with.’

‘And the Worm?’ Che asked.

There was a long silence. Clearly nobody had any answers.

While the fire burned itself out, they rested. Thalric, Tynisa and Esmail slept, and Che guessed that they had been doing most of the work while she had been refusing to face reality. Now she took hold of herself, still ashamed of the way that she had just given in. So I have no Aptitude? It’s not as if anyone down here’s going to ask me to fix their gear train. So this place has no reserves of magic, somehow. Are the Worm Apt nowadays, then? Was there an underground revolution that drove it all out, or . . .? But it was as Thalric had said: they needed more information. If there were any people here who would not kill them on sight – or worse – then Che needed to speak to them.

Messel had led them to this cave, she was told, and it was deep and tortuous enough that the firelight would not show outside. While the others slept, Maure took Che to the mouth of it, a jagged slash of dark in a broken rockface, where some ancient upheaval had changed the contours of this buried place. The terrain fell away from them in a tumbled field of jagged stone and shale, and Che’s Art let her see out across it, the great desolation of it: as inhospitable a landscape as she had ever seen.

‘How can anything live here?’ she asked hollowly.

‘There’s plenty.’ Maure’s voice still sounded shaky. ‘There’s stuff . . . lichen-looking stuff over a lot of the rocks, and wherever there’s water there are fungi. And things eat the fungi and the lichen, and other things eat them, just as you’d expect. Crickets – there are a lot of crickets. That’s what we just ate. Messel brought one down for us.’

The idea of eating cricket meat seemed such a normal and domestic thing that Che almost laughed.

Her Art had limits, but she strained her eyes, seeing something out there that looked more complex, more artificial. There was a chasm, and she thought there was a river, but beyond it, set into the rising cliffs of the far bank . . .

‘Is that a town?’

‘Cold Well,’ said a low, resonant voice, and they both started from a shrouded figure crouching motionless nearby, which even Che’s eyes had missed.

For a second Che was reaching for magic that remained stubbornly absent, seeking a defence, a weapon, but then Maure announced, ‘Messel.’

He was draped in cloth, cloaked with it, then a long, hooded tunic and trousers beneath, all cut into a heavy and unfamiliar style, the fabric woven from thick grey-mottled fibres. Seeking his face under the cowl, she tried to meet his eyes and failed.

His skin was dead white, save where it was thinnest – where the faint shadows of veins and bones showed through. He was small, surely no taller than she, and thin to the point of starvation. His face was taut over a skull whose contours she could trace, and his long, delicate hands were lessons in anatomy. He had no eyes at all, not even sockets, just a wrinkled expanse of translucent skin from hairline down to his beak of a nose.

‘Cold Well,’ he said again. ‘I was born there.’ The voice buzzed within his chest, sounding as though it was meant for a far larger man than this fragile creature.

‘A slave?’

‘There are only slaves and the Worm.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘And now you.’

‘Messel,’ Che spoke his name. He was not coming closer, crouched against the stone with that sightless visage cocked upwards, drawing in his understanding of the world through sound and smell and who knew what hidden Art besides. When she took a step towards him, he scuttled back exactly the same distance, his feet sure on the uneven rocks, silent in motion, then remaining still to the point of invisibility, no matter how good her eyes were.

‘Are you . . . the Worm?’ She had meant to say ‘of the Worm’ but the way the words came out seemed more fitting.

He shook his head, his blind attention plumbing unseen vistas. ‘Messel,’ he said in that rich voice. ‘Messel the hunted. Messel who would not work. Messel the kinless, the cursed.’

‘And you are of this Cold Well.’

‘Once.’

Che let her Art lapse, so that the darkness rushed back on her like a tide, obliterating all she saw of the land beyond. She had the measure of her own sight, though, and after a while her eyes adjusted, and she could see a faint suggestion of light from what Messel had just named Cold Well. Even the prisoners of this tomb felt the chill: there was a scatter of fire over there, though what it was they burned in this place she could not guess.

She turned her face upwards and then clutched abruptly at Maure’s arm. ‘There are stars! The sky . . . we can just fly out?’

A long pause from the other two, and then Maure’s subdued response: ‘They’re not stars.’

‘They dwell above. Their lights lure the unwary who tread the air above us, insects, men too. All who are drawn to the lights are devoured,’ Messel intoned softly. ‘Those that tell the story that says we were not always here, that we came here from another place, a place of light – not my kinden, but I have heard the tale – they say that the ceiling-dwellers were placed there so that none could even search for a way back out. For me, I never believed in such things.’ And of course, whether he tilted his head towards the distant ceiling or towards the night sky itself, he would see no stars.

Che felt a hand clasp her arm, and then Maure was leaning into her, trembling slightly. ‘There are no dead here, Che,’ she whispered. ‘No loose spirits, no pieces of the slain. They all go. They all go to the Worm.’

Che shuddered, and for a long time she just sat there, a comforting arm about the halfbreed magician, staring up into that closed and hungry sky.