Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And at last she spotted what must be the Turning Spire. It was a spear of rock stabbing hundreds of feet towards the unseen ceiling, formed with an irregular spiral twist to it. Seeing it, she understood what Messel had meant. If they were caught at its top, with the Worm scaling it after them, then where could they escape to?

  She put her hand on his shoulder, feeling him tremble.

  ‘I see it,’ she told him. ‘From here I go alone. Wait here, and I’ll come back to you.’ She saw his thin lips move, and she hurried on with, ‘I know what Orothellin said, but this is what I say. You’ve done enough.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said eventually. ‘The seat of the Worm is beyond the spire. I cannot know what your eyes may see from the top, but you will see it all.’

  She wondered what he made of it when she took wing. Could his senses follow her through the air, or did she vanish for him, utterly gone beyond his ability to imagine?

  The spire was high, and she was no strong flier, so she let her wings take her to a midpoint, where she clung to the twisted side of it and rested a little before casting herself further upwards. She guessed that few enough of the prisoner kinden here could fly – only the Moths, perhaps. The air must be a barren void empty of life.

  During her second rest she saw that this assumption was not true. She saw enough to make her regret her boldness.

  There was a moth, far bigger than she, thundering gamely through the air on whatever unguessable errand its small mind had fixed on. Clutching at the stone of the spire, she tracked its progress through the dark expanse. Large enough to ride, surely, she thought, and wondered that the locals had not enlisted these creatures already, or perhaps they had and she had just seen no sign of it . . .

  Then the moth dropped from the air ten yards before catching itself, weaving madly back and forth so that she could see the desperation in its every movement.

  When the great shadow came from above and scooped the insect up and away, she was caught rigid and horrified at even that brief glimpse. Something horrific, something unnatural, a great pale thing with silent wings that looked almost like webbed hands.

  It was a long time before she dared ascend further and, when she did, she climbed more than she flew. If this place were not terrible enough, there are monsters of the air as well, and with that thought she looked up to find herself near the top of the spire, almost approaching the stars.

  She had momentarily forgotten them, those ersatz constellations. The Art that let her see needed no light, and so she saw no light. Where the naked eye saw that glittering array, eerie and almost beautiful, her sight saw the truth: the gleaming threads, the hungry larvae, the drained moth corpses hanging distantly like dead leaves. There was no escape above.

  And had they always been there in the Worm’s realm, or was this some twist of the Moth ritual, to make their prison even worse? She had a sudden desperate need to be out of here, back to somewhere where her newfound magic was worth something, to some place less inimical to life.

  Then she had reached the summit, a bare ten feet below the lowest of those sparkling, murderous threads, and she finally beheld the city of the Worm.

  Twelve

  Bells sounded across Chasme an hour before dawn, startling hundreds of pirates, mercenaries, tinkers and whores from their beds. Nobody had heard anything like it: the alarm system had been installed by the city’s new masters but never needed before now.

  Totho found Drephos standing at his high balcony, staring out to sea. All was darkness out there, barely even a moon, but the master artificer had the eyes of a Moth-kinden. Back in Imperial service he had made a practice of walking right up to the walls of besieged fortresses on moonless nights, just to get a personal look at them.

  ‘What’s coming?’ Totho demanded of him.

  ‘A fleet. At least three score ships of various sizes, with airships as well, and . . .’ A hand was lifted for quiet, and they both heard the droning buzz of flying machines.

  ‘I’ve all our people armed and ready: machines to go into the air and the artillery crewed,’ Totho reported. ‘But . . .’

  He did not need to say it. The Iron Glove had all the technological marvels of the age, and its artificers and labourers could all don a breastplate and hit a target with a snapbow, but they were few. There was no army on the Glove’s payroll.

  ‘I have sent some chests of coin into the city. Those who will stand and fight will be wealthy men, if they survive,’ Drephos said.

  ‘Tell me,’ Totho pressed him.

  The Colonel-Auxillian’s head snapped round. It was plain he knew what Totho meant, but he said nothing.

  ‘Why won’t you give them the Bee-killer?’

  ‘You think this is about the Bee-killer? You think they have roused the entire Exalsee against us for that? Have you learned nothing from history, that you think everything must have such simple causes?’

  ‘Tell me,’ Totho insisted.

  ‘I have made a mistake,’ Drephos said softly. ‘Should I have given them all they wanted? Should I have whored our last secrets, spread our legs that final span? Or would they still have come calling with their rank badge and their invitations. Do you think that they would have been happy, in the end, if I remained outside their reach?’

  ‘Tell me!’ Totho repeated, and at that moment the first of the Iron Glove greatshotters loosed into the darkness, the range to their targets calculated. The thunder rolled out across the lake, but Totho knew the weapons were not meant to take on moving targets like boats.

  ‘I did not want it to be my legacy, that is all,’ said Drephos quietly, so that Totho had to read the words forming on his lips as more engines roared and boomed, brief flashes lighting up the shanties and chimneys of Chasme. ‘It was all they spoke of, after Szar: the Bee-killer, the city-slayer, the weapon of all weapons. And it was a failure, inelegant, hard to control, easy to suborn. A bludgeon, not a blade. And it was not even mine. The Twins, those Beetles of mine, devised it, and my own input was solely the method of delivery, and even that was never used. You just piled up the canisters and set them off, like any common soldier might. So many wonderful things I have created – we have created: the ratiocinators, the new alloys, the similophone, and they would cast me in the histories as some demented alchemist.’

  The fliers were launching, powering off into the pre-dawn sky. The Iron Glove had a small stable of elegant combat orthopters, and there were plenty of mercenary pilots in the city who would fight for their home – up to a point. Against them would be Imperial Spearflights, and perhaps some of the new Farsphex.

  And whatever Solarno itself can launch. The city had its own pilots and machines, even if its formal air force had been destroyed in the joint Imperial–Spider invasion. Totho had heard plenty of rumours of unrest amongst the Solarnese, chafing under two yokes. If there was one issue on which they would see eye to eye with their conquerors, though, it would be Chasme.

  It was still too dark to make out much, but he thought he spotted shapes out on the water. Then there were flashes answering the Iron Glove artillery, small shipboard weapons throwing explosives and scrapshot at the docks. There seemed to be precious few ships at anchor there, and Totho suspected that many had already fled rather than become an unwilling first line of defence.

  ‘What should we do?’ he asked. Chasme had no walls – it was a straggling mess of a place, constructed piecemeal and slipshod, half out over the water, utterly indefensible. The Iron Glove’s own stronghold could be barred against attackers but the place was a factory complex, not a fortress. It had a dozen weak points and far too few defenders.

  ‘Arm yourself,’ Drephos told him. ‘I see mercenary companies in place to defend the wharves, and our artillery will have more success against their vessels once they have come to rest. The air battle remains open.’ His eyes flashed defiance. ‘And we have some more toys to call on, which they have not guessed at. Arm yourself and take command of our forces. I myself shall look to the engi
nes.’

  Totho had not worn this armour for some time, but he remembered how to don it with a minimum of help. It was black and all-encompassing, its plates fluted and angled to turn away shot and blow. He took up his snapbow and strapped on a belt of little grenades, small enough to throw a fair distance, but with enough power to them to punch in the side of an automotive if he got his aim right.

  With the helm on, the visible world would shrink to a narrow slot, so for the moment he left it dangling at his belt as he set out from the Iron Glove complex with a score of his followers. Their own mail was somewhat less than his: helm and breastplate of black steel over chain links so small that they flowed like water. They were veterans of a score of small actions defending the assets of the Iron Glove, and they carried repeater snapbows of Totho’s own design, an expensive luxury that had never been viable for mass export. Some toys we keep just for ourselves.

  Parts of Chasme were on fire; that was what first greeted his eyes. Flames roared and leapt across a broad swathe of the docks: ships and piers and the clustered shacks there all ablaze, constricting the possible progress of the attackers.

  Fly-kinden messengers sought him out, dodging and swerving through the air. After a handful of reports, he had a picture in his mind of how the fight was going. The Exalsee forces had forced beachheads at three points, with the superior aerial might of the Empire driving the defenders from cover. Two of these were locked in bloody stalemate even now, the mercenaries – and the outraged Chasme locals – preventing the attackers from pressing further in. There was a solid central thrust that had broken through the cordon and was working its way towards the Iron Glove; it seemed to be mostly made up of Wasp Airborne and Bee-kinden heavy snapbowmen under the drab banner of Dirovashni.

  He gave orders with an artificer’s economy, drawing together all the forces that could be spared and setting out exactly where they should position themselves. The men at his back, his picked few, would be the anvil to meet the attackers’ hammer. We have more tricks yet.

  Denied targets, the artillery was mostly still now, but the orthopter battle raged on – the sort of war the Exalsee best understood. There would be dozens of Chasme and Solarnese pilots up there who were old enemies, duelling not for anybody else’s grand plan but to resolve their own bitter grudges.

  Already there was fighting close by, so he led his people to cover, having them spread out as a rabble of mercenaries was pushed back on his left flank. He saw the Dirovashni snapbowmen advancing in professional order; the Bee city had always been a third player around the Exalsee, never quite matching the inventiveness of Solarno or Chasme, but they were solid warriors, that was plain.

  Let’s make some holes in them, see how solid they really are. Totho braced his snapbow against his shoulder, because these models tended to jolt a little. He had a magazine in place, and spread a dozen bolts across the face of the Bee-kinden advance with a single touch of the trigger. His own mail might have turned the shot, but the steel of Dirovashni was not equal to the task; a handful of the Bees dropped before they even realized what was happening. Then Totho’s people were following suit with their repeating weapons, each of them worth a squad of regular soldiers at twice the range, and Totho watched the Bee advance shudder and disintegrate as the attackers rushed for cover.

  He let off another spray of shot, hitting little but keeping the enemy at bay, hoping that there were other eyes watching the flanks, because an encirclement was all the Bees could really try at this stage.

  The Wasp Airborne tried attacking them shortly after, but Totho and his people were dug in, and their snapbows were more than equal to the task of picking off soldiers in flight. Again the enemy fell back, and those Bees who had tried to take advantage of the distraction were made to regret it in short order. Totho had not lost a soldier of his command.

  He recalled leading the defence in Khanaphes, matching modern snapbows against the ignorant ferocity of the Many of Nem. Now his enemies came against him with snapbows, and he was teaching them the same artificer’s lesson.

  An automotive would be problematic at this point. It was a detached thought, as though this was some classroom problem of military theory. But, of course, the enemy had not brought automotives.

  Is this it, then? Can we hold them here until they run out of will, or bodies?

  Then a Fly-kinden was scuttling up to him from behind, one arm bloody.

  ‘The complex is under attack! You have to pull back!’

  Totho stared at her. But we’re winning . . . ‘Attack from who?’

  ‘Wasp Airborne, and there are Dragonflies as well,’ she got out. ‘And more on the way. The city’s wide open on your right – they’ve all run away there, the lot of them.’

  Mercenaries, of course. And if he had two hundred of these repeaters rather than twenty, then he could have held off the entire Exalsee, but . . .

  ‘Get everyone to fall back to the complex, double time,’ he agreed. ‘We’re still in the fight.’

  The gates of the complex were open only long enough for Totho and his followers to get through them, but the skies overhead were already busy. Squads of the Airborne were dropping down wherever there was space, while overhead swooped great dragon-flies, the battle-mounts of Princep Exilla, whose warriors would not be far behind.

  The Iron Glove forces pulled back in good order, their superior weapons accounting for any attempt the enemy made to engage them in close fighting. The compound itself was indefensible, though – too many buildings, too scattered. Totho spent precious minutes seeking word of Drephos before the order came: Fall back to the main workshops.

  That was the centre of their power, where they lived and slept and worked. Neither he nor Drephos had intended to make a stand there, but the walls were strong enough to contain explosions, the windows few and much of the Glove’s artillery was mounted there.

  Even as he was giving his orders, those weapons spoke almost in unison, the shudder of their recoil resounding through the air and the ground simultaneously.

  Beyond the walls of the compound, whole sections of Chasme erupted into incandescence, and Totho could only stare, even as his own people ran for the shelter of the workshops. Their own city. Drephos had unleashed their artillery on their own city.

  But it isn’t our city now. Even so, he took to his heels to go and find the Colonel-Auxillian, to talk to him, to dissuade him, to . . . Totho did not know what he intended to do.

  There were Wasps ahead of him as he came within sight of the main door, but snapbowmen stationed at each window and balcony were stripping them away even as Totho approached, running full-tilt in the perfectly balanced weight of his mail. He loosed a scattering of bolts with his own weapon, tearing down a pair of the Airborne as the men tried to lift off. Then he was inside with the door slamming shut behind him.

  ‘Drephos, where is he?’ And, of course, the master artificer was at the top level, directing the bombardment. Where else would he be?

  Every step of the way up, Totho was rehearsing his arguments, thinking of the streets of Chasme in flames, the hundreds who eked out their existence there, the senseless waste of human life. Bursting in upon Drephos, half out of breath, finding the man giving his cool, clipped orders to the artillery crews via a speaking tube, Totho’s mind reeled and he realized he was wrong.

  Drephos looked back at him, and Totho saw the other man waiting for his objections, but instead he just walked over to stand by the Colonel-Auxillian’s side.

  ‘This is the end, is it?’ he asked, as another salvo of incendiaries fell on Chasme, rooting out the invading soldiers that had tried to use their own streets as cover.

  ‘We have a few tricks left, you and I,’ Drephos replied. He was strung taut as a wire, but at least some of the energy now animating him was exhilaration. It had clearly been too long since he had been given free rein with his machines.

  A word from him, and the sky around the workshops crackled with lightning, the generators belo
w giving up their stored power like a sacrifice. Totho saw the briefly writhing forms of men and insects who had got too close, saw them char and fall. This weapon was the very latest addition to their arsenal, based on accounts of Collegiate air defence.

  The attackers were within the compound in force now. Totho saw Imperials and Spiderlands troops and the motley rabble of the Exalsee, all jockeying to get to where the long-reaching artillery could only overshoot them.

  All those people. But Totho reached into his heart and felt almost nothing, for Chasme was no town of innocents. There was nobody who chose that place as home who did not live off piracy or the arms trade, or some other manner of vice. It was a wonder the Solarnese had not destroyed the place earlier, before the Iron Glove had made the city too strong to be threatened by the little powers of the Exalsee.

  It has taken the might of half the world to break down our doors. An exaggeration, but not much of one.

  ‘Shutter the windows now,’ Drephos commanded, and Totho rushed across to haul the lever that slammed the iron covers over each open portal, sealing them in.

  ‘Something new?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing I’m proud of,’ Drephos replied. ‘Amateur’s work. I beg your forgiveness in advance. I’m pressurizing the fuel tanks.’

  Totho’s mind spun its wheels, imagining the big vats spread around the compound. Yes, you could detonate them, and that would do some damage, but surely not much . . .

  ‘I understand. What’s your dispersal method?’

  ‘I had some bolts installed a while ago, when we were waiting on that steel shipment. When the pressure reaches . . .’

  Now that the artillery had stopped, there was enough quiet for them to hear the explosive popping sounds, the inner bolts perforating the skin of the fuel tanks, piercing each in a dozen places, the holes so tiny that the viscous oil vented out in a great cloud of black mist. In Totho’s mind’s eye he saw it: a choking fog that issued from every quarter and covered the entire compound.