Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  But there was no time for training. Anyone who could demonstrate to Darmeyr and the others that they had the will and an able body was sent on to wherever Thalric was going next, in the hope of rescuing more from the jaws of the Worm.

  The Worm had not found them yet. Che suspected the Worm had not even begun to appreciate what was going on. At some point it would realize, in its blinkered, hungry way, that things were not going as they should.

  She did not know what they would do then. No ideas had come to her.

  Now she strode through the camp, aware of the attention fixed on her: the woman from the other world whose eyes had seen the sun. Some seemed to treat her with a reverence she found uncomfortable; others scowled at her. Still more did not care, concerned solely with their own well-being, their own fears.

  Orothellin had walked amongst them earlier, to calm them. Everyone seemed to know the ancient Slug-kinden, and to call him Teacher. He had been a calming influence in the often-disruptive life of the camp. Now he was gone, though, to help bring in more of the lost, to try and thwart the predations of the Worm. Che was left to manage on her own.

  Not on her own, quite. She had Tynisa as her constant shadow, though after her failure on the way to the Hermit’s cave the Weaponsmaster was riddled with doubts about whether she would serve any useful purpose when the Worm arrived. She had the Hermit, too, although the ragged old man stayed out of everyone’s way, by mutual consent.

  Tynisa worried Che, if only because the less credence the Weaponsmaster put in her own abilities, the more she seemed to defer to her sister. She dogged Che’s footsteps as though the Beetle was the only spark of hope in the whole underworld. As though Che knew what she was doing.

  And I’m still working on that one. No guarantees.

  Che stopped to receive the latest news: more arrivals in, word from Messel, movements of the Worm. She did her best to listen, to take it all in and end up with a coherent picture of what was going on. She was terrified that vital information was slipping through the cracks in her mind.

  ‘What will you do if you win?’ Tynisa asked her suddenly.

  Che almost replied, I don’t think that’s very likely, all very self-deprecating as a polite Collegium girl should be. But that was not what anyone wanted to hear. Instead she hedged, ‘Win?’

  ‘If you defeat the Worm.’ Tynisa, who had not seen that darkly shining abomination beneath the stone city, sounded almost optimistic about it. ‘These people have never known anything other than this. They’re slaves born.’

  ‘Nobody’s a slave born.’ It was pure polemic but, as she said it, Che realized it was true in a way. ‘The Worm didn’t feed these people, or house them or clothe them. Take away their masters and they will live and thrive.’ Easier here than in the Empire, if only the Worm could be resisted as the Wasps can. ‘The Worm is a parasite on all of them, on this entire world. It takes, and gives nothing – not even the tyranny of order. If we can defeat the Worm, or outlast it or exhaust it, then these people will live very well in its absence.’ She glanced up at Tynisa, seeing her frown. ‘You doubt me?’

  ‘It’s just . . . what then?’ the Weaponsmaster finally managed to say, apparently wrestling with the question herself. ‘And will this place be cut off forever, or will it join up with what we know, or . . . I mean, if we fit back with the world we came from, what happens when the Wasps come down here and enslave everyone, or Helleren magnates realize there’s a whole nation of cheap labour, or . . .’

  ‘You have been thinking this through,’ Che noted, as if she was a proud College Master. ‘Well, perhaps I will have them cast lots and form an assembly of the underworld. Perhaps it will be they who venture into the lands of the Wasps and Beetles, rather than the other way round. Perhaps everyone will finally learn to live with one another and there will be no more war. Only, let us just find a way to beat the Worm first, Tynisa.’ She heard her own voice tremble a little with the words. ‘There’s no sense in planning for tomorrow when we haven’t secured today.’

  They thought Esmail was mad. He himself wasn’t sure whether the whole exercise was just stupidity or a failure to adapt. His discipline was unknown here in the underworld, though. If he did not test his limits, how would he ever know?

  He was being forced to improvise: conditions were adverse.

  There had been a community here in the darkness by the name of Old Aderax. Enough Moths had lived there that he wondered if the name was an echo of Dorax, the Moth hold that still existed back in the familiar world. He and Orothellin had gone there to spread the word, lunatic missionaries crying out that the end really was nigh.

  By that time their enemies – or perhaps Enemy singular, by Che’s version – had become aware that something was amiss. The response had been fierce. Locals, using their Art wings and the dark-seeing eyes of their kinden, had reported a host of the Worm descending on them. Fighting to win had been out of the question, whatever Che might have wanted. Fighting to give the bulk of them a chance to escape – the non-combatants, the few remaining children – had become a necessity.

  Old Aderax had been a layered city, a strip mine that people lived in, descending in broad tiers into the pit of its own workings. Esmail had been hoping that the Worm would just swarm them, as blunt and simple as the force Che had claimed possessed it, but the horde of bodies sent against them instead split into snaking columns, each accompanied by a seething foam of their sinuous beasts. The armed defenders who had hoped to delay them had been flanked almost immediately.

  That was when Esmail had seen it: of course there were minds directing the assault – not the blind and oblivious Worm-god but the Scarred Ones, the priests, those who had betrayed humanity to buy themselves back from oblivion.

  He had identified the one column that would be quickest on the trail of the fugitives and dispatched the defenders to intercept it. The miners of Old Aderax were strong and determined, and many of them were huge Mole Crickets, but he knew they would die, and he knew that they themselves had not quite appreciated this. It was a cold decision, but he made it quickly, without hesitation. Regret he would save for later.

  He himself had gone hunting.

  His small magics had almost vanished after they had been banished here, but he was still sensitive to the fluctuations of his meagre personal power. When the Seal had broken, as Che claimed, he had sensed a little heightening of his strength, perhaps as magic began seeping in from the wider world beyond. Whenever he was close to the foot soldiers of the Worm, however, it was gone entirely. The power they had tapped into was a primal, mindless, pre-human archetype that knew and understood neither Aptitude nor magic, and so denied them both, potent enough in its ignorance to enforce the same on all who came into contact with it.

  Nevertheless he wanted answers, and most of his training needed no magic, and he had crept and lurked through the near-abandoned galleries of Old Aderax, listening to the fates of those few who had been too slow or too stubborn to leave.

  It had been a nerve-racking business, because Esmail could not see in the dark as well as his quarry could, but he was clever and careful, and eventually his moment had come. Secure in the knowledge that the Worm’s human bodies had scoured Old Aderax of life, one of the Scarred Ones had gone wandering.

  Esmail had struck, descending on the robed figure, dealing a blow that sent the priest insensible to the floor, then pausing, waiting. He had been sure that, had he tried this with one of the husks that formed the army of the Worm, he would even now be running for his life as their entire force came for him, each individual body just a segment of the angry whole. How separate were the Scarred Ones? That had been the test.

  A slow count of five as he had crouched against the stone, and no instant backlash. He had shouldered the unconscious body and stolen away with it, avoiding the many-limbed coils of the Worm as it thrashed and clawed at Old Aderax, executing the few it could find there and carrying their bodies away.

  There would come a time to
feel horror, Esmail knew. Even he, whose heritage should have steeped him in blood, could not go into a place like this creature’s mind and remain unmoved. Esmail had listened to every word Che said, and he knew that the Scarred Ones were about something unspeakable, beyond mere tyranny or cruelty. He clung to his humanity, embraced it. Once he had done what needed to be done, he might face the memories, but until then he must entertain nothing but professionalism.

  Orothellin had led the refugees into the darkness, keeping the majority safe by sacrificing detachments of men and women, sending them to lead the Worm’s questing tendrils away – and to die, surely, Esmail thought – and Esmail had caught the rabble up eventually. When they saw what he had brought them, they had wanted to tear the priest to pieces. When he told them he had a use for the creature, they had begun to suspect a madness in him.

  But he was not mad. He was desperate. He was inventive. He was going to see if his discipline, all that vaunted training, could subvert the will of the Worm.

  The refugees from Old Aderax had made a wretched and temporary home out of a scar in the rock, but they would be moving on through the pitch-dark landscape soon. Orothellin had been telling them that they must keep ahead of the Worm, though Esmail was not even sure if that was possible. The Slug-kinden had very clearly decided that anything resembling an organized defence was a lost cause. He was hoping to keep people on the move until the Worm had sent the bulk of its forces elsewhere – meaning to the lands under the sun, the Old World, Esmail’s home.

  Esmail had thought about that, coldly and clinically as his training required, and decided that, even if he liked the idea, it wouldn’t work. He had listened when Che had spoken of the terrible beast below, the avatar of the Centipede-kinden whose blind hunger possessed and drove the legion of bodies that comprised the Worm. It was an impossible thing, a terrible thing that the Centipedes had called up and turned into, at a time when it was either that or extinction.

  And Esmail, the assassin, considered his chances. What would happen to the Worm if he was able to kill god?

  Had he been given free rein with his particular brand of magic, he would already be walking freely through the foot soldiers of the Worm, seeking his chances, but his old trick of taking on the face of another would now fall away the moment he got close to a single human segment of the beast, let alone to the colossal creature itself.

  But not, apparently, the priests themselves. There was humanity enough left in them that they could still become his victims.

  This one was a woman, he noted, although he had not realized before. She was pale and lumpen and her skin positively boiled with spiralling scars. Taking that pasty face of hers would not serve, but Che and the Hermit had showed that there was another way.

  First, though, he needed to understand.

  His remaining little handful of magic, which he had sheltered like a candle down here, would finally see use. The Scarred One snarled at him and spat, and called down curses on his head as he reached for her mind.

  She sensed him, and her defences were remarkable, walls after walls, all slamming into place about her, fending him off, turning him away. She was as defended as a magician, and for a moment he was thrown, unable to force his way into her, his strength venting itself against the barriers of her brain.

  How has she learned to do this? Why should she need it?

  And, with that, he understood. She did not need to fend off roving assassins who might want to pillage her brain, but every day of her life she must shield her mind from the thing that was her god. Mind was the very quality that it abhorred, that it denied in its tools and subjects. The higher things of mind were blotted out even in the presence of its servants. If it detected the decaying human thought left in its unasked-for priesthood, then it would obliterate them entirely.

  Knowing that, Esmail attacked again, drawing upon not strength but sheer finesse, not the hammer but the needle, to pierce through all the little gaps in her armour that the bludgeon of her god could not have penetrated.

  He was in . . . and in that moment her whole mind, her history and her nature, were spread before him like an abattoir.

  Afterwards, the horror came, and he abandoned the corpse that he had made of her and found some place out of the sight of humanity and shook and shuddered for all the dead in Old Aderax, and for all that he had since learned.

  He had seen how they lived, the Scarred Ones: the last true Centipede-kinden. Priests and leaders, as they styled themselves, servants of their insatiable god. But he had seen through their eyes. He had seen how they scratched a living inside the city of the Worm, maintaining their fragile identities against the constant eroding tide of the godhead. He had seen how they were permitted to direct the armies of labour, to organize and provision and supply. He had seen how they were suffered, an irritant that salved the sore it had caused, and so lived on another day. They had become parasites in the corpse of their own history, and they knew that one day the Worm would not need them. The perfect unthinking monstrosity that they had called up in their time of need would consume them, just as it would consume everything else.

  They comprehended all of that, did these scarred priests, and yet they did nothing. They cringed and served, and they sacrificed countless lives to an entity that only grew and consumed and made everything like itself, just as the Centipedes had always done, every child of every kinden becoming just a new segment in their composite body. Only now even they would be the victims of their own work, and the only victory they could hope for was that they would be the very last, when all else was gone.

  Later, when the trembling had subsided and he had come to terms with what he had learned, he took his Art to his own flesh, keener and more precise than any knife, drawing red, raw sigils to complement the mark the Hermit had already laid on him. He gritted his teeth and illustrated his skin with careful spirals. His magic would fail him, but those marks, and his understanding, would serve to let him pass beneath the notice of the Worm. Or, if they would not, he would die, but it seemed to him that the Worm meant the death of everything, above and below, sunlight and darkness.

  He had failed to kill the Empress of the Wasps when the chance had been given to him, but he could make up for that. He could kill the Worm god.

  Twenty-Nine

  The Sarnesh army was already on the march eastwards. The Imperial force that had been camped out to dissuade the Ants from just this sort of move was packed up and retreating – leaving a network of traps and buried explosives, and moving slowly enough that the Ants could not just steam all the way to Helleron unopposed. The Imperials had recognized the superiority of the Sarnesh force, however, and that was before Milus’s allies were taken into account. The liberation of Collegium was the trigger that released the Sarnesh war machine.

  There had been some dissent, back home, silent concerns voiced by other tacticians and commanders. Was Sarn being left too exposed? Should they not hang back now that their city was free of threat? What would this march eastwards achieve?

  The destruction of the Empire, Milus had told them. No more threat from the east. No more strong Wasp power to overshadow us. Total victory. And if Sarn gains from that, if it is we who fill the power vacuum, then so be it. That had persuaded many of them, and to the rest he had said, If you do not agree, replace me, for this is my plan. That was not how Ant cities or Ant armies were run, but he had a strong and charismatic mind that used consensus as a tool to get what he wanted, rather than as a decision-making process. Every time he interacted with the Royal Court of Sarn he put his career on the line: Replace me or let me do my work. He had sufficient past success to vouch for him, and he found that the rest of his people were scared. The Wasps had come so close, had smashed their fortress at Malkan’s Folly, had enslaved other Ant city-states. In the face of extinction, they had found allowing Milus the reins the least unpalatable solution.

  Now he had the army moving east and repairing the Helleron railtracks as they went. Milus was no
t going to stop at that mythical line that cartographers used to delineate the edge of the Lowlands. There was a city out there called Capitas that was supposed to be the greatest in the world, and he intended to visit it with an army at his back.

  Tactician, the Mantids are here.

  First order of business: the Sarnesh army alone would not suffice. His people were disciplined, well armoured and equipped, the best soldiers in the world, but the Empire had far more – both their own and their slave soldiers, the Auxillians. Sheer numbers would crush little Sarn on its own.

  But Sarn was not on its own. Stenwold Maker was even now approaching with every Collegiate willing to bear arms, with soldiers from Vek and Tsen – of all the madness! – with warriors of kinden that Milus had not even known existed. The old Beetle had come through at last, and Milus was grudgingly impressed, for all that the man’s tactical sense plainly left something to be desired.

  And now there were the Netheryen, as they had taken to calling themselves. Since the Mantis civil war, or whatever it had been, the forest kinden had been quiet, making no attempts against either Empire or Ants. Now, and at last, they had deigned to send out some ambassadors.

  The sight of them, relayed through his scouts, was something of a surprise. He had expected perhaps one sullen warrior, or a knot of them, bitter and resentful and wanting somebody’s blood. Instead they had actually mustered something that looked like an embassy. There were about a score of them, and some – older women mostly – who were robed like diplomats, or perhaps wizards, for all he knew. They were still armed, of course, and no doubt they would be effortlessly lethal with their claws and rapiers and bows, if still rather permeable to snapbow shot, for all that.

  They had a couple of Moths and, through his vicarious sight, Milus watched the way they stood, interested by the changes. Everyone knew the Moths normally told the Mantids what to do, but that had fallen apart with all the fighting in the forest, and now a pair of Moth-kinden were plainly trailing after the Mantids in a rather submissive manner, like beggars hoping for crumbs.