The Seal of the Worm (16 page)

‘Ah, little one, I am sorry.’ He took her hands, losing them entirely within his vast, gentle grip. ‘I have no gifts any more. A thousand waking years, what could there be?’

Che saw the woman twitch, eyes wide. The power that leapt between them was a mere spark with no tinder to goad into a blaze, but for Maure it must be water in the desert.

‘I am sorry,’ the big man repeated. Maure was weeping, though, holding her hands to her face to shelter that tiny mote of strength Orothellin had given her.

The big man turned his sorrowful gaze on the others. ‘You see, it is useless,’ he murmured. ‘I’m all used up. I can’t get out, and I can’t get you out. I can barely keep the Worm away for a few moments, perhaps not even that any more.’

‘Yet the Worms get out,’ Thalric objected. ‘Why not us?’

‘The Worm.’ Orothellin made a curious stress of the singular. ‘Can you walk the Worm’s path? The Worm has ways, but they are its own ways. My poor children,’ he said softly, ‘to find yourselves in this place. Can it be done? I cannot think it, but I can’t know, can I? The Seal has always held until now, no ray of hope in this place, no sun or moon. But perhaps you are right. Perhaps the boundaries between the New World and the Old are crumbling as we speak. Bring Messel back. Let me speak to him.’

Esmail, who had sat silent and unreadable throughout, went out to fetch the blind man, and Che leant closer to Orothellin, glancing sidelong at Thalric, whose expression was still one of fierce suspicion.

‘When the Seal . . . when it happened, why did you stay?’

Orothellin raised his eyebrows, as though he could not quite remember. ‘In all conscience, I stayed –
we
stayed, my countryfolk and I – because we were responsible for this place and the doom of all who were trapped here. Many of my people escaped at the start, while they still had strength. Of those who stayed, all the others have been found and killed. To my knowledge, I am the last.’

‘But Argastos made the Seal,’ Che argued.

‘His idea,’ the great man said, ‘but we all agreed, my people included. We are all responsible for this place. We – I – had hoped that I might help. I am dearly afraid that I have not been of much help to anyone, until now.’ For a moment he stared desolately into space, then: ‘I see how it may be done.’ It was as though he were divining, not by the ragged ends of his magic, but simply by thinking through each possibility, over and over. Messel had returned by then, to be greeted with: ‘You must be her guide.’

‘Not just
her
,’ Tynisa said instantly, but Orothellin held up a broad hand.

‘One alone might escape their notice. Messel, the Turning Spire, you know it? It overlooks . . .’

‘Their city,’ the blind man finished grimly. ‘If they catch us there, we will have nowhere to go.’

‘But she will
see
. Will you go, Messel?’

Che could read the blind man’s agitation, eyes or no, but at last he nodded. ‘Yes, Teacher.’

‘The rest of you . . . here is shelter, warmth, some food.’ A nameless expression crossed Orothellin’s haggard face. ‘And if you would keep watch, then perhaps I might sleep for even a day, an hour . . . it has been so long.’

After Che had gone off with Messel, Tynisa was left with the others, standing guard over the great bulk of Orothellin who lay sprawled at the back of the cave. The man had gone down like something punctured, sagging in collapsing folds until his massive frame was stretched out in sleep, his breathing slow but ragged.

Thalric wanted a fire but, without Messel or anyone from this otherworld to advise them, the others refused. Besides, what had they to burn? Nobody much fancied trekking out into the abyss to gather fungi and lichen, or going tapping the rocks in the hope of striking coal. So they huddled there in the cave and listened out for movement in the chasm of the world beyond, their only lights the distant false stars, and the darkness so absolute that Tynisa was scarcely better off than Thalric himself. Only Maure’s heritage gave her good enough eyes to pierce it.

Esmail spoke first, waiting until Orothellin seemed to have fully embraced his long-denied slumber.

‘You put great faith in her.’ He spoke softly so that any scuffling or displaced stone from beyond would still be heard.

‘Of course we do,’ Tynisa said defensively. ‘Che . . .’ And then she paused.

‘Now you’re trying to remember just when it was you started to put any faith in her at all,’ Thalric remarked drily.

‘No!’ Tynisa insisted, and then conceded, ‘Well . . . yes. I grew up with her, we were like sisters. She was always wanting to do things she was no good at. She wanted to be like me. And she was constantly taking things the wrong way, or offending people without meaning to, tripping over her own feet, coming up with big ideas that everyone else could see were foolishness. When exactly did we start listening to everything she said?’

‘Khanaphes,’ Thalric said firmly. ‘
His
people’s place. Orothellin’s, I mean. You weren’t there to see what I saw.’ His voice shook a little, and Tynisa caught herself thinking,
And when did you start to doubt yourself, Rekef man?

‘The thing is,’ Thalric went on, ‘she changed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was watching her at the very point as she . . . grew up.’ At Tynisa’s derisive snort he added defensively, ‘I don’t mean it like that. I mean like . . . larva to insect. She was growing, right then. I saw her become something new, and suddenly it wasn’t me rescuing her but me following her. By the time she found you in the Commonweal, she was almost there.’

‘Almost,’ Maure said quietly. When she had first met Che, the Beetle girl had been under attack by the Empress, trapped inside her own mind. ‘I don’t think she’s changed like that. I think she’s still making things up day to day, like the rest of us. It’s just that you’ve finally learned to listen to her.’

‘Typical Inapt nonsense,’ Thalric mocked. ‘All light and flowers.’

‘Oh, if you believe that, Thalric, then you know very little about the Inapt world indeed,’ the magician chided him, and Esmail made a curious noise that Tynisa realized was actually something close to a laugh.

‘Still,’ she put in, ‘we’re following her now, though.’

‘Only because she’s the only one who can
see
.’ Thalric’s humour sounded forced. It died on his lips, then he came out with, ‘I wish I’d stayed in the Empire.’

‘I wish you’d stayed in the Empire, too,’ Tynisa responded automatically. There was a pause that could have gone either way. ‘But you don’t actually mean that,’ she added.

‘Don’t tell me what I mean.’

‘Do you?’

‘No, no I don’t.’ A shuddering sigh. ‘But I do need her to get us out of here. I don’t care how she does it. I don’t need to understand. But I need it to happen. There’s only so much of this darkness a man can take.’

Messel led her, in fits and starts, across an increasingly uneven rockfield that seemed as if some great impact had broken it up into tilted slabs. The man was plainly reluctant even to be there, flinching at nothing, disappearing into crevices at sounds or vibrations that Che could not detect, sometimes staying still for minute after minute, while she crouched beside him. She held her patience in check, aware that he was born to a world of darkness that even her eyes could not penetrate, and that they were travelling in his domain.

She tried twice to ask questions, but both times he virtually thrust his hands in her face to stifle the sound.

At last they stopped, and she looked about them, seeing nothing that she would call a landmark. Had they arrived? She realized that they had not. Instead they were merely resting, the two of them tucked under an overhang after evicting a nest of pallid crickets, their antennae longer than their bodies, who went tapping their way off through the rocks in search of another hiding place.

Watching them go, elongated feelers exploring a world of touch, she recognized the origin of Messel’s kinden’s sightless Art.

She slept poorly, cold and cramped, and they travelled on soon after, with her guide becoming more and more erratic. She wanted to ask him what he owed the ‘Teacher’, that he should expose himself to such fear. What was it that Orothellin
taught
?

She remembered Messel at Cold Well, a firm believer in a world beyond, a world that he could never see. Orothellin taught
hope
. He taught the legend of an Old World he could barely remember.

And at last she spotted what must be the Turning Spire. It was a spear of rock stabbing hundreds of feet towards the unseen ceiling, formed with an irregular spiral twist to it. Seeing it, she understood what Messel had meant. If they were caught at its top, with the Worm scaling it after them, then where could they escape to?

She put her hand on his shoulder, feeling him tremble.

‘I see it,’ she told him. ‘From here I go alone. Wait here, and I’ll come back to you.’ She saw his thin lips move, and she hurried on with, ‘I know what Orothellin said, but this is what
I
say. You’ve done enough.’

‘Thank you,’ he said eventually. ‘The seat of the Worm is beyond the spire. I cannot know what your eyes may see from the top, but you will see it all.’

She wondered what he made of it when she took wing. Could his senses follow her through the air, or did she vanish for him, utterly gone beyond his ability to imagine?

The spire was high, and she was no strong flier, so she let her wings take her to a midpoint, where she clung to the twisted side of it and rested a little before casting herself further upwards. She guessed that few enough of the prisoner kinden here could fly – only the Moths, perhaps. The air must be a barren void empty of life.

During her second rest she saw that this assumption was not true. She saw enough to make her regret her boldness.

There was a moth, far bigger than she, thundering gamely through the air on whatever unguessable errand its small mind had fixed on. Clutching at the stone of the spire, she tracked its progress through the dark expanse.
Large enough to ride, surely
, she thought, and wondered that the locals had not enlisted these creatures already, or perhaps they had and she had just seen no sign of it . . .

Then the moth dropped from the air ten yards before catching itself, weaving madly back and forth so that she could see the desperation in its every movement.

When the great shadow came from above and scooped the insect up and away, she was caught rigid and horrified at even that brief glimpse. Something horrific, something unnatural, a great pale thing with silent wings that looked almost like webbed hands.

It was a long time before she dared ascend further and, when she did, she climbed more than she flew.
If this place were not terrible enough, there are monsters of the air as well
, and with that thought she looked up to find herself near the top of the spire, almost approaching the stars.

She had momentarily forgotten them, those ersatz constellations. The Art that let her see needed no light, and so she saw no light. Where the naked eye saw that glittering array, eerie and almost beautiful, her sight saw the truth: the gleaming threads, the hungry larvae, the drained moth corpses hanging distantly like dead leaves. There was no escape above.

And had they always been there in the Worm’s realm, or was this some twist of the Moth ritual, to make their prison even worse?
She had a sudden desperate need to be out of here, back to somewhere where her newfound magic was worth something, to some place less inimical to life.

Then she had reached the summit, a bare ten feet below the lowest of those sparkling, murderous threads, and she finally beheld the city of the Worm.

Twelve

Bells sounded across Chasme an hour before dawn, startling hundreds of pirates, mercenaries, tinkers and whores from their beds. Nobody had heard anything like it: the alarm system had been installed by the city’s new masters but never needed before now.

Totho found Drephos standing at his high balcony, staring out to sea. All was darkness out there, barely even a moon, but the master artificer had the eyes of a Moth-kinden. Back in Imperial service he had made a practice of walking right up to the walls of besieged fortresses on moonless nights, just to get a personal look at them.

‘What’s coming?’ Totho demanded of him.

‘A fleet. At least three score ships of various sizes, with airships as well, and . . .’ A hand was lifted for quiet, and they both heard the droning buzz of flying machines.

‘I’ve all our people armed and ready: machines to go into the air and the artillery crewed,’ Totho reported. ‘But . . .’

He did not need to say it. The Iron Glove had all the technological marvels of the age, and its artificers and labourers could all don a breastplate and hit a target with a snapbow, but they were few. There was no army on the Glove’s payroll.

‘I have sent some chests of coin into the city. Those who will stand and fight will be wealthy men, if they survive,’ Drephos said.

‘Tell me,’ Totho pressed him.

The Colonel-Auxillian’s head snapped round. It was plain he knew what Totho meant, but he said nothing.

‘Why won’t you give them the Bee-killer?’

‘You think
this
is about the Bee-killer? You think they have roused the entire Exalsee against us for that? Have you learned nothing from history, that you think everything must have such simple causes?’

‘Tell me,’ Totho insisted.

‘I have made a mistake,’ Drephos said softly. ‘Should I have given them all they wanted? Should I have whored our last secrets, spread our legs that final span? Or would they still have come calling with their rank badge and their invitations. Do you think that they would have been happy, in the end, if I remained outside their reach?’

‘Tell me!’ Totho repeated, and at that moment the first of the Iron Glove greatshotters loosed into the darkness, the range to their targets calculated. The thunder rolled out across the lake, but Totho knew the weapons were not meant to take on moving targets like boats.