Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Czajkowski

  She waited awkwardly at the edge of their circle of firelight – when she tried to take a step closer, which might have allowed her to make something of their low murmurs, one of the Fly women gave Straessa a filthy look and shifted a crossbow slightly, so that it was not quite directed at her. The message was clear enough.

  But I’m an officer in the Coldstone Company with an urgent message . . . only she felt that wouldn’t count for much with this crowd. Perhaps not with Maker either, right now.

  Then she could hear distant shouting from across the camp, and a moment later another Fly – one of the Collegiates whose name Straessa should really know – dropped down right in the middle of Stenwold’s gathering, almost getting herself killed several times over. She was urgently insisting, ‘War Master! You have to come now!’

  Stenwold stood up immediately, and a moment later he was following the Fly as she set off, Laszlo and his crew of pirates trailing after them.

  Hearing a clatter of steel, Stenwold quickened his pace, feeling a multitude of old wounds tugging at him. He was keenly aware of Paladrya at his elbow, unarmoured and almost unarmed, horribly vulnerable if the camp erupted into fighting. Is it the Wasps? But he knew it was not. He was pushing on between the Sarnesh tents, and the Ants were not forming up, not rushing to repel an assault. They were all alert, though. Whatever drama was playing out was in all their minds. He sensed their eyes on him, the word of his approach rippling out ahead of him.

  In front he saw a brief flurry of motion, heard more swords clash – a shout of pain, raised voices. One was a woman’s, louder than the rest. A voice he knew.

  ‘Hammer and tongs!’ he swore and started running abruptly, lumbering along with the dumb force of a ram, hoping Paladrya could keep up. Behind him, Laszlo’s people whirled in the air like a trailing tail.

  Kymene! Then he saw her, held by half a dozen Sarnesh, wrestling with them furiously. There were a lot of Mynans there with drawn blades, facing off more Ants, and more arriving moment to moment from both sides, save that Sarn had so many more to draw on. Kymene was spitting, shrieking like a madwoman at – yes, at Milus. Of course, at Milus. The tactician was standing aloof, a few paces away from her, his own sword still in its scabbard. His expression was one of mild, almost scholarly interest.

  ‘What is going on here?’ Stenwold demanded, finding a pair of Ants moving to block his path. He slammed into their shields, but they braced against him and fended him off with that surprising strength of their kind.

  ‘Stenwold!’ Kymene shouted, and then got out something more that he missed, save that it was to do with her city.

  Then the Ants were letting him through at some unheard order from Milus, and he stumbled forwards, aware that the Tidenfree crew was now holding back and, he hoped, Paladrya along with them.

  ‘Release her!’ Stenwold demanded. ‘This is insane!’

  Milus gave a wintry little smile. ‘I am afraid I cannot allow attacks on my person, War Master – whether from enemies or supposed allies.’

  ‘Attacks?’ Stenwold looked at Kymene, seeing her scabbard empty – disarmed by the Ants or had she actually drawn on the tactician?

  ‘Stenwold, Myna is rising!’ Kymene shouted. ‘We have to march for Myna, now!’

  He blinked at her. ‘Well, of course—’

  ‘That is not the plan,’ Milus pronounced. ‘I have one destination for this army, Master Maker, and you know that. It is Capitas.’ The cool boldness of that statement was sobering. ‘We will cross into the Empire south of the Darakyon. We will not detour north for the Alliance lands. When the Empire is on its knees, all its cities shall then be free. I play no favourites.’

  A good speech. Stenwold had to admit that it was compelling logic. If Milus believed Capitas could be taken, then the Empire could be shattered all at once. Unless the garrisons from the north head south to take us while we’re committed . . .

  ‘Stenwold!’ Kymene insisted. ‘My people are taking to the streets now! There is an uprising in Myna now! You know how large the Wasp garrison there is – if we do not go to aid them, they will be slaughtered!’

  The horrible twisting feeling inside Stenwold was nothing less than impotence, because Milus’s logic still held. There would have been a time for the Mynans to throw off their chains, but this was not it. ‘Kymene . . .’ he said helplessly, and she read the thought on his face.

  ‘Ask him!’ she spat, fighting with her captors again, almost breaking free. ‘Ask this flat-faced Ant bastard what he’s done.’

  Milus’s expression admitted nothing, but Stenwold sensed the mass of assembled Mynans reaching the point where they would just lay into the vastly greater number of Sarnesh to get their leader back and, at all costs, he had to stop that.

  ‘Enough!’ he yelled out, using his Assembler’s voice that had silenced dissenters in the Amphiophos for a decade. ‘Release her. She’s hardly about to attack anyone with her bare hands.’

  The pause that followed was plainly Milus weighing the options, and then abruptly Kymene was free, shaking off her captors, her eyes still glowering bloody murder at the tactician.

  There was something in Milus’s face, something that all the Ant stoicism in the world could not quite hide. It was an admission that there was more to this business than his smooth words might suggest.

  ‘A messenger arrived, half dead, from my city,’ Kymene hissed between gritted teeth. ‘He came in a heliopter that had been riddled with shot, and almost crashed it coming down. He told me that my people were rising against the Wasps.’ She drew a ragged breath. ‘He was asking where we were. Why we weren’t at the gates to help them.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Stenwold admitted. ‘Help me, Kymene. What’s going on?’

  ‘He sent people to Myna.’ She jabbed a finger at Milus, as though it could kill. ‘While he was making deals with the Auxillians to sell their Wasp masters, he sent men to my city. He said that his army was coming, and that now was the time. Ask him, Maker! Hear him deny it, then come listen to my poor aviator’s tale.’

  Stenwold glanced between her ravaged features and Milus’s infinitely composed ones. But why would he . . .? came to his lips and was instantly banished, because he thought that he was starting to see.

  He settled on simply ‘Tactician?’

  The Ant met his gaze without a shadow of guilt, surrounded by tens of thousands of his kin who would implicitly understand and approve of all he had done. ‘It was necessary to clear the way to Capitas.’

  ‘Because of the garrisons in the Alliance states,’ Stenwold filled in for him. ‘You needed them occupied.’

  ‘And any other forces still positioned north of our route. I am hoping for widespread revolt across the Auxillian cities as we near Capitas, too. The aim of this war is to win, War Master. The Wasps are a formidable adversary, you must admit.’

  ‘And Myna is our ally,’ Stenwold replied heavily. Kymene was shuffling from foot to foot ever so slightly, as if counting every minute in the blood of her people.

  ‘The Mynans will win their freedom eventually, whether now or after the Wasps are defeated,’ Milus explained dispassionately. ‘I will not allow the Empress more time to strengthen her defences, nor divide my forces to attend to secondary objectives.’

  ‘You think the Mynans will fight for you now?’ Stenwold demanded.

  Milus shrugged slightly as if in a brief token of regret, not for what he had done but at being inconveniently discovered. ‘There are not so many Mynans. It is unfortunate, but apparently unavoidable.’

  Stenwold eyed Kymene. Milus was correct: there were simply not so many free Mynan soldiers with the army. Enough to save the people of Myna from the Wasps’ wrath? Probably not.

  He remembered all his promises to Kymene before the war, regarding solidarity and unity. He himself had stood beside her when the Empire came to knock down her walls and bombard her city.

  When the Empire had come against his own city, she had stood beside him. She h
ad led her people against Tynan’s Second Army. They had died to keep Collegium free, so that they in turn might be freed. Their pilots had kept his city’s skies safe. Their soldiers had shed blood before the walls, and then on the walls. They had never even asked him for sworn promises, because Kymene had trusted him to keep them.

  He remembered Myna long, long ago, that distant day when the Wasps had first arrived. The day he and Tisamon and the Sarnesh renegade Marius had learned about the Empire the hard way. Where had Sarn been then, apart from disowning its only son who had tried to warn them about what was coming?

  And indeed it was coming. And had it not been for Myna, I would never have known.

  ‘You will march without the Mynans?’ he enquired, for clarification.

  ‘Apparently,’ Milus confirmed.

  ‘Then you will march without Collegium.’

  Milus studied him for a breath. ‘Reconsider,’ he snapped.

  Stenwold was very aware of the many, many Sarnesh gathered around him. Many of them might well be shocked and disappointed at their leader’s strategy, but they would even now be subsuming those feelings into a core of loyal obedience. They were still Milus’s to command, any fugitive personal feelings notwithstanding.

  ‘You have sent to Myna, inciting an uprising on the pretence that you will come to relieve them. You have given them false hope, without which they would surely have bided their time. You have killed thousands as surely as if you had held the blade yourself.’ He reached desperately for the sort of arguments that would sway Collegium. ‘How will people speak of Sarn, after this?’

  ‘As the victor!’ Milus declared. ‘For once, Maker, cast aside that blinkered College philosophy. The Wasps will spare nothing to defeat us, so we cannot spare ourselves any trick or advantage to beat them. What did you think, all those years ago, when you started rattling swords against the Empire? Did you think that you could lecture the Wasps into surrender? Did you think that they – or anyone! – would look over towards your sanctimonious city-state and fall to their knees in awe of your moral superiority? Victory is all that matters, Maker. Why have you been fighting to keep them out of the Lowlands for so long, if you didn’t want to beat them?’

  ‘What I have been trying so hard to keep out of the Lowlands is right here in front of me!’ Stenwold spat, the words outstripping any ability he might have to check or tailor them.

  ‘And yet I am what you have!’ Milus shouted back, his thinning mask of calm cracking apart. ‘Who beats the Wasps for you, if not I, Maker? Who brings down the Empire you have been preaching against for years? How will that war be won, if not by my strategy? You need me, Maker. You need me more than you need Myna. You need me because you need to beat the Wasps. That has always been what you have wanted. You will not throw it away now.’

  Stenwold stared at him, and he was aware, just for a moment, of a brief shiver that seemed to run through the assembled Sarnesh forces, as though Milus’s thoughts had abruptly yanked them viciously back into line. All those ‘I’s and ‘me’s and not a single ‘us’.

  ‘I will go to Myna,’ he said, finding that, now the Ant had at last lost his temper, Stenwold himself was able to be quite calm.

  ‘Then you concede the war to the Empire!’ Milus hissed at him, and abruptly the Sarnesh were closing in – many of them evidently unhappily, but still they were all closing, ringing Stenwold and Kymene and the Mynan soldiers, and at that moment it was anybody’s guess what the Ants were about to do.

  ‘Will you prevent us diminishing your ranks by simply killing us all?’ Stenwold asked quietly. ‘And will you still hope to hold on to the Collegiate detachment then? And the Vekken? The Sea-kinden? The Tseni?’

  Milus’s expression was murderous, but he summoned up restraint from somewhere. ‘Regarding the other Ant cities, Maker, you are too far behind the times. Believe me, we understand each other.’ That was an unwelcome revelation. ‘But of the rest . . .’ He paused, lips moving minutely as though testing out the words. ‘If we lose before the gates of Capitas, then Myna cannot hold anyway, even if you take your soldiers there now and cast the garrison out.’ He was smiling now, and that was even more unwelcome. ‘It’s true, Maker! Fault my logic: Myna dies either way!’

  Stenwold opened his mouth, glancing sideways at Kymene, trying to weigh numbers and odds and realizing that he simply did not have enough information to make the call. Every warrior he took from Milus’s army was one fewer sword against the Wasps, even as it was one more towards the salvation of Myna. If there was some perfect solution to the equation it was beyond his ability to recognize.

  And what of my own kin, the people of Collegium. Would they even agree? Surely most of them would back Milus, because they need to defeat the Empire. They do not need to free Myna.

  But then: ‘Stenwold,’ Kymene hissed, and he knew: I need to free Myna.

  ‘I will take Rosander’s Sea-kinden, if they will follow me,’ he said into Milus’s face. ‘I will take Maker’s Own Company. That will have to be enough. The rest will remain in the command of their officers with your force.’

  He sensed Milus at the tipping point, angry enough to give rash orders that Stenwold would not even hear before they were carried out, yet at the same time he remained a rational, pragmatic man. Stenwold could not hope that any better nature would win out, but merely that what he proposed would be recognized as the tactician’s best chance at overall victory. And what a mess we’ll face when this is over, if it ever comes to that.

  Milus’s nod was small, but the Sarnesh were abruptly stepping back, no longer crossing swords with the Mynans. The Ant leader’s face was stony, but then wasn’t that what his kinden were known for?

  Stenwold caught a glimpse of Laszlo, though, as he turned. The Fly was staring at him desperately, and only a short while before Stenwold had been passing him assurances about the fate of Lissart, Milus’s prisoner. There is nothing I can do. No matter how hard we try to do the right thing, we still do wrong things alongside it. I am sorry.

  A company soldier was pushing forward then – the Antspider halfbreed, the officer from the Coldstone. ‘Master Maker, there’s a message from Collegium,’ she was insisting. ‘It needs . . . you can’t just. . .’ She was thrusting the partly torn scroll forwards, virtually into his face, and he took it from her automatically, letting his eyes skip listlessly across it, before shaking his head.

  ‘They’ll just have to sort it out for themselves,’ he stated flatly. ‘I don’t think I’m in a position to speak for Collegium any more.’

  Thirty-Four

  The Second Army had now reached Capitas, having commandeered every transport in Sonn to make the last leg of the journey as fast as possible. Behind them, Tynan knew, there would be Imperial soldiers giving their lives just to slow the Sarnesh advance. It cut bitterly that he could not bring the Second to their aid. Every day the thought occurred to him: You have disobeyed one order by abandoning Collegium. Why not another? And yet he had not turned back. He had received a missive demanding his presence before the Empress, borne by an unsympathetic Red Watch captain who apparently looked down on a mere army general.

  The meaning was plain. Word of his parting of ways with Vrakir had flown ahead of him. That, or she really does know. Tynan’s world seemed to be fraying at the edges, the impossible bleeding into it. Who could say, any more?

  He called up his underlings – Major Oski of the Engineers and a handful of others he trusted to keep order. The soldiers of the Gears ringed them round, the veterans, the survivors, a great mass of fighting men worn out by their long retreat, but all staring now as their commander made his farewells.

  ‘I will be entering the city alone,’ he told them. It was a ridiculous statement, for a general needed an escort, a personal guard. He would not give a bent coin for the lives of any who accompanied him, though, and so he would preserve his followers, and walk without companions into the trap. For a moment, he saw in his mind the image of Stenwold Maker leaving Col
legium, walking towards Tynan’s camp to save his Spider-kinden lover, with an honour guard behind him that the man had plainly been trying to shake off as he stepped out through the gates.

  A brave leader inspires brave followers. The difference was that Tynan’s orders were obeyed, and that the Wasps had the discipline to do as they were told. There would be no wasted heroics from the men of the Second, though he knew that, if he asked for volunteers, there would be no end to them.

  But it’s better this way. And had he not been waiting for this moment since that first time he had fallen back from the Beetle city? He truly was the man who had lost Collegium. He was owed a rebuke from the throne, and if that came with a brace of crossed spears, then he would accept it.

  ‘It’s been a privilege to command the Second,’ he told them, lifting his voice so that it echoed over the heads of his men, and his words were passed back and back further by the murmurs of his soldiers. ‘And you and your new commander will have to do your best, because the Lowlanders must be driven back from the Empire’s borders. The fate of the Empire is in your hands!’

  ‘In your hands, Tynan!’ snapped out a new voice, and then there came an arrowhead of soldiers pushing forwards. For a moment there were hands thrust out, swords drawn, snapbows levelled, but Tynan recognized their leader and shouted for calm.

  ‘General Marent, what is this?’ And the humiliating thought, Is he here to arrest me in front of my own men?

  The leader of the Third Army looked about him at the assembled host of Tynan’s followers.

  ‘Do not go into Capitas, Tynan,’ he stated, and he too was pitching his voice for the crowd.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘General Tynan, the Empress’s Red Watch is waiting to arrest you as a traitor,’ Marent stated.

  Tynan nodded soberly. ‘I had thought as much. That doesn’t change—’

  ‘Yes, it does!’ Marent snapped, his tone sending a ripple of anger through the men of the Second. ‘Tynan, do you think men like yourself come so cheap that the Empire can do without you now?’