Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Rosander dragged his helmet off, grinning fiercely. ‘Well, now! And you wonder how it would have gone if we’d come for you after all, back then? Wonder no more, landsman!’ He laughed, despite his pain. ‘What would you do now if we decided we wanted to keep this place, once we win it for you?’

  ‘Oh, I’d find some way to take it back. You know me, Rosander.’ Gauntleted hands reached up to tug away the helm, revealing a dark, serious face, its eyes flicking from the Nauarch to the cityscape beyond.

  Stenwold Maker had come home.

  Twenty-Five

  Greenwise Artector had intended to get out, he really had. When the Eighth Army had descended on Helleron, however, it had come howling out of Three Cities territory far quicker than anyone had expected. He had just not been ready.

  He could still have slipped out, nevertheless. Sufficient applications of care and money would have allowed it, because money always spoke loud in Helleron. He had been watched, though. The other magnates of the city already knew that he was a man the Wasps would want to speak to. He had faced a choice, in the end: he could have abandoned his family and staff within the city and crept out like a thief, or he could remain, public and noticeable, sending his family and staff away instead. He had sought within himself for that courage, the self-sacrifice he had always believed he was capable of. Somewhat to his surprise, he had found it. He had stayed on until it was too late to leave, just so that his kin, his servants, his entire household could get clear.

  Then, with the noose already closing on him, he had vanished.

  All the routes in and out of Helleron had sported eyes on the lookout for this rogue magnate. One of the Council of Thirteen that had governed the city would be recognized, and many on the lookout had been former colleagues, former employees – men who knew his face. The airfields were watched, the gates likewise. After that, there were Wasp soldiers on the streets, and his name was first on their list to apprehend: Greenwise Artector, the missing magnate.

  Even so, perfect vigilance was impossible to maintain for long, whether it was the hirelings of the rich or the soldiers of the Empire. Helleron was ostensibly a free city where the ruling council – its thirteenth place now filled by a woman who had until recently been the fourteenth most powerful merchant in the city – took careful advice from a colonel in the Imperial Consortium on all matters. The city’s trade – its life’s blood – ran free, especially that conducted with the Empire to the east. Greenwise could have got out by now, if he had been willing to risk it.

  Instead he had decided to take a stand.

  He had fallen far from his old haunts. He had gone to the slums, where a man could lose himself and just about everything else. Thankfully he had been making preparations for this day ever since the end of the last war. Helleron’s gangs, the fiefs, had not been friends of the Empire, and the Wasps had done their best to eradicate the network of criminal cartels whose interlocked gears made the city’s underside turn. Greenwise, like many magnates, had his contacts beneath the surface, but he had been marked as a man who opposed the Wasps. Criminals, mobsters and murderers, thieves and racketeers, who cared nothing for anything but their own illicit properties, saw in him something worth keeping alive. Not a hero exactly, for they had no use for a hero, but an ally in these hard times.

  They had resources and he had knowledge, and together they were making plans. Greenwise wanted to hurt the Empire and, most of all, his former fellows on the Helleren Council. His new friends from the fiefs wanted to do the same by filling their pockets and perhaps shedding a little blood. The Empire hated their chaos, and the Consortium hated any flow of money it did not control. Had the Wasps used a lighter hand last time round, then no doubt the Imperial merchant arm could just have bought into Helleron’s cesspool of vice, but the crackdowns had closed that door.

  Now Greenwise, with a sword and a crossbow hanging from his person and dressed in clothes that would not have been fit to clean his servant’s boots not so long before, was guiding a gang of thieves towards the heartland of the rich. Their target was the townhouse of a man named Scordrey, perhaps the most influential merchant in the city. Nobody was feeling inclined to think small these days.

  At the moment Greenwise was working with two fiefs. The Whoresellers fleshed out their pimping with fencing and protection rackets, and the Bitter Men were strong-armers and housebreakers daring or lunatic enough to try and crack a target this big. Greenwise Artector, erstwhile big man about town, was hurrying through the narrow covered streets of Helleron’s poorer quarters in company with a pack of Fly and Beetle thieves, a lean and loping Scorpion who was second in command of the Bitters and a halfbreed locksmith and appraiser that the Whoresellers had hired. He himself was along with them because he had kept one of Scordrey’s men on his payroll for years, knew three quiet ways into the man’s house and had a very good idea of where the strongroom was and how to get into it.

  Helleron was a cramped city, and a cunning man who knew the right paths and shortcuts could make the transition from the gutter to the mansions of the rich in surprisingly few steps. So it was that Greenwise and his crew were passing through the slums along the back of a row of refineries, but ahead of them rose the roads where the houses grew larger and the streets were better lit.

  There were watchmen, of course, the city’s militia, but the Whoresellers had greased a fair number of palms these last few nights, and if any watchman turned out to be incorruptible enough to get in the way, then Greenwise reckoned it would be a poor night for that man. The same would apply if they ran into a Wasp patrol, especially as the Imperial hand lay light on the richer parts of the city – only two or three soldiers at a time.

  The ground shook, just a little, but at first Greenwise assumed that some machinery in the refineries was responsible. Nobody else raised the issue, so they were soon on their way.

  ‘This alley takes us to Shoffery Row,’ he murmured. ‘From there to Servil Street, where there’s a tunnel that can take us to Brackish Lots, practically behind Scordrey’s house.’

  ‘Handy,’ the Scorpion grunted.

  ‘It is indeed. It’s how his staff receive deliveries without the great man’s view being cheapened,’ Greenwise explained, thinking for a moment about the recent times when he himself had lived with such considerations.

  One of the thieves twitched. ‘Curse me, what was that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Anyone feel that, the ground . . .’

  ‘Just some engine . . .’ Another, dismissively.

  ‘No, wait,’ the halfbreed locksmith broke in. ‘That was . . . That was no machine, that was . . . an earthquake?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ someone said derisively, and the slowest-witted of the thieves wanted to know what an earthquake was. But by then Greenwise was feeling decidedly uncomfortable; something was communicating itself to him via the soles of his feet.

  Then the entire city of Helleron seemed to lurch and slump fluidly beneath them, spilling them all off their feet as, behind them, several hundred yards of low-rent workshops and refineries – and at least a hundred homes – just fell into the earth.

  Greenwise cried out, but his voice was lost in the colossal scraping and rumbling of stone, the shrieking of metal, wooden beams snapping and cracking like munitions. And the voices: hundreds of voices in a moment’s hideous realization, shocked from sleep, caught while at work, ripped from their dreams in the night’s quiet.

  He went running back towards the broken edge of the city, aware that half of his confederates had already made themselves scarce. Given the shadow life he led now, he should have done the same, but the night was wild with the screams of the injured, the cries of children. He was not the man to turn his back on all that.

  And besides . . . he needed to see. Because this was impossible, what had just happened. He needed to bring his eyes closer, so that they could take in and comprehend the ruin of so much in such a fractured moment.

  The street was al
ready slipping and canting even as he ran, the earth still about its vengeful night’s work, but he scrabbled to that broken edge, intending to find a way down, to help the trapped, the hurt. He could still hear yells and wailing and sounds of horror, but he put it down to the simple mechanical damage. He had not thought to see his city under attack.

  The earth was boiling with them. His eyes would not take it in. From the cracks between the shattered buildings they came seething out, a riot of armoured forms like no kinden he had ever known, and moving like nothing human, as though he was watching some spreading, foaming plague – a contagion in human form. They were swarming over everyone down there, and he saw blades glitter and flash, bright silver on the descent, but red as they were lifted once again. They were butchering everyone trapped down there – literally, hacking them limb from limb without the mercy of killing first, then just carrying off the severed pieces.

  No, they were not killing them all. He saw struggling, living forms carried away on that churning tide, being hauled back within the earth as they wept and kicked and screeched. The children! They were taking the children.

  He staggered back from the brink. Going down to help was no longer an option. Those below were beyond any help a mere human could give.

  The street tilted further, and he felt the ground beneath him shift and shudder as though it was being eaten away from below, hollowed out to an eggshell thinness, like ice about to crack.

  He ran. He ran towards those grand houses that he had planned to prey on that night. The quiet streets were beginning to fill now: with watchmen, Wasp soldiers, servants, the great and the good tottering from their doors, half asleep, to demand what was going on. He was Greenwise Artector, most wanted man in Helleron, but right then nobody cared.

  Ahead of him, suddenly looming from the night, was the townhouse of Corda Halewright, a fellow magnate back when the world hadn’t fallen completely sideways and gone mad. Greenwise had the crazed idea of banging on her door and begging for sanctuary, because even familiar enemies were to be preferred to what he had just seen. He shouldered past a couple of militiamen who were just staring back towards the devastation, and he staggered on towards that remembered building, feeling the earth jump and shudder beneath him. And slide.

  He actually saw it slide. Before him, three of the grandest houses in Helleron were suddenly on a slant, tilting and tilting further as the ground beneath them cracked and decayed, falling away to reveal impossible depth, rifts reaching into the earth’s innards, and from those rifts a swift-surging swarm of something that was not humanity but wore its shape.

  Greenwise cried out, backing away, even then feeling the flags beneath his feet peel away into the abyss, one after another, until suddenly there was nothing beneath him and he was teetering on the very brink.

  A hand took his shoulder, hauling him away from that hungry profundity, landing him on his back, and he saw – his world skewed further with it – three Wasp soldiers step past him, hands out to sting, the gold fire flashing and flashing as they struck downwards at that advancing host. One of them turned, dragged the former magnate to his feet with a grunt of effort and gave him a shove.

  ‘Get out of here!’ the soldier snapped, and Greenwise stumbled away, but where could he go? All around him he could see the facades of buildings running with fractures as their foundations were tested and found false. His ears were ringing with the groans of broken stone, with the appalling composite wail of hundreds of people in pain and fear, with the shrilling of children.

  Then they were before him, the enemy. Their faces, their movements, everything about them spoke of an abdication from the human race.

  He took up his crossbow and a bolt, but that was all he did. Some vital connection between the objects he held was missing in his mind. The principles, the learned motions, all of it was gone from him in that moment, and the weapon fell from his numb fingers.

  By the time he reached for the hilt of his sword, they were already upon him and it was too late.

  In the lowest reaches of Tharn there were cries and screams, the lightless chambers overrun by enemies who came from deeper still, creeping up through cracks in the rock to kill and steal, all moved by the same great and inhuman hand. Above, the great magicians of the Moth-kinden, the Skryres, stared at their pages of lore and found that none of it meant anything to them any longer. They were left with an understanding of nothing but despair.

  Across the sea, Golden Skaetha, glorious heart of the Spider-lands, heart of the web, was riven by earthquakes, thousands crushed and whole dynasties thrown into chaos.

  In the cavernous halls of the Delve, where the Mole Crickets laboured in Imperial servitude, the scuttling of claws could be heard in the dark. Whole families of Fly-kinden vanished overnight from the deepest warrens of Shalk and Merro. In the salt mines of Coretsy the miners abandoned their galleries and chambers for the surface, knowing only that the worst had come to pass. In a thousand buried places, what had once been dead ends, closed chambers, blank stone, all were suddenly gaping on to a deeper world that had been hidden and closed off for a thousand years.

  Everywhere across the Lowlands and the Empire the ground trembled – what was solid become abruptly brittle. Apt and Inapt alike had dreams of a suffocating ignorance, of a horrifying presence, of their children turning terrible and alien faces to them.

  And in that dark world that had been sealed away for so long, Cheerwell Maker stumbled as she arrived at another slave town, staring up towards the living constellation of the ceiling only because she had no other point of reference for the world she had been banished from.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she got out, and her companions stared at her. Orothellin and the Hermit would have known her meaning, but her friends had parted ways, the better to spread their ragged revolution. She now had only Tynisa and Messel with her, and neither understood what she meant.

  ‘The Seal has finally given way,’ she told them, trembling. ‘This place is rejoining the world once more.’ The Worm would be casting itself out into the wider world in ever-increasing numbers, and with just one aim in mind.

  And as the Worm’s half-world moved back into full conjunction with the real, as if she had been deaf all this while, her strangled and tenuous connection with the outside flared and grew in her mind: her link to her sister in Inaptitude, to Seda.

  She braced herself for the venom, the loathing that she was used to, but instead that faint contact came with an altogether different sense from the Wasp Empress.

  Reassurance.

  Seda was telling her that it would be all right. She had a plan.

  Part Three

  On the Edge of the Abyss

  Twenty-Six

  ‘What are they?’ Tynan demanded. He was looking red-eyed after being torn from his bed at midnight and put through a battle that nobody really understood. His officers around him looked worse, though, and the oldest of them was ten years his junior. Oski himself felt about a hundred.

  ‘General,’ he said, ‘we have no idea, but we basically can’t contain them. That armour’s so strong some of the men thought they were automotives or something. The bastards go where they want, when they want. We’ve lost most of our pissing artillery at the harbour, sir – just gone – and they’re using it on us, you can believe me. They’re not slow with the Aptitude.’

  ‘They’re Spiderlands troops, sir?’ one of the army majors asked.

  ‘If the Spiderlands had that, why didn’t they use it when we were still . . .’ another snapped back, and then faltered into silence under Tynan’s glower.

  ‘Sentinels have proven effective as mobile artillery, and are just about the only things that will keep the creatures back, but we only have about seven left. We’ve lost three overnight,’ Oski went on. ‘We have the air, still. We can drop Airborne wherever we want, if only they could accomplish much when they got there. The other troops – the buggers that look like Spiders or Grasshoppers or whatnot – they’re not shot-proof.
But now the Tseni have landed several hundred repeating crossbows and snapbows at the docks and, wherever we go, we’re getting bolts coming at us.’

  ‘Sir.’ A lieutenant had finished marking up a map of Collegium with the latest scouts’ reports and now stepped back for Tynan to look over his work.

  ‘They’ve slowed up a lot,’ the general noted.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the lieutenant agreed. ‘Scouts say they seem to be working to a plan, taking key points – the College, market squares, workshops – and then holding them. We’ve now lost –’ he actually took a breath as though the news was just catching up to him – ‘almost half the city, it looks like, sir.’

  ‘We just can’t keep them back or bottle them up or anything,’ Oski commented wonderingly. ‘They’re real Sentinels, sir, the old heavy infantry – only like I never saw. If we’d had lads like that, we’d not have disbanded them.’

  ‘“Stone armour,”’ Tynan threw at him.

  ‘Sir, you didn’t see.’

  ‘What’s the latest word on the Ants – not the Tseni, the Ants outside the walls?’

  A captain who had been waiting patiently for just this moment stepped forwards. ‘Sir, they’re moving in, but they’re not storming the walls just yet. Sarnesh and Vekken both, they’ve approached to just outside the range of the wall engines.’

  ‘What are they waiting for?’ Tynan murmured.

  ‘Morning.’ It was the first thing Vrakir had said since he arrived, standing at the back like a pariah, and yet the only man who didn’t look drawn and pale with fatigue.

  Tynan glared at him. ‘If they’d wanted the walls they could have had them by now. We’ve not had the men to keep them back. Someone’s playing games. Besides, at least when morning comes, we can see properly what we’re doing.’ It had become plain that darkness was no encumbrance to any of these invaders. ‘And the locals are just sitting tight, too. No taking to the streets, no throwing themselves at our stings and snapbows. Precious little welcoming of their liberators, as far as that goes, which suggests that they don’t know what the pits the creatures are, either.’