The Seal of the Worm (28 page)

For I do not wish to be remembered as . . .
but there were no words to express how they might remember her. Long after her death, her name would be a byword for atrocity unless she could make them understand how
right
, how
necessary
, this whole desperate endeavour was.

So she had called them all to her audience chambers, where she sat on her throne before them with Tisamon’s louring presence at her side. The great powers of the Empire had all been represented there. She had summoned General Brugan of the Rekef and General Lien of the Engineers. She had called in Marent of the army and the magnates of the Consortium. She had spoken the names of the luminaries of the Quartermasters and the Slave Corps, and of course they had come as swiftly as they could. Nobody wanted to disappoint the Empress.

There, in the very hub of her power, where she was strongest, she had confronted them. She had worked it all out beforehand, what she would say. She would tell them the truth. They were the Empire, her people, so the truth was something she owed them.

She would tell them it all: the secret histories and the hidden worlds and the terrible deeds done at the dawn of time. ‘There was a war,’ she would say, for at least they would understand that much. She would detail who that war had been against, not even deigning to mask her intentions behind the derogatory label of ‘the Worm’.

She would stand before them and tell them how all the powers of the old world had gathered together to defeat that ancient enemy, and how it had then been sealed away, locked beyond the world, until now.

Her own guilt in its eventual release she would not describe – they did not need to know – only that it was out now, and must be put back in its place.

After that, she had planned to explain precisely the draconian measures that were now their only chance. It had all made such perfect sense to her, regardless of the blood that would be on all their hands once it was done – blood enough to make even a general flinch. They would at least know that the ends justified those or any other means.

When they had come at her call, to throng her chambers with as great a gathering of Imperial power as the world had seen in many a year, she had stood, faced them and drawn breath. She had looked upon their faces, and touched the hard stones of their minds.

Her words had dried up in her throat.

What she had seen there was ignorance. It was not the sort of ignorance that could be educated out of them: they had been born with it, a birthright passed down through the blood of every Wasp save for her. Looking at all those respectful expectant faces, she had abruptly seen herself as they saw her – and as they would also see her once she had finished her earnest recounting.

They would nod, and bow, and be the abject servants of the throne, and then they would leave. And they would think that she was mad.

The truth of her words – she would speak nothing to them but truth – would curdle into fiction in their ears and in their minds. The grinding mills of their Aptitude would take it in and churn out nothing but scrap for them. And they would murmur to each other that their Empress was insane. And after that perhaps some of them would laugh at her. And, however hard she strove to root out such mirth, she would still hear their laughter. That kind of humour spread like a disease.

For the first time since taking the throne, Seda stared her Empire in the eye and was the one to look away first. She could bear many things, but she found that the mockery of her people was not one of them. Let them hate her; let them fear her; only let them not laugh.

And so, before that great host of the mighty, she had simply given out a handful of uncompromising instructions, baffling in their scope and intent, and let them wonder. Even then there was a miasma of doubt hanging about the room as they thought:
All this, just for that?
They did not understand her, and the distance between them was only growing wider. Even her own Red Watch could not follow her to the terrible places she was forced to walk.

Straessa the Antspider ducked back, a snapbow bolt striking stone dust near her face. By now she reckoned there were far fewer Wasps scattered amongst the buildings of this village than there were solid Collegiate company soldiers at her back, but the Wasps had been very inventive in picking their shooting positions.

And they said I shouldn’t be leading this sort of thing any more. And I didn’t listen, worse luck.

It was just a little satellite village on the rail line, but the Wasps had obviously picked it as a good place to inconvenience the expeditionary force; no doubt there were all sorts of explosive surprises planned, and so a punitive force had been sent in to root them out. Straessa had vaguely expected to find barricades and a shooting line, but the Wasps had spread out their force and were using the buildings themselves as their cover, making every step into the open a potential last one.

She had got her people within sight of the central square, but then three or four had speedily been picked off, and everything had ground to a halt. She had some fifty soldiers with her, against perhaps half that many Wasps, but so far the Collegiates had scored only a single kill.

She saw movement across the square, what might have been a shape hunched on a rooftop, and took careful aim at that low bulge disfiguring the flat-roofed silhouette, drawing a deep breath and trying to hold each muscle in perfect stillness save for those of one finger.

And loose.

And miss. She saw the figure jerk back, but in surprise rather than pain. A moment later the Wasp was dead, toppling from the roof, and she had a momentary glimpse of an arrow’s long shaft in the corpse.

Castre Gorenn, founder and sole member of the Commonweal Retaliatory Army, dropped from a clear sky onto the roof, another arrow already nocked to her bow, the string drawn back even as the Antspider watched. She got a single shaft off before rolling off from her perch, wings catching her and taking her to cover, the bolts of the Wasps darting past her like gnats.

That’s one more – no, two, I’ll bet. Three in all.
And, because she was watching for it, she saw a Wasp leaning out, trying to track the Dragonfly, incensed by the loss of his comrades. Straessa brought her snapbow up hastily, but someone else was quicker, and the enemy death toll went up to four in that moment.

And how many are there in total? A score? Score and a half?

She had no more targets that she could see, although that didn’t mean there weren’t any that could see her.
Time to make another dash for it.

A handful of her people had the same idea, all rushing forwards to their next piece of cover. Bolts struck dust at their heels, and one man fell, yelling, shot through the leg, dragged into cover by his comrades. Straessa sent a shot towards where she reckoned one of the enemy was positioned, then braced herself to make the same advance, knowing that some of her people were going to have to go into the buildings and flush the Wasps off the roofs for the rest to shoot at.
And this is just a little village. Collegium is going to be all this and a hundred times more.

And where the pits is everyone? Is the Empire enslaving whole villages, or did they flee, or . . .?

She ran, just breaking into the open without thought, and not stopping until she was in the shelter of a doorway, whilst some detached part of her mind calmly noted where the shooting was coming from. A second of pause, in cover, to check whether she
was
actually in cover, and then she had leant out round the side of the house, snapbow already tracking upwards. She saw the Wasp there, exactly where she had guessed at, but he was already ducking back, someone else’s shot keeping his head down. Then a bolt came at her from another angle entirely – her blind side – and she returned the shot instantly but somewhat randomly – no hope of hitting but it was something for the enemy to think about.

Then there was a shout from her first target, and she leant out again, wincing, seeing Gorenn there again, kicking the man backwards off the roof. The Wasp scout’s wings flared, catching him, but one of Straessa’s people took him down a moment later, and Gorenn took three swift steps – as though she was simply winding up to jump to the next roof – and then dropped straight down. Straessa found the man who had shot at her last and skipped a bolt near him as he tried to aim, and then the Sarnesh arrived.

She had not been expecting them. Indeed, the Sarnesh had been remarkably stand-offish about their Collegiate allies, with that particular silent sneer that only Ant-kinden could ever master. Here they were, though, and it looked to be at least a hundred of them, swarming across the village, through the streets, into every house.

The Wasps had plainly decided that enough was enough, and they were lifting off and trying to head south with all speed. Straessa saw several picked off promptly, but at least a dozen got clear away. They had done their job for as long as it remained possible, and they were no fools.

She stayed in cover for a while longer, enough to allow the Sarnesh to clear every building – no point taking the risk of one last Wasp sniper with an over-keen sense of duty. At last, though, once she saw the Ants assembling in the square, she came out and called for her own people.

‘Good work, all of you,’ she shouted to them. ‘Wounded being tended?’

‘Yes, Officer.’

‘Gorenn!’

The Dragonfly headed over, an arrow to her bow still, just in case.

‘You did well.’ Straessa expected the Dragonfly simply to shrug that off, but the woman nodded gravely. ‘What is it?’

Gorenn held up an arm, putting a finger through the bolt hole in her sleeve that had a little blood at the edge of it. ‘Good shots, that lot,’ she said soberly.

‘Get it seen to,’ Straessa advised her, and then put her hand on the Dragonfly’s shoulder as Gorenn turned around. She wanted to say,
Remember you’re not immortal
, but in the end she just squeezed reassuringly and let the woman go.

‘Who’s officer in charge?’ the Antspider called out to the Sarnesh. She was expecting to encounter that stiff-necked disdain, all the more so because she was a halfbreed – an Ant halfbreed at that – but one of them stepped forwards and nodded to her without any obvious antipathy. Of course he wore no badge of rank, and of course he looked just like the rest, more or less. She made sure she kept him in sight at all times, in case they should pull some sort of switch on her.

‘Where are the locals, Officer?’ he asked her.

‘No idea. Run away, probably.’

‘I think the Wasps killed them,’ he told her.

‘You think . . .’ A cold feeling rose up in her.
A village like this with, what, three hundred people, more?
‘Why do you say that?’

‘My soldiers see signs of violence in many of the buildings – broken furniture, bloodstains. Some of the homes themselves seem damaged. And there was . . . a body.’

‘
A
body? Just the one?’ But something in the way he said it was making her very uncomfortable.

‘Show me.’ And, as Gorenn was shamelessly eavesdropping and had not gone to get her scratch seen to at all, she signalled the Dragonfly to come with them.

The place had been a general store, the main room hung with tools and supplies, neither taken by the fleeing occupants nor looted by the Wasps. The Ant officer led her through to the back room, and there she saw it.

Gorenn was a little ahead of her, and she recoiled as soon as she entered, bowstring tugged back and arrow levelled at something low to the floor. Straessa heard the Ant say, ‘It’s dead. We killed it when we came in here, though it bit one of my soldiers . . . we don’t know yet if he’ll survive the poison.’

Eyes following the point of the arrow, Straessa could be forgiven for seeing the dead centipede first, almost bisected by a sword-blow and curled up in its last death throes. Then she saw the human body, or what was visible of it.

Her stomach lurched, and perhaps it was only her stubbornness in not wanting to show Collegium up before the Sarnesh that kept down the bile.

A Beetle-kinden woman lay dead there, but not by sword or sting. She was buried up to her armpits in the ground itself, the very stone flags of the floor rippled and twisted about her, as though it had become quicksand. As though something had been dragging its victim down into it. Her arms were frozen as if clawing at the ground, her face tilted towards the ceiling and locked in a twisted, soundless scream.

‘You think . . . the
Wasps . . .
?’ Straessa breathed in disbelief.

The Sarnesh officer shuffled uncomfortably. It was plain he very much wanted to be able to blame the Empire.

‘Not the Wasps,’ Gorenn whispered. ‘Not the Wasps.’ She was already backing out of the room, out of the building, arrow still held to the string, but her hands shaking far too much to have aimed it.

‘We withdrew when the Sarnesh arrived, sir,’ the scout reported. ‘We got the chance to lay some traps on the rails for their baggage train, though.’

‘Given current progress, I’d guess they’ll find and disarm them quickly enough,’ Tynan decided, because the Collegiate artificers had proved quite capable of that so far. ‘They’re camped within sight of the walls?’

‘Yes, sir, but out of effective artillery range.’

If we still had the big greatshotters . . .
But, like respectable air reinforcements, replacement artillery had not been forthcoming. Tynan guessed that, as he was already on the right side of the walls of his city, he was not considered a priority.

‘General, the village . . . it was cleared of its occupants when we arrived,’ the scout added. ‘Signs of a struggle, but we saw no bodies. Just like . . .’

Tynan held a hand up. ‘I know.’
I know, and I don’t want to think of it, because we’ve all seen too much of that – even inside the city, that once! – and still nobody has any answers for me.
‘And the Vekken?’ he enquired, because that was something military and comprehensible.