Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And so, before that great host of the mighty, she had simply given out a handful of uncompromising instructions, baffling in their scope and intent, and let them wonder. Even then there was a miasma of doubt hanging about the room as they thought: All this, just for that? They did not understand her, and the distance between them was only growing wider. Even her own Red Watch could not follow her to the terrible places she was forced to walk.

  Straessa the Antspider ducked back, a snapbow bolt striking stone dust near her face. By now she reckoned there were far fewer Wasps scattered amongst the buildings of this village than there were solid Collegiate company soldiers at her back, but the Wasps had been very inventive in picking their shooting positions.

  And they said I shouldn’t be leading this sort of thing any more. And I didn’t listen, worse luck.

  It was just a little satellite village on the rail line, but the Wasps had obviously picked it as a good place to inconvenience the expeditionary force; no doubt there were all sorts of explosive surprises planned, and so a punitive force had been sent in to root them out. Straessa had vaguely expected to find barricades and a shooting line, but the Wasps had spread out their force and were using the buildings themselves as their cover, making every step into the open a potential last one.

  She had got her people within sight of the central square, but then three or four had speedily been picked off, and everything had ground to a halt. She had some fifty soldiers with her, against perhaps half that many Wasps, but so far the Collegiates had scored only a single kill.

  She saw movement across the square, what might have been a shape hunched on a rooftop, and took careful aim at that low bulge disfiguring the flat-roofed silhouette, drawing a deep breath and trying to hold each muscle in perfect stillness save for those of one finger.

  And loose.

  And miss. She saw the figure jerk back, but in surprise rather than pain. A moment later the Wasp was dead, toppling from the roof, and she had a momentary glimpse of an arrow’s long shaft in the corpse.

  Castre Gorenn, founder and sole member of the Commonweal Retaliatory Army, dropped from a clear sky onto the roof, another arrow already nocked to her bow, the string drawn back even as the Antspider watched. She got a single shaft off before rolling off from her perch, wings catching her and taking her to cover, the bolts of the Wasps darting past her like gnats.

  That’s one more – no, two, I’ll bet. Three in all. And, because she was watching for it, she saw a Wasp leaning out, trying to track the Dragonfly, incensed by the loss of his comrades. Straessa brought her snapbow up hastily, but someone else was quicker, and the enemy death toll went up to four in that moment.

  And how many are there in total? A score? Score and a half?

  She had no more targets that she could see, although that didn’t mean there weren’t any that could see her. Time to make another dash for it.

  A handful of her people had the same idea, all rushing forwards to their next piece of cover. Bolts struck dust at their heels, and one man fell, yelling, shot through the leg, dragged into cover by his comrades. Straessa sent a shot towards where she reckoned one of the enemy was positioned, then braced herself to make the same advance, knowing that some of her people were going to have to go into the buildings and flush the Wasps off the roofs for the rest to shoot at. And this is just a little village. Collegium is going to be all this and a hundred times more.

  And where the pits is everyone? Is the Empire enslaving whole villages, or did they flee, or . . .?

  She ran, just breaking into the open without thought, and not stopping until she was in the shelter of a doorway, whilst some detached part of her mind calmly noted where the shooting was coming from. A second of pause, in cover, to check whether she was actually in cover, and then she had leant out round the side of the house, snapbow already tracking upwards. She saw the Wasp there, exactly where she had guessed at, but he was already ducking back, someone else’s shot keeping his head down. Then a bolt came at her from another angle entirely – her blind side – and she returned the shot instantly but somewhat randomly – no hope of hitting but it was something for the enemy to think about.

  Then there was a shout from her first target, and she leant out again, wincing, seeing Gorenn there again, kicking the man backwards off the roof. The Wasp scout’s wings flared, catching him, but one of Straessa’s people took him down a moment later, and Gorenn took three swift steps – as though she was simply winding up to jump to the next roof – and then dropped straight down. Straessa found the man who had shot at her last and skipped a bolt near him as he tried to aim, and then the Sarnesh arrived.

  She had not been expecting them. Indeed, the Sarnesh had been remarkably stand-offish about their Collegiate allies, with that particular silent sneer that only Ant-kinden could ever master. Here they were, though, and it looked to be at least a hundred of them, swarming across the village, through the streets, into every house.

  The Wasps had plainly decided that enough was enough, and they were lifting off and trying to head south with all speed. Straessa saw several picked off promptly, but at least a dozen got clear away. They had done their job for as long as it remained possible, and they were no fools.

  She stayed in cover for a while longer, enough to allow the Sarnesh to clear every building – no point taking the risk of one last Wasp sniper with an over-keen sense of duty. At last, though, once she saw the Ants assembling in the square, she came out and called for her own people.

  ‘Good work, all of you,’ she shouted to them. ‘Wounded being tended?’

  ‘Yes, Officer.’

  ‘Gorenn!’

  The Dragonfly headed over, an arrow to her bow still, just in case.

  ‘You did well.’ Straessa expected the Dragonfly simply to shrug that off, but the woman nodded gravely. ‘What is it?’

  Gorenn held up an arm, putting a finger through the bolt hole in her sleeve that had a little blood at the edge of it. ‘Good shots, that lot,’ she said soberly.

  ‘Get it seen to,’ Straessa advised her, and then put her hand on the Dragonfly’s shoulder as Gorenn turned around. She wanted to say, Remember you’re not immortal, but in the end she just squeezed reassuringly and let the woman go.

  ‘Who’s officer in charge?’ the Antspider called out to the Sarnesh. She was expecting to encounter that stiff-necked disdain, all the more so because she was a halfbreed – an Ant halfbreed at that – but one of them stepped forwards and nodded to her without any obvious antipathy. Of course he wore no badge of rank, and of course he looked just like the rest, more or less. She made sure she kept him in sight at all times, in case they should pull some sort of switch on her.

  ‘Where are the locals, Officer?’ he asked her.

  ‘No idea. Run away, probably.’

  ‘I think the Wasps killed them,’ he told her.

  ‘You think . . .’ A cold feeling rose up in her. A village like this with, what, three hundred people, more? ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘My soldiers see signs of violence in many of the buildings – broken furniture, bloodstains. Some of the homes themselves seem damaged. And there was . . . a body.’

  ‘A body? Just the one?’ But something in the way he said it was making her very uncomfortable.

  ‘Show me.’ And, as Gorenn was shamelessly eavesdropping and had not gone to get her scratch seen to at all, she signalled the Dragonfly to come with them.

  The place had been a general store, the main room hung with tools and supplies, neither taken by the fleeing occupants nor looted by the Wasps. The Ant officer led her through to the back room, and there she saw it.

  Gorenn was a little ahead of her, and she recoiled as soon as she entered, bowstring tugged back and arrow levelled at something low to the floor. Straessa heard the Ant say, ‘It’s dead. We killed it when we came in here, though it bit one of my soldiers . . . we don’t know yet if he’ll survive the poison.’

  Eyes following the point of the a
rrow, Straessa could be forgiven for seeing the dead centipede first, almost bisected by a sword-blow and curled up in its last death throes. Then she saw the human body, or what was visible of it.

  Her stomach lurched, and perhaps it was only her stubbornness in not wanting to show Collegium up before the Sarnesh that kept down the bile.

  A Beetle-kinden woman lay dead there, but not by sword or sting. She was buried up to her armpits in the ground itself, the very stone flags of the floor rippled and twisted about her, as though it had become quicksand. As though something had been dragging its victim down into it. Her arms were frozen as if clawing at the ground, her face tilted towards the ceiling and locked in a twisted, soundless scream.

  ‘You think . . . the Wasps . . .?’ Straessa breathed in disbelief.

  The Sarnesh officer shuffled uncomfortably. It was plain he very much wanted to be able to blame the Empire.

  ‘Not the Wasps,’ Gorenn whispered. ‘Not the Wasps.’ She was already backing out of the room, out of the building, arrow still held to the string, but her hands shaking far too much to have aimed it.

  ‘We withdrew when the Sarnesh arrived, sir,’ the scout reported. ‘We got the chance to lay some traps on the rails for their baggage train, though.’

  ‘Given current progress, I’d guess they’ll find and disarm them quickly enough,’ Tynan decided, because the Collegiate artificers had proved quite capable of that so far. ‘They’re camped within sight of the walls?’

  ‘Yes, sir, but out of effective artillery range.’

  If we still had the big greatshotters . . . But, like respectable air reinforcements, replacement artillery had not been forthcoming. Tynan guessed that, as he was already on the right side of the walls of his city, he was not considered a priority.

  ‘General, the village . . . it was cleared of its occupants when we arrived,’ the scout added. ‘Signs of a struggle, but we saw no bodies. Just like . . .’

  Tynan held a hand up. ‘I know.’ I know, and I don’t want to think of it, because we’ve all seen too much of that – even inside the city, that once! – and still nobody has any answers for me. ‘And the Vekken?’ he enquired, because that was something military and comprehensible.

  ‘At a similar distance to the west, General, and a good space between them and the Sarnesh. The Collegiate orthopters are still providing air cover for them.’

  But not the Sarnesh fliers. Although the Ants and the Beetles flew the same model of craft, Bergild’s Farsphex pilots could tell whose hands were on the stick just from the flying styles.

  ‘Fine, back to your squad.’ He dismissed the scout because his headquarters was crowded at the moment, with friends and enemies both. ‘They can only be waiting for an uprising from the populace,’ Tynan decided. ‘Double patrols, no exceptions to the curfew, and break up any gatherings of more than a dozen. Let’s have some keen-eyed lads up on the roofs as well, to keep a lid on it. Prepare a sally force of about a third of our strength. We’ll hit the Vekken first.’

  ‘General, no.’

  Tynan’s head snapped round, to see the eternal thorn in his side.

  ‘Major Vrakir, you have something to say?’

  ‘Do not dilute our forces within the city, sir. They will be needed.’

  Vrakir had that curiously set look to his face that Tynan had learned to expect, as though the man was trying to disassociate himself from his own mouth.

  ‘No doubt this is the Empress’s wisdom we’re hearing?’

  Vrakir locked eyes with him. ‘Her own words, General. Our forces will be called upon to defend Collegium. There must be no sorties. You’ve said yourself that they have neither the numbers nor the engines to take the walls.’

  ‘Unless some concerned citizen opens the gates to them, and the longer they sit out there unchallenged, the more chance there is of that happening,’ Tynan shot back.

  ‘Even so, General.’

  Each time this happened, each time Vrakir came out with some new proclamation, Tynan braced himself, wondering if this was the moment that he would break loose from these ridiculous shackles and call the man’s bluff. But then came the thought, always: Remember what it is you have already done. And, in the echo of that, he just nodded and gritted his teeth. Bend over for Vrakir and the Empress.

  He put a hand to his forehead. He had been drinking last night, when the dreams had got too much for him, and the aftereffects were proving stubborn.

  ‘So our ground forces sit still, and yet you want most of our air cover pissing off east to escort who knows what, leaving us open to their orthopters?’

  ‘Yes, General. It is necessary.’

  ‘What does she tell you, Vrakir?’ he asked roughly. ‘Why can’t we just smash the Vekken and the Sarnesh, given they’ve delivered themselves up to us in such convenient numbers?’ He had long since given up questioning how it was that the Empress’s words reached this man. Secret agents, messenger insects, some tiny ratiocinator engine surgically implanted in Vrakir’s skull: all of these he might believe.

  Vrakir swallowed, and Tynan raised an eyebrow, seeing that even he was having difficulty forcing the words out.

  ‘Fear death by water,’ was all he had in reply.

  After dismissing the lot of them, Tynan returned to his quarters in disgust, to meet with his guest.

  When she had been brought in – not long before the scouts returned – he had assumed this was the herald of some great insurgency amongst the Collegiates. After all, the Fly Sartaea te Mosca was reckoned to be some manner of agitator by the Moths.

  She had denied that, and so he had her placed under guard while he went to deal with more important matters. He had left her food and wine, though, and refrained from putting her in a cell or binding her. He felt that she had become one of those curious unknown quantities – not one of ours, and yet perhaps not one of theirs either, someone who might prove useful. Tynan was no intelligencer, but governing a city was fast turning him into one.

  ‘Now,’ he addressed her, as he strode in, ‘what was it?’

  She had been sitting at his table and pouring the last of the wine, and now she started guiltily. ‘General, no doubt you’re wondering what’s about to happen with the Sarnesh and the Vekken.’

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t actually believe you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know, not exactly, but I know that they have come to retake the city, General. I’ve come here to give you some advice, if you will take it.’

  He stared at her for a moment. ‘Is that advice to leave the city?’

  ‘It is, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Then that’s not an option. I have my orders.’

  ‘General, I . . .’ She bit at her lip. ‘I’d be getting nowhere if I said that I was a magician, would I?’

  He laughed at her although, by the time he had sat across from her, the sound had something broken about it. ‘Is that something you’re likely to tell me? Are you the Empress’s voice, too?’ Even as he said it, he knew that those words should sound like some wild non-sequitur, but instead they seemed to follow on perfectly naturally.

  ‘General—’

  ‘Listen to me, Fly-kinden,’ he told her, harsher than he had intended, simply to cover up his unease. ‘Your Ant friends are too few to help you, and they can’t even join forces to work together against us. Vekken and Sarnesh, they hate each other worse than they hate us! They’ll be at each others’ throats within a tenday, if we don’t destroy them first.’ Which we can’t, because Vrakir says that the Empress says . . . That curious tone in which the Red Watch man uttered, Fear death by water, as though he could not believe his own mouth, as though he was a prisoner to some barbed thing inside his head, which was making him say such things.

  ‘They will not fight each other,’ te Mosca told him. ‘Your scouts will tell you soon, if you have not heard already.’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘Stenwold Maker has been seen in the Ant camps. He will keep them in l
ine.’

  ‘Maker’s dead,’ Tynan spat back immediately.

  ‘Then show me his body.’

  Abruptly he kicked back from the table, as though this small woman was venomous. Her words, Vrakir’s words, the scout’s report of the emptied village, everything rattled and jumbled in his mind, and for a moment he felt that it almost came together to make some terrible, unthinkable sense, some pattern that his mind was simply not prepared to accept.

  ‘Tell your people that if they rise up, I will make an example of them,’ he hissed to te Mosca. ‘Every man or woman who takes up arms will be on the crossed pikes, and their families shipped east as slaves. Tell them!’ His own threats sounded hollow in his ears.

  Taki was proud that at least half of her pilots got into the air ahead of the Sarnesh. Certainly, the Ants had the benefit of their mindlink, but defending Collegium from the Empire had meant that being kicked out of bed and straight into the cockpit had become second nature to her.

  Barely half an hour before, a Stomreader scout had skidded to a hasty landing, the pilot leaping out to warn that there was trouble on the way. The Empire was getting reinforcements.

  At around the same time, the Imperial Second Army’s Farsphex were all lifting off and heading eastwards to shepherd the new arrivals in. That meant it was time for Taki and her comrades to go and pick a fight.

  Rising up now from the Sarnesh camp, she craned left and right to see the swiftest of her comrades falling into place around her – Collegiate Beetle-kinden and Mynan airmen, most of them veterans of a dozen aerial skirmishes. The Sarnesh were below, just warming their wings, all about to leap from the earth at the same unheard signal.

  Airships, the scout had said, and that covered a multitude of sins. Taki had given very clear orders on how to react if the Empire was trying the same trick as last time – a ship that was basically nothing more than a mobile hornet hive. When the Second had taken the city, Collegium had lost the bulk of its aerial forces to that ruse, although the Imperial pilots had hardly come out unscathed either.