The Seal of the Worm
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Principal Cast
The Empire
Seda
, Empress of the Wasps
General Tynan
, Second Army
General Marent
, Third Army
General Brugan
, Rekef
General Lien
, Engineers
Colonel Varsec
, Engineers
Colonel Brakker
, First Army
Colonel Nessen
, governor of Helleron
Honory Bellowern
, Beetle diplomat
Major Vrakir
, Red Watch
Major Vorken
, Slave Corps
Major Oski
, Fly-kinden, Engineers
Captain-Auxillian Ernain
, Bee-kinden, Engineers
Merva
, wife of Edvic, governor of Solarno
Lieutenant-Auxillian Gannic
, Engineers
Tisamon
, Seda’s undead guardian
Collegiates and their Allies
Stenwold Maker
, Beetle-kinden War Master, missing, believed dead
Straessa ‘the Antspider’
, officer, Coldstone Company
Eujen Leadswell
, Beetle-kinden officer, Students’ Company
Castre Gorenn
, Dragonfly-kinden, Coldstone Company
Laszlo
, Fly-kinden agent, former pirate
Kymene
, Beetle-kinden commander, free Mynans
Tactician Milus
, Sarnesh Ant-kinden
Sperra
, Fly-kinden, agent from Princep Salma
Balkus
, commander, renegade Sarnesh from Princep Salma
Sartaea te Mosca
, Fly-kinden magician and lecturer
Poll Awlbreaker
, Beetle-kinden artificer
Metyssa
, Spider-kinden writer
Raullo Mummers
, Beetle-kinden artist
Lissart
, Firefly-kinden agent, prisoner of Milus
Aagen
, renegade Wasp-kinden, now of Princep Salma
Others
Cheerwell Maker, ‘Che’
, niece of Stenwold, magician
Thalric
, Wasp-kinden renegade, her lover
Tynisa
, halfbreed Weaponsmaster, Tisamon’s daughter
Maure
, halfbreed magician
Esmail
, Assassin Bug spy
Dariandrephos, ‘Drephos’
, halfbreed master artificer and leader of the Iron Glove
Totho
, his second, halfbreed artificer
Messel
Orothelin
The Hermit
Contents
Part Three: On the Edge of the Abyss
Part One
Buried Alive
One
It was cold down in the bowels of the earth. The darkness was not the same hindrance to her that it was to her companions, but the cold she could do nothing about.
Worse than that was the
absence
. Born Apt in Collegium, she had no precise words for it. Perhaps the Moths might have done before her ancestors had thrown them out. To a magician, every place had its own feel. There was some additional sense thus engaged that the Apt could never guess at, and that she herself was still learning how to use. Travelling from her home city to the halls beneath Khanaphes, from the great wild expanses of the Commonweal to the tortuous knots of the Mantis forest, all these places had touched her and informed her, even if she had not realized it. There had been a constant voice, and now it was gone – at best. At worst, when she strained that unnamed sense of hers to the utmost, she could hear something else.
A chanting, a susurration from the stone depths. The voice of the enemy. The voice of the Worm.
They were all in the realm of the Worm. In her rage, the Empress Seda had broken the Seal holding that common enemy in its prison domain for a thousand years. Che and her companions had been cast into that dark closed-off place.
It was still closed off, like a woodlouse clasped about itself, but uncurling now, slowly but surely. There would be cracks showing already, weak points that the Worm could pierce to cross, experimentally, into the wide world beyond. Che had thought to do the same, at first. So simple, to exercise her powers as a great magician in this magic-forged place, where surely power was concentrated and free for the taking. She would find out where the fractures were, and she would leave the Worm’s realm before its denizens ever realized new guests had arrived.
But that sense, that ability of hers, had fled. She could not breathe water. She could not walk through rock. The medium of this place was inimical to her powers. She, crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes as inheritrix of the ancient ways, had been cut off from her throne and from her inheritance. She was denied the Aptitude that was her birthright, and also the magic that was its replacement. Without those crutches, she fell.
Only one lifeline remained to her. She yet held on to one faint and tenuous connection back to the world, as if fate had considered her exile not cruel enough. Seda was still her sister, in some perverse, bitter way. They had been crowned at the same time. They were linked. Sometimes, unbidden, Che sensed her.
She knew, from this bond, that the doom that had befallen her and her fellows had not touched Seda. Seda was free, still out in the world.
Seda had won.
Faced with that realization, something had broken inside Che. She was aware that she had been down here now – if
down
was even a meaningful word for where she was – for some time, for days, tendays, months even. She was moved, goaded to her feet and forced onwards from place to place. The hands that shoved at her, that grabbed at her and pulled and would not let her just sit down and give up – they belonged to her friends. She remembered them, distantly. She had brought them to this fate, led them here to their banishment. She would not have blamed them if they abandoned her in the dark, just left her behind. Possibly she would have preferred that, but they would not let her be.
They brought her food. It was horrible, uncooked and slimy, breaking into brittle, dry pieces in her mouth. They would not leave her alone until she had eaten. They brought her metallic-tasting water.
Sometimes she was aware that they were hunted, and then they hustled her along from hiding place to hiding place. In the depths that she inhabited – her own personal prison – she could not raise sufficient curiosity to care who pursued them, or why.
Let it be the Worm
, was all she thought.
Let it make an end of me.
For surely that hideous, all-consuming monster of legend was more than equal to the task.
In those moments she listened too hard and heard that chanting, ranting echo of it, so distant and yet so potent and hateful, she knew it could do more than make an end of her: it could make an end of all the world. The Worm was a thing apart from Apt and Inapt, from mere kinden and kin. The Worm would devour the world, and Seda had given it the chance to do so.
After unknown ages, there was fire.
Che had lived with the cold and the dark – within and without – for so long that at first she did not understand what it was. The feel of warmth on her skin, the light – so brazen, such a lure to all the dangers of this place – it was like a distant beacon to her, calling her back from the lonely places where she had become lost.
She, who could see in darkness, only realized how blind she had become to her surroundings as she began to return to them.
How long. . .?
But she could not know. Some part of her, some internal regulator that marked the hours and days, had ceased to function once she was cast down here. The land of the Worm had no sunrise, no phases of the moon. Timeless, undying, it had lain here for an age beneath an unchanging stone sky. It was beyond the sun, therefore beyond time.
Her eyes were already open, but she opened them anyway, beginning to see rather than just stare vacantly.
She remembered her companions, her friends, fellow inmates of this final asylum. What could be worse than being a lone prisoner of this dungeon? Being responsible for the imprisonment of others. She found their faces as the fire lit them, one by one.
There was Tynisa, her sister in upbringing if not in blood, Weaponsmaster, Tisamon’s daughter. Tynisa, whose revenant father was now a slave to the Empress, bound by chains of magic. The girl had always run ahead through all the years of their shared childhood, with poor clumsy Che stumbling in her wake.
So how did it come to this, that she has followed me even to this place?
Che could feel all the sharp points of the Mantis breaking through Tynisa’s Spider-kinden facade, and all it told her was how fragile that combination really was.
Thalric next, her enemy, her captor, her victim. Thalric, whom she had wrested from the Empress, transformed from Imperial consort to renegade lover of one Cheerwell Maker, dysfunctional Beetle magician. How could he cope in the realm that she had come to? His limited ability to accept or understand magic must have broken him, surely . . .? And yet here he was, still sitting beside her. The hand that cradled hers was his. She knew its callouses and its lines, the touch that warmed her, the heat in it that could kill.
Further from her: Maure, the halfbreed magician from the Commonweal, no doubt fiercely wishing she had stayed there. She lacked Che’s power but far surpassed her in understanding. Seeing her, Che found hope: surely Maure could help her. The woman was a survivor. She must have some way of wriggling free from the bonds of this place.