Still, it doesn’t make sense to do it twice. Not only because their opponents would be expecting it, but because the overwhelming air superiority the Empire had been countering then simply did not exist now. Perhaps Collegium and Sarn did have a bit of an edge in the air, but both sides had nowhere near the number of craft that earlier clashes had seen. In the end, neither the Empire nor its enemies had been able to match production to the intervening attrition, and now Taki guessed that the flower of the Wasp Air Corps was being deployed elsewhere.
Three big airships, though? Can’t just be a supply run. And the only answer to that was: Better take a look, the hard way.
She had them in sight: whatever they were, the dirigibles were big enough that she could see the three dots in the sky even at this distance, and she flashed her wingmen to draw their attention.
It was an agonizing wait for the vessels to come into range and, at the same time, the last few hundred yards seemed to dash by far too fast. By then she had had a good look at the airships, seeing some of the largest freighters her considerable experience had encountered, but certainly not the specialist piece they’d shipped the insect hive in.
The Second Army’s complement of Farsphex circled and dived about them, already fanning out to take on the enemy. Whatever this business was about, the Wasps wanted to protect it.
Taki’s mind spun through its unconscious mathematics, one hand clicking signals left and right at her comrades, detailing plans of attack, the codes all second nature to her now. She knew that the Sarnesh would work to their own agenda, but she had spotted the line they were taking and simply kept her people out of that quarter. The Ants fought together impeccably, as she would have expected, but they tended to huddle as a pack despite everything she had tried to teach them – deadly, but of limited impact in a battlefield as vast as the sky.
Planning done, the burdens of leadership discharged, she again became Taki the pilot, skimming her Stormreader through the sky at her first target, aiming to scatter the enemy and dive at the closest of those airships. Let’s put a few holes in one and see what colour it bleeds.
After the fight, there were more questions than answers. The Wasp Farsphex pilots had put up a spirited defence, keeping the pressure on the attackers to deflect them from the slow-moving dirigibles. They had lost four, which Taki reckoned was a good catch. One Collegiate pilot had been struck from the air, and the Sarnesh had lost one as well. That had been an education – the Ants all over the air for almost ten minutes, as if they had abruptly remembered the drop beneath them, the utter hostility of the surrounding element to a kinden without wings. They had pulled themselves together after that, but Taki reckoned that from now on they wouldn’t be so stuffy about taking advice from kinden more at home in the air.
They had brought down one of the three airships by concerted and determined strafing, and that had been mostly due to the Sarnesh, who had been able to coordinate their attack runs faultlessly. The other two had lumbered on until they were over Collegium itself, and Wasp soldiers began rising up from the walls, whereupon Taki had finally called off the attack.
She had gone straight back to that one downed craft to get a good look at it before the Imperials tried to rescue whatever it had been carrying. She had been ready for just about anything: soldiers, beasts, more artillery, all the materiel that General Tynan might need to hold off a siege.
What she had not expected was nothing. Nothing at all.
‘What do you mean, nothing?’ Tynan demanded.
‘Just that, sir,’ Captain Bergild reported, sounding just as incredulous as he did. ‘I lost four of my pilots to bring these things in, and they’re empty – great big freight-carriers, and it looks as if the Quartermasters forgot to load up before they took off.’
Tynan stared past her for a second as he fought his temper down. ‘Get me Vrakir.’
‘He’s already here, General, awaiting your pleasure.’
‘Then he’ll be waiting a long time.’ Tynan glowered about his headquarters. ‘Send the man in. I want to hear this.’
Major Vrakir entered smartly. There was a look on his face that Tynan recognized immediately: the look of a man whose duty it was to bear unwelcome news. Vrakir had looked like that when he had come to order Tynan to act against their Spider allies.
‘You’ve some explaining to do,’ the general growled. ‘First, I hear your threat from the sea has resolved itself into a fleet of a dozen ships hanging back down the coast. Apparently the land forces practically at our gates don’t take precedence over a few hundred Tseni marines. “Fear death by water” indeed.’
Vrakir regarded him impassively, rising to none of it.
‘And now your empty airships that we diverted our entire air strength to defend. Is there a nagging feeling in the back of your mind, Vrakir? Did your people forget something back in Capitas, perhaps? Is their plan still sitting back at the airfield, all neatly crated and waiting to fly?’
‘I need to speak with you, and only you, General,’ Vrakir replied.
Tynan looked at him, thinking, Is this it then? Is this when we come to blows, the two most senior Wasps in Collegium trading sting-shot across a small room?
Would I welcome that, if it was?
With a sick feeling he realized that he would. If Vrakir tried to kill him, then he would take that as a fair excuse for killing Vrakir right back. Is this something Mycella did to punish me, when I killed her? Is this some Art – some Inapt thing – that has hold of me? Or is it just me? Come on, Tynan, you don’t need anything more than that to want this man dead. You’re already an unnatural bastard for having let him live this long.
He flexed his fingers, shrugged his shoulders. He wore a leather cuirass under his tunic, and it might deflect the fire of a stingshot, if he was lucky. Vrakir, on the other hand, looked unarmoured.
‘Get out, all of you,’ he murmured.
‘General—?’
‘All of you, out now. Out into the next room, but wait for my shout.’ Because if he is quicker than me, then by the Empress I’ll trust you to kill him before he can get out of this place. ‘You too, Captain Bergild.’
The woman looked as though she wanted to protest, which Tynan found oddly touching, but in the end she left along with the rest of them.
Tynan slid one foot back for better balance, waiting for the first sign that Vrakir might go for him. He was a loyal servant of the Empire, was Tynan. He would not strike first.
Instead, the Red Watch officer reached into his tunic, the least threatening gesture a Wasp could make, and drew out a scroll.
‘Orders, General,’ he said quietly. ‘These airships brought orders.’
‘That’s a lot of hold space for one piece of paper,’ Tynan remarked. Vrakir was pointedly still at attention – a hard pose to launch a surprise attack from, which was probably the original point of it. Unwillingly, Tynan stepped forwards and snatched the scroll that Vrakir proffered.
Tynan retreated again, unrolling it, noting the seals: no strange intuitions of the Red Watch this time. The Empress herself had held this paper and given it her mark.
He scanned the few lines written there, feeling a weird sense that he had done this all before.
‘This is . . .’
‘We should begin loading immediately, General,’ Vrakir confirmed.
Loading, yes, but not with the soldiers of the Second, who were hereby commanded to hold Collegium against all comers. No last-minute escape for Tynan’s boys if things go bad, instead . . .
‘What is this?’ Tynan demanded, crumpling the scroll.
‘Orders, General,’ Vrakir said again. ‘We have three score Slave Corps to deal with the logistics, but we should . . .’
‘Major Vrakir, we don’t have anywhere like this number of Collegiates in the cells, never mind whether any of them are Inapt or not. This simply isn’t—’
‘General, the Empress is not looking for criminals or seditionists or rebels. She simply seeks slave
s. I will give the necessary orders to begin rounding up the local population. We have lost one airship, but the slavers reckon we should be able to fit almost a thousand in the hold of each surviving vessel, if they pack them tight.’
‘What is this all about, Vrakir?’ Tynan demanded.
‘The Empress’s will, sir,’ Vrakir replied, while his expression said eloquently, I don’t know. I do not know.
Twenty
‘First,’ said the Hermit, ‘we must prepare.’ He stared into Che’s eyes, as though trying to startle into the open the fear he plainly thought should be there.
She met his gaze evenly, if only because his eyes were relatably human. They had less of the Worm’s taint than his other features.
‘You cannot just go to the Worm. You cannot see what the Worm is, not a stranger like you,’ he went on. ‘The Worm knows its own, yes, it does. And you are not. You will be—’
‘But you have a way,’ Che cut him off. She was very aware of her companions watching all this. Despite the gravity of the situation, she was beginning to feel slightly ridiculous with this man prattling on.
Abruptly there was a knife in his hand, a curved blade most of a foot long, and he had latched on to her wrist, dragging her close again when she tried to pull away. He was stronger than he had any right to be.
Hearing the sudden scuffle, she knew that Thalric would have one palm thrust forwards, with Tynisa’s rapier whispering from its sheath. Her eyes were on the knife, though, and she could not work her throat sufficiently to tell them to stand down.
Instead, it was Orothellin’s voice booming, ‘Wait!’ the echo of it rolling about the cave. ‘It must be this way.’
Che felt the tension waver in its balance, because the old Master of Khanaphes did not command that sort of authority, and the Hermit’s expression offered no reassurance at all.
Her heart was hammering, but she studied the old man, his pallid skin cicatrized with those twisted spirals. ‘The mark of the Worm,’ she got out.
His smile was vicious. ‘As you say. Are you regretting your decision yet?’
Yes. Because what she did here now would mark her permanently, and not just her flesh. She was being inducted into a terrible mystery, the touch of which would stain her forever.
The Hermit’s grin was spreading as he saw her falter, and sheer obstinacy did the rest.
‘Do it.’ She bared one arm for him, right up to the shoulder. This is the price I pay, or the first instalment of that price. I have set my course and I shall follow it, come what will.
He rested his blade on her skin, pausing a moment as though working out the precise movement in advance, and then drawing the keen edge across her skin with a twisting circular motion of his wrist.
She hissed pain through her teeth, eyes clenched shut against it, suppressing the cry. The sickness inside was worse, though: the corruption that bled in just as her blood welled out, and she knew she had consented to a terrible thing. But she wanted knowledge, and every tale of the Bad Old Days made clear that knowledge was only had for a price – and at least she had known beforehand what coin she would be paying in.
Then the Hermit was swabbing at the wound – which hurt more than the cut – and considering his handiwork.
‘Not quite, no, not quite,’ he muttered, and she felt Thalric’s hand in hers, giving her something to clench on as the Hermit picked and cut shallow hatches and lines, and then as he rubbed something gritty and stinging into the bloody gashes, his fingers wet to the knuckles with her blood. The burning pain of his work seemed to go on forever, and reach right to her core, the actual wound itself a mere abstraction.
‘It mustn’t heal. You’ll have it for life, yes indeed,’ the Hermit muttered. ‘And, even then, it won’t last you for long. This doesn’t make you one with the Worm. You’ll not walk in its shadow for long, with just this little scratch, no, no.’ Another vile grin. ‘Though you’ll have this to remember us by, oh yes, you will.’
She could see more than a dozen such scars on his own skin, and that counted only those parts of his dirty, pasty hide that were exposed.
‘Now you’re ready, eh?’ And the grin had become a glower, as though he had been forced to do all this at knife point. ‘Now you’ll see – and you’ll be sorry.’
‘Old man,’ Esmail broke in, ‘give me a scar to match hers.’
‘I’m not taking two!’ the Hermit spat.
‘Perhaps I’ll walk that way on my own,’ the Assassin replied.
The Hermit chuckled bitterly. ‘This one, I’ll take her, but if she strays from my heels, that little mark won’t save her. She must be marked, yes, but even then her life is bound to me. I was born of the Worm, at least. She can hide in my shadow. You will not pass for the Worm without me.’
Esmail considered this, his face a closed book to Che. Then he blinked and nodded. ‘I have made a livelihood of walking where I was not wanted, seeming what I was not. So, there is no magic here, and my old tricks won’t work, but the bulk of my training does not need a magician’s touch, and I’ll take whatever I can get. Cut me, old man.’
The Hermit’s eyes sought out Orothellin, who shrugged, plainly uncertain, but in the end Esmail endured the same ritual, gritting his teeth against it as the Hermit worried away at his arm. If he felt the depth of the taint, he did not show it. Perhaps it was only a little more darkness in an almost starless sky.
‘What will you do?’ Che asked Esmail, after it was done and he was nursing the wound.
He shrugged with his unmarred shoulder. ‘If you intend to accomplish anything here, and if I am to be of any use to you – if we are to see the sun again – then I play by whatever rules this place admits to. If there is an Emperor of Worms, I will walk into his palace and cut his throat.’
At that, the Hermit cackled, eyes bulging. ‘You’ll . . . aha no, no, you won’t. She’ll tell you, if she comes back. She’ll see, and she’ll tell you just why you can’t. Now come on, girl. It’s time we were gone.’
‘Orothellin has told me we were magicians, once.’ The Hermit had a surprising turn of speed for an old man, moving swiftly over the uneven ground, clambering here and there with the sureness of his Art, making Che work to keep up with him. ‘No more, though.’
‘I had thought you . . . or the others like you . . . the men with scars . . .’ she began uncertainly. ‘Are they not . . .?’ Ahead her eyes could make out the random clutter of the city of the Worm she had looked out over before. Until it had come into sight, the Hermit had just hunched alongside, practically ignoring her. Now it was as though the sight of his kin had opened a door within him, and the words came out.
‘No, magician is not the word for what they are, or for what I was,’ he grunted, hauling himself over a ledge, his staff clattering against the stone. He was making no attempt at stealth. ‘But we must keep clear of them. That mark on you, as well as my presence, these will let us pass the segments of the Worm – but the head has eyes, yes? The Scarred Ones, they will see you, and know you for an intruder, and then you will die. I will die, too, if they know me. We must avoid them.’
‘If not magicians, then what?’ Che demanded, out of breath with the constant scrabbling and climbing and bursts of flight.
He stopped abruptly. ‘You must not think in such terms. It will not help you where you’re going.’
‘So give me some new terms. Just tell me . . . I mean, what do you believe of magic? Are you Apt? Do you just think it’s nonsense?’ It struck her that here, where the magic just drained away like water out of cupped hands, it would be very easy to be Apt.
‘Magic is irrelevant. The work of the slaves, their devices and machines, that is irrelevant,’ the Hermit pronounced. ‘None of it matters in the face of god.’
Che stared at him, and the smile that broadened across his colourless face seemed only just this side of madness.
‘And the name for what they are – for what I was – is priest.’
‘I . . . don’t
understand,’ she confessed.
‘No, you do not and you cannot, just as I cannot understand when Orothellin talks of magic. But I can show you, and then you will understand—’
‘And regret, yes,’ she finished for him testily.
They travelled in silence for a while, as the broken city expanded to fill the dark land ahead of them, but the Hermit kept glancing back, still trailing the threads of their conversation, and at last he said, ‘Orothellin told me we were magicians.’
‘So you said.’
‘But magic failed us. We fought our war, and lost, and came to this place, as you – so wise, yes – as you know. But magic was not enough, and we were imprisoned with our enemies, so many of them, our own slaves among them. And we needed some kind of strength that was not the strength of magicians nor the strength of slaves. So we found god. You’ll see.’
They were approaching a caravan of beasts: great armoured woodlice and millipedes burdened down with cages and sacks. The soldiers of the Worm were everywhere around it, but she saw slaves there, too, some bound, others walking freely alongside, no doubt to assist with the unloading. Why do they not resist? she found herself thinking, but she had seen this too many times before not to know the answer. Because collaboration spares them the whip or the tax or something similar. How cheaply lives are sold when slaves make their own shackles.
If she was to accomplish anything here, that collaboration would be her greatest foe: the habits of a thousand years of indenture would not be broken easily. Or perhaps at all.
As they crossed into the shadow of the buildings, the Hermit’s pace had become more cautious, and he was looking out for other Scarred Ones, holding her back whenever he saw one, skulking by walls, creeping across open spaces, every clumsily underhand movement seeming to scream out to Che that here they were about some clandestine business. And all the more surreal because the Worm was all around. Its foot soldiers thronged the city, many of them heading inwards to join that great and spreading spiral. But whatever power lay in the Hermit’s scars, it shielded them from that collective vision entirely.
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