The Air War

Twenty-Six

Whenever Seda dreamt, she was always there: the other, the twin, her sister and her rival. As she wrestled with her own sleeping mind, trying to recapture the ancient techniques that had allowed the Moth-kinden to parse the future through their nightmares, always there was that presence, sometimes near, sometimes far, but always there. Then the clarity of divination would fragment and crack, the stress of two kindred powers too much for such fragile visions to sustain.

She woke into rage and frustration yet again. I will destroy you! But there was a tinge of fear as well. She was the Empress of all the Wasps, and she was crowned the heir to yesterday’s lost magic but, so long as she must share the throne, she could not be easy in her mind, and every triumph, every victory would taste like ashes. She had lived in fear most of her life, in the shadow of her vengeful, petty-minded brother, but now she understood the fear that he himself had lived in, the power of his office exposing him to threats that would pass over the head of a lesser man.

I will not become Alvdan. And yet one ordinary Beetle-kinden girl, a child of wretched Collegium, was haunting her.

When Seda had been gifted — or cursed — with this inheritance, so too had this Cheerwell Maker. When Seda had gone to the ancient seat of power in Khanaphes and bullied the Masters there into making her their heir, so too had the ignorant, stupid girl also been crowned. Too late Seda had realized what she had created: an equal, an opposite, an enemy. All the power that she had worked so hard for had been divided between her and this witless Beetle. However great Seda had become, so too had Cheerwell Maker, if she only understood it. And Seda knew that the other girl would understand all too soon.

I tried to kill her. She should be dead. Yet the girl lived, and Seda felt her like a thorn, every minute. Worse, the Beetle was even now in the Commonweal, where surely magicians lived who would be teaching her their secrets, and although the Beetle had been made Seda’s peer, any new power she coaxed from the Dragonflies would make her stronger.

There was only one way out now: Seda must unearth powers that the girl had no claim to. I would rip out the heart of history if it would but serve me.

One of the old counterproductive superstitions that could still be found sometimes in some out-of-the-way parts of the Empire was the belief that, when twins were born, their father must kill one soon after the birth or else, when grown, each would destroy the other, neither able to countenance the existence of so close a mirror to themselves. It was a foolish belief, and the practice had been outlawed on pain of death — why deny the Empire its soldiers, after all? — but Seda understood it now. Even if the Beetle girl bore her no ill will, even if she went away and never returned to trouble Seda’s ambitions, the simple knowledge that there existed that other self, that counterpart, was to her unbearable.

I will never be free of her unless I destroy her, and to destroy her I must acquire strength.

Where is Gjegevey?

She kicked her way out of bed angrily, shouting for the servants, who entered reluctantly. Being a body servant to Empress Seda was an uncertain prospect. To the cringing women who dared present themselves, Seda shouted, ‘Get me Gjegevey, now!’ and they rushed out, grateful for an errand that took them away from their mistress almost immediately.

Seda stood naked in the centre of her bedchamber, quivering slightly from the dregs of the terror and revulsion the dream had left her with.

Something scraped — the husk of a metal sound seeming to come from a greater distance than her bedchamber would allow. When she looked round, an armoured figure stood statue-still in one corner, and she could not have said whether he was there before or not. Certainly, the servants had not noted him, but then Tisamon was very good at passing unseen, and his armour was no hindrance. The armour was him, as much the focus of his physical presence as anything else.

‘So, you’re back,’ she said, her tone carefully casual. ‘I trust General Roder appreciated your assistance.’

I want to kill him, came the stony rattle of his voice, more felt than heard.

‘Of course you do. Sometimes I envy how simple your desires are, how easily satisfied. She stepped towards him like a dancer, feeling the chill of his dead eyes on her bare skin. ‘You would kill us all — all of my kinden — I know.’ For in life he had hated Wasps, which made her taming of him all the sweeter.

Not you. Never you. She stood well within his reach now, and his bladed gauntlet was donned. A single swift strike, far faster than she could react to, and she would follow her brother and Uctebri into the final dark. She reached out and touched the elegant lines of his mail, following the contours of his carapace. Oh, he was bound to her, and eagerly he followed her commands, but it was not a soldier’s loyalty that moved him, nor a slavish obedience, but something stronger and weaker than either. The closest word language had for it was love, but what could such a dreadful thing as this revenant make of that idea? She had bound him by holding his blade that was a part of him through the mysteries of the Weaponsmasters. She had bound him by feeding him blood, and she continued to do so, to keep him strong and close. All that was just the foundation, though, preliminaries that had allowed her to open negotiations with his will. She had bound him after that with promises to the heart of his Inapt nature — Inapt by kinden, and Inapt by his very existence now — that she and only she might bring back the old days when magic, and his people, were strong.

Greatest of all, though, she had bound him by understanding the razor edges of his true nature, seeing where they would bend and twist until he was a weapon that would fit her hand only. Passion and death made up the essence of Tisamon. He had been a hero fit for all the old Mantis romances, tragic and doomed and bloody-handed. So it was that what he felt for her was something like love and, if she handled him poorly, if she took a false step in toying with his bitter feelings, he might kill her despite — because of — all the chains of magic that linked them.

And if I take him to my bed? The thought was irresistible. It was possible, she suspected, but the old stories were full of those who had been lured to lie with a ghost, and had found only death. The fools in the tales were all in love themselves, though, and Seda had no such vulnerability. The thought only excited her, and it would bind the revenant to her all the more thoroughly, for good or for ill.

She nearly gave in to the temptation there and then, because there was a challenge that she could meet with her eyes open — not like the sly, sneaking threat that the Beetle girl posed. But, no, she had summoned Gjegevey, after all, and if the old man walked in on that it might kill him. She smirked at the thought, for a moment just a Wasp girl of good family treasuring a risque thought. Then her main purpose returned to her, the lurking presence of the other, and her need to secure some source of strength that Cheerwell Maker could not touch. Gjegevey was being coy with her, she knew, holding back information because he thought he knew what was best for her. She would have to disabuse him of that notion.

If only she could simply send Tisamon after the wretched Beetle girl, but she knew that would only lose her his services, for the Maker girl had already driven off the revenant before. Unless Seda was close to prevent it, she would do so again, or banish him, or even wrest control of him from Seda’s hands. Such tools as the Mantis ghost were best used against more mundane enemies. Any work of magic was vulnerable to a magician, just as (she supposed) any mechanical weapon would fall prey to the enemy’s artificers, could they but get hold of it.

There was an almost inaudible scratch at the door, Gjegevey announcing his presence. She shrugged into a robe to spare his stammers, and called for him to enter.

He shuffled in, hunched and grey-skinned, old but sufficiently distant from Wasp-kinden humanity that it was impossible to date him. He wore a robe of Imperial hues today, halved black and gold like an Auxillian’s uniform.

‘It’s time,’ she told him, as soon as he had closed the door behind him.

‘Ah, Majesty?’ Always the vague old man, but she had known him too long to be fooled. He was as keen as a knife behind the wrinkles and the rheumy eyes.

‘The Seal of the Worm, you called it,’ she told him, ‘and to me that said power. Something the Moths kept to themselves, all those years ago, almost completely excised from those writings that they let out into the wider world. They didn’t think that my people would conquer their roost at Tharn, though, and seize some few of their precious scrolls. The Seal of the Worm, Gjegevey.’ Her hand traced the spiral that she remembered, crooking into a claw for the tridentine blot that had formed the centrepiece.

The old man was silent for a moment, still only a step inside the door. ‘Majesty,’ he said at last, his voice soft and steady, ‘you know I am your loyal servant, and have been for perhaps longer than any other. Trust my wisdom on this: you do not want to meddle with it. There is no victory to be had over the Worm. There will be other secrets, but not this one. Trust me, your Majesty.’

Seda nodded as though considering this, and then: ‘Kill him,’ she said and, without pausing for breath, ‘Stop!’

In that eyeblink Tisamon had travelled almost all the way across the room towards Gjegevey, claw upraised. Her last word brought the Mantis to a halt perhaps a foot beyond striking distance. Seda watched Gjegevey’s face, the eyes gone wide, the jaw slack, staring at the tip of Tisamon’s metal claw glinting in the morning light. Not so old, then, that death does not hold a little terror for him. Well, it was a lesson he had to learn.

‘I value you, old man,’ Seda said lightly. ‘You were my friend when I had no friends. You say rightly that you were my first supporter. I treasure your advice and your company, but you must never forget,’ and now the steel entered her tone, ‘you are my servant, my slave if I decided to enforce that status upon you, and I am the Empress of all the Wasps. I will brook no divided loyalties, even if that other mistress you serve is only your idea of what is best for me. Counsel me, advise me, but do not take me for a child. Do not seek to protect me from the world, and most certainly do not seek to protect it from me. Do you understand?’

He nodded, swallowing. ‘I congratulate your Majesty on your, ah, reflexes,’ he murmured, just a dry whisper, no doubt calculating what a small fraction of a second’s delay in her countermanding order would have accomplished. Tisamon had not moved throughout the exchange.

‘There was a war,’ she prompted him. ‘I have gleaned that much. But there were many wars, and they blur into one another. Mosquitos, Assassin Bugs, Spiders — the Moths were always fighting someone. And they never simply write as historians. Everything is metaphor. Except that I can see the gap, the hole they have made, as they censored their own past. The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’

‘Yes,’ Gjegevey agreed heavily. ‘The Seal of the Worm is all that is left.’ He gave the words such strange weight that Seda paused for a moment, abandoning her rhetoric.

‘When we were in Khanaphes together, I saw the embassies there. The ancient Masters had entertained ambassadors from all the great powers of their day, and their Beetle servants had maintained that lost past even to the present day.’

Gjegevey nodded glumly, and his eyes flicked to the uplifted blade again. ‘Majesty, may I, ah…’

‘Stand down, Tisamon.’

There was a notable moment of reluctance before the armoured figure lowered its arm and stood back, freezing once again into that brooding Mantis stillness. She would have to have a slave or a prisoner brought up, she knew, for he hated being denied his ration of blood.

‘I saw statues of Moths there,’ Seda continued. ‘Spiders, Dragonflies, Mantis-kinden even. And your people, Gjegevey, ranked as equals. My own kinden were housed in a building that had two of your cousins displayed in stone at the door, and I was given to understand that this was because, when those likenesses were carved, the lands that would become my Empire were yours. Is this true?’

Again that mournful nod and, when her expression hinted at exasperation, he spoke. ‘You have guessed it all or, hm, most of it, I think. Yes, my people had their great days. Yes, there was a, mn, a war that came that we could not stay out of. Yes, after that war we were no longer great, nor have we, ah, ever been so again. The will to change the world was gone from us, hm, after that. We had used it all up in the fight against the Worm.’

‘Worm-kinden,’ she mocked.

‘Ah, no, you know better than that, from your stolen Moth scrolls, from your deciphering of their writings. But the term, the insult, was how they were known from the war, for to the Moths there was ever power in names.’

‘Gjegevey, the Moths had many enemies,’ she told him, and his long face twisted, foreseeing what was coming. ‘The Mosquitos were the greatest threat to their power that they write openly of — or at least as openly as they ever do — and I see that conflict was underway before this… before whatever it was that resulted in the Seal of the Worm. But your own people…?’

‘No,’ Gjegevey whispered, ‘we took no part.’

‘The blood-drinkers, Gjegevey, practitioners of a magic that you yourself have decried. I don’t hold the Moths out as paragons of virtue, but surely…’ She was watching him through narrowed eyes.

‘We took no part,’ he repeated.

‘So what was it that brought your… warriors? Did your people even possess such? What brought you into the war against the Worm?’

‘Yes, we had warriors,’ Gjegevey murmured, so quietly that she could barely hear. ‘Our, hm, our Sentinels had mail that was the envy of the world, and we fought. You do not believe me, with only my example before you, but we fought.’ Before she could press her questions, he looked up, eyes abruptly sharp. ‘Would you see, Majesty?’

She stared at him, and Tisamon quivered slightly, responding to her frustration.

‘The Seal of the Worm, Majesty,’ Gjegevey went on, a strange tone to his voice. ‘Or one of them. I can take you to it.’

To Seda it always seemed that for her to leave Capitas was like having to set in motion an avalanche. Her word was law, her mere whim the driving force behind all the lives around her, but even she could not make these things happen fast. The Imperial bureaucracy gathered pace around her, sending advance scouts and guards, forming her entourage, requisitioning vehicles and in all other ways ensuring that her course was as smooth as possible, if not as swift.

At the edge of her notice was the fact that many of the faces — those that shuffled the deck of her staff and set out the new patterns required to get her where she wanted to go — had changed recently. The palace seemed to have suffered some subtle catastrophe, and the men brought in to replace the fallen or lost all had a certain look, almost a taste to them.

But she told herself she would come back to that. She would first see what it was that Gjegevey wished to show her, and she would judge him on it, and if this escapade turned out to be one more attempt merely to turn her aside, then she would deal with the old man once and for all. Not without regret, it was true, but she could not allow herself to be manipulated, not any more. She had lived through enough of that before her brother died.

The salt mine at Coretsy had changed hands a few times in the Empire’s history, being sufficiently far north and east from Myna that the Beetle-kinden there had not been able to prevent the Wasps walking in and taking it over when the winds of politics and war had blown that way. Recently the Mynans had reclaimed it as part of their sovereign territory, under the acclaimed Treaty of Gold, but as the Mynans were currently not even holding on to Myna, their control over the mine had also lapsed. Still, it was a surprising and risky move for the Empress, so the number of Wasp soldiers that descended upon the tiny community outnumbered the entire local population several times over.

Alighting from her airship — a small, swift craft that had flown with a half-dozen Spearflights to escort it — Seda saw only a handful of buildings raised in a style that recalled somewhat the low, half-underground dwellings of Bee-kinden, but with rounded roofs, so that from overhead they might be mistaken for little hills. The entry to the mine itself could have swallowed any of the buildings easily, and drew the eye away from such meagre dwellings. The gaping portal was set into a hillside, a maw twelve feet high sloping down into the earth.

Coretsy was thronging with her soldiers, but there was a welcoming committee of locals there too, who stood out by virtue of most of them being twice as tall as the Wasps. Mole Crickets, she saw, and should have expected as much, for they were the best miners, and the Empire shipped them in wherever hard work needed to be done. About waist level to the pitch-skinned giants clustered a knot of others, mostly Beetle-kinden, though they looked subtly different to the sophisticated Capitas breed Seda was used to seeing.

‘So, this is who gets condemned to the salt mines, is it?’ she asked Gjegevey as she strode out from under the airship’s shadow, the old man hobbling after her, with Tisamon’s metal silence bringing up the rear.

‘Ah, no, your Majesty,’ the Woodlouse-kinden corrected her almost urgently. ‘They are, hm, not slaves, nor are they sent nor forced, ah

…’ He was losing his breath, unable to keep up with her confident stride, and she found herself suddenly face to face with the delegation of locals. There was a fraction of a pause, very obvious to her, before they knelt, not quite in unison. The Mole Crickets amongst them were still taller than her, even in obeisance.

There was a commonality about them, she noticed, the Beetles and the Crickets. It was as though they had been glazed in the same kiln. A film of white had settled on them, into the creases of their lined faces, in the folds of their clothes. Salt.

‘These mines have been worked for… a, hm, long time. More than Myna and the, hem, Empire has claimed them over the years. Mosquitos, yes. Moth-kinden, certainly,’ Gjegevey huffed, catching up. ‘These men are of mining families; their ancestors served the Moths a thousand years ago, hm, no doubt. It is a proud calling. A mystery.’

Seda was about to respond with some flippant rejoinder calculated to restore her place at the heart of the universe, but another look at these men gave her pause. They had a gravity, a history to them that Gjegevey’s words only scratched the surface of. Beetles and Mole Crickets, yes, but there was a scent of the Old Times about them such as she had never known from the Apt. She had thought that working in a salt mine would be a punishing experience, something that destroyed men, but the miners before her seemed hardened, preserved almost, few of them young and yet all of them strong.

‘Show me what you have brought me here for,’ she ordered, and Gjegevey twitched and bowed, and went shuffling past the kneeling miners, with Seda in his wake and Tisamon following like a steel shadow. As her soldiers moved to accompany her, she held a hand up to halt them.

‘No further,’ she told them. ‘Await my return.’

‘But Majesty-’ began their captain.

‘Should I fear? These are my subjects.’ Her gesture encompassed the miners. In truth it was no great risk, for Tisamon would brook no harm to her, and she trusted his reflexes more than all the soldiers of the Empire. Still the captain hovered reluctantly, and she read strange things in the uppermost level of his mind. Not a concern for her wellbeing, not a devotion to his duty, but a need to know so that reports could be made. He was one of the new men, she realized.

Well, your paymaster shall remain ignorant. ‘You will stay here,’ she ordered, and then turned and followed Gjegevey into the gloom of the mine.

The lights of the Coretsy mine burned with green and blue flames leaping behind glass. Gjegevey had explained that more sophisticated lighting suffered too much from the salt that ate into machinery, so that much of the mine working was still done in ways that the Moth-kinden of old would have recognized. Even so, there were rails set into the floor, and she could hear the deep thump of pumps. Their path took them away from the sounds of machinery and picks. The miners no longer worked the gallery that Gjegevey was leading her to, nor had they for longer than any records showed.

‘And I can take it that it was not simply because they ran out of salt,’ Seda remarked drily.

‘Majesty we are, mn, surrounded by salt: the walls, the ceiling.’ He managed a wan smile. ‘Taste, if you, ah, do not believe me.’

Two miners were waiting ahead by some manner of device, one of them a Beetle holding a spitting, greenish-purple lantern. The other, standing in his shadow, was a slender creature, pale-skinned, blank eyed: a Moth-kinden. Seda raised an eyebrow at Gjegevey, but he simply stepped onto a platform on the contraption, and she realized that it must be some manner of lift.

When she had joined him — and reluctantly now, for this sort of travel did not suit her — the lamp was passed to Gjegevey. Once Tisamon was at her shoulder, some unseen signal sent their platform plummeting into darkness.

‘Yes, there are, hm, Moths here,’ his quiet voice said, as they descended. ‘They are the descendants of the overseers, the masters. They dwell entirely within the earth and seldom venture above. This is a place of power, just as you, ah, sought, but I will try to persuade you to look elsewhere. All the, hm, power that the salt and its traditions can muster is committed to what you are about to behold.’

Without warning, the narrow shaft they had been dropping through was gone, the walls opening into a cavern so broad that the lantern light barely scraped its sides, glittering on them, dreamlike, with unnatural colours. Gjegevey held it out at the full length of his thin arm, tilted so that the light fell below them, even as the lift swung and jolted, swinging in a wide spiral as it slowed.

Seda looked down. There, not quite directly beneath them, was what she had come to see. There was no mistaking it, for in the centre of the rock floor — no, the petrified salt of the floor — was a great disc of dark stone, easily ten feet across. It glistened as the light caught it, some peculiarity of its material making it seem wet. She saw the design that had been cut into it: a spiral of beads, each bead crossed through, and at its centre that three-pronged claw, or head.

‘The Seal of the Worm,’ she breathed.

‘None other,’ Gjegevey conceded softly. ‘Not the first and greatest of them, by any means, for that is lost to record, but a Seal nonetheless. Now, Majesty, your senses far exceed my own, both mundane and magical. You are, I am, mn, sure, quite alive to the invisible world. Would you now descend to step upon the seal?’

Her eyes flashed. ‘Do you doubt my courage?’

He shook his head and at that moment the lift touched down onto the greyish stone-like salt of the cavern floor. With a halting step he was out, and another had taken him past the rim of that circular carving, onto the face of the Seal itself. Looking back, he extended a hand. ‘Majesty?’

She felt for Tisamon’s response and sensed, beyond his usual thorns of suspicion, a thread of fear. But of course Mantis-kinden had been virtually bred to defer to magicians, which was why they had been such valued servants to the Moths, and why the dead man was in her thrall now.

And Gjegevey had dared to walk there, so her choice was either to match him or have him killed. She wondered if he appreciated the position he had put her in.

She was ready for a great deal as she stepped onto that great coin of inscribed stone, reaching out for the lessons in magic that must surely be buried beneath it. But instead she found… absence, nothing, a faint aftertaste of power about the edge of the disc, but nothing more. Her reaction must have shown in her face, for Gjegevey was nodding.

‘The great war against the Worm was different, as you divined; different enough to draw my people into it. There were two reasons that we took up arms that single time. One was that our own kin, our cousins, were threatened, already in the Worm’s shadow, but even for that reason we might not have stirred. We were slow to anger, even when we, ah, possessed the might to make that anger felt. The truth was the nature of our enemy, or so I deduce. The war with the Worm broke us as a power in the world, humbled us and reduced us. Our records from that time and before are, hm, incomplete.’ His voice betrayed a scholar’s horror. ‘Our very culture suffered wounds; some records were lost, whilst others, hm… our libraries hold the knowledge but will not, ah, disclose it, the pain is still too great.’

‘The nature of your enemy?’ Seda echoed sceptically. ‘They were wicked magicians, like the Mosquitos? Deceivers like the Assassins? Perhaps they were simply a great and conquering empire?’ She smiled, but with a touch of steel.

‘We wrote that they did not seek to plunder or to conquer, nor to control, nor even achieve such mundane ends as to, ah, kill or to enslave. The Worm had one intent in those days: to make all others like itself in all ways.’

‘If this is a thinly veiled attack on some point of Imperial foreign policy, then you are being far too elaborate. I am quite sure your people find our Auxillians and subject cities distasteful. No doubt this is why we have an Empire and they do not.’ But Seda’s vitriol was automatic, even defensive. Something in Gjegevey’s words had struck an uneasy chord within her, some inner understanding that must have accompanied her Inaptitude.

‘Your slave cities cannot be compared to it,’ Gjegevey told her, somehow managing to stress that word without in the least condemning it. ‘The Worm killed and enslaved, of course, but our writings say that the Worm’s true goal was to simply, mn, overwrite all other cultures, to obliterate all trace of any otherness, and to leave behind nothing but the Worm. I cannot say how this was accomplished, save that it sufficiently provoked my kin that we went to war and paid a great cost: the very future of our kinden as a great people. The Moths and the Mosquitos recovered. We, mn, never did.’

‘The Mosquito-kinden fought for the Worm?’ Seda queried.

‘No, Majesty, they fought alongside us against it.’

That was a sobering thought, and Seda stared down at the great stone Seal beneath her feet. It still made no sense. An age of magic such as she could barely conceive of, and a grand war between magical powers of which this was a relic, and yet… nothing but a vacuum, an absence beneath her.

She felt that she was on the very brink of the truth. ‘So what happened. What do we stand on?’

‘This is all that is left of the Worm. When the Moths had defeated their armies and chased them back to their lairs, there was a, mn, choice. The realm of the Worm was beneath the ground, of course, and extended how far, ahm, no one could say. The Moths had no fear of darkness, but the atrocities that the Worm surely committed within its own halls gave pause to everyone. Whatever obscenity produced that kinden and had made them into the thing we called the Worm lay within that realm, and, hm, in the end the Moths had paid too much already to relish further fight. Instead they fell back on their strengths and devised a ritual.’ The old man’s gaunt face twisted into a painful smile. ‘You know of the great rituals of the Moths, hm? You owe your current status to one of them.’

‘The Darakyon,’ she reflected, barely breathing the word: the power of a failed ritual that had destroyed a Mantis-kinden hold, twisted an entire forest and liberated her from her former ignorance.

‘Bear in mind, then, that the Darakyon was the result of a ritual undertaken after the Apt had begun to rise, in the, mm, grey dawn that was bringing an end to the Moth-kinden’s world. Back during the War of the Worm, they had real power and, at that war’s end, they had the will to use it. They could not simply destroy their enemies, or they would have done so before, and spared us all the war. But with their victories to fuel them, their foot, hm, symbolically on the neck of their enemy, they sealed up the entrances to the Worm’s underground domain, and they banished the Worm.’

‘There is no such underground domain,’ Seda declared, but her voice shook slightly, because, after all, they were some way underground already, and she was acutely aware that Tisamon seemed to be refusing to step on the Seal. ‘Any such realm would have been uncovered through some mine or landslip, or this Worm finding some other way out. It cannot be so easy.’

‘Banished,’ Gjegevey repeated. ‘Not buried but banished. All their power, their armed force, even the wretches that they fed on — the other lightless cultures of the under-earth, my own, ah, kin included — all of them, banished and gone. Sent elsewhere, forever. So, no, hem, there is no underground domain of the Worm beneath our feet, but there was, once.’

Seda stared at him, as the greenish lantern began to gutter. ‘But

… where?’

‘Away,’ was all Gjegevey would say. ‘Just as there was a world within the Shadow Box, curving away and closed off from the real world that we know, so there is a far greater world where the Worm rules, or perhaps was unthroned there by those other luckless kinden who were exiled with it through no fault of theirs. Perhaps my own, mn, kinden have risen to a greatness there that we have been, hm, denied under the sun. But I fear that, Majesty, if you were to exercise your power and somehow undo the Seal, then you would find the Worm, and nothing but the Worm, patient and bitter, and that is why I ask you to, hm, pursue this no longer, seek this no more. Let the Seal of the Worm lie. Yes, there may be, hm, power to be gleaned there, but the lessons of history are clear. Do not wake it. Do not bring it back.’

She stared at him for a long time, still feeling that absence beneath her. His story was impossible, save that nothing else could account for that inexplicable lack that she felt, the echo of what had been. I will not fear. But she did fear — not the dread of that Beetle girl usurper or the tedious concerns of state, but a fear of the dark, and of what the dark had once hidden.

‘Find me something else, then,’ she snapped, and Gjegevey bobbed his head eagerly and gratefully.

‘I will, I will,’ he assured her. ‘Rely on me, Majesty. You shall have what you seek.’ His gratitude at having his counsel followed was abject and instant.