Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And, in the end, even the Empire had broken its rules for him. Firstly in creating the rank that he had borne, and secondly in storming an entire city for fear of him.

  Totho drank because he had been told that men drank to forget, or for consolation, or to dissolve away all those rational, soluble parts that knew guilt and regret. Each fresh mouthful only brought all those things to the fore of his mind, though. He found no oblivion waiting at the bottom of the bowl.

  ‘That’s fine armour you have there, friend.’

  He looked up to see a trio of Bee-kinden there, soldiers from the look of them – all too similar to the vermin who had marched into the streets of Chasme and never marched out again. They had snapbows slung over their shoulders and axes at their belts, typical unimaginative sorts without an interesting innovation between them. He had no words for them, and his eyes slid back to his wine.

  ‘Where’d a halfbreed get armour like that, I wonder,’ the Bee went on.

  ‘Only one place, I reckon,’ one of his companions suggested.

  Totho looked up at them again, recognizing that familiar mail of Dirovashni make, that industrious city that had nonetheless always managed to fall behind both Chasme and Solarno, never quite good enough.

  ‘Never quite good enough.’ Until he saw their expressions, he had not realized he had spoken aloud.

  ‘We’ve just come from a city, halfbreed,’ said their leader. ‘Plenty of halfbreeds there, or there were. A whole nest of them. Burned out now. If it were day, you could see the smoke from here.’

  Totho shrugged.

  ‘Some of them got clear. Vermin always do escape. You have to hunt them down or else they breed.’

  So, this is it, then. Totho reached within himself, feeling how unsteady he was. Even the prospect of action made his head swim. The unassailable confidence of the drunk seemed to have utterly passed him by. Perhaps it would be best if I just let this happen.

  ‘Pissing Iron Glove bastards,’ the Bee went on. ‘I lost too many friends to your kind when Chasme burned.’

  And Totho lurched to his feet, empty handed, snapbow still on the floor with his overturned wine bowl. He was smiling as he said, ‘Not to my kind. To me.’

  The Bee struck him, a mailed fist striking his cheek and knocking him back against the wall. Then the man had punched downwards, trying for his head again but bruising himself against Totho’s pauldron, the force still enough to knock Totho off his feet.

  Then they were all on him, kicking and stamping, while he cradled his unarmoured head in his arms, feeling the Bees achieve a rhythm between them, unintentional but mechanical, almost comforting as they tried to destroy him, to stomp him into the dirt of the floor.

  They could not hear beneath their own shouts and grunts, but he was laughing. He was laughing because he could barely feel the blows through his magnificent armour, kick as they might.

  Then there was a new voice, and he realized to his dismay that the woman had got involved.

  She was trying to call them off, and they turned on her, and she had no armour, but she too was a halfbreed. Foreign to Exalsee politics, she would not understand why that made her even more fair game than usual.

  But she was speaking firmly, almost desperately, and Totho craned up and saw them listening. First she spoke to one of the subordinate Bees, words too soft for Totho to hear, but the man shook his head, frowning in bafflement, taking a step back. Then she was addressing the other, and he heard her say, ‘Would your mother have wished to see you like this? Was this what she meant when she said that she would always be proud of you?’

  The look on the Bee’s face was stunned. ‘My mother’s dead,’ he got out.

  ‘And she would still be proud of you, if you let her,’ the half-breed woman declared.

  She turned to the last man, their leader, her mouth open to speak, and he struck her across the face, then lunged forward to grab her even as she fell, hoisting her up and throwing her across the taverna, spilling her in amongst the gamblers. She came up with her shortsword drawn, one hand bloody at her mouth.

  ‘Now we’ll see what you’re made of, bitch!’ the Bee spat.

  Then Totho said, ‘Hey, you.’

  He had prepared himself better, this time. He had his helm on, his world narrowed to a slit, and he had his snapbow in his hands.

  To his credit, the Bee was quick. He had his own weapon off his shoulder and aimed towards Totho even as he stumbled back. The whole taverna had gone horribly silent.

  Totho had his weapon levelled, as did the Bee. The other two were frozen, reaching for their bows, eyes flicking between their leader and his former victim.

  ‘Go on,’ Totho got out, though his words sounded a little slurred even to him. He was aware that he was swaying slightly. ‘Go on, shoot me. We’ll make it a game.’

  The Bee’s eyes were very wide.

  ‘A game, you and me,’ Totho went on. ‘You shoot me, and then I’ll shoot you after. Give it your best. Go on. I lost friends in Chasme, too. I lost more than that. I lost everything. So let’s play our game.’

  He shifted his aim slightly, down and to the side. The Bee’s teeth were bared, his hands shaking a little, suddenly on unfamiliar ground.

  ‘Shoot me, you turd!’ Totho screamed at him, and the man brought his snapbow to his shoulder and loosed it at a range of only a few feet.

  He had been aiming for the throat but had hurried the shot. The bolt struck the cheek of Totho’s helm, snapping his head round and sending him reeling back into the wall for the second time.

  He heard a jubilant yell from one of the other Bees that choked to nothing halfway when Totho did not fall, but just levered himself back on to his feet with his snapbow still levelled, one-handed, the barrel weaving enough to threaten just about everyone else there.

  He had their full attention, all of them.

  He felt he should say something arrogant and heroic, like My turn! or something similarly witty, save that he had known true heroes, men for whom killing was an art form and livelihood and reason for being, and they did not quip as a rule. Instead, the words that came from him were an artificer’s.

  ‘Not even a dent,’ he told them, and their eyes strayed helplessly to the fluted steel of his helm, the Iron Glove’s finest metallurgy and smithing in perfect harmony.

  The man on the left broke first, barrelling for the door, and when the snapbow inevitably swung wildly to follow him, the others were running as well, and the rest of the taverna’s occupants after them, including the taverner herself. Only the halfbreed woman was left, well within the compass of Totho’s roving aim.

  ‘We should be moving,’ she suggested. ‘No doubt they have more friends, and you seem to be a wanted man.’

  ‘We? What we?’ he demanded of her. ‘Why are you doing this? Why won’t you leave me alone?’ He had a horrible moment of disconnection when he wondered if she was actually real, or just some guilt-spawned product of his mind. But the Bees were talking to her, weren’t they? Or were they?

  ‘I can’t tell you, because you wouldn’t – couldn’t – understand, and it wouldn’t make any sense to you. And, anyway, I’d have to mention—’

  ‘Che. Che who you can’t know.’

  ‘Her, yes.’

  His hand twitched, but he managed to fight his finger away from the trigger. ‘Let’s go,’ he told her. ‘We’ll go. We’ll find somewhere.’ He wanted to take more wine, but the sheer logistics of trying to transport a keg defeated him. ‘You’ll tell me . . . I don’t care what. Just tell me. Tell me about Che.’

  When Maure had finished the whole sorry story, Totho found himself just shaking his head. They were by the lakeside still, but well beyond the Bee village, amid a grove of willows with the light of a half-moon filtering through their branches.

  He felt that if he had drunk less he would have made out more of her actual sentences, and yet still not have understood. It was as if someone had told him some bizarre old story, some ancient M
oth legend, but substituted names he knew for its original mythical characters.

  ‘You make no sense,’ he complained weakly.

  ‘I told you that you wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘But you make no sense,’ he insisted. ‘How can there be some underground world that isn’t actually underground? How can a whole kinden, and all those others, just have been lost to history – and now come back? How was this Argastos . . . what was he? How can that possibly even be a . . . a metaphor, even? What does it mean?’

  ‘You’re Apt. I have no words that you will comprehend,’ she said sadly. ‘To think I used to seek out Apt men . . . but I never needed them to understand me before. All of it is a metaphor. None of it is a metaphor.’

  ‘Besides, Che’s Apt too.’

  ‘She’s not.’

  He scowled stubbornly. ‘She’s Apt. She was . . . confused, in Khanaphes. She’d lost people, she wasn’t thinking straight. I know . . . knew her, though. She’s—’

  ‘A magician.’

  At that he just laughed, hearing an edge of desperation in his own voice. ‘Don’t be stupid, woman. Fine, you obviously do know Che and Tynisa and . . . but you’re Inapt and you’re cracked. I don’t care whether you were born that way or fell on your head, but . . .’

  ‘She is a magician.’ And this time she was standing, staring down at him as he sat with his back to a tree.

  He found one hand creeping towards his snapbow, for all that she could not possibly be a threat to him. ‘Sit down.’

  ‘She is the most powerful magician I have ever known, Totho,’ Maure insisted. ‘She says she was crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes, and I believe it. She is raw, untrained, but she has power . . . she had power.’

  ‘Khanaphes,’ Totho spat in contempt, and abruptly a vision came to him, a memory he tried to keep locked in darkness, of a great wall of water descending, obliterating an army, defying rational explanation. ‘She’s not . . . Che’s not . . .’ He stared into Maure’s face, recognizing utter certainty there, for all the gap in Aptitude that lay between them. Something clicked into place within him, an escapement that had been waiting for its moment for years. ‘He did it. He did it to her.’ His voice sounded very cold even to his own ears.

  Maure backed up a step. ‘Who . . .?’

  Abruptly Totho was on his feet as well, snapbow in hand. ‘The Inapt bastard . . . the Moth boy.’ For all that the boy had been older than Totho at the time. ‘He corrupted her somehow. He took her from me and he changed her so that . . . he spoiled her.’

  ‘I don’t think—’ Maure started and then the snapbow was directed at her face, its aim far steadier now than before.

  ‘Pissing Inapt!’ Totho snapped at her. ‘Always you pissing Inapt ruining my life.’ He knew he was still drunk, but here was that grand confidence in the rightness of his actions that he had always been promised. Here was the courage to do what must be done. ‘If I could – if I could invent a machine for it – I’d kill every pissing Inapt bastard in the world! Piss on the Bee-killer, I’d make a Moth-killer and I’d use it. And the world would be a better place!’

  She was frozen, staring at the weapon.

  ‘And you know why? Out of your own mouth, that’s why!’ He was fighting to order the words. ‘Either you’re such pissing ridiculous liars that every word you say is suspect, or . . . can you imagine what I would have to think if I believed any of it? If any of it was true? How you Inapt have screwed the world over and over, fighting stupid wars, burying whole kinden, sitting around and turning into the living dead? Even if it were true, how much better the pissing world would be if we’d never had any of you!’

  Eyes wide, she looked at him down the length of the snapbow. ‘I suppose that’s probably true.’ And then, after a strained pause: ‘Do you shoot me now?’

  He blinked at the snapbow, which had seemed so very necessary a moment before. ‘It was just . . .’

  ‘A metaphor?’

  He scowled down the tentative smile appearing on her face. ‘Don’t you joke with me. I am not in the mood.’ With that, he felt as though his strings had been cut, and he slumped down beside the tree again. ‘I should have brought that wine after all. Why me, eh?’ He hadn’t wanted to return to the question, but the mere mention of Che, her reintroduction into his life, even by proxy, had kindled a horrible spark in him, for all he tried to extinguish it. Sometimes hope became the worst enemy.

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘I saw you in Che’s mind, back in her past. I know you were a friend of hers. When she sent me back here, when she sent me out, I don’t think she could dictate where I went but . . . there is meaning.’

  ‘Or your bad luck.’

  She shrugged. ‘You Apt believe the world is so random, and so you build your machines to control as much of it as possible. To me, there is so little actual chance in the world. Its patterns are capable of prediction, and so it is not a matter of controlling so much as planning ahead.’

  That came so close to making sense to Totho that he just nodded and let her continue.

  ‘She sent me here to you,’ Maure concluded. ‘What else is there? Not to Khanaphes, not to Collegium, not to the Commonweal where she and I met. No – here, to you. The line that connects the two of you was strong enough to guide me.’

  ‘There is no line, not any more,’ Totho announced harshly.

  He saw her expression, clearly wanting to speak but fearful of doing so, and waved her words on.

  ‘Only if you promise not to shoot me.’

  ‘I won’t shoot you.’

  ‘I am a necromancer. I can see the ghosts that haunt people, that hang about them – both the dead and the living. I look at you and I see Che there, right there.’ And he actually looked around to where she pointed, craning past his pauldron to see what was so very evident to this woman.

  He did have a brief moment of wanting to shoot her then, if only to eradicate this incomprehensible knot that his life was caught in. The realization that he had nothing else left, that the knot was the one thing holding him from plunging into the abyss, stayed his hand.

  Nineteen

  She tried to tell them, truly she did.

  Yes, she was Empress of the Wasps, and her word was law, transmitted by her own mouth or by those of her Red Watch. She was entitled to command, and indeed the entire structure of the Empire was set up for that specific purpose. Nevertheless she had felt a burning need to communicate her reasons for what she was telling them to do.

  For I do not wish to be remembered as . . . but there were no words to express how they might remember her. Long after her death, her name would be a byword for atrocity unless she could make them understand how right, how necessary, this whole desperate endeavour was.

  So she had called them all to her audience chambers, where she sat on her throne before them with Tisamon’s louring presence at her side. The great powers of the Empire had all been represented there. She had summoned General Brugan of the Rekef and General Lien of the Engineers. She had called in Marent of the army and the magnates of the Consortium. She had spoken the names of the luminaries of the Quartermasters and the Slave Corps, and of course they had come as swiftly as they could. Nobody wanted to disappoint the Empress.

  There, in the very hub of her power, where she was strongest, she had confronted them. She had worked it all out beforehand, what she would say. She would tell them the truth. They were the Empire, her people, so the truth was something she owed them.

  She would tell them it all: the secret histories and the hidden worlds and the terrible deeds done at the dawn of time. ‘There was a war,’ she would say, for at least they would understand that much. She would detail who that war had been against, not even deigning to mask her intentions behind the derogatory label of ‘the Worm’.

  She would stand before them and tell them how all the powers of the old world had gathered together to defeat that ancient enemy, and how it had then been sealed away, locked beyond the world,
until now.

  Her own guilt in its eventual release she would not describe – they did not need to know – only that it was out now, and must be put back in its place.

  After that, she had planned to explain precisely the draconian measures that were now their only chance. It had all made such perfect sense to her, regardless of the blood that would be on all their hands once it was done – blood enough to make even a general flinch. They would at least know that the ends justified those or any other means.

  When they had come at her call, to throng her chambers with as great a gathering of Imperial power as the world had seen in many a year, she had stood, faced them and drawn breath. She had looked upon their faces, and touched the hard stones of their minds.

  Her words had dried up in her throat.

  What she had seen there was ignorance. It was not the sort of ignorance that could be educated out of them: they had been born with it, a birthright passed down through the blood of every Wasp save for her. Looking at all those respectful expectant faces, she had abruptly seen herself as they saw her – and as they would also see her once she had finished her earnest recounting.

  They would nod, and bow, and be the abject servants of the throne, and then they would leave. And they would think that she was mad.

  The truth of her words – she would speak nothing to them but truth – would curdle into fiction in their ears and in their minds. The grinding mills of their Aptitude would take it in and churn out nothing but scrap for them. And they would murmur to each other that their Empress was insane. And after that perhaps some of them would laugh at her. And, however hard she strove to root out such mirth, she would still hear their laughter. That kind of humour spread like a disease.

  For the first time since taking the throne, Seda stared her Empire in the eye and was the one to look away first. She could bear many things, but she found that the mockery of her people was not one of them. Let them hate her; let them fear her; only let them not laugh.