The Seal of the Worm (20 page)

And cut.

For a frozen moment she felt the sun just beyond her fingertips, the world she knew, maddening in its proximity, just out of reach.

No, just
in
reach. She could do it. She could step through, force her bulky frame into the light and air, the Worm just a rancid memory behind her. But only her. In that moment of the possible, there was strength for just one to step through.

She had no time. She had them all there, linked in that circle, their minds as open to her as they could ever be. She was holding the knife. She was the judge and arbiter of what happened next. She would live with the consequences.

In that moment, that split instant, she weighed a great many things on the scales of her life, and she understood Orothellin, and the others, and herself most of all.

Then the knife was slipping, and she had a brief wave of despair and loss, at all the possible futures she was confining herself to, and she made her choice.

Part Two

Tremors

Fourteen

‘You obviously left most of your wits behind when you quit the College,’ decided Metyssa. ‘This is what we Spider-kinden would call a stupid idea.’

They were in the cellar of Poll Awlbreaker’s workshop, after dark, which meant that it was a question of either staying as his houseguests or breaking curfew in order to leave. Of course, Metyssa was enforcedly his houseguest anyway, but right now her hidden retreat was getting crowded.

Sartaea te Mosca, at whom the jibe was aimed, drew herself up with dignity. ‘I have not “quit the College”. I am on extended leave from teaching until they stop having Moth-kinden leering over my shoulder. Which temporary cessation of my duties allows me to serve the city in other ways.’

‘Such as giving yourself up to the Wasps, apparently,’ Poll Awlbreaker grumbled.

‘I am not giving myself up. I am merely presenting a petition to the general. I am, after all, a law-abiding citizen with no connection to any form of wrongdoing – or that is how the Wasps see me.’

Poll sighed heavily. ‘Firstly, when has that stopped them? Secondly, you don’t know what they know. They could have you on a list even now.’

‘If they wanted me, they could have taken me. Raullo, you see why this is necessary, surely?’

The artist sat sketching in the corner of Metyssa’s cellar, although odds on it was one of his new-style works, the ones that left te Mosca with a sick feeling in her stomach but that she couldn’t look away from. His eyes stared out of his pouchy, dark face like prisoners. ‘I agree with you: it needs to be done. I agree with them: do it now and you’ll get vanished like the rest. According to
her
–’ and his finger jabbed at the other Fly-kinden in the room – ‘things are about to shift. So just wait.’

Te Mosca glanced at Sperra, the bringer of word from Sarn. ‘If what we’re told is true, then this must be done
now
. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid that the moment the Empire believes that there are forces actively mobilizing against it, then I might as well tear this scroll of mine up and walk away. Tomorrow isn’t too soon. I only hope it isn’t too late.’ She glanced from face to face, seeing nothing but grim, miserable expressions.

‘And, besides, who knows how things will go? Perhaps the general and I will get on splendidly,’ she added brightly.

‘Who’s my contact, then?’ Sperra put in flatly. It was a moment before anyone understood her meaning, and she had to repeat herself before Poll forced an answer.

‘Sartaea will still be your contact when you’re here next, don’t you worry.’

‘No, it’s a fair question.’ Te Mosca held up a small hand. ‘Jen Reader has volunteered for it, and you have everyone else here to rely on as well. We’re not lacking in patriots here in Collegium, although we might be deficient in soldiers – at least at first. The student rebellion has stuck in people’s minds. It will take a lot to make people risk taking up arms.’

‘They’ll see,’ promised Sperra.

Sartaea te Mosca managed a smile. ‘Probably. And I’d argue that a certain caution is probably no bad thing when undertaking an armed uprising. Have you everything you need?’

‘I’m stuck here for another day before Taki picks me up,’ Sperra explained, not for the first time, from the sound if it. ‘Will you have more letters for me to take to Sarn, Sartaea?’

‘I’m sure that someone will, anyway,’ te Mosca replied, managing a smile.

When the Fly-kinden woman was brought before him, General Tynan was not entirely sure what he was looking at. She was hauled in under armed guard, so that at first he assumed that she was a dangerous insurgent or Sarnesh agent. After something of an awkward silence, and then some murmured questions, with the woman standing between two soldiers throughout, it was plain that nobody had any idea what it was she was supposed to have done. Certainly, if she was something as simple as a criminal or a curfew-breaker, she would never have got as far as the general himself. He had an entire apparatus devoted to keeping Imperial law in Collegium. The whole point of the Empire’s order was that things worked on their own, without his constant intervention.

He nearly decided to lump her in with that particular mob and have her taken away. In the end it was her demeanour that convinced him otherwise. Through all this wrangling, with the tangible threat of the Imperial army on all sides, she had shown no fear. Instead, her expression had been one of polite attention. It was Tynan’s curiosity that got the better of him.

‘Does nobody know who she is, then?’ he demanded of his people. ‘Is she even a citizen?’

By that time the machinery of government had finally got its wheels engaged, and one of the quartermaster’s clerks who were running so much of his administration turned up with a stern-looking Moth-kinden and some information.

Tynan eyed the Moth without love. This was one of the Tharen ambassadors who had descended on him, unasked and unexpected, shortly after the conquest. Tharn was nominally an Imperial ally, and this collection of arch, disdainful men and women were here, somehow, with the Empress’s blessing. They spent most of their time over at Vrakir’s headquarters, and thus Tynan saw them as his enemies. While he and the Red Watch major were maintaining their uneasy truce, however, there was no reason that this grey man should not turn up in Tynan’s commandeered townhouse.

‘Well, then?’ he demanded.

‘This individual is known as Sartaea te Mosca, General,’ the Moth declared. ‘She was formerly a teacher of magic at the Great College, but abandoned her post under suspicious circumstances shortly after I and my colleagues arrived. Our belief is that she has been responsible for spreading sedition and anti-Imperial sentiment.’

‘A teacher of magic,’ Tynan echoed with some disgust.

‘I do not imagine she had much to teach,’ the Moth sniped, obviously looking to drag a reaction out of this te Mosca, but the Fly woman’s composure was equal to the challenge.

‘Lieutenant, what does Intelligence say?’ Tynan prompted.

‘She’s on the watch list, sir,’ the quartermaster’s man reported, meaning that the woman was not sufficiently under suspicion to have been arrested, but she was the next best thing. Whether the Moths’ antipathy alone had done for her, or whether others had noticed her being in places she should not, Tynan did not know, but the information told him that there was a formal duty here beyond his personal whims.

‘And you, Sartaea te Mosca, why do you say you’re here?’

She mustered a fragile little smile. ‘I have been deputized by our citizens to bring a petition to you, General.’

‘Have you, indeed?’ And that statement marked her out as some sort of ringleader, and he could lock her up for less than that. ‘And what is it that your citizens are so unhappy about? I’ve reopened their precious College, have I not? My men keep order on the streets. I even have my chief engineer overseeing the rebuilding.’

Te Mosca cleared her throat. ‘Ah, well, there are just a few matters that people are curious about.’ The Moth was stalking about behind her, and she was doing her best to ignore him pointedly. ‘Such as, for example, the Spider-kinden.’

‘What about the Spider-kinden?’ Tynan asked flatly.

‘How long will an entire kinden be outlawed from our city, under threat of arrest?’ Abruptly there was a thread of bravery in her tone. The Moth stopped pacing, staring down at her.

‘We are at war,’ Tynan informed her dismissively. ‘Next matter.’

‘I beg your indulgence, General, but you are at war with a state, not a kinden. Collegium is –
was
– home to hundreds of Spiders who had fled their homeland, or who simply preferred to live here amongst the Beetles. So I . . . we were wondering . . .’

Tynan wondered if she knew his own past, how he had been close to the leader of the Spider-kinden before that inexplicable order had come through to turn on them. It was common knowledge amongst his men, but perhaps not in the city as a whole, and he could not imagine that this woman wanted to provoke him.

‘Send for Major Vrakir,’ he ordered, shocking the entire room into stillness.

‘Sir . . .?’ one of his aides queried nervously.

‘I think hers is a valid question, so we’ll go to the source.’
And it’s been too long since I hauled him from his pit to remind him of the chain of command.
‘Tell him he’s needed.’ Everyone knew the Red Watch was answerable to nobody, but ever since Vrakir had brought the order concerning the Spider-kinden, Tynan had been fighting the man at every opportunity. It was as if he had found the resolve to refuse the man, just one order too late.

‘What else?’ he demanded of the Fly woman, once the aide had set off.

‘I have a list, General,’ she said, a little more softly.

‘A list of demands?’

‘A list of names, I’m afraid.’

Something in her tone warned him he was not going to like this – not that he had liked much of it so far. He was already making the relevant adjustments for a fight with Vrakir. The Fly had given him that opportunity, and now he just wanted rid of her. ‘You understand that you’re going from here to the cells to await questioning, yes? There’s too much stink attached to your name to avoid it.’

‘It did seem likely, yes.’ Was that a faint tremor in her voice? He thought it was. Her veneer of calm was cracking, then, but she was still putting on a brave face.
I’ve had soldiers who broke sooner. She’s doing well for a Fly-kinden.

‘Well, then, what’s this list? Perhaps it can be looked at while you’re otherwise engaged.’

‘I do hope so.’ This time there was a definite trembling. ‘Only . . . I am aware from what I’ve heard about Myna and other places that your administration here has not been heavy-handed, by Imperial standards . . .’

He nodded bluntly, accepting the praise to exactly the extent that it was intended.

‘Only, by Collegiate standards, it has still been something of a novel experience for us, and I was wondering . . . we were wondering . . .’

‘What’s your list, woman?’ Tynan demanded of her.

‘Everyone who has been arrested, taken away without charge or who has disappeared after being in the company of your soldiers, and who has not thereafter been seen, General,’ te Mosca declared. ‘All those sons and daughters of Collegium, Spiders and other kinden, whose fate remains unknown, and who have families and friends who desperately wish to know the truth.’

He found that, in the silence she left, he had stood up, staring down at this woman who
dared
to question Imperial practice. She met his eyes, this tiny thing that he could have struck down with a sting or broken with his bare hands.

‘Do you think that they will like the truth when they hear it?’ he demanded of her.

‘I suspect not,’ she replied quietly, ‘but they wish to know, nonetheless, because not knowing is worse.’

He closed his eyes, wavering on the point of violence, of some punitive order that would serve no purpose but to make him feel as though he was again in control of the situation. At the back of his mind:
Is this really what I have become?
He had been meant as an army commander, not to become mired in this civic morass.

‘Take her away,’ he snapped, and then, as they were marching the woman out, ‘Bring me the list.’

Captain Bergild of the Imperial Air Corps knew that most of the Second Army were getting restless. They were a battlefield force pressed to act as a city garrison, and she was frankly amazed that General Tynan was holding them in check as much as he did. She remembered, from her childhood during the Twelve-year War, just how soldiers could be.

Her own pilots were suffering in the same way. They were warriors of the air, and so far no aerial threat had come to attack the Second or its new possession of Collegium. The Sarnesh had yet to venture south, and who else was there?

Instead, Bergild and her people were flying endless long-range scouting missions, like this one, looking for an enemy that wasn’t there. Technically the orders were Tynan’s, but she had spotted Vrakir, the Red Watch man, about the airfields, insisting that they scout further and further, that a foe was out there, if they could only find it.

The man was going mad, by her reckoning, and, as he was in command whenever Tynan’s back was turned, that was a very bad thing indeed.

Then there was Oski, the major of engineers who had formerly been the one non-Air Corps soldier she could really talk to, but he was off doing some secretive business that he was evidently very keen for her not to know about. This left her and her pilots rattling about in their Farsphex orthopters, ranging out over ludicrous spans of ground, looking for . . . anything, really. Anything at all.

If there had been more of them, then perhaps they might have formed an effective scouting force, but the Imperial manufactories were still replacing the catastrophic losses that the Collegiates had inflicted on the Air Corps. And now, of course, there were multiple fronts to supply: both the fighting down the Silk Road and the force that was blocking the Sarnesh path eastwards. The Second Army had to make do.