Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Esmail had said that the priests of the Worm seemed to be sacrificing more and more to their uncaring god. Che imagined that they must see the end of their own world here, with the Worm focused more and more on its intended new conquests.

  ‘And Totho?’ she pressed.

  Messel shrugged. ‘He did not break free with the few I managed to get out. I cannot say what his fate was.’

  She sent for Esmail and the Hermit, and they came reluctantly. The Assassin had been brooding since his recent return from the city of the Worm, and his news regarding Orothellin had hit the renegade Scarred One hard. Neither looked impressed when Che told them she needed their help.

  She explained about Totho. That did not help much.

  ‘So this friend of yours, whom I wouldn’t know from a stranger, might have turned up down here and might have been captured, and might be in their city right now, instead of just torn apart and already feeding their fields, or their bellies,’ Esmail summarized in disgust.

  ‘Esmail, please,’ Che said simply. ‘The two of you can go to that place safely. Or I’ll go myself, but I need one of you to take me.’

  ‘And she’s needed here,’ Thalric interjected, over her shoulder. ‘Because at least some of the people will listen – and listening to Che’s the only thing that’ll save them.’

  Esmail moved to make some sharp retort, then bit it back. ‘Is it true that you can get out? That we can all get out?’

  ‘I hope so,’ Che told him. ‘We have nothing else, now.’

  The Assassin closed his eyes, considering. ‘If I – we – go, he may not be there. He may even be there but hidden from us. Even if we find him, we will not be able to get him out.’

  ‘Cut the scars into him and hide him. At least try,’ Che insisted, a surge of frustration welling up inside her. She had intended to say, ‘please’ like the good Beetle girl she had been brought up as, but instead she found herself standing up, with some unspoken word echoing about them. Esmail’s eyes were wide as he scrabbled back.

  ‘What?’ Thalric demanded, and Tynisa’s sword was already clear of its scabbard. But Che was still trying to work out what had just happened, what she had done. Esmail was regarding her in a different way, now – respect and fear together.

  ‘You have it back,’ he murmured. ‘For just a moment . . .’

  ‘I have what?’ Che asked, almost plaintively.

  ‘The crown, the mark of the Masters that I saw on Seda . . . and on you, before we came down here. The magic came back for a moment.’

  It was true that they were far from the Worm – or so she hoped – and so its deadening, levelling smog was not robbing her of the ability even to consider magic. Still, this place was parched dry of power, choked off from the world beyond, a dead place drained of its strength by the Moths and their Seal . . .

  Their broken Seal.

  Che felt an odd flutter. Like a disarmed duellist finding a dagger in her belt. That door was open only a crack, but did she perhaps have more options than she had realized? The Worm’s cavern realm was open to the world once more, and she could reach out for the magic that still existed outside. But, more, the Seal was gone. All that magic tied up in one place to keep the Worm locked away, and now the great knot of it was undone, all that magic was freed to . . . to do what? To drain away, even as all the magic had? Or could she still grasp for it?

  ‘Will you do it?’ she asked Esmail.

  ‘I cannot promise that I can accomplish anything, still less save your friend,’ he told her, ‘but I will go. I will search for him.’

  ‘And you?’

  The Hermit had stood silent through this whole exchange, merely glowering at her. ‘Me? Return to that place? To my people? Forget myself that much, eh? Would I come back, I wonder? Now that he’s dead, should I even care?’

  ‘Please . . .’

  The old man shook his head angrily. ‘I would lose myself. Then I would be gone. Without Orothellin, what am I but a broken-off piece of the Worm. I will not go. Let this fool go back to that place. I will not go.’

  That night she tried to dream. She lacked the props she had once used to retain the pictures that issued from her sleeping mind, but she simply concentrated, meditated and absorbed the slow filtering of magic that was permeating this world for the first time in a thousand years.

  Who else here, after all, could make use of it?

  To her reopened mind, the cavern world was a continuum strung from the bright flare of the outside down towards the obscuring murk of the Worm itself. Up above, beneath the sun and moon, she could touch Seda distantly and feel the Wasp woman trying to reach back towards her.

  Che, I need your strength! I am so close! I can defeat the Worm!

  And then there was a sense of some great plan in motion, forces of ritual like great stone slabs sliding into place, leaving Che terrified and appalled and yet unable to say exactly why. The details did not come through.

  And, besides, she was seeking a different communion. She was trying to find Totho.

  I know him so well, after all. We were friends for so long. If he is down here, and living still, then surely I can find him.

  But she hunted and hunted, gaining transient glimpses of other groups of slaves – fleeing, dying or squatting in filth and misery as they waited for their end. Even if Che got her current charges out of this charnel world, they represented only a fraction. So many more would die; so many more were already dead.

  But there was no sign of Totho, and so she turned her attention to that coiling blot at the heart of the world – where the Worm dwelt.

  By now she was deep in dreams, her revelations progressively less reliable, more likely to be the product of her own wishes and needs. When she did find a momentary contact with a familiar personality – the callused edges of his innocence, his earnest striving, his bitterness towards the world – it was a fleeting thing, and she could not know for sure if she had found him after all.

  More likely he was dead. More likely he was smothered beneath the cloud of the Worm’s influence, and she could not reach him at all. Or else his own stubborn Aptitude prevented her from touching him.

  Or perhaps I just don’t know him as well as I should do.

  Thirty-Six

  The Red Watch man – he never revealed his name – entered the governor’s residence in Myna as though he owned it.

  In truth, just getting here had been a struggle. Myna itself was in chaos, the streets fiercely contested between the Wasp garrison and the local forces. It’s as though they know what we’re about to do, Gannic thought. The reality of what they were planning – what his vaunted technical expertise would propagate – was something he was doing his best not to think about.

  There were lines drawn now. The governor had been sent his orders, and the garrison forces had done their best to corral the bulk of the Mynans into a single district, pushing them up through the tiers of the city until they were crammed into its highest areas. By then, there were no intact flying machines left in native hands, and the Imperial Spearflights and Farsphex could drop incendiaries on the locals to their heart’s content. Except that orders forbad it.

  In actuality, a great part of the city was not safe for either side. Insurgents were constantly breaking out and setting traps and ambushes for Wasp forces, or being caught and killed in turn. Keeping the Mynans bottled up was a constant struggle.

  The great governor’s palace, which had once dominated the city for more than a decade, had been torn down by the ingrate locals after they had driven the Empire out during the last war, but they had yet to replace it with anything else. Their interim government had been keeping the Empire’s seat warm in a structure still only half complete when the Wasps returned, and that building had been methodically destroyed during the retaking of the city. Instead, the garrison had fortified its own district, turfing out all locals and barricading all the streets. In between those two districts of concrete loyalty, the Wasps had a fair run of the street
s, but their control was piecemeal.

  The airship, with its lethal cargo, had been shot at by ballistae when it arrived over the city – and Gannic was by no means sure that all those incoming bolts had been Mynan. It was a fearful chaos down there, and the thought of what might have happened, had some explosive cracked open the hull, did not bear thinking about. When at last they had the vessel anchored to the ground, he breathed a sigh of relief.

  He had thought, without much hope, that he might be able to hand over responsibility to the local engineers. The Red Watch man kept close to him, though, leaving the airship under heavy guard and snapping at any of the garrison men who tried to get in his way. Gannic remembered the way the Rekef had always worked. Yes, the name had inspired fear, but its presence had been subtle – everywhere and nowhere: could be your superior officer or the man next to you on parade, or even your own slave. The Red Watch was nothing but a fist backed by the Empress’s writ. It was great power given to little men. Gannic, a little man himself, knew how that would feel. Oh, what I’d do if only I . . .

  The Mynan governor was an old soldier with grey in his hair and a jagged scar on his face, seconded out from the army as a reward for long service, but given the poisoned chalice of this city because he was a warrior still.

  ‘So, what have you brought me?’ he demanded. He seemed less awed by the Red Watch than the rest were.

  ‘Orders, Colonel,’ the Red Watch man told him. ‘The Empress’s voice. May we speak in private?’

  The colonel’s expression was wary, but a flick of his fingers sent his junior officers out of the room. ‘This Myna business, it’s absurd,’ he commented. ‘They’re fighting like madmen. The whole city’s up in arms, all of a sudden. I don’t have the forces to keep them bottled up. I’ve sent to the Szaren garrison for reinforcements. I sent to Capitas, too. Apparently you’re who they sent in response.’

  ‘It seems that way,’ the Red Watch man confirmed. ‘Other reinforcements will not be necessary. The Empress has decided to settle the Mynan question once and for all.’

  Gannic had thought the colonel would take this as typical Capitas bombast, but the man looked thoughtful. ‘My men say you’ve a whole load of metal barrels on that boat of yours.’

  ‘Yes, Colonel.’

  ‘I was fighting near here in the last war, you know. Some bad pieces of business in this region. You hear all sorts. Some kind of madness-weapon in Tharn, they say. And then there was the Szaren garrison. What was it they called that stuff the Colonel-Auxillian had?’

  The name made Gannic start guiltily, and the Mynan governor did not seem surprised, only disappointed. ‘So you’re here with orders for me to win the war that way, are you?’

  ‘No, Colonel. My orders are to relieve you of your position and have you return to Capitas.’

  Gannic wasn’t sure whether he or the colonel was more startled by that statement.

  ‘Are you mad . . .?’ The governor – former governor – tailed off because the Red Watch man now had a hand directed towards him, palm outwards.

  ‘Effective immediately. Show him the orders, Gannic.’

  Unwillingly dragged into the dispute, Gannic took the scroll from the man’s other hand and hurried over to the governor, making sure not to get between them.

  The colonel pointedly ignored the threatening palm, breaking the seal on his orders and perusing them as calmly as he was able. ‘I see,’ he observed. ‘And Her Majesty’s commands will of course be obeyed.’ His eyes flicked up. ‘I shall depart for Capitas to clear this mess up myself. I note that, in my absence, you are acting governor. Congratulations.’ Gannic had never heard a more bitter word uttered. ‘One question,’ the colonel added. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she knew you would not go through with it, in the end,’ the Red Watch man told him flatly. ‘Sometimes the Empire needs special servants to carry out special tasks.’

  ‘Is that what you are?’ The ex-governor’s tone was dripping with disgust.

  ‘This is insane. Why don’t they fight?’ Castre Gorenn complained.

  The Lowlander army had reached Sonn, the predominantly Beetle city that was one of the Empire’s great centres of industry.

  In actual fact, there had been fighting. The local garrison force, or whatever, had come out and destroyed the rails west of Sonn and then fortified themselves as best they could outside the city. They had fought doggedly and well, but the Lowlanders had outflanked and heavily outnumbered them. The Sarnesh had got in close because the Wasps had not been willing or able to retreat from their positions, and that had been that. At the time nobody had understood why they had not retreated back to the city.

  Now it seemed that the good people of Sonn had ideas of their own.

  The army of the Lowlands was currently mustering, division by division, in the city’s rail yards, embarking on the carriages of rail automotives about to head east with all the speed of the Apt age. The local Beetles had only seemed apologetic that the Empire had already stripped them of their great lifter airships.

  ‘You remember Helleron, Gorenn?’ Straessa enquired, watching the Collegium contingent begin to climb aboard.

  ‘Disgusting place,’ the Dragonfly spat. ‘But much like this one, yes. Like twins that were separated.’

  ‘Well, you might not know, but Helleron got a bit of a reputation after the first war,’ the Antspider explained to her. ‘Basically, for kissing the arse of whoever turns up with more soldiers. Now, I remember hearing that the Wasps were putting a lot into modernizing this place, Sonn – factories and the like, and all built with Helleren knowhow. Every tramp artificer from west of here was guaranteed a good salary, if the Rekef didn’t take them up and torture them to death, you know.’

  Gorenn made a rude noise.

  ‘At the time, I remember, everyone was saying how this meant that Helleron wouldn’t even pretend to think about it when the Wasps came knocking again and, sure as death, that was the right call. But there was something Eujen said. He was all for the exchange. He said that whatever Helleron learned from the east, the Sonnen would learn just as much from the west.’ There had even been a rumour that the Sonnen had been ordered to destroy the rail line east of their city and had mysteriously failed to do so, as a gesture of appeasement towards Milus. In return, aside from some requisitioning of supplies and automotives, their city had been left almost unmolested.

  Meanwhile the soldiers of the Coldstone Company were starting to file aboard, shouldering their kit. Gorenn looked around her, past the throng of soldiers, to the locals themselves. They were mostly Beetles, with some Flies and even a few Wasps standing in carefully passive poses. There was a remarkable lack of black and gold, as though everyone had been stockpiling spare clothes of neutral hues.

  ‘Thing is,’ Straessa went on, ‘the Wasps were basically as fed up with Helleron’s weathervane thing as everyone else, and so they wanted their own tame Helleron right here in the Empire. And that’s what they got, I reckon. Perfect in every detail – right up to the surrendering.’

  Gorenn let out a brief yap of laughter at that but, when Straessa turned to nod her on to the carriage, the Dragonfly looked sad.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s . . . is this it? Is this the world, now, outside the Commonweal borders?’

  The Antspider blinked. The Gorenn she knew was bright, hard, almost insanely optimistic. The Commonweal Retaliatory Army, she had called herself, and had appeared to believe it. Straessa had not seen this solemn Dragonfly face before.

  ‘We fought the Wasps,’ Gorenn said softly. ‘It was hopeless. We fought and we fought. My whole family . . . everyone I knew. But we fought, because that is what one does. That is how it is in the stories. That’s how it’s always been. And now you clever Apt have invented a new way of being invaded, a clever way that means you do not have to fight. Like all your Apt things –’ she waved a hand at the automotive that they were about to board – ‘it makes your lives easier and more comfo
rtable, and at the same time it robs you of something of worth that you do not know enough to miss.’

  ‘We’re fighting,’ Straessa reminded her, giving her a shove to get the woman into the carriage.

  ‘Are we?’ Inside, Gorenn turned back to her. ‘I don’t know what the tactician is doing. Fighting is part of it, yes.’

  There was one carriage reserved for Milus himself, guarded by his soldiers and only accessed with his direct orders. The tactician spent most of his time elsewhere, however, sitting amongst his troops, just one anonymous Ant amongst many. He would be able to receive reports from every soldier in his army, keep an eye on all the others – the Mantids and the Lowlanders and the like – and take reports from the scouts who were checking the integrity of the rail line ahead. Sometimes he spoke face to face with Ants of the other cities, such as Tsen and Vek. It was the first time that military leaders of different Ant-kinden city-states had done so in living memory.

  The interior of Milus’s private carriage had been stripped bare – no comforts here, and certainly not anything too flammable. Some machinery had been installed – a few unique pieces brought by Milus himself, but also a good deal of equipment that had been freely available in Imperial Sonn. The artificers who tended it were specialists, equally at home with the anatomies of metal and flesh.

  Lissart shivered. Her world was reduced to this. She had fought and fought to preserve her freedom, defying every master who would lay a hand on her. She had defied the Empire, and she had fled poor Laszlo, and all in the name of not being bound by the world or anyone in it.

  The other tenet of her life – that she was cleverer than the rest – had been the one to break under her small weight and to land her here. She had hooked on to Milus as a useful source of amusement – why should she be not be able to play some dull Ant with titbits of knowledge about the Empire and the Inapt? Everyone knew that Ants were plodding unimaginative creatures, and that it took a dozen of them to have an idea between them. She had out-thought Wasps and Spiders and Fly-kinden. Ants should have been no challenge. She had not reckoned on Milus, however.