Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She could feel Seda beyond the broken Seal, reaching towards her, gravid with the strength she had stolen from the lives of slaves, from the ambient power of the sunlit world that had always seemed meagre to Che until she had been banished down here.

  Further! she told the Empress. Please, I cannot bridge the gap!

  Hold out, Che!

  There was a faint tremor running through her internal world, the edge of the Worm’s influence brushing her as the attacking warriors gained another step before the raining missiles of the slingers drove them back down the slope again. Tynisa was shifting from foot to foot, wanting to retreat further up, but knowing that she could not move Che.

  Almost, she thought. The ghostly extent of Seda’s power was like a beacon to her, a blazing lamp being lowered into this dark place.

  Almost, again, and Che composed herself, finally separating herself from the distractions of the world around her, shrugging off her fears for Thalric and Tynisa, her guilt, her self-doubt. For one crystalline moment she found a clear, calm place within her from which to muster the magic at her command. In that moment she saw everything.

  She touched fingers with Seda, felt the Empress stretching desperately for her power, ritual half complete, ready to recreate the Seal and lock away the Worm forever – or until some other misguided magician should shatter it anew. The lives of thousands of slaves already slain, and thousands more that she had ordered to be slain, all hung about her, bloating her with curdling, stolen strength that prised at every seam of her, demanding to be used.

  Che pulled.

  She took hold of Seda, accepted the proffered connection, and she pulled, dragging at the other woman’s power, the threads of her ritual, her very being and body. Instantly the Empress was fighting against her, and she would have been effortlessly stronger had she not overextended herself so far in driving a connection down to this lightless pit.

  Che pulled and pulled, burning the fickle reserves of magic that she had harvested here, pitting her will against the Empress of the Wasps, and even in the midst of this she heard Seda’s appalled, agonized voice.

  Che, we must remake the Seal! Why?

  Because some things come at too great a cost, Che told her. Because the ends do not justify the means. And she sank the hooks of her mind into Seda’s unwieldy half-made ritual and tore it apart, and then abruptly there was no resistance and Tynisa was dragging on her arm.

  The armoured Mantis drove forwards, and Tynan sank two burning darts of stingshot into its chest without even slowing it. He lurched aside, tripping over the lines securing his tent, seeing one of his officers lunge in with a sword and get his throat cut for his trouble. A moment later, Vorken the slaver was in the Mantis’s way as Tynan’s tent emptied, getting a blow in across the attacker’s pauldrons that was hard enough to stagger the intruder, then diving past with a flurry of wings. The Mantis lunged after him, opening his leg from knee to ankle, and then turned back to take on the next challenger.

  It was Marent, Tynan saw, as he struggled to his feet. The general of the Third feinted at the Mantis, his off-hand blazing fire, but the Mantis twisted past both steel and sting effortlessly, the barbs of one forearm raking across Marent’s face.

  Tynan put another bolt of his Art into the Mantis’s side, putting it briefly off its stride. Marent, half blinded, was still trying to go on the offensive, though, hacking down at the lithe, mailed form.

  That metal claw drove down into his chest, effortlessly penetrating through armour and bone without meeting any obvious resistance. Marent made a choking noise and died.

  A dart of loss pierced Tynan’s composure, and he let fly with both hands, bolts crackling and streaking around his enemy, most just seeming to glance away from it as the figure turned to him, taking one long step that put Tynan well within reach of its blade.

  The blow never came. Instead, the Mantis lurched sideways as though the ground had betrayed it. Its helmed head whipped about, hunting for an enemy Tynan could not see, and then it . . . receded was the only word Tynan could think of to describe what he saw. Without actually retreating from him, the Mantis seemed to fall away suddenly into some unseen gulf, dropping into the shadows as though they were an abyss of immeasurable depth.

  Tynan’s knees hit the ground, his legs abruptly too weak to support him. ‘Marent?’

  ‘He’s dead, sir, sorry.’ It was Oski, now kneeling by the other general’s body. ‘I think we’ve lost at least twenty of the watch as well, the ones who got in that thing’s way.’

  ‘Vorken?’ Tynan spotted the slaver already under the care of a surgeon. ‘Who else?’

  ‘General Lien, alas.’ The aviator, Varsec, crouched by him.

  Tynan looked at him narrowly. ‘Is that so?’

  Varsec’s face was guileless. ‘I believe there was something to sign, General. I appear to be ranking officer of the Engineers.’

  On such a shifting foundation do we build. ‘Ernain?’ A sudden cold moment, what if Ernain, too, had got in the Mantis’s way?

  There was the living Bee-kinden, though, and Tynan allowed Varsec to help him to his feet. ‘Bring your cursed paper here!’

  They signed and signed, copy after copy, those of them who were left. If the Empire was permitted to write its own histories after tomorrow, these same names would go down in those records: Tynan, Merva, Nessen, Varsec, Vorken, Honory Bellowern, Ernain, Oski. After that, and after Ernain had dispatched his precious declaration to the cities that had entrusted him with this task, there remained just one duty, and it was one that Tynan could not delegate to anyone else.

  He did not enter Capitas alone, but with some several hundred soldiers of the Gears, and he accumulated more as he approached the palace: Engineers, Consortium men, Slave Corps, Light Airborne, newly freed Auxillians – all the pieces of the Empire, not quite knowing what they were supporting but trusting in Tynan or in the other men who had given them their orders.

  There followed some fighting at the palace gates, but surprisingly little – a holdout handful of the Red Watch tried to stop him, but they were just a dozen against all his force, and they died swiftly and fiercely.

  He was expecting some other force to ambush him within those corridors of power, or perhaps the murderous Mantis to reappear and finish his work, but Tynan reached the doors of the throne room without incident. There were plenty of servants and courtiers and soldiers within the palace, and yet nobody seemed to have orders, and everyone looked to everyone else, and Tynan just marched on.

  He threw the doors open and strode in, and the Empress was not there, only the shaking form of General Brugan, who had once been a soldier to be reckoned with and now stared wildly at Tynan with the eyes of a lunatic.

  ‘Where is she?’ Tynan demanded of him. ‘Where’s the Empress?’

  ‘She . . .’ Tears were running down Brugan’s face, which twitched and jumped as though maggots were running just beneath the skin. ‘She’s gone, just gone . . . She fell, far, far away . . . Help me get her back, Tynan. We have to get her back.’ His hands scrabbled at the carved wood of the throne.

  Tynan regarded him impassively for a moment and then lifted a hand, not knowing whether it was necessity or revulsion or mere pity that moved him. The crackle and flash of his sting echoed about the chamber, and Brugan’s body rocked back against the throne and then slid to the floor.

  No Empress? No Empress and no confrontation, but here was Tynan in the heart of Empire, and nobody to contest the declaration he cast before the throne. He would have to trust to men such as the Bellowerns to ensure that everything held together now, while he got on with his real job.

  Soon afterwards the word came: the Lowlander army had been sighted.

  Forty-Three

  Stenwold woke up.

  For a moment, standing there, he had a sense of a great whirl of sound and motion, nearby and yet unseen, as though it was in a further room, in some space separated from him by the thinnest of membranes and yet utterly i
nvisible, undetectable.

  He was in Myna. He remembered now.

  Before him the gates rose solid and whole, and he felt waves of memory wash over him. He remembered watching them through a telescope while they shuddered under the impact of the Wasps’ ramming engine, but that had been a long time ago, in a world now lost. Those gates had fallen, and then the wall . . . years after, when the Empire had come again . . .

  He looked left and right, seeing that remembered wall intact now, re-edified and restored to be the perfect mimic of the way everything had been, before it all started.

  There was nobody else there, just Stenwold before the gates of Myna.

  Again he sensed a wave of commotion just beyond his reach, the clatter of metal, a woman’s voice – a woman he knew? – making demands. Atryssa? Arianna? No, another woman he knew and loved. A face ghosted brokenly through his mind, of a woman who looked like a Spider-kinden but wasn’t, not quite.

  Besides, they were dead, the others. The thought seemed obscurely wrong. As he stood here before those unbreached gates, how could they be dead? Time had respooled itself, surely. All the pieces were back in their box.

  He turned from the gates slowly, feeling the city about him blur slightly each time it moved, as though his image of it took a second to catch up. Myna rose up before him in its tiers, towards that top airfield where . . . Again those layers of memory interfered with each other.

  There was nobody else in sight. He had the city to himself.

  The Consensus building was in its proper place again – no sign of the hideous ziggurat the Wasps had replaced it with after they took the city the first time, nor the mess of scaffolding that was all the second Consensus hall had amounted to before the Empire had knocked it right back down again.

  Is this a second chance? he wondered. What happens if I just walk away? If I open those gates, what will I see? A Wasp army? Or just the view out towards the hills of the Antonine?

  Or nothing?

  Instead, he set off into the city slowly, uncertainly. Each step seemed to be over the edge of an abyss until it landed. The Myna of his memories shivered and danced, always on the point of fracturing.

  Here there was only silence. Somewhere else a woman was crying.

  Hokiak’s Exchange was still there, although he felt somehow that the geography had been twisted in order to lead him to it, the city’s layout subtly corrupted by his imperfect recall. The old sign swung gently in a wind Stenwold could not feel.

  If I go in, will I find the old man there? And then a sharp memory. But he’s left. Last time, he was gone. And the Consensus was in ruins and then the walls . . . the walls came down. For a moment the image threatened to overwhelm what he was seeing, buildings become vacant, decaying shells; the skies alive with fighting orthopters; incendiaries from the greatshotters unfolding their bright blooms, Sentinels on the streets. The ground beneath him shifted, and he knew that way dissolution lay.

  He clung to the peace of his past, that moment before Stenwold Maker the idealist scholar had become Stenwold Maker the driven statesman, chief of all the enemies of the Empire. Rather keep Myna like this, before the Wasps came. He was too tired and too old to go through all that again.

  He walked on through the still and soundless city, searching for a way out that had nothing to do with the city gates. He let his feet lead him where they would.

  A townhouse stood within sight of the gates. He remembered it well: far better than he remembered many more recent things. Where it all started. For a long moment, for a time that he could not measure, he stood before it while, just a hair’s breadth away, there was such panic and shouting, hands dragging at him, the clatter of surgeons’ tools.

  He went in.

  Seda stood up slowly. Tynisa watched her.

  The Empress of the Wasps stared about herself at the terrible enclosing dark, barely kept at bay by the lone fire that Tynisa needed in order to see. Below them, past the great huddled mass of non-combatants, the thin line of armed slaves surged back and forth, still desperately trying to keep the Worm from breaking through. The slaves yelled and screamed, cried out in shock and agony, shouted encouragement to one another. The Worm remained silent, incapable of words.

  ‘What have you done?’ Seda demanded.

  Beside Tynisa, Che did not answer. I don’t think I really believed that would work, said the expression on her face.

  The Empress was backing away from her, though there was precious little space – not far to go without climbing a sheer wall or approaching the Worm. ‘What have you done, you stupid child?’ she cried out. ‘My ritual—’

  ‘I could not allow you to complete it,’ Che told her simply. ‘I could not be a party to such magic. I hope that, in dragging you down here, I have saved at least some of the lives you sought to squander.’

  ‘Squander?’ Seda shouted at her. ‘I was saving the world from the Worm.’

  A fragile smile made its way on to Che’s face. ‘And I was saving the world from you.’

  For a moment Seda just stared at her, face twitching with shock and incomprehension, and then fury gripped her hard enough that her entire body jolted, and she thrust out a palm at Che to burn her from the face of the world.

  Tynisa lunged forwards – ready for this moment she had known must come – and her rapier’s point opened up the Empress’s hand, severing two fingers. The appalled Wasp fell back with a cry that owed more to outrage than to pain, and Tynisa drove in to finish the job.

  Her blade struck steel that deflected her thrust, and she dropped back immediately, making space and keeping her sword between her and the newcomer. For, of course, he was here.

  Tisamon had come to the aid of his mistress.

  In the poor light he was just an armoured shadow, his claw a crooked extension of his barbed arm. As Seda hunched backwards, cradling her ruined hand, the revenant of Tynisa’s father stepped closer to her, protectively.

  There was so little space to fight in, here at the top of the slope. They had discussed this chance. Che would be trying to get her mind into Tisamon, to prise him apart and disperse him, creation of magic that he was, but Seda would be opposing her, move for move. They were locked together, each the other’s equal in strength and skill, but while they struggled silently, magic to magic, their Weaponsmasters fought the real duel.

  Tynisa lunged in, angling her blade to take Tisamon under the arm, then circling the point over his arm as he brought it up to parry her, pushing next for his throat. He swayed back, just enough to be out of her reach, inviting her to overextend.

  She took a pace back, saw him follow her up, darting inside her reach and going for her throat, always his favourite strike, but a poor choice against a skilled opponent. She passed back and to her right, feinting at his eyes, at the cold, pale face within his helm. He was dead, long dead, but there was magic in her arm and in her sword. A killing blow from her might not destroy him, but it would be enough to bring him down. After that she needed only a moment to bring an end to Seda, and that would free her father forever.

  Abruptly he blurred into motion, striking high towards her head, then stepping around her parry, steel claw darting for her shoulder, her side, her injured hip. She felt no pain from her old wounds, the sword sustaining her as it leapt almost joyously to her defence, matching move to move and always the point directed to him, so that each parry was nothing more than the most economical shifting of her hand, only the angle changing, never the intent.

  She struck against his shoulder, then his side, scraping mail both times, and never opening herself up. She was inside his shorter reach most of the time, but her own blade was constantly holding the centre line, standing in the way of his strikes. He was relentless in attack, near perfect in defence but, try as he might, he could not hook his claw around her guard to get to her.

  She knew him. He was her father and she had fought him so many times, for practice and for blood. When they had first met they had nearly killed one another
. They had crossed blades in the sewers beneath Myna, in the Prowess Forum of Collegium, in the darkness of Argastos’s domain in the Netheryon. She retained that connection with him, that understanding of his style and his limits. Dead, now, he had lost his feel for her, locked inside his armour and cut off from the man he had been.

  He lunged for her hip again, trying to exploit an injury that did not slow her, and she twisted aside deftly, caught his blade when it flicked up for her face and bound it back behind her, punching him across the jaw with the edged knuckle-guard of her sword. She contacted only metal, but he staggered with the blow, and a moment later she had stepped around him, leaving her sword behind to catch his following strike, and Seda was before her, backing up frantically.

  Then a blazing white agony struck through Tynisa, surging out from her hip, and she fell to one knee with a screech of pain, sword dropping from her hand with the utter, unexpected shock. Tisamon would not hesitate, she knew. His blade would be descending even now. She tried to fling up a hand to ward off the blow, in a hopeless, futile gesture.

  It never came. She looked back wildly, trying to find him. He was gone. The deadening influence of the Worm had rolled over them, a momentary gain in ground by the attackers, and Tynisa’s magic had been snuffed out. As had Seda’s. As had Tisamon.

  Tynisa gave out a rasping cry and reclaimed her sword – no Weaponsmaster’s call to have it instantly to hand, but just fumbling it from the floor with shaking hands. Seda’s face was stricken – how long had she been relying on her magic, and now it was gone, as though she had never been special at all.

  Tynisa limped forwards, teeth gritted, willing herself to finish this.

  A moment later and the pain was gone, her sword flooding its strength back into her. And she turned instinctively, bringing her hilt up so that the diagonal of her blade intersected Tisamon’s darting strike. The revenant was back.