Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Esmail had killed, in his time. He had served evil causes. He was well acquainted with the sort of motives that drove the Wasps to send out their armies or drove Moths to intrigue against one another. He understood evil. The horror of the Worm was that it was not evil. Evil implied a choice. The Worm was what it had been made to be, as innocently destructive as a machine.

  The Scarred Ones, though . . . they were evil. He was happily killing any that he could creep up behind and cut open. They had been given the choice, and they had made it.

  Here in their city he possessed no magic, but he remembered with a professional clarity just how a Scarred One’s mind had thought, and he remembered the Hermit’s reluctant blessing, and he had cut himself again into the exacting patterns of their mystery. He had taken every word of Che’s account and analysed it as a spy should, and now he walked amongst the bodies of the Worm and they did not notice him. Or, if he felt a ripple of unease run through them, he would add another scar to his flesh and quell their suspicions. He avoided the Scarred Ones themselves, who would know in an instant he was not one of them. It was hardly textbook fieldcraft, but it had kept him alive and undetected so far.

  And he had seen it all. He had not realized that he came here only because Che’s story had seemed too bizarre to be believed, but now his eyes had been opened: it was true in every word.

  Or every word but one. He had yet to see that final inner secret. He had yet to confront the Worm inside its den.

  The child pits had nearly finished him. He had been a hard man once, but having children, loving children, had fractured some part of his inner armour. He had stared down at the terrified, lonely infants, seen them look up at him beseechingly as though he could do anything for them. He had come so close to trying to help, even though all he would have accomplished would have been to destroy his own cover.

  He had looked in each subsequent pit, witnessing each group of children one step further removed from their roots, from their individuality. He had seen, stage by stage, the Worm consume everything that they had been, and leave nothing but its hollow casts behind.

  It was after that that he had started murdering the Scarred Ones whenever they gave him the opportunity. He desperately wanted to kill somebody for it, and they were the only ones to whom it was even possible to attach blame. If it had been feasible to go backwards somehow and kill all their ancestors as well, all the great magicians of the Centipede-kinden when they had first thought up this madness, then he would have done that, too.

  Not long ago he had made a surprise discovery: he had found out where the Scarred Ones lived. There was a nest of caves beneath the city, unconnected to the tunnels leading to their god. There the true remnants of the Centipede-kinden clung to their precarious existence, hiding and breeding like vermin, like parasites in their own places. He saw them there, and their children – already scarred to keep them from the wrath of the mindless host all around them. He could have stalked in and butchered them, but found that it was not in him, quite, to do so. Besides, they did not all sleep at once, but operated some kind of staggered rota, so that some were always vigilant. At first he imagined that they feared some intruder such as himself. Then he realized that they feared the end of their immunity, that their god would suddenly realize that it had no need for them. Such feeble sentries could not have kept that tide out, but still they watched. It was not quite enough to engender sympathy in him, but it came close.

  He had no idea how Che’s own work was going – her attempts to gather and organize the slaves. He had been out of contact now for unknown days and uncounted moonless nights. All he knew was that there were prisoners being brought into the city on a regular basis, but no clue as to whether they were captured in battle or were just part of the Worm’s attempts to consume its human chattels here to fuel its assault on the world above.

  That there were prisoners at all was because of the priests, he guessed. The Worm would have no use for living slaves to be brought to its city, any more than it had a use for the city itself. The priests, though, had concocted their insane, all-denying religion around it, and told themselves that their practices earned them its blessings, and their sacrifices protected them from its wrath. Esmail could see, with utter clarity, that there were no blessings and likewise no wrath.

  The priests killed their prisoners fairly quickly. Many they killed themselves in lesser rites – and the bodies went to feed the Worm’s own growing mass, or to load the tables of the priests themselves. Far more were being taken down into the chamber that Che had spoken of – the true final point of all roads within this stone nightmare. The Worm was hungry.

  He had been steeling himself to follow one such expedition. He needed to view his enemy with his own eyes before he brought this whole edifice down.

  In the end, his hand was forced. He would never know if, unassisted, he might have possessed the courage to make that journey deeper into the earth.

  He saw the latest band of prisoners brought in. Amongst them was a familiar face.

  The big man stood in the centre of this ragged band of slaves, hands extended over them as though still trying to protect them in some way. Orothellin.

  Esmail watched that huge, haggard figure even as the Scarred Ones came for him, weaving through the constantly busy throng of soldiers. The big man had mustered a certain dignity for the occasion, and Esmail badly wanted to make himself known in some way: to let Orothellin know that he was not alone in these last moments.

  Then, of course, the soldiers were separating the giant out, for who was a better offering to the Worm than this man, this veteran of a thousand years and a symbol of their captivity?

  They took him away, Orothellin moving slowly, almost as though he was still half asleep, with the people of the Worm milling around him like children.

  The thought suddenly made Esmail sick. Of course, like children. They were all somebody’s children. Generations of children stolen and hollowed out and sent to tyrannize and kill their own kin. And no wonder the ancient world had stood together against the Worm.

  This time, he followed when they took Orothellin beneath the earth. This time, the Scarred Ones did not delay. There was a dreadful excitement about them. They know who he is. They have been hunting him for a long time.

  And it will buy you nothing from your god, save that the wretched man is perhaps a larger morsel than most.

  He crept in their shadow using the skills of a long life in the trade – no magic, but his expertise had always counted more than mere magician’s tricks. There were many of them, and soldiers too – had there been fewer Esmail could have won Orothellin a moment’s freedom, for all that they were in the heart of the enemy’s domain. As it was, natural caution won out and he merely watched. What else, after all, was a spy for? Today he was a spy.

  Tomorrow an assassin, he fervently hoped.

  They led him, all unknown, to the lair of their god, that same great rift that Che had described, and there the Worm came for Orothellin, and devoured him and his thousand years without thought or appreciation, and went away again.

  Immediately afterwards, Esmail left the broken city and found himself some hidden nook in the stone to creep into, and he trembled and stared at his hands in the darkness.

  He couldn’t do it. He saw that now. Even if the thing was not a god, then it was still too vast, too dark, too terrifying. He had no Art or skill or useless, useless magic that would permit him the hubris of attacking the Worm. His courage went only so far. It could not be done.

  Thirty-Three

  Everyone had questions, but Eujen had no answers, not real ones. When are they coming back? was the one he heard most often. So many citizens of Collegium had marched off with the Sarnesh, and people wanted to know when they would see their loved ones, their relatives, their business partners or drinking mates. Worse, there had been that airship which had escaped ahead of the Second Army’s retreat. Nobody had realized at the time just what had been going on – not eve
n the general of the Second, apparently. Only after the dust had cleared did anyone realize that the Imperial Slave Corps had simply floated away with several hundred citizens.

  Everyone was mourning someone: dead or missing or marched off with the army. Whole sections of the city were running short-handed. There weren’t enough hands to rebuild or to reorganize. Collegium was merely limping through the days.

  When are they coming back? people asked about the Merchant Companies. Eujen himself wanted to know that. What news he received from the troops showed that nobody there knew, either.

  And there was that other trouble – the attacks under cover of darkness that scoured isolated farms and mills and villages and left no witnesses – or sometimes left a row of houses untenanted without warning or explanation. Everyone had somehow been assuming that it was some game of the Wasps, some pastime of Tynan’s Second, but the Wasps were gone, and it was getting worse, and so they came to Eujen and asked him what he intended to do about it.

  He had not been appointed the leader of the city. There was no real Assembly. That sad rump that the Wasps had permitted to ‘advise’ had since been disbanded, and those who had sat on it were all doing their best to explain that, really, they had been given no choice, and of course they had worked against the Empire in so many, alas invisible, ways. At the same time, nobody was about to say they needed another governor to rule the city with a tyrant’s rod. Their intricate system of government had been taken apart, and nothing brought in to replace it.

  Eujen, a student who could walk only through the intervention of artifice, had been the de facto Collegiate Speaker in exile in Sarn. Now he found that people were still looking to him for leadership, when there was so very little he could do.

  So he did the little that he could. He found other people who themselves could only do a little. He got them together and talking to each other. He combined all those small contributions, building one on another until he had something that looked as though it would at least keep the wheels turning for now.

  He started with his friends and associates, with a keen realization of, So this is nepotism, then. He found people who had been useful in Sarn, College Masters, his parents. He moved on to people they knew, for his parents had their mercantile contacts; scholars knew other scholars, who in turn knew someone who . . .

  Eujen himself did nothing save point people at other people, and point people at problems, and he waited for someone to look at him and demand to know what gave him the right.

  When the people he was pointing at each other had differences or came to blows, he intervened. To his lasting amazement, they listened to him bluster, nodding soberly. If he voiced a thought, that opinion of his seemed to manifest almost as a physical thing, with weight and impetus.

  Nothing was working. Everything was still falling apart. Except, each morning, it was all still falling apart just as the day before, barely any worse at all. He was a dam against the entropy that would lead to collapse, anarchy, starvation.

  He had no militia, of course – the Merchant Companies were off with Stenwold Maker, what was left of them, and his own Straessa had gone with them. There was a contingent of Tseni Ant marines on the streets, though, and one day they just started doing what he said, their leader apparently recognizing in him some authority that was otherwise wholly fictitious.

  Then the Spider ship had sailed into harbour, as civilized as anyone could have asked for.

  There had nearly been a fight over that – not even involving the Tseni so much as the locals who remembered the Spiderlands’ armada and alliance with the Empire, however that had turned out. There was only one ship, though, and it put ashore a single ambassador, an elegant woman who wanted to speak to Stenwold Maker. Of course to Stenwold Maker, who else?

  She would have to make do with Eujen Leadswell, she was told.

  Their meeting was strained but cordial. Eujen the student had sat there, pretending to be the important Collegiate diplomat whilst wincing at the spasms of pain afflicting his back and legs, and the Spider woman had apparently pretended to take him seriously. There had been an offer, in the midst of all the talk, and Eujen’s scholarly mind had cut through the expressions of mutual need, of shared history, of regrettable recent developments, to see that the Spiders wanted a truce, a safe port, perhaps even an alliance in due course. He had heard that the fighting down the Silk Road was fierce, and more than that, he had heard that the vast reaches of the Spiderlands were beginning to show the strain of current times. There had been catastrophic earthquakes in Skaetha, the golden city at the heart of the Spiderlands’ web. He had heard of a high death toll amongst the highest echelons of the Aristoi, divisions between the families, an inability to address the Empire’s encroachments. Their pragmatism in coming to Collegium was almost disarming.

  He would have to consult the Assembly, he had told her, and they both pretended that there still was such a thing, rather than merely a large group of people Eujen knew distantly who could each make small things happen. He would offer her and her crew accommodation in the city, but there might be some wait before she received word of any decision.

  He saw the tiny wince in her expression, suppressed just a moment too late. Time was a precious commodity along the Silk Road.

  Minutes after the meeting, Eujen was hurrying through a letter to Straessa because, resent it as he did, he really needed to know what Stenwold Maker thought.

  His letter caught up with the Lowlander army at the gates of Helleron. The rail lines from Malkan’s Folly eastwards, which the Imperials had used to send in their reinforcements, were intact, and the entire force was able to close the remaining distance to the Lowlands’ eastern borders in remarkable time, using auto-motives rushed in from Sarn. Straessa had wondered if destroying those rail lines, if the worst came to the worst for the Wasps, should have been the job of the Auxillians whom Milus had apparently suborned. Certainly it seemed an obvious way to slow the Lowlands down and yet nobody had done it. More cracks were showing in the Imperial facade.

  By the time they reached Helleron, the Empire had already abandoned the city, plainly all too aware of the place’s shifting loyalties. Everyone had been expecting sly Helleren merchant lords appearing to swear smoothly that the Wasps had been their guests under protest, but a whole district of the city was in ruins, and the faces of the citizens looked stunned, unsure whether this was liberation or just a new invasion.

  When the magnates did come, Milus kept them waiting, and then presented them with his demands: ammunition, fuel, supplies, automotives – with no suggestion of paying for any of it. Those who demurred, he had arrested. At the same time, Stenwold was sending Collegiates into the city to make contact with lower-level merchants, men and women who would normally wait for the nod of their betters before dabbling in this sort of politics. Enough of them were sufficiently quick off the mark to ensure that supplies were quickly rushing in on credit, because on credit was still better than free, and because being friends with Collegium and Sarn suddenly looked good.

  Even now, after a pause of just a few days, Milus’s people were getting ready to move out.

  Eujen’s missive was carried there by a civilian pilot with a swift fixed-wing who had tracked the Lowlander army by simply following the rail lines. Finding Straessa in that throng should have been harder, save that – just like Eujen himself – she was looked on as the solution to every problem, large and small, and so everyone knew where to locate her.

  She took the missive eagerly, because it gave her an excuse to shake off the little mob demanding her attention. About time, Eujen, she thought. Beginning to think you’d forgotten about me.

  The seal broken, she found the contents were not exactly as personal as she had hoped, but still she found herself smiling fondly, skimming over Eujen’s patient setting-out of the Collegiate situation, as orderly and clear as if he thought he would be graded on it. Given that he had marked the contents for the urgent attention of Stenwold Maker, she
wasn’t sure why he hadn’t simply bypassed her altogether. Perhaps he still felt too wary of the man to approach him directly, even in writing.

  And then, just as she was despairing of Eujen entirely, came that last paragraph:

  I badly want to hear the news that Maker and Milus, between them, have brought the war to some manner of satisfactory conclusion. Every child of Collegium, of whatever kinden, is badly missed and badly needed. I miss and need my Antspider most of all. I will muddle on here, and do what can be done, but I am waiting each day for the news that you are coming back to me, and most of all for you to bring that news in person.

  And this letter is to go before Maker, apparently, she considered with a wry smile, picturing him losing his thread, forgetting the chief purpose of his writing. He never did remember to read things through.

  She excised that last paragraph deftly and went in search of the War Master.

  He was to be found with his pirates – or that was what Laszlo had claimed the pack of Fly-kinden were. Straessa had her doubts, principally because the thought of being cooped up on a ship with Laszlo for any period of time felt like the prelude to homicide. The pack of them had seemed just a vagrant band of travellers, save that they had the ear of Stenwold Maker. Now, as she approached, she saw them in a different light. Maker was sitting at their fire, discussing something in earnest, and there seemed no suggestion that he was just handing down orders to them. Instead, from their cautious nods, their thoughtful looks, it seemed they were assessing some sort of proposal he was putting forward – but something with no guarantee of acceptance. After that, she also noted just how well armed they all were, and began to wonder, Pirates, really? And if that was the case, what were they doing here?

  And there were others, too, she saw. Sperra was there, whom Straessa had met before the liberation, and that big renegade Sarnesh from Princep as well, and that weird pale Sea woman who seemed to be at Maker’s elbow much of the time, and all of them apparently conspiring over something, thick as thieves.