Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘No,’ Che whispered, but the Worm was demanding, through the scarred priest its mouthpiece, and huge Darmeyr was turning to his children, his expression fixed and dreadful.

  His hand fell on the youngest of his sons, and his wife was shaking her head, but it was plain she had no answer to his blunt question: What other choice?

  So many children here – and so many of the women already growing round again with child, now she looked for it – and yet so few of four years or more. Cold Well had another resource for the Worm beyond weapons or smelted ore.

  The chasm was a cacophony of screeching infants separated from all that they knew, of children just old enough to realize what they had lost in being taken from the hands of their parents and shoved into jagged cages by the soldiers of the Worm. Che did not even ask herself what this was in aid of, what need the Worm had for such a sacrifice. There were no reasons that she could ever want to know.

  She saw Darmeyr take his son in his hands and hold him up, looking into the child’s screwed-up face, and she could not stop herself.

  In the aftermath of her cry, which had cut through even that loaded and busy air, she now had the attention of the Worm.

  ‘Go!’ Esmail hissed, about to take off along the wall back the way they had come, but the Worm were there also – all of them roused in that one moment, all of them coursing up the sides of Cold Well towards them. ‘In!’ the assassin decided, pushing Che back into Atraea’s cave mouth. ‘In, and hope these tunnels go somewhere useful.’

  But that’s mad; we’ll just get lost or— But there was Messel ahead of them, beckoning urgently. An expression had appeared on his eyeless face at last, screamed out by the set of his grimacing mouth: fear, terrible fear. His words of defiance were utterly gone.

  ‘Lead us!’ Thalric demanded, and the blind man shrugged past him, disappearing into the rear reaches of the cave and beyond, down into the warren of the mines.

  ‘No light.’ Esmail warned. ‘Hold to Maker, she can see. Beetle girl, you must go first.’

  Logic roused her from her horror and she went rushing after Messel, terrified that he might already have taken one turn too many and be beyond her reach. He was waiting, though, and she caught up with him quickly, with Thalric hanging on to her shoulder, and Tynisa and Maure behind him. A hurried glance showed Esmail bringing up the rear, hands extended like weapons.

  ‘Quick quick quick,’ insisted Messel, and then he was gone again, and at a run that Che knew her stumbling charges could not match. She hauled them on at the best pace she could, and every time she thought that she had been abandoned, there the blind guide was waiting for her, his face twisted in fear.

  She recalled the speed at which the soldiers of the Worm moved, how long it would take them to return to Atraea’s cave and how swiftly they would follow into the tunnels.

  And where can these tunnels possibly lead us?

  She knew she would barely even hear them approach before they caught up with Esmail, and the thought of even being that close to the Worm, with its horribly vacant human faces, made her weak with fear and revulsion.

  Then there was a clatter and a thrashing, and she almost cried out at the sound.

  ‘One of their beasts,’ came Esmail’s tight, controlled voice. ‘Keep moving, whatever you do!’

  ‘They’re coming,’ whimpered Maure. ‘Oh, Che . . .!’

  Was that a plea, or recrimination? You should not have followed me from the Commonweal. I have doomed us all.

  Magic – surely I can find some magic . . . but it was like trying to wring water from stones, and the approaching Worm’s mere presence seemed to drive from her mind the faintest understanding of how she might even accomplish what she thought of as magic. That whole sense, that she had grown so accustomed to, had been put out like an eye.

  Except . . .

  One star remained in that sky, the thinnest thread back to that old life led under the sun. Seda, the Empress.

  Her enemy, her sister and bitterest enemy, but the Worm was closer and closer, swifter and more sure than they could be in these confined and uneven tunnels, and Che would take anything at all now – anything to save herself and her friends.

  She pulled, reaching across that immeasurable distance for aid of any sort, and it was given – a reflexive gout of strength, like a cup of water spilt on the desert sands.

  Che took it in her hands and cast it at the Worm, anything to delay them, to buy another few moments without their attentions.

  And nothing. Even as she cast it out, she lost the thoughts that would let her make use of it. Wasted – all that borrowed power, all she had; the simple presence of the Worm had deadened it to nothing.

  Then she fell. Messel had descended a near-sheer drop of twenty feet without stopping, just crawling down the rock by his Art without ever thinking to warn her. Her wings snapped out as she dropped, and Thalric’s too, and the pair of them spiralled down, clutching at each other, into a wide mine gallery.

  There were lights here – made of twined fungus like Thalric’s, and dim. The miners were all gone, though, summoned above to pay their tax to the Worm.

  Messel was crouching, looking up. Maure had flown down, but Che saw Tynisa being supported by Esmail on the lip of the drop. Neither of them could fly.

  ‘Climb!’ she shouted, but she knew the Worm would climb down faster, and Tynisa seemed injured.

  ‘Just drop!’ Thalric shouted, and then he was kicking off, wings surging him upwards. Che saw him recoil as he reached the top, saw Tynisa’s blade out, the Worm surely almost on them. Then Thalric had grabbed the Weaponsmaster about the waist and just yanked her off the ledge, straining to slow their fall so that they crashed down almost at Che’s feet, bruised but alive.

  ‘Esmail—!’

  But the assassin was already with them, falling on his feet, knees almost to his chin to absorb the shock of it, then turning to see the Worm moving down the cliff, descending almost as fast as they could run on level ground.

  Gather, said a voice, and only a moment later did she realize it spoke directly into her head. It was a man’s voice, a tired voice but a strong one.

  ‘To me!’ Che hissed, and she dragged Esmail back even as he was weighing a throwing blade in one hand, then she clutched Maure closer with the other hand. The little knot of them drew close, defiant, blades out against the Worm.

  A sense of calm touched Che, utterly incongruous in the circumstances but she saw that Maure felt it as well, and even Esmail.

  ‘Very still now,’ said that low, deep voice, in words they could all hear. A huge figure had joined them, stepping out from who knew where. Che’s eyes were fixed on the Worm as they reached the ground, those slack faces unreadable. She saw one huge pale hand from the corner of her eye, though, bearing a staff of black wood etched with countless tiny glyphs.

  Messel’s Teacher had come, after all.

  The man’s other hand, empty, was on the far side of them, so that their entire group fit within the curve of his arms, and Che could sense a vastly focused power at work – not strong but applied with a finesse and skill that could make her weep. It was not turned against the Worm, but focused inwards, drawing the darkness around them, turning the light away, until even the most dark-adapted eye would miss them.

  The Worm had stopped, though nothing in all its faces or its bodies betrayed any emotion. Then it set off a little way, and halted once more, then back, as if making tentative searches for an enemy that had apparently been snatched away from it.

  Che could hear the laboured breath of the giant newcomer, and she saw the hand holding the staff begin to shake. Without thinking, she placed her own there, and even though she had nothing she could give, the huge man seemed to take strength from that gesture.

  Then the Worm was gone, its human segments retreating up the wall as quickly as they had come, heading elsewhere in their determined search.

  The staff drooped, and their benefactor let out a sigh as big as himself.
‘We must go now. They’ll be back here very soon, searching for the trail. Oh, I have given too much, drunk a cupful out of a thimble.’

  Thalric was already staring at the man, backing off slightly, and Che turned to see what had so startled him, craning upwards.

  He was as big as a Mole Cricket, but without that broad strength, his frame instead a vast, sagging bulk within his patched and ragged robes. He was sickly pale, too, haggard and grey as though he was near death. Once upon a time his pouchy face would have radiated majesty. Che knew it – she could almost see him as he had once been, because she and Thalric had both encountered a great deal of his kin beneath the ancient city of Khanaphes. He was of their Masters, the Slug-kinden who had a claim on civilization to predate all others, who had beaten back the wilderness, raised the first cities, taught the younger kinden about law and craft and magic. Or so they claimed.

  Having witnessed what he had just accomplished with so very, very little, she believed that.

  ‘Master . . .’ If a little reverence had crept into her voice, she felt she could be forgiven.

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said gently, ‘not “Master”, not from you. We are ill met in this benighted place, but I know a crowned head when I see it. But we must leave here. Please, come with me.’ He levered himself upright again. ‘No place here is truly safe, but at least I will take you away from the Worm.’

  Eight

  Capitas was filled to bursting with soldiers. The entire Imperial war machine was on the move, and the Third Army and elements of the First were thronging the streets, trying to resupply while waiting for their orders.

  To General Brugan, watching from the Imperial palace, it all had a random, mindless air to it, the mad scurrying of insects whose nest has been turned over. He had a horrible feeling of doubt in his own perceptions. Was it always like that, and I just fooled myself that I could see any patterns?

  He was the general of the almighty Rekef. He had plotted and schemed for it, done away with rivals, raised conspiracies. He should have been the most powerful man in the Empire, with the Empress under his complete control. That had been the plan.

  Yet he could not have guessed what the Empress was. Even now he did not know, save that she was not human, not natural. When she looked at him, or thought of him in a certain way, he loved her, lusted after her. When she forgot about him, he found some place out of her sight and lived in dread of the moment that his name would enter her mind again. None of it made any sense.

  He wanted to be mad. If he was mad, and it was all his own madness, then at least that would leave the rest of the world sane. But he knew it was true and he was sane, and everything he had ever believed in now made as little sense as the scurrying of the soldiers below.

  She had been gone for a while: some whim of hers taking her westwards to where the Eighth had been fighting. She had not told him why, and he had not dared ask, where once he would have demanded. For some short time his life had been his own, even though the Red Watch men strode through the palace with decrees somehow direct from the Empress’s mouth. He believed that as well. He was becoming painfully adept at believing the impossible.

  And now she was back, and it had all started again. Half the time he felt that even his own body was somehow running his commands to it past the Empress before allowing him to move his limbs.

  Last night she had sent for him again. The lovemaking had been hard enough, torn between the helpless need she generated in him and her own hunger that devoured another part of him every night they grappled together. Afterwards, though, when he had lain exhausted and blood-dashed by her side, there had been no sleep. He had trembled and clenched his eyes shut, hands to his ears as Seda, Empress of all the Wasps, fought with her own nightmares.

  There had never been nightmares until her return. Whatever she had done, whatever had been done to her, it had ended badly. Before her journey, she had been the cool, fierce Empress that the Wasps had grown to love: ruthless, elegant and deadly. Now Brugan alone was witness to something new, an undermining of her nature. As she slept, she twitched and cried out, moaned in horror, screamed sometimes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she had said, last night. Words he had never thought to hear from those lips.

  And all through it, the coupling and the torment, her bodyguard Tisamon had watched on, silent and menacing, in the very same room. She would not be parted from the man. Or from whatever lurked within that metal shell.

  ‘General!’

  He turned sharply to recognize General Marent of the Third Army. The man looked angry, and it was unthinkable that anyone could address Brugan with so little respect. A Rekef rank overrode a regular army one, as everyone knew. Brugan should draw himself up and stare the man down, enforce his indomitable will on this jumped-up infantryman.

  He reached into himself for that certainty and self-possession he had known of old, but it had rusted under the Empress’s caustic regard, leaving nothing for him to draw on.

  ‘What is it, Marent?’ he asked, horrified to hear a trembling in his own voice.

  The army general’s eyes widened, and Brugan saw that he would far rather have been shouted at, dismissed, threatened even, because that was the way the world worked. He had come looking for reassurance, and had found only Brugan.

  Marent had been a battlefield colonel whose record during the revolt of the traitor governors was such that the choice was either to promote the man or to have him disappear. Right now Brugan was wishing it had been the latter. Marent seemed to storm through life constantly angry with the inefficiencies of everyone and everything else, but that resentment had never quite dared to light upon his superiors until now.

  ‘My Third is still sitting idle, General,’ the man reported. ‘We were supposed to head for the front two tendays back, but the quartermasters have been feeding me excuses, I haven’t any Engineer Corps, siege train or air support, and today . . .’ His hands were clenched into fists at his sides as the man forcibly restrained himself. ‘Today your cursed Red Watch comes to me—!’

  ‘They’re not my Red Watch!’ Brugan’s words were supposed to match the man in rage and volume, but there was a terribly plaintive edge to them he could not control. ‘They take orders from the Empress – only the Empress.’

  ‘So they said,’ spat Marent. ‘And so I asked for an audience with her, to hear it from her own lips. The Empress—’

  ‘The Empress is not seeing anyone,’ Brugan finished for him. Not true. She sees me. Oh, she sees me.

  ‘And so I have nonsensical orders to sit here, with thirty thousand men clogging every barracks and garrison and camped outside the gates, without even the basics of a support corps. Because – and I quote – I “may be needed”. What is that supposed to mean, General?’

  ‘It means you may be needed,’ Brugan replied hollowly. ‘If she says it, that is what she means. Don’t question her.’

  Marent stared at him, and for a terrible moment Brugan thought some kind of pity would fight its way onto the man’s blunt features. ‘What is going on?’ Marent demanded. ‘Is this what we fought the traitors for? Orders that make no sense, commands from the throne that are vaguer than an Inapt prophecy –’ if he saw Brugan’s twitch at that, he did not let it slow him – ‘a war on two fronts, for no reason that anyone’s saying. And the Eighth . . . how did the Sarnesh destroy the Eighth so thoroughly, Brugan? What aren’t they telling me?’

  He was so self-righteous, buoyed by his own war record and his youth, that Brugan should destroy him, remind him of the Rekef’s power, break him for the sheer disloyalty of even questioning the way things were.

  But he’s right, the Rekef general knew. He could only shake his head, sagging against the stone rail of the balcony, whilst beyond him the city bustled and struggled in a hundred different directions, and achieved nothing.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Marent said, his voice at last losing its anger in the face of the inexplicable, but Brugan only shook his head further and turned away. />
  Wasps lost their tempers, it was well known. Every officer had been forced to discipline soldiers who let that temper fly. Every occupied city had learned the dark side of Wasp temperament, to tread carefully and not provoke the Lords of Empire. Each Wasp conquest had paid for its resistance in killings and rape after having sparked the frustration of the invaders. Few from outside the Empire realized the amount of effort that went into directing and controlling that innate rage, from their rigid upbringings to the Imperial expansion itself, a constant channel for a kinden unwilling to be idle and quick to take offence, and whose every adult member could deal death through their Art.

  Soldiers and the lower ranks could afford to let loose their anger occasionally – earning a flogging perhaps, but little more. Those who sought promotion must learn to curb their excesses, though. The Empire had no use for a colonel or a general who could not keep a level head, no matter what.

  And what of an Empress?

  She had been so careful. All those years spent in the executioner’s shadow during her brother’s reign, and then the careful – oh, so careful – conspiracy to bring him down. And then the frustrations of the war against the traitor governors who would not accept her rule, and her discovery that her privileged position as Great Magician amongst the Apt had to be shared . . . her quest to the broken hold of Argastos, her contests with Cheerwell Maker, her unwanted sister . . . None of these had sufficed to breach her calm.

  And then it had seemed that her rivalry with the Beetle girl might become something else, that Seda could now live in peace with her, that they could even combine their strengths. She had entertained such hopes.

  It had been that, she thought, that had broken her resolve. Not the betrayal itself, for under other circumstances she would have been expecting it, ensuring her response was deadly but proportionate. She had laid herself open, though, cast off her armour. She had fallen victim to hope, and then the girl had turned on her.