Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘We have reports—’

  ‘Looters brawling in the wreckage!’ Scordrey declared stridently.

  Nessen honestly could not have said whether the man was trying to convince himself or whether he had already succeeded. The Wasp turned away in disgust and headed back to the house the Empire had rented for him.

  He got a messenger off to Capitas, asking for . . . He had not known what to ask for. He had only reported, and left it to wiser heads to work out what response could possibly be made to the patently impossible.

  Back behind closed doors, he retired to his room to stare at the walls and turn over all the things Scordrey had said, and what Nessen had heard the man’s peers say. Their response to the tragedy had been ‘highly personal’, as his report had stated. They had been apoplectic over the damage to their property. The loss of life throughout the wider city seemed barely to have touched them. Their general feelings seemed to be summed up as: There are plenty more.

  Nessen was not a soft man, but he was one who abhorred waste. He had come to see Helleron as his city, and its workers as something akin to his slaves. It was an eye-opening thought to realize that this meant he was more concerned for their well-being than were their own leaders.

  He gave his orders, sending a detachment of Light Airborne and a couple of spare Engineers to go and help look for survivors in the poorer districts. He felt it was a valid investment of resources – not sympathy for the bereaved and the injured so much as that the mess offended him.

  He had expected his house guests to question him closely about what had happened, for they had picked a tumultuous time to overnight in Helleron. There were two officers travelling with a dozen of the Engineers and a score of soldiers, and they had come to Helleron on the heels of top-priority orders to three of the city’s chemical works. The seal of the Empress had been all over their business, and Nessen was wise enough to ensure that, when they had turned up the evening before, everything had been ready for them. The canisters had already been taken from the factories and loaded onto the visitors’ airship, and he understood that they would be setting off back east shortly afterwards, bound for some destination he sensed it would be unhealthy to enquire into. Under other circumstances he would be curious and would use his contacts back at the capital to indulge that curiosity, but his lead visitor wore the armour of the Red Watch, and Nessen was astute enough to know when to leave well alone.

  He knew that he was not the only one to find this new corps, with its apparent absolute mandate from the throne, to be intrusive, unbalancing and bad for business. Similarly, he knew that anyone saying so would be looking to end up on the crossed pikes in short order. Best to get them out of my city as fast as possible.

  So perhaps it was a good thing that the Red Watch man had reacted the way he had when he had been told of the night’s upheaval: not horror or alarm, nor even surprise. Whatever had laid waste to so much of the city, the Red Watch man clearly knew what was behind it, and he wasn’t telling anyone as lowly as a mere governor-colonel.

  The other man, the little halfbreed officer who stood in the Red Watch’s shadow, had been concerned only for their chemical cargo, some foul sort of stuff that Nessen’s contacts suggested was being churned out at three or four other locations as well as Helleron.

  Another thing that it’s unwise to enquire further about. Nessen was uncomfortably aware that more and more of his life was falling into that category. Something was going badly wrong, back home. Or perhaps it had always been going wrong, and only now was it visible. Now it had gone too far to stop.

  After that was all dealt with, after he had patrolled the wounds that Helleron had suffered overnight and seen off the Red Watch with his airship full of reagents, Colonel Nessen finally found that he had time for other apparently urgent business.

  After all, he told himself, how important can it be, if they trust the news to such a messenger?

  What appeared before him in his townhouse wore a uniform, but was no soldier of which he had ever seen the like before. One of Nessen’s slaves poured the colonel some wine while Nessen shook his head at this apparition. Yes, there were signs that things were not well at home, but this . . .

  ‘What’s the sour look for, woman?’ he demanded.

  ‘Colonel, I have been waiting for over four hours.’ His visitor was a Wasp-kinden woman got up in the leathers of the Air Corps, on this day of all days. ‘I have come with urgent word from General Tynan of the Second, sir, for your eyes only.’

  He stared at her levelly. ‘And for this urgent word he sends me a woman.’

  ‘No, sir, for this word he sends you his best pilot and the officer in charge of his aerial forces.’

  ‘Well, listen, woman, whatever your name was—’

  ‘Captain Bergild, sir. May I deliver this into your hands?’

  Nessen felt that he had gone through quite enough today, above and beyond the requirements of a Consortium colonel. To hear that sort of insolence from this . . . whatever this even was, was too much. ‘I never picked Tynan as a man with a sense of humour,’ he snapped, snatching the scroll from her hands and breaking the seal.

  A moment later he visibly twitched, reading it again. ‘The Second . . .’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Bergild said, with exaggerated patience.

  The Second have fallen back from Collegium. The Sarnesh are marching. The war . . .

  The war is coming this way.

  ‘You have an answer for me, Colonel?’

  His eyes flicked towards her, then back to the message. Tynan was asking for any and all military aid he could provide. ‘What does Tynan think I have here? There’s barely a garrison, and when the Beetles here get word . . .’ Actually, the Beetles here would do nothing, he reflected. They would sit there in their double-sided coats, ready to turn them at a moment’s notice. A Helleren uprising was not the problem. The Alliance cities, however . . .

  ‘Go and tell Tynan he’s on his own.’ Nessen stood up abruptly, already planning exit strategies.

  Within sight of Porta Mavralis, they had watched the Worm attack. A caravan had been travelling north up the Silk Road – Totho and Maure had almost tried to join it, checked only by a residual caution. They had not realized that their lives rested on so simple a decision.

  The caravan had consisted of a dozen beetle-drawn wagons, two score travellers and two dozen armed guards – which seemed a lot. Then again, the Empire was fighting Spiderlands troops not so very far away, and a long-range airborne squad might have slipped over the lines to come down and cause trouble.

  Totho and Maure had shadowed them all night, travelling unseen in their wake. Whoever the travellers were, whatever their goods, they were not stopping to set up camp.

  They had been going through a pass between hills when it happened: the earth rippling and cracking, wagons sinking up to their axles, turning over, the beetles rearing and twisting in their traces. The travellers and their guards were running back and forth, unsure of what was going on. Totho and Maure had heard their shouts of panic.

  The Worm issued forth, some from the earth itself, more from a great rift in the hills. The two of them had watched those swift expressionless warriors dissect the caravan with clinical efficiency, as ants might cut up and parcel out some large beast that had fallen into their jaws. The guards were slain, the travellers likewise; even the draught beetles were just cut apart, without hesitation or sentiment. The wagons themselves were prised open, the human bodies of the Worm showing no sign that they understood the purpose of such things or how they worked. Everything within, along with bodies and the pieces of bodies, was carried back inside the hill, the Centipede-kinden working with horrifying speed and leaving only spilled blood and broken wood in their wake. The entire business, from attack to the site being left picked clean, was a matter of minutes.

  Neither Totho nor Maure had made any attempt to help the travellers, but whilst she had fallen back and back, unwilling even to look at the attackers, Totho
had stared on, his hands on his snapbow, fingers twitching. Maure had wanted to go to him and drag him back, for fear that the Worm would see him and find her, too, when they came for him, but there was so much anger in Totho that she did not dare.

  After the butchery was done, he turned to her, angrily gesturing her back to his side.

  ‘That was them, was it?’ he demanded.

  Maure nodded cautiously, still not coming close.

  ‘Savages,’ was his verdict.

  ‘Oh, surely,’ she agreed. ‘And in ways you can’t imagine.’ She paused, studying his face. ‘Vile, unnatural, utterly without . . . whatever it is that makes us us.’

  Totho shrugged, his armour plates scraping. ‘None of that Inapt business now. Savages, like I said. Not a crossbow amongst them.’

  ‘And yet you yourself didn’t stand up and show them the superiority of your Aptitude. I wonder why?’

  He sent her a sharp glance, but then looked down at his snapbow, plainly troubled by the thought.

  ‘You think they’re Inapt,’ she noted. ‘They’re not. They don’t believe in my magic, any more than you do. Less than you do, perhaps. They don’t even tell each other stories of when the magic was. But they’re not Apt, either. They don’t believe in your gears and machines. And when they get close, they can stop you believing, too. A world without artifice or magic, that’s the Worm’s world. A world without anything of the human mind.’

  ‘Artifice doesn’t work like that. I can shoot you dead with this snapbow whether you believe or not.’

  ‘Only if you can think how to make it work.’

  ‘It’s just pulling a trigger.’

  ‘And yet I couldn’t do it. Or perhaps I could do whatever that is just by fumbling at the thing, but I’d not be able to aim it like a bow, and probably I’d just shoot a rock with it, or a friend, or even myself. But you can’t imagine what it’s like to not know all those things you take for granted. And if I have a better idea of how you Apt think, it’s only because the Woodlouse-kinden who trained me counted both types in their number.’

  She wanted to move on, but he would have none of it. The contained massacre they had witnessed had not affected him in the way that it had her. Or perhaps it had, but he buried his feelings deep. He was obviously not an expressive man – his emotions were bottled up and put under pressure, and when they burst to the surface, they had soured into varying degrees of anger. She knew that the true object of all his animosity was Totho himself, but that would not stop him harming her if she got too close at the wrong time.

  ‘Those things . . . those ignorant . . . whatever they were. She is amongst them, even now?’

  Maure only nodded.

  ‘Do you think she’s dead?’

  ‘I hope not.’

  ‘Do you?’ He hauled his helm off and stared at it. ‘If I could know that she was dead, I think I’d be free. I could walk away. There’d be nothing I could do. She’d have passed the limits of even what artifice is capable of. But I can’t know.’ He was a man in dark armour, picked out against the darkness of the sky only because she had Moth eyes. ‘She won’t leave me alone.’

  I know, she thought. I see her there, the ghost of her that’s in your mind. But what can I say? You can’t understand me, and you wouldn’t let go even if you could.

  ‘There is no kinden that artifice and Aptitude can’t conquer.’ He said it to the blank face of his helm, and to the hills and the sky, and to the rift that the Worm had ventured from. ‘Progress: how can we have progress if there was some thing such as that, which could undo all our work since the revolution.’

  ‘Totho,’ Maure tried, ‘I know—’

  ‘What do you care? Your magic is nothing – a lie, not even a spent force.’ There was no rancour in his tone. ‘But I have power. Drephos taught me that. In my own hands, I have more power than any magician that was ever born.’

  She saw him differently then, for just a moment, in as vertiginous a shift of perspective as she had ever experienced. For a moment she saw him as he would have been, had he been Inapt; had he been born a thousand years before. She saw the questing hero of Commonweal legend, with lance and bright mail, willing to brave the stuff of nightmares for the woman he loved, invincible in his purity of heart, his nobility of spirit. And herself, of course: the magician who advised him and sent him off on his journey. There were so many stories that followed that old road.

  And here they were, a thousand years later; she was the most meagre of magicians and he was a tormented, brooding and bitter man whose aim – if he even had an aim – was not to be reunited with his true love but to show her, to prove her wrong, to win the argument that he had been conducting with her inside his head for years. The woman who rode his shoulders and ate through his mind like a maggot was no more the Che that Maure knew than she was some great Skryre of legend. And is this what Aptitude has brought the world to?

  And even with that thought, and despite everything, the responsibilities of her role were on her, now that she had recognized how fate had cast her.

  ‘Do you . . . I could foretell your future, cast for omens . . . Advise you.’

  He did turn at that suggestion, just enough to look at her past the armour of his shoulder. ‘You have nothing to say to me,’ he told her, but not harshly, more as a recognition that their worlds were too far apart for any mutual understanding. And then: ‘Who-ever dwells in that cave, they are just men.’

  She woke at dawn, alone, the fire burned down to nothing. There were tracks, heading towards the broken rift in the earth, but nothing in the world could have persuaded her to follow them.

  Instead she set off northwards up the Silk Road. The Commonweal was out there somewhere, and she would make it home eventually if she kept putting one foot in front of another.

  Nobody knew what was happening, or at least Straessa didn’t, and if any of the Collegiate soldiers under her command did, they weren’t telling her. Obviously there was supposed to be some manner of signal, and with luck Kymene or the Sarnesh or someone knew what it was, because everyone had advanced to a point where it looked as though they were going to make some mad dash for the city walls, and then they had stood about past dawn, making no attempt actually to fulfil that promise. The Wasps, in turn, made no attempt to come out and do anything about them.

  A single one of their enormous airships had risen from the city earlier and lurched off across the sky; Taki’s aviators had been ready to take a shot at it, had it shuddered its way over the Lowlander forces with a bombardment in mind. It had kept its distance, though, and despite fierce debate, they had let it go. The Second had plainly remained in command of the city; nobody had wanted to waste time and resources on an enemy that seemed to be going away, and risk an assault by the enemy still very much in evidence.

  So, is our being here all a bluff? She could see the impatience down the line. Even the Sarnesh were plainly raring to go; if it was a bluff, and a single one of them knew it, then all of them would know.

  And now this: the messenger from out of the city, and Straessa found that she knew him. She knew him and was not even particularly surprised to see him. It was that loudmouth Fly, the one who got everywhere: Laszlo.

  He strutted out quite on his own, as though he wasn’t coming from a city held by the enemy, asking to speak to the leaders of the Sarnesh force. Straessa found herself ranged beside Kymene of the Mynans and Commander Lycena of Sarn.

  Laszlo beamed up at them with a face Straessa wanted to slap, and then told them how things were.

  An hour later they stood watching as a delegation marched out of the city to meet with them. Behind them, the city bustled with black and gold, but if it was an attack it was the most elegant piece of misdirection Straessa had ever seen. The Second Army was giving every indication of abandoning Collegium to its new masters, as represented by the approaching delegation.

  And the city’s new masters are us, Straessa reminded herself. Looking on them, however – indeed
looking on this whole gathering – she had to work hard to quell her concerns. There was precious little that looked Collegiate in this mess, not even the leader of the approaching forces, for all that he was Collegium to a great many people.

  She sensed a similar disquiet from her troops, the Company soldiers squinting and pointing and muttering. The Sarnesh Ants were standing stiffly, plainly still all bowstring-taut and mistrustful of the situation, especially given who else was turning up around now. The Mynans, though . . .

  Kymene broke from the pack, striding forwards.

  ‘Stenwold Maker.’ She stopped before him, shaking her head with a rare grin. ‘Look at you, old man, back from the dead.’

  The face was Maker’s, Straessa had to admit. He was carrying less weight and had made up for that by wearing far more armour, of a material and design she could not place, all spiral and flute patterns moulded out of something brown and shell-like.

  He smiled at Kymene, but it was not an overly sentimental expression. Purpose burned in Stenwold Maker’s face like a furnace.

  ‘We have much to discuss,’ he told them all.

  ‘Why can we not attack the Empire as they leave?’ the Sarnesh commander, Lycena, demanded. Imperial airships were floating over the city, along with a cloud of Light Airborne. The gates had opened, and already the first automotives of the Second Army were outside the walls, with soldiers marching behind to join them.

  ‘We have much to discuss,’ Stenwold Maker repeated. ‘But this thing is simple: the Wasps are leaving because I have requested that they leave, and I promised them safe passage if they did.’

  ‘And how long does that last?’ Lycena asked furiously. ‘Do you think that we shall not have to fight them again, once we march?’

  ‘Of course we will,’ Stenwold confirmed, ‘but we will fight them as soldiers. I will not have my city turned into a battlefield. I will not have the war fought over the bodies of civilians.’

  ‘Tactician Milus will not be pleased,’ she warned him.

  He shrugged. ‘Tactician Milus can take it up with me himself. Now, gather round, give me leaders from every contingent. You have questions. I have answers. Then we march to meet Milus, who, if I can second-guess him, is already leading the main Sarnesh army against the Wasps who are dug in north-east of here.’