Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘You tell me.’

  Milus obviously wanted very much to show Stenwold that he appreciated the man’s spirit in taking this stand. He got the expression slightly, discernibly wrong, though. ‘What would you do if I refused?’

  ‘Be gravely disappointed in you. And I’d remember.’

  The conversation balanced on a razor’s edge, and Stenwold waited to see which way it would fall.

  ‘Let’s get to Helleron,’ said Milus dismissively. ‘It won’t be long. From there this army will become an arrow pointing straight at Capitas, and the Helleren will have better and more up-to-date news than anything the Fly girl can tell me, and they’ll sell it more willingly, too.’

  Stenwold nodded heavily, aware that he couldn’t necessarily trust the man, but aware that even though he needed Milus, so Milus needed him a little, too. That would have to do, and at least he would have something to tell Laszlo.

  The next morning the Sarnesh began mustering for the assault, but they were certainly taking their time over it. Colonel Brakker was not sure whether this was meant as a taunt to try and get the Empire to abandon its position and attack, or whether the Ant tactician was having second thoughts about committing his forces. The first seemed vanishingly unlikely and the second too good to be true, but Brakker’s makeshift team of subordinates could offer no alternatives.

  What it did mean was that he had plenty of chance to study the structure and arrangement of the Lowlander force, and to redeploy accordingly. The Sarnesh had taken the centre for their own, along with what he took to be Beetles and a rabble of other kinden in Collegiate uniforms. There was a big wing of Mantis-kinden on the Sarnesh left, which he guessed would be swift and mobile enough that the fortifications would not slow it down much, and they were so scattered that snapbow volleys would have only a limited effect on them. The enemy’s right was more of a plodding anvil to that hammer: mostly non-Sarnesh Ants and the red and black of Myna.

  Keeping the Mantids back would be key to holding his position here for any length of time, Brakker surmised; it was no enviable task. He had heard plenty of horror stories about that kinden – how they had annihilated the old Fourth Army near Merro, and the grim, savage fighting that followed the Eighth’s incursions into the Netheryon quite recently. And, of course, the Eighth was lost, too – General Roder and his entire army massacred to the last man by the Sarnesh and their allies.

  It gave Brakker a cold feeling just to think about it. He had never been intended as a field commander. He thought too far ahead, and too broadly, and it seemed to him that even in the last war the Empire had not been put in quite this position. Eighth gone, Second – the mighty Gears! – in full retreat, and ‘hold until further notice’ is the word from Capitas.

  In his heart, Brakker had already begun to fear for the Empire and his kinden.

  He would do the best he could with what they had given him. He must hold.

  A quick decision, then: who would face the razor storm of the Mantis charge? He would concentrate his snapbows against the solid Sarnesh centre, where they would be most effective – and most especially he would place the new recruits there, where their more experienced brothers would give them heart. The logical choice for facing the Mantids was his Auxillians – the Ants, the Grasshoppers, the Bees. He spared the Maile detachment to fend off the enemy’s comparatively weak right, placed the men of Vesserett, of Jhe Lien and of Monas to sell their lives as dearly as possible against the Mantis left.

  As he gave his orders, the Auxillian officers glanced at one another. He assured them that, once the Sarnesh were pinned, he would spare Wasp troops to back them up. Even as the words spilt out of him, everyone present knew that they were nonsense. This was not a battle for winning. Only for holding.

  Then the Sarnesh and their allies were visibly on the move, and the artillery began speaking loud on both sides.

  The first orthopter droned overhead, Brakker’s own Farsphex rising to meet the superior numbers of the enemy. A moment later the bombs began to fall.

  Taki skimmed over the Imperial positions, noting just how much refortification they had managed in a relatively short time. The Stormreader she piloted was sluggish and bumbling, a profoundly unsatisfactory flying experience because of the load of bombs it carried. By Milus’s orders the combat flying would be undertaken by the Sarnesh pilots this time, allowing them to chase the handful of Farsphex about the sky and thus hone their skills in what should be a relatively safe air battle. She and the Collegiate and Mynan aviators had been left with the heavier Stormreaders, bombing craft refined by the skills of Willem Reader from the jury-rigged machines the Collegiates had used against the Second Army.

  And doesn’t that seem a long time ago now? she reflected.

  She had wanted to know why they hadn’t been bombing the Wasps for all they were worth every day since the Sarnesh began heading east. A Sarnesh pilot commander had explained that they didn’t want the Imperials just to run and keep running. Milus wanted his battle. He wanted to start cutting away slices of the Imperial forces. Hence, Taki and her pilots had maintained their aerial presence, even dropped the odd piece of ordnance, but they had held back: a war of shadows and misdirection to draw the Wasps to this place and this fight.

  Now she unloaded the last of her bombs – holding only half a dozen, the Stormreaders were far less effective bombers than the Imperial machines that had rained fire on Collegium – and turned on a wingtip to head home for more. She marked out in her mind the arrangement of the enemy, where she might want to come back and spread some love. Only the centre, though. Those were Milus’s orders and, like most of the man’s plans, not to be questioned.

  The Sarnesh were coming on in open order so as to deny Brakker’s snapbowmen a chance for a solid charge-stopping volley, but the bolts were flying fast both ways, the closing gap between the two forces shredded by shot. Brakker’s men had cover, and so far were getting the best of it, but the Ants would soon turn that around if they could get in close.

  Because he was an administrator and not a warleader by nature, Brakker was very focused on the centre of the battle – the part of it that contained himself – and had been assuming that someone would tell him if other parts of it were not going according to plan. When the Mantis-kinden screamed unopposed into the Wasp right flank, he was completely unprepared, unable to formulate an order for one vital minute during which hundreds of his soldiers were killed in their trenches and dugouts.

  By that time the Sarnesh were in full advance, pelting across the broken ground as fast as they could in their heavy mail, with felt-backed shields held high.

  The Auxillians? Brakker had time to wonder. Did they chew through the Auxillians so fast?

  He had far too many underlings clamouring for his attention right then, but he needed to see the field for himself, discern how it had all gone wrong. With a strangled grunt, he kicked into the air, Art wings carrying him above the throng.

  The Auxillians were still there. The Ants and Bees and even the Grasshoppers were falling back with a discipline and dignity that any drill sergeant would have been proud of, utterly unmolested by the enemy. The Mantids were just rushing straight past them, across the front of their retreating formations, as though they weren’t there.

  On the other side, the Ants from Maile were pulling out with the same almost dream-like calm, as though they had not noticed that there was a bloody battle in progress. The Lowlander right was already moving in to catch Brakker’s other flank.

  Brakker opened his mouth to give some order – he had no idea what, but it was plain that something remarkable would be required, the sort of order that went down in the history books.

  He never made the histories. A Sarnesh bolt took him in the chest as he hung above his army, and he dropped back into the panicking mass of his men. In moments those Wasps that still could were trusting to their wings, whilst the Auxillians marched implacably away.

  Thirty-Two

  He had a lamp
. The lamp was life.

  It gave out a harsh, greenish-white chemical glare, and it would last for a long time but not forever. That indicated Totho’s deadline, his allotted time to find Che and get her out of this black and unnatural place.

  He was not sure what he had expected, but this was not it. He had thought of caves, winding tunnels where the monstrous Worm-men walked. He had thought that he could catch and question one of them, perhaps. He had thought that all roads would lead him to Che.

  In this, he recognized, he was guilty of thinking as the Inapt must think, that there was some pattern directing life, so that these things worked out.

  The caves were a world in themselves, vast and overarching. The stone sky was filled with stars in some way he could not understand. Moths battled through the air, and also terrible things, great albino shadows he glimpsed at the very edge of his light. Here was not a warren of narrow passageways that he might search methodically until one of them was found to contain Che. He had thought to find her in some prison, at the mercy of a villain that Totho could slay. He had come to rescue her, after all. Poor, helpless Che was always getting herself captured. It was almost endearing, save that those enemies who caught her seemed thereafter to become the target for her mercurial affections: Moths, Wasps, vile and deceitful kinden all.

  But the caves remained a world that was vast and unplumbed, and he knew she must be here somewhere but he had no way of finding her.

  He had seen some of the Worm-men. When they had come within the reach of his lamp he had been petrified at first by the fear that the thing he clung to must make him a beacon to the whole of this dark world. Later he had come to realize that their eyes worked backwards: they saw in the darkness, but they could not see his light. It meant nothing to them.

  He had killed them initially. He had intended to confront them, or to capture some straggler, but he had forgotten the skin-crawling way they moved all together, the utter inhuman detachment that was in their every look and motion. Revulsion had risen within him instantly on seeing them – the simple fact of having them within sight was more than he could deal with. He had ambushed them with his snapbow and emptied a precious magazine into them, striking down half a dozen instantly at long range and before they knew he was there.

  Then they had seen him, and something terrible had happened. He had stood there with his snapbow – he was up on a jutting rise and had been shooting down at them – and his hands had lost their way. The very logic of what he was doing, that deep, ingrained understanding of mechanism, of cause and effect, had gone. His finger had been on the trigger, and had even twitched on it, spitting a single bolt uselessly off into the dark. It was not that the weapon had jammed. It was that he himself had.

  They had come for him – were already coming for him – and he might have stood there until he died if they had not been so repulsive and unnatural. That instinct to get away owed nothing to those higher parts of his mind that had come unmoored. Clutching his useless snapbow and his lamp, he had fled them and escaped.

  Later, hiding in a cave after driving out the pallid long-legged spider that was its previous occupant, he had tried to understand what had happened. He had panicked, he told himself. The sight of the Worm-men had unnerved him. It had been a human failing, and therefore one that he, Totho the Apt, could overcome.

  He had seen things in his life that he had fought to explain away and he had succeeded in each case. Time and the dulling of memory had allowed him to conquer even the sight of the river Jamail in Khanaphes, stirred to sudden flood and scouring one bank of the invading Scorpion-kinden whilst leaving the locals on the other bank untouched. In his Apt heart, he could look back on that sight and know that there had been a rational explanation because he himself lived in a rational world.

  When he remembered confronting the Worm, though, he found his powers of self-deception were insufficient to the task. He could deal with attempts to add new and intolerable experiences into his life, but this was an absence, a theft. When the attention of the Worm had turned on him, he had been stripped of all those things that made him him.

  He ate sparingly of the food he had brought – another constantly encroaching limit to the time that he had. He was suddenly convinced that he would not be able to find his way out of this place if he did not find Che. His journey only went one way. No retreat.

  He slept, dreading what dreams would follow. When he awoke again, adrift in time in a strange, cold place, he turned out the lamp and forced himself to face the darkness.

  There was other light, aside from his chemical lantern and those distant, mobile stars. Something out there was ablaze. To Totho, fire meant the work of human hands, and he had nowhere else to head for.

  He could see people, when he drew closer. Because of the lamp, some of them had already spotted him. In this dark-mirror world, that meant that they were not the enemy. Or not necessarily the enemy. Not the enemy that he feared.

  But they were a horrible ragbag of creatures, nonetheless. He had the snapbow ready, and he nearly killed the first of them that he saw. They were Moths. Of all creatures other than the Worm, Moths were those he most did not want to see.

  There were others too, he saw shortly afterwards, and the Moths were their advance scouts, their fliers. As he strode into their community in his dark mail, with his lamp in one hand and his snapbow over his shoulder, they stared at him as though he had come from another world or another time. Which he had.

  There were Beetles there, and Mole Crickets, and a weird dark-grey velvet-haired people whose Art let them throw nets of gluey strands at their prey or their enemies, and pallid men and women with no eyes at all, who saw through their feet and their long fingers. Confronting them, seeing them study him with just the same wariness of the familiar facing the alien, he felt that he had taken the final step out of a sane world and into some ancient folk story.

  They were in the process of leaving, he understood. They were the slaves of the Worm, and the Worm was consuming its slaves, burning them like fuel so that it could make its grand assault on the world that Totho knew. He gained this understanding in fragments and pieces. They were all scared of him, so none of them was particularly coherent. He learned first of all, though, that the Worm was coming: their common enemy.

  He asked them about Che, without much hope – did they know a Beetle girl from the surface who had become lost down here? Would they know if she was a prisoner of the Worm? For a long time, none of them realized who he was talking about.

  Then, with the Moths floating back in to warn that the Worm was almost upon them, and the evacuation still ongoing, the people of that nameless place fleeing into the dark, one of the blind men approached Totho warily.

  His name was Messel, he said. And, yes, he did know Cheerwell Maker.

  Esmail walked amongst the Worm.

  He hadn’t been sure that it would work and, even now, he couldn’t know how long he could pass amongst them in safety. He was limiting his exposure.

  The sheer geography of this realm had begun to make his mind hurt. Che had spoken of the Worm’s city, and he had thought, It must be just one of many, surely. But no, there was just the one, from whence all the Worm sprang, and all roads led towards it. It was the centre of this prison world, and the Worm itself – the physical form the Centipede-kinden had given to it in their desperation – was the centre of that, ergo the centre of this entire world.

  He could not imagine how it worked, how everything would have to curve and funnel in to make that true. Perhaps Che could, or some Moth Skryre with a far greater understanding of the world than poor Esmail.

  The breaking of the Seal had sent slow shockwaves through the Worm’s domain, Esmail surmised. This had been a part of the larger world once, and it was trying to be so again. These caves and caverns, this lightless place of many kinden, had simply been another power in the old Inapt games of state, until the Worm’s practices – their aggression, their conversions, their taking of children a
nd repurposing them for their own cause – had caused that great and almighty war of antiquity. Now the underearth was striving to return to its proper place, and Esmail could see cracks and damage, fallen buildings, entire shattered districts of the great stone city. But of course the Worm needed no buildings, no cities. The Worm had been born out of the Centipede ideal and from the depraved desperation of its people with one need only: that there should be the Worm, forever and forever. The Worm was the centre of its own world. The only things it permitted to exist were those that furthered the existence of the Worm. It needed slaves because they produced new life to become segments to graft on to its extended body; because they toiled and mined to arm and equip its mindless host of soldiers. For a long time that uneasy stasis had been maintained by the Scarred Ones, who had the human intellect the Worm lacked. They had preyed and preserved all at once, keeping a precarious balance of feast and famine.

  The breach of the Seal had ended that. Now the Worm, which had been coiled in readiness for a thousand years, was striking upwards at that great mass of the sunlit world, not because it was some manner of birthright from before the war, but because it was different to the Worm. Because it was a world that the Worm was not the centre of.

  That was the thought that obsessed Esmail, for what he had gleaned from the scarred woman’s mind had suggested that Che had underestimated how the Worm would conquer. Not merely casting the bristling loops of its body up into the wider world, but by warping that world’s very nature, simply by its presence. As its armies funnelled into the lands above, so the Worm would twist the very weave of the world around it, dragging at the centre until all the world, and not just this barren prison, led to its jaws. And by then the Worm would need no others, not soldiers, not priests, not slaves. There would be just the Worm.