The Seal of the Worm (18 page)

Half of them would not open, in the end, their metal warped and softened by that sudden flare of heat. What the rest of them revealed was a blasted wasteland, the familiar outlines of the stores and forges and foundries coated black, and everywhere the flash-charred bodies of the dead and dying. The sound was the worst part: that weak chorus of agony and mortality from those still alive, set amidst the many voices of the inanimate – the burning wood, the metal that creaked and cracked as it cooled, the secondary retorts as flammables burst their casks and drums.

‘It would have been the perfect time,’ Totho heard himself saying, ‘to use the Bee-killer, after all.’

Drephos studied him. ‘You’re right, although I had not thought to hear you say it. I . . . One of the reasons I had kept that weapon from the Empire was that I thought . . .’

‘You thought that
I
. . .?’

The Colonel-Auxillian’s face was blank, as the mind behind it – whatever its perfect grasp of artifice – wrestled with its less than perfect understanding of people. ‘That you would not approve.’

It was a strange moment, to find that there was something in the man beyond that pursuit of efficiency, and that he valued his junior partner enough to tiptoe around his imagined sensibilities. Totho sagged against one wall, feeling as though he should weep, if only the fires without had not scorched away his ability to do so.

One of the other artificers suddenly lifted his head. ‘I hear fighting still.’

Even as he announced it, Totho picked out the sounds himself, wondering how some pocket of the enemy could possibly have survived the firestorm outside.

No, not outside. Fighting within the workshops.

He was bringing his snapbow up, hearing the harsh hammer of a nailbow’s firepowder charges detonating. The first two Wasps pushing through the doorway took the balance of his magazine, but then it was empty and he was fumbling for a new one as five or six more spilt into the room. Their nailbows were crude and inaccurate compared to the Glove’s weaponry, but they were good enough at close quarters, and most of the artificers there were not even armed.

A trail of bolts tore across Totho’s chest, knocking him from his feet and almost propelling him out through one of the unshuttered windows. The impact dented his mail but failed to pierce it, the new magazine spinning from his hands across the floor.

He was scrabbling at his belt for a grenade, actually had his hand on it ready to prime it and tear it free, when Gannic came through the door with a snapbow directed straight at Drephos’s head. The sly merchant who had visited them before was now almost unrecognizable. The man wore the mail of the Airborne, his scalp stiff with dried blood: a desperate man wild with the need to fulfil his orders.

‘And now you stand down,’ he spat, taking one careful step after another. Others of his men had their nailbows aimed at Totho where he sat or at the surviving artificers. They all looked ragged and battered: the Iron Glove staff had plainly given them a hard time, even when taken by surprise.

‘You forced entry before we closed the shutters,’ Drephos observed. ‘Or . . . no, before the fighting started.’

Gannic nodded. ‘And chose our moment to make our move, too. We had to wait for your apprentice to come back from playing soldier. My orders are to take the pair of you back to the Engineers.’

‘For execution?’

‘For conscription,’ Gannic returned. ‘Your head’s made of gold dust, Colonel. And don’t think I was joking about anything I said before. You could make the next best thing to general if you play along. The whole cost of our taking Chasme could be written off.’

‘“Taking” Chasme?’ Drephos enquired carefully, his eyes on the slight weaving of the snapbow barrel as he slid a half-step closer to the other man.

‘I’m amazed you held out as long as you did. Goes to show that governors make bad battlefield commanders nine times out of ten, and this is no exception . . .’ Gannic’s words trailed off into a querulous sound as his eyes registered the opened windows and what lay beyond: the charred wreck of the Iron Glove compound, the fires still blazing across much of Chasme, the wrecked boats at the wharves. Less the city of Chasme now than its broken corpse. ‘What did you do?’ the Imperial whispered, eyes wide.

‘We defended ourselves with whatever tools were available,’ Drephos declared. He had moved a little closer now, and Totho saw some of the Wasps notice, but Gannic himself was still staring at the utter desolation outside.

‘What did you do?’ he repeated. ‘The attack . . .’

‘Has been repelled,’ Drephos said calmly. ‘Totho thought we should have used the Bee-killer instead. On reflection, I believe it would have been more elegant.’

At last Gannic’s eyes returned to him. ‘You had it all along, then.’

‘Oh, yes.’ For a moment Drephos was looking at Totho, an understanding passing between them. ‘I imagine you’ll want to take it to show your masters.’

‘At the very least,’ Gannic told him hoarsely. ‘We’re going to need to show them as much as possible, to explain this mess.’

‘Our cellar here has a strongbox that you will find easily enough. The formula is within, along with various other plans. At least they will see some use, I suppose.’

‘That’s more like it—’ Gannic began, and Drephos closed the final distance between them and got his metal hand about the snapbow barrel.

Had Gannic simply pulled the trigger, it would have ended there, but he tried to tug the weapon free, and Drephos’s mechanical grip crushed the steel tube into a clenched mess.

Totho twisted the release catch of a grenade, feeling the priming cord whip free as he tore it from his belt. He counted two seconds – during which the first nailbowman was already shooting – and cast the little faceted shape past the Wasps towards the far wall.

The blast seared through the room, knocking most of the Wasps off their feet, with the edged shrapnel cutting the nearest two apart, and then Totho was lunging for Drephos and Gannic.

The two of them had been blown over by the blast. The Imperial had a sword out, and Drephos had lunged for his throat but caught only the collar of his armour. Gannic slammed the sword down with a yell of rage, and Totho saw the master artificer’s delicate elbow joint shatter.

A spray of nailbow bolts pounded him as he cast himself across the floor, reaching for Gannic. The sword came down again, striking the same point with mechanical precision and smashing the joint entirely, so that Drephos rolled free and staggered to his feet.

‘The window!’ Totho yelled, because, although Drephos was a poor flier, at least his Art gave him wings.

Gannic was in his way, but Totho backhanded the man and was already reaching for another magazine, trying to locate the Wasps who were still shooting. Then Drephos’s remaining hand had hooked Totho’s arm, hauling him away, the enemy shot impacting around them, striking stone chips from the walls and scoring lines in Totho’s armour.

They tumbled backwards out of the window, and fell, Drephos’s wings fluttering and flickering as he tried to slow their joint descent. Even so, they hit the ground hard, Totho ending up on his knees with the Colonel-Auxillian laid out beside him.

Realizing they would be within sight of the window still, Totho snapped, ‘Come on,’ hauling on the other man’s good arm. This distance was a long shot for a nailbow’s accuracy but, after what the Glove had done here today, the Wasps were probably due some luck.

Drephos lurched to his feet, then sagged against Totho, hissing. Dark stains were spreading across his robe. After two steps he collapsed again, shaking, hunched about his wounds.

‘Come on!’ Totho was no surgeon, and Drephos was such a piecemeal thing anyway that he would not have known where to start. ‘Come on, we’ve beaten them. We’ve escaped.’

‘Nailbows,’ Drephos spat – and he spat blood too, his lips shiny with it. ‘Totho . . .’

‘I’ll get them,’ his apprentice promised fiercely. ‘I’ll kill Gannic. I’ll kill them all, the bastards. I’ll kill the Empress. I don’t care if it kills me, but I’ll tear the pissing Empire apart.’

‘Totho.’ Drephos’s hand scrabbled at his breastplate. ‘No, Totho. Live.’

Perhaps there was more: live and work, live and build, a whole plan of artifice rooted in Totho’s continued survival. If so, it would be lost to posterity. The focus of Drephos’s pale eyes slid off Totho’s face and into infinity, and he was gone.

Back in Solarno, Colonel Varsec would not even look at Gannic while the lieutenant gave his report.

Chasme destroyed, the Colonel-Auxillian dead. Was that a victory for the Engineers? Did the removal of the competition make up for the loss to the world of artifice? What reception would Varsec meet when he returned to Capitas with that news?

If not for one thing, Gannic reckoned that Varsec would simply have not gone home, instead thrown in his lot with the Spiders, fled across the Exalsee, or who knew what? Except that, in the charred fortress of the Iron Glove, Gannic had found the strongbox, as promised. Until he had located it, he had not truly believed it existed. Inside had been a scroll bearing a surprisingly simple chemical formula. Apparently Drephos had, this one time, not trusted to his ability to invent a thing at need.

The Bee-killer.
With luck, it would buy Varsec a safe return home, just enough of a success to make up for the whole wasteful venture: the last secret of the Iron Glove.

Thirteen

It was vast, what she saw. If the chasm of Cold Well had been like a wound in the earth, this was a body in advanced decay, the substrate not mined out but genuinely eaten away as though the mere presence of the Worm was corrosive and even the stone could not bear its touch.

A slope-sided pit hundreds of yards across, declining shallowly but inexorably towards a busy centre – that was what she saw. She thought of ant lions more than centipedes, on viewing it, but the scale was immense, city-sized. And it was a city of sorts. There were buildings there – crude slab-sided constructions that might have been barracks or civic offices or warehouses, or nothing of the sort. They were not packed together like the homes of Collegium or Helleron, though, and much of the Worm’s city was open ground that was riddled with pits and openings, so that she knew there must be far more than she was seeing, beneath the surface.

There was much movement but no sign of Apt industry, and of course no feel of magic came to her. Seeing all that scurrying activity without either artifice or ritual brought back the gnawing sense of wrongness she had known when looking upon the soldiers of the Worm themselves. What it did
not
remind her of was an ant’s nest, nor yet an Ant city-state. The linking that the Ant-kinden shared allowed them to act together, in concert – to build great things, to have their ordered and tidy society – but they were individuals beneath it. Even watching the insects that the Ants drew their art from, she could have discerned individual effort and initiative, each ant contributing to the nest’s well-being through its best judgment. Not so here, though. Ants would have wept to witness such coordination, but not for joy. The entire city moved like the coils of a single living thing, and so much of it about a business that she could not understand; it looked as though simple coursing, in their lines, from place to place was an end in itself for whatever mind directed the Worm.

She watched a caravan approach, no doubt bearing produce from some place like Cold Well: food, metals, crafted goods, plus the terrible tax that the Worm exacted on its slaves. Huge millipedes, burdened along every segment, hauled the goods, and she saw big men and women, large as Mole Crickets but of a different kinden, guiding the beasts’ progress. Then they were unloading outside the city, strings of the Worm’s people issuing out to take the load and carry it back in. She heard a shrill and distant squalling and saw how some of that load consisted of cages, and she knew that the same tax had been levied on some other luckless place.

And is that the meat the Worm feeds on?
It could not be, though, for there were thousands of the Worm thronging the city below. They would have consumed all the future generations of their slaves long ago if it had been mere sustenance they sought.
Then what . . .?

Like so much else about the Worm, Che felt that she would far rather be in a position where she would never find out than have to remain in this cursed place. Even as that thought came, she remembered Orothellin, who had stayed: the huge weary man a volunteer in this prison, because to do otherwise would be to leave all the Worm’s victims to an unwitnessed fate.

They are not my responsibility. Who can tell me I should bleed for them?
A desperate plea, because she wanted out, she so very dearly wanted
out
.

And that was why she was here. The Seal was broken, and the Worm itself was finding a way out, and so she should look . . .

But her eyes were now following those cages. There were pits, she could see – a ring of round apertures in the rock. Even at this distance, she could just make out the course the Worm took. She could follow the sound of the screams, the sound of the inconsolable forever parted from home and family, and yet too young to comprehend truly. She could watch as they were consigned to whatever fate the Worm reserved for innocence.

They were emptying the cages into those pits. She felt ill with her understanding, thankful only that it was not complete.
What dwells in the pits? What horror is the Worm hiding there? I hope I never know.

She dragged her eyes away, let them follow the twists and turns of the Worm until she found the midpoint, and there she felt it.

A pulse, a flicker, a touch of magic.

Her heart leapt
: There is a way!
But she was still watching, seeing that vortex of bodies in the lowest point of the city – too far away to distinguish individuals, just the great spiral that all those bodies made up. It seemed they were dancing with a regular ordered step, dancing ever inwards, though, not one of them returning out: a spiral that consumed itself. And she understood.