Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Straessa stared at her hands, not knowing what to say.

  ‘I did not know what it would be like, to serve with the Apt,’ Gorenn went on awkwardly. ‘It has not been easy. I have made many adjustments, as you have seen.’

  Straessa, who had seen nothing of the sort, wisely said nothing.

  ‘You, though, I understand,’ the Dragonfly finished, and it was only with the dragging silence after those words that the Antspider realized that that was it, and that it was intended as a compliment.

  ‘Ah, thank you,’ she managed, and then the automotive was in motion at last, and they were back on the road to Capitas.

  Straessa left matters for most of an hour before she let herself wander back down to the Collegiate baggage car: a little more difficult now to squeeze her way down the aisle, but then an army did travel with a remarkable amount of kit.

  ‘I hope you’re happy,’ she murmured, after making sure that nobody else was within earshot, ‘because frankly that was pissing terrifying. “It’s not such a grand thing,” you said. My arse it wasn’t.’

  There was a little shuffling of luggage from down by her knee, opening up the space that the Flies had prepared earlier. There she could see Laszlo, his artificer Despard and the rest of his crew, all sitting elbow to elbow in relative comfort in the baggage fort they had made.

  ‘Nonsense, you loved it,’ he told her, although his expression was serious. ‘Well done, though, you and the Princep lot.’ Laszlo and the rescued girl had slipped in under cover of the Collegiate detachment in the midst of the Princep Salma soldiers.

  ‘They’ll come searching here,’ Straessa said. ‘Once they start thinking that maybe you didn’t just leg it, they’ll search all over.’

  ‘We can move around. This isn’t our only bolthole,’ Laszlo assured her.

  Straessa looked past him at the Fly with the shock of red curls. ‘She’s the why, is she? You’re . . . what was it?’

  ‘Lissart,’ the woman said. ‘Apparently I’m the why.’ To Straessa she seemed too tense and twitchy still, scarcely more at ease beside Laszlo than she had presumably been in Milus’s keeping. Then, again, perhaps being imprisoned and tortured would do that.

  ‘Why haven’t you all just gone, anyway?’ she asked the Flies. ‘I reckon you could vanish easily in this country, let the Ants search as much as they like.’

  ‘Oh, we’ve got work to do still,’ Lissart told her, cutting off Laszlo even as he opened his mouth to speak. ‘We’re not done yet.’

  Forty-Two

  Are these the people I would have chosen to decide the fate of the Empire?

  Tynan’s command tent was full, even cluttered. The Lowlander army was close now – projected to arrive some time before dawn, and it was close to midnight now. Any moment his scouts might burst in and announce that Tactician Milus had made better time than predicted, and that the battle would happen now.

  And Ernain would take his Auxillians, stripping away a little short of half the Imperial army’s strength. The lesser half, most Wasps would say, but half was half. Numbers weren’t everything, but they were something no general would go without if he had the chance.

  And even with those numbers there are no guarantees.

  At first he had been furious. How hard it had been to keep himself from having Ernain and Oski, traitors both, arrested or even executed. Making angry decisions was not a trait a general allowed in himself, though. So Tynan had let them go, and he had read over Ernain’s new model Empire, and he had pondered.

  Then he had sent for them all, so they had come, and others with them, elbowing each other for room in his little tent.

  Here they were, jostling for their place in the history books: Nessen, former governor of Helleron; Merva, the Solarnese governor’s wife; Varsec the aviation expert, except that now he was dancing attendance on General Lien himself, the lord of the Engineers having finally been drawn from his lair beneath Severn Hill. Major Vorken the slaver was still skulking about at the back, a large and powerful man cowed into submission by the fact of his inferior rank.

  A Beetle-kinden had arrived, too, apparently unbidden: Honory Bellowern, whom Tynan recalled as the Imperial diplomatic aide in Collegium, but who was now apparently engaged on the business of his wealthy and powerful family. He carried the seal and authority of its patriarch, the venerable Auder Bellowern, on whose word large sections of the Empire’s economy might start and stop.

  And there was General Marent, of course, and there was Ernain of Vesserett – Tynan couldn’t think of him as just Captain Ernain any more – with Major Oski at his side. Quite a gathering, all told.

  ‘Marent,’ Tynan said, reaching out for a man he hoped would back his strategy. ‘Your words: there’s a rot at the heart of the Empire. We’ve heard what Vorken and Varsec have had to say about the slave camps. We know that I’m currently disobeying a direct order just by preparing to defend Capitas from the Sarnesh, rather than hand myself in. We’ve seen that things have gone wrong, terribly wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marent replied forcefully, his stern gaze daring anyone present to disagree. There were plenty of unhappy expressions, but none that gainsaid him.

  ‘You tried to suggest, then, that we needed a new head wearing the crown.’

  Utter silence as that ultimate treason was revisited. Tynan looked round at the newcomers, noting Lien’s narrowed eyes, Honory Bellowern’s politic lack of expression.

  ‘Have you reconsidered your position, General?’ It’s not too late, Marent was saying.

  ‘I have not,’ Tynan told him. Best to make that plain from the start. ‘However, it’s safe to say that we’re not the only ones who have been thinking on those lines, who’ve noticed that things are falling apart. The Empire has spoken, or at least significant parts of it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Nessen demanded. ‘Rebellion?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Tynan said. He felt ferociously tired. ‘Not armed uprising, anyway, but something . . .’ He nodded at the Bee-kinden, whom most of his guests must have been wondering about. ‘Ernain here has brought an ultimatum.’

  He talked them through it, then, just as Ernain himself had stood in this very tent and explained it all to him. Looking from Wasp face to Wasp face, he saw their anger – at being blackmailed in the Empire’s greatest time of need, but also just at the suggestion itself. He saw, on many faces, the very problem that Ernain and his followers were making a stand against. How dare these slaves, these lesser kinden, dictate to us?

  ‘Put one in ten on the crossed pikes and they’ll soon come to their senses,’ Nessen said when Tynan finished. Nessen: the man who had never even commanded an army.

  ‘No, they will not,’ Tynan told him heavily. ‘They are ready to leave, right now. If we attack them they will fight back, and no doubt the Lowlanders will reward them for it – Milus has his agents in amongst them, making promises.’

  ‘This is his doing?’ Marent asked. There was a terrible vulnerability in his face, wholly unbefitting a general. I probably looked the same when that Bee-kinden bastard put this to me.

  ‘It is not,’ Tynan confirmed, and only just prevented himself from saying, No, it is ours. ‘This has been brewing for a long time, at least since the traitor governors. They have looked at the Empire, and they have come to exactly the same conclusion as we have: that it must change. The only difference lies in the degree of change.’

  ‘The only difference, Tynan?’ Lien demanded. ‘You’re talking . . . everything.’

  ‘Oh, no, no, General.’ Honory Bellowern’s smooth voice. ‘Not everything. Only little things. The top of the ziggurat, that’s all. The base and all its levels can remain mostly undisturbed.’ Most of the Wasps were staring at him now, and he swallowed a little nervously and then went on, ‘So a little self-rule for those cities who – let us face the truth – have been more stalwart in their support of the Empire than many whom the Empire put in place to govern them. A few more free men working harder for coin than sla
ves will for bread. And, in place of all that pressure of government resting on a single point, an Assembly of the great and the good, all working towards the benefit of the state. The Empress has her advisers, does she not? And if those advisers had been more than mere decoration, had been given real authority to check the excesses of the throne’s power, then perhaps we might not be in this position even now.’

  ‘Tynan.’ Marent was sounding slightly choked. ‘Am I to take it you support this?’

  Tynan closed his eyes, picturing the Lowlanders nearing with every heartbeat, but more than that: he saw thirty years of Imperial history, the waste of the Twelve-year War, the profiteering of the slavers, the Rekef infighting, how swiftly the traitor governors had arisen, how brutally the power of a single man or woman could be exercised when they had literally nobody to tell them ‘no’. And is this any better? Is Collegium really a model of efficient governance?

  The mocking thought followed: Measure them by the Imperial yardstick: who will be at whose gates tomorrow?

  ‘I do,’ he said. It was said so quietly, and yet everyone was craning forwards to catch the words.

  There was an instant outburst of horror and argument, but Marent shouted them down.

  ‘Tynan, I would have followed you to the throne, and knelt to you as Emperor,’ he declared. His eyes were hollow, accusing. Why could you not have said yes to the crown? Then the words came out of him like gall, vomited forth as though the taste of them sickened him. But they were: ‘I will follow you in this. Your judgement, Tynan, over all.’

  ‘No, no, listen,’ Nessen insisted, sounding terrified, almost in tears. ‘Yes, the Empress is clearly mad, but there’s no need to undo all we’ve built, all we have. It was our mistake ever to allow a woman on the throne. Women aren’t made for such things.’

  There was some nodding at this, despite Merva’s immediate complaint, which Nessen blithely ignored. But Tynan was shaking his head.

  ‘I have seen a woman command an army as ably as any man,’ he told them, feeling something tug and strain within his heart at the thought. ‘And I have seen a man sit on that throne and make decisions as ruinous as anything Seda has ordered. Alvdan was no paragon.’

  ‘Then it’s the family that’s rotten, not the institution!’ Nessen argued hurriedly.

  ‘No,’ Tynan said with enough finality that it shut the man up. He took a deep breath. ‘Listen to me. We are most of us soldiers here, and those of us who aren’t at least understand how an army works. It needs one commander: a general to order his officers, who in turn command their men. Perhaps I would take advice from my specialists, from my chief of engineers, my lead scouts, but my word is law, and it is final. That is how an army works.

  ‘But an Empire is not an army. It is not some little tribe in the hills, where a chief knows every one of his village by name, and it is not a military force where an instant’s indecision is sufficiently disastrous that one man must take charge. We have an Empire of so many cities, of so many hundreds of thousands of subjects. To give one man – or woman – power over that, unchecked and absolute . . . Who would not become a tyrant, a monster? Marent, you’d see me take the crown? Let me stand where my every meanest whim means life and death across all the Empire and I’d make Alvdan seem a glorious warrior hero, I’d make Seda seem the very hand of mercy. Have you never stopped to look around you at our neighbours? The Ants have their kings, but they are constantly in each others’ minds, accommodating one another’s points of view. Others rule by council or assembly, or just a network of feuding nobles for the Spiderlands. What other state has this madness of an absolute and hereditary ruler? Name it for me.’

  ‘The Commonweal,’ from Varsec of the Engineers.

  ‘That’s it,’ Tynan agreed. ‘The wretched, disintegrating chaos and poverty that is the Commonweal. Nobody else, but them and us. So, yes, I am in favour. I will sign Ernain’s declaration. And not just to save the Empire here, or because of his threats, but because that way lies a future that might just endure.’

  ‘But . . .’ Major Vorken of the slavers put in awkwardly, ‘the slaves, the slave cities . . .? They cannot be proposing to do away with slavery, surely.’

  ‘There are slaves and slaves.’ It was the first time Ernain had spoken. ‘Criminals, war prisoners, those purchased from the Spiders or the Scorpions, they are slaves, certainly, and we rely on them, after all. Let the Collegiates live that particular dream. But, as for the people of my city, and of the other cities, we will not be born into slavery. We Auxillians will be soldiers as you are, not slave conscripts. We will be citizens of an Empire that is ours, as it is yours. Yes, there will be adjustments. Yes, some that are slaves now will be free servants or artisans or soldiers in the future, but I’m not some bleating Collegium scholar telling you everyone has a right to be free. We all know that isn’t true – and so does most of the rest of the world.’

  ‘And what of those cities that you don’t speak for?’ Marent put in thoughtfully.

  ‘If they don’t come round, if they don’t see that this is the best for them?’ Ernain shrugged. ‘Then they deserve all they get.’

  ‘Well, then.’ Tynan looked around at them. ‘I have Marent with me. I have Bellowern, so I suspect that means that a great deal of the wheels that would need to spin to make this work are already in place.’ And now Honory was nodding slightly at that, the weight of his clan and its many, many dependants and adherents in that small gesture. ‘But what of the rest of you? Here’s our experiment in government. You are my assembly, here and now. So speak.’

  He saw Nessen shaking his head, shrinking back, a man not in favour but not brave enough to speak out. Vorken had already stepped back, his expression tense and conflicted, quite out of his depth.

  ‘General,’ Merva of Solarno said, ‘this is probably where I mention that Ernain’s people have already spread the word as far as Solarno. The Spiders there are aware of this proposal, as is my husband. Solarno will take what is offered.’

  ‘The Spiders will join the Empire, will they?’ Nessen demanded.

  ‘Those families who have made their power base in Solarno may,’ she agreed, ‘so long as it would become their Empire too.’

  ‘What say the Engineers?’ Tynan asked.

  ‘I have always been a man of progress—’ Varsec started.

  ‘Quiet, man,’ Lien snapped at him, but the colonel just looked at his superior for a moment, and then went on.

  ‘Progress is what an engineer should wish for. If a thing does not work, you redesign it until it does. If a thing could work better, it’s the same. And if you do not advance in this way –’ now he was shouting over Lien’s orders to be silent – ‘if you become fond of yesterday’s designs even though they no longer function, then you will fail. Only by changing and bettering ourselves can we survive.’

  ‘Says the same man who brought mindlinked pilots into the army!’ General Lien snapped.

  ‘And they have served us well, Lien,’ Tynan stated. ‘And, yes, some of them are halfbreeds, and some of them are women – my own chief of aviators even – and yet they still serve the Empire.’

  ‘No,’ Lien protested. ‘Tynan, this is treason and, worse, it is a fool’s treason. The Empress has her . . . irregularities, perhaps, but I have faith in her. The Engineers will not sign. I will return to Capitas and prepare to man the wall artillery against the Lowlanders.’ As he turned away he bellowed, ‘Varsec!’

  He left the tent, striding out into the night air, and Tynan wondered, Can we do it without him? What would the Engineers do – elect their own Emperor if we deposed Seda?

  ‘Lien!’ he called, but then he heard the clatter of steel from outside, and a scream.

  Did someone stab him? Instantly, Tynan was pushing his way out of the tent, too. He saw a cluster of men fighting in the firelight, trying to keep something from approaching him. Even as he watched, that single figure scythed through them, cutting down anyone within reach of its blade, shrugging of
f or stepping aside from stingshot and snapbow bolts.

  The Empress’s Mantis.

  Tynan’s blood ran cold just to see it, but the armoured figure was already picking up speed, cutting down any soldier luckless enough to get in its way and coming directly for him.

  The first wave of the Worm’s soldiers had fallen on both sides, buried beneath the rockslides that Thalric had prepared. They had used that weapon to the very best of their ability, leaving scores of the attackers crushed and broken. But that was it, for there was no more they could throw down. Now the slingers were working, casting stones into the advancing mass of the enemy as fast as they could, but it would not hold them back long. Nothing would hold them for long.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Che asked Tynisa.

  ‘As I can be,’ her foster-sister replied. She was standing up straight, right now, sword in hand and feeding off the strength it lent her. The tide of the Worm would not have to advance far before she was a cripple once more and Che was again just a Beetle girl with delusions.

  If this is my last act, let it be the right one – but she had gone beyond the ability to judge.

  She reached out – with her arms and her mind both – searching for that connection with Seda, that conduit through which the Empress would absorb her power. The cries and shouts of the fighting, Thalric’s exhortations to the slaves, trying to shout some backbone into them . . . she did her best to blot it all out. Concentration was everything, as she tried to focus on that ephemeral sense that had been gifted to her, when she had lost her Aptitude.

  She had a feel for the great funnel that was the Worm’s world, where it squatted hungrily at the lowest point that all roads led to. From above – and it was not truly above but her mind insisted on that comparison – filtered down the fine rain of magic, leaking back into this void of a world after so long. She gathered it to herself. She was the only true magician in this whole world. All the power here was hers by right.