The Seal of the Worm (32 page)

She had expected to witness the same scene, but the children here were older, larger. They struggled and fought with one another, and it was as beasts fought – in sudden confrontations just as suddenly abandoned. Again, some were dead, and there was a curious look to the rest that sent her hurrying on to the next pit, revelation curdling in her gut. They made no sounds here.
Because they have learned it will do them no good
, was the inescapable conclusion.

‘Orothellin . . .’ The Hermit’s voice came to her. ‘He says that my people ever sought to make the world in our image. That was what the others could not forgive – what our efforts showed them, of how the world truly worked. Our intolerable truths.’

And the bodies in the third pit were older still, looking not far from grown, pallid and lanky and all too similar to one another, save that here or there she could see some mark of ancestry: darker skin, a larger frame, a Moth’s blind eyes. But they were the Worm, all of them, or would be soon. They were the foot-soldiers of the Worm.

‘What am I looking at?’ she whispered. ‘What does Orothellin say this is?’

‘That we found a way, long before the war, to break the bonds of kinden. That we took the children of our enemies, and we made them into our own. So that when others fought the armies of the Worm, they knew that they would shed their own blood, make themselves kinslayers, every blow they struck. We called them the New Soldiers, Orothellin says. In those days it was just to supplement our numbers, to swell our armies. He says.’

She wanted him to stop then, but she had called the Worm from dark recesses of his mind and it would come forth, segment after segment, whether she wanted it to or not.

‘But now we are the Worm, in truth. Now my people have become a mindless appendix to our god. Only we Scarred Ones can even sire or bear children, the rest are just . . . segments. Segments is all they are. Sexless, mindless, hollow shells they are. But the New Soldiers, oh, that is easier, far quicker than once it was. It took so long to grow a mind to the fullness of intellect. But to grow a body to strength is short work. No wonder they tax the slaves. They will tax them until their wombs are barren. The Worm needs soldiers to swallow the world, to empty all the lands under the sun. The Worm can spend the futures of its slaves, for there are a million new recruits in the wider world. Already they are being carried down here, the children of your kin. The Worm grows ready to hatch from this place. It will consume everything here, and it has no patience for things it no longer needs.’ That divide within the man, his present self-knowledge warring with the thing he had once been, was blazing on his face.

And beyond him rose another face, like a brother to his own, and twisted with its own individual rage. Another Scarred One.

Che was moving in that instant, barging past the Hermit, almost knocking him into the pit where the soulless things below would surely have torn him apart and devoured him. Her sword cleared its sheath with the effortless ease she always imagined Tynisa must feel when her rapier leapt to her hand. She was inspired, driven. She had purpose.

The cicatrized priest had his mouth open, the first howl against blasphemy escaping his lips. The enormity of what he saw had rooted him to the spot. He made no attempt to defend himself or step clear of her lunge. She killed his voice within his throat, all the force she could muster driving that sharp point up to the hilt in his neck, seeing that pallid face contort with agony and outrage, and for a moment attain a sort of humanity.

The Scarred One staggered and dropped, twitching, but now she became aware of a wider disturbance that centred on herself.

The Worm was awakening to her presence.

All around her, all throughout the city, the warriors, the segments, had stopped their concerted bustle. They stood like men waking from a dream, and then their heads began turning towards her. The same eyes looked out from a hundred faces, a thousand, searching for this imperfection in the heart of the Worm.

She caught her breath, the Scarred One’s blood on her sword, because what could follow now but utter extinction?

Then the Hermit had seized her wrist, hauled her towards him, and in his other hand was his long knife. For a moment she thought he had suffered some change of heart, fallen victim to the Worm once more, abandoned Orothellin and humanity in one brief step. Then the blade licked across her forearm, scoring a twisting line of pain and blood, a jagged spiral to join the blood-matted gouge on her upper arm.

For a moment after that, absolutely everything in that city of the Worm was still.

The multitude of the warriors blinked, all at once, as though caught in mid-thought and forgetting what they had been doing. They then returned to their busy labours, and she saw that more and more of them were joining that great spiral – that it was growing to encompass the whole city around them, thousands of the Worm’s bodies threading through the streets, marching inexorably on that vanishing centre.

Clawing their way towards the sun.

‘We must go,’ the Hermit insisted. ‘More Scarred Ones will come. They will know something is wrong. We must escape.’

This time she did not resist him.

When they had put the city behind them, with its buried god and its child pits, he turned to her. ‘You regret now, do you not? You wish you had never asked.’

‘I do not.’ She faced up to him without flinching. ‘Because I know more than ever that it must be destroyed, all of it. You have given me purpose, Hermit.’ Perhaps this buried chasm was no proper soil for hope to grow in, but that did not preclude a purpose. She defied anyone to see what she had seen and not take purpose from it. She felt herself on fire with a rage that burned as bright as the writhing silhouette of the Worm had been obscure.

And in the back of her mind she explored what had been returned to her when she had got far enough from the city to escape the deadening hand of the Worm: some faint recollection of magic had crept back into her. She had felt that bond, that tenuous link to the outer world that had always been there, but so faint that only by having it taken away and then restored could she know it was real.

Are you seeing this, Seda?
she demanded silently.
Do you understand now what you have done?

Twenty-One

She awoke thrashing at her sheets, eyes open but seeing only that dark place and stark grey images of horror torn from another woman’s eyes.

Seda had ridden the waves of Che’s own despair and it had infected her, but it was not the children of the dark world that had touched her. The breeding of slaves was beneath her; let them live or die as they chose.

She had seen through Che’s eyes, but her mind had remained her own. She tore herself from sleep with a true understanding of what would happen to the world –
her
world! – and of the rules the Worm was breaking just by existing.

A vast void in the shape of a centipede. Kinden blurring into other kinden. A homogenized world contained within the freezing guts of a mindless ignorant god, forever and forever.

That was the future.

Morning in Capitas. As she stepped onto the floor of her chamber, she thought she could feel the ground tremble slightly, even from so many storeys up. The armies of the Worm were coming. There was no way of knowing where they would strike next. Nobody was safe, and there was no way to retaliate.

Seda could only close the door on them, leave them to their obscenities. Let them practise their rites on their slaves in the darkness. Let them scrape to their god, only let them not open the way for it to come
here,
and devour the sun.

For a moment, a great wave of hopelessness threatened to overwhelm her: the thought that none of it would be enough, that her painstaking calculations were wrong, that the entire concept was misguided.
How do I know this will work?
And, of course, she could never
know
, not until she had done it and seen the results. And there would only ever be one chance for her to stopper this bottle, to bury the Worm forever.

Because it’s my fault. I let them out. I must force them back.

But I must be right. I must be sure. Better to go too far than not far enough. I have no time for subtlety.

From the corner of the room, Tisamon watched her impassively, and she strode over to him, trying to read condemnation in his face – trying to read
anything
in his face. His pale dead features regarded her and did not judge. He was her creature, and he was the only one she could rely on. The rest – her generals, Brugan, all of them – they were mortal, fallible, weak. She must make use of them, for want of any better, but they were all poor tools.
How is it that my people have come to this?

Once she stepped from her chambers, her anguish and desperation were left behind. She was the Empress; people bowed before her and feared her.

In her throne room she dismissed the waiting suitors and advisers and petitioners, all the detritus of state. She spared time only for her Red Watch, spread as it was across the Empire and beyond. In her mind she moved it as she would chess pieces, each member with its particular instructions and mandates coming to its mind inexplicably but irresistibly. It was her voice. That was no idle boast.

After that she summoned a handful of Consortium officers, men of the Quartermaster Corps and veteran slavers, those to whom she had entrusted the minutiae of her plan. None of them truly understood what this was all for and, though of course they did not question her, she suspected they did not even ask questions of themselves. If the Empress wanted an unprecedented concentration of slaves, whole camps crammed full of the luckless Inapt, then why should that raise an eyebrow, beyond the intellectual exercise of arranging the logistics?

They reported to her patiently and carefully, checking their numbers with each other. They confirmed that every airship of any size that the Empire could make use of had been diverted; that vessels crammed with the spoils of the war with the Spiderlands were coasting north up the Silk Road; that the Principalities were selling off their Dragonfly serfs with an open hand; that the Grasshopper-kinden of Sa had been culled, a full one in four currently on forced march towards Capitas. They spoke dispassionately about death rates: those who would not make the camps because of the pace or the overcrowding. They were regretful but only because such waste diminished the value of their service to her.

And she sat and listened to those dry voices, these men whose only war had been fought on paper, or against an enemy already in chains, and she felt a spasm of revulsion go through her that she should need such men, and that she should need this venture.

They will remember me as the mad Empress. History will never forgive me. Even though we win, history cannot condone what it is we do here. But I pay that price, and I make all these others pay that price. To save the world.

Put in those words, it sounded almost convincing.

‘It’s not enough.’

The words were hers. She could not deny them.

To save a world from the Worm, great sacrifices would have to be made. The Inapt made better gifts to oblivion, but she could not afford to restrict her ambitions. The Apt were still valuable to her, and she had far more of them still at her disposal. Entire cities full of them, if need be. Even if it took ten Apt deaths to equal one of the Inapt, why then, she would just find some place with Apt to spare, and have ten times as many killed.

‘Your Imperial Majesty,’ one of the Consortium men began, ‘forgive us. There are limits to what even the resources of the Empire may accomplish in so short a time. And there is the matter of feeding the slaves at the camps, keeping them alive for . . .?’ His small eyes searched her face for some indication of that ‘for. . .?’

And indeed, although she herself knew what for, how could she possibly accomplish it? She could hardly haul each one in turn to the museum for a ritual bloodletting. Could she ask Tisamon to pass amongst so many thousands to cut their throats? Even he – even being what he now was – would take too long about the task. And that was just the camps themselves. She had heard their reports regarding the numbers they were gathering. Surely that would not be enough, for the colossal hubris of the ritual that she was planning. Even the ancient Moths would not have dared what she was intending. The power she would require was unprecedented. Only an unprecedented toll would pay for it.

I could have my soldiers shoot them. Why not turn to the weapons of the Apt one last time? The blood would still flow, and it would be quicker. It could be effected with all the efficiency of these modern times.

But even then . . . and how many am I relying on to follow such orders? Too many, surely. And they would fight back, the Inapt slaves, and a city of the Apt even more so. Can I be sure that such bloodletting is possible, even with every soldier in the Empire at my bidding?

Do I even need the blood? Is that not simply an antiquated concept of savage peoples? What is blood, after all, but a symbol for the real power: death.

Death is all I need.

She dismissed them, the entire pack of them, exhorting them to double their efforts, and for a while she brooded, seated on the throne with only Tisamon for company.

Then she beckoned a servant close.

‘Bring me General Lien,’ she directed.

The Engineers had done so much for the Empire in recent years. Perhaps they would come to its rescue again.

When General Marent returned to Capitas from his unexpected trip to Collegium, he could readily ignore all those questions that inferior ranks dared ask of an army general. The only voices he would truly have to answer to were the Rekef and the Empress, and neither sent for him. General Brugan was seen less and less at the palace, so that some were beginning to say he was a spent force, and the Empress . . . The Empress was fixated on her own concerns, rumour of which was now rife across Capitas. She had a grand project, it seemed, but the more her people found out about it, the less they understood.