The Seal of the Worm (42 page)

And even with that thought, and despite everything, the responsibilities of her role were on her, now that she had recognized how fate had cast her.

‘Do you . . . I could foretell your future, cast for omens . . . Advise you.’

He did turn at that suggestion, just enough to look at her past the armour of his shoulder. ‘You have nothing to say to me,’ he told her, but not harshly, more as a recognition that their worlds were too far apart for any mutual understanding. And then: ‘Who-ever dwells in that cave, they are just men.’

She woke at dawn, alone, the fire burned down to nothing. There were tracks, heading towards the broken rift in the earth, but nothing in the world could have persuaded her to follow them.

Instead she set off northwards up the Silk Road. The Commonweal was out there somewhere, and she would make it home eventually if she kept putting one foot in front of another.

Nobody knew what was happening, or at least Straessa didn’t, and if any of the Collegiate soldiers under her command did, they weren’t telling her. Obviously there was supposed to be some manner of signal, and with luck Kymene or the Sarnesh or someone knew what it was, because everyone had advanced to a point where it looked as though they were going to make some mad dash for the city walls, and then they had stood about past dawn, making no attempt actually to fulfil that promise. The Wasps, in turn, made no attempt to come out and do anything about them.

A single one of their enormous airships had risen from the city earlier and lurched off across the sky; Taki’s aviators had been ready to take a shot at it, had it shuddered its way over the Lowlander forces with a bombardment in mind. It had kept its distance, though, and despite fierce debate, they had let it go. The Second had plainly remained in command of the city; nobody had wanted to waste time and resources on an enemy that seemed to be going away, and risk an assault by the enemy still very much in evidence.

So, is our being here all a bluff?
She could see the impatience down the line. Even the Sarnesh were plainly raring to go; if it was a bluff, and a single one of them knew it, then
all
of them would know.

And now this: the messenger from out of the city, and Straessa found that she knew him. She knew him and was not even particularly surprised to see him. It was that loudmouth Fly, the one who got everywhere: Laszlo.

He strutted out quite on his own, as though he wasn’t coming from a city held by the enemy, asking to speak to the leaders of the Sarnesh force. Straessa found herself ranged beside Kymene of the Mynans and Commander Lycena of Sarn.

Laszlo beamed up at them with a face Straessa wanted to slap, and then told them how things were.

An hour later they stood watching as a delegation marched out of the city to meet with them. Behind them, the city bustled with black and gold, but if it was an attack it was the most elegant piece of misdirection Straessa had ever seen. The Second Army was giving every indication of abandoning Collegium to its new masters, as represented by the approaching delegation.

And the city’s new masters are us
, Straessa reminded herself. Looking on them, however – indeed looking on this whole gathering – she had to work hard to quell her concerns. There was precious little that looked Collegiate in this mess, not even the leader of the approaching forces, for all that he
was
Collegium to a great many people.

She sensed a similar disquiet from her troops, the Company soldiers squinting and pointing and muttering. The Sarnesh Ants were standing stiffly, plainly still all bowstring-taut and mistrustful of the situation, especially given who
else
was turning up around now. The Mynans, though . . .

Kymene broke from the pack, striding forwards.

‘Stenwold Maker.’ She stopped before him, shaking her head with a rare grin. ‘Look at you, old man, back from the dead.’

The face was Maker’s, Straessa had to admit. He was carrying less weight and had made up for that by wearing far more armour, of a material and design she could not place, all spiral and flute patterns moulded out of something brown and shell-like.

He smiled at Kymene, but it was not an overly sentimental expression. Purpose burned in Stenwold Maker’s face like a furnace.

‘We have much to discuss,’ he told them all.

‘Why can we not attack the Empire as they leave?’ the Sarnesh commander, Lycena, demanded. Imperial airships were floating over the city, along with a cloud of Light Airborne. The gates had opened, and already the first automotives of the Second Army were outside the walls, with soldiers marching behind to join them.

‘We have much to discuss,’ Stenwold Maker repeated. ‘But this thing is simple: the Wasps are leaving because I have requested that they leave, and I promised them safe passage if they did.’

‘And how long does that last?’ Lycena asked furiously. ‘Do you think that we shall not have to fight them again, once we march?’

‘Of course we will,’ Stenwold confirmed, ‘but we will fight them as soldiers. I will not have my city turned into a battlefield. I will not have the war fought over the bodies of civilians.’

‘Tactician Milus will not be pleased,’ she warned him.

He shrugged. ‘Tactician Milus can take it up with me himself. Now, gather round, give me leaders from every contingent. You have questions. I have answers. Then we march to meet Milus, who, if I can second-guess him, is already leading the main Sarnesh army against the Wasps who are dug in north-east of here.’

There was much jockeying then, shouldering and elbowing for precedence, and she would gladly have given up her place at the front if only someone had come to demand it. Instead she found herself standing there, feeling as though she had gatecrashed a horribly inappropriate party, while Stenwold Maker introduced his allies.

The Tseni Ants were led by a stern-faced woman with blue-white skin, and Stenwold explained how they were maintaining a presence on the Collegiate streets, keeping order until the Beetles themselves were ready take that mantle from them. Why them? Because, compared to the forces that had won Collegium against the Second, the Tseni were practically familiar faces.

The little contingent of Vekken were meanwhile keeping well away from the Sarnesh. They would also be marching east against the Empire, in a symbol of the newfound solidarity between their city, Tsen and Collegium. Straessa was watching Lycena carefully for her reaction then: surely the Sarnesh would go berserk on hearing that two enemy Ant city-states – and all other Ant city-states were surely theoretical enemies at all times – were now allied to the Beetle city whose affections they had been monopolizing. Her face was blank, though, any whirl of emotions hidden well away inside.

Laszlo was fully reintroduced, as though anybody would not know him, but Stenwold said he was from the
Tidenfree
, and named the little muster of Fly-kinden with him as that vessel’s crew, although Straessa spotted Sperra in their number.

Then Stenwold turned to his other allies, upon whom most eyes had been fixed since they turned up.

‘May I present Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train; his mechanic Chenni; the magnate Wys; and Paladrya, chief adviser to the Edmir of Hermatyre.’ He reeled off the string of titles and names as though they were supposed to mean anything to anyone. ‘The Sea-kinden,’ he finished.

Straessa looked at them and saw a middle-aged Spider woman, a couple of little bald girls about the size of Fly-kinden, and . . . and a very, very big, broad man in pale crusted armour that made Maker’s suit look as if it was made of paper.

‘Sea-kinden,’ went the murmur, passing back down the ranks, or passing invisibly between the heads of the Ants.

‘Explain,’ said Lycena, almost desperately.

He did. Concisely, and with obvious gaps in the narrative, Stenwold told them about the Sea-kinden, opening up a secret that had stayed beneath the waves since the revolution.

Listening to his calm, measured account, Straessa had to keep looking at the massive figure of Rosander, because otherwise she would not have believed any of it.

‘You, Officer.’ Abruptly Maker’s gauntleted hand was directed at her.

‘Officer Antspider, Coldstone Company.’
Probably.
Whether there was still a Coldstone Company to be part of was debatable, but what else could she say?

Although he might have recalled her as Eujen’s friend, if nothing else, there was no recognition in his face.

‘Get a pilot off to Sarn to call back the Expatriates. This city’s going to need to stand on its own feet just about immediately. We can’t spare the soldiers to . . .’

‘Administrate it, War Master?’ Straessa dropped into the gap, because she was horribly sure that the unwanted word Maker had bitten back on was ‘garrison’.
He said ‘this city’, not ‘our city’
, she thought, but maybe she was being too hard on the man because of Eujen’s clashes with his ideology. Or perhaps going where Maker had gone could not help but change a man.

‘Officer.’ At Straessa’s elbow was the aviatrix, Taki. ‘I’ll go.’

‘Thank you. Cram everyone who wants to come aboard a rail automotive and get them over here, double time. I don’t think we’re hanging about,’ the Antspider told her. ‘Take word to Eujen and he’ll sort the logistics. I expect the Sarnesh’ll be glad to see the back of us.’

The Fly-kinden nodded, casting a sidelong look at Stenwold Maker. ‘Right you are.’ Then she was lifting herself into the air and scudding over the assembled heads towards her Storm-reader.

‘War Master, regarding your allies . . .’ Lycena indicated the Sea-kinden. ‘What do I tell the tactician? Do they march east with us? The Vekken, you have spoken for –’ no disguising of her distaste there – ‘but these?’

Straessa saw the ‘No’ on Stenwold’s face, but the Spider-looking woman at his side said, ‘Yes,’ immediately, and Rosander, the vast armoured brute, echoed her a moment later. Maker glanced at them, and she noticed his facade crack briefly.

‘Paladrya—’ he started, but the huge Sea-kinden broke in.

‘You once showed me the land, Stenwold Maker,’ he rumbled. ‘Do you think I put it from my mind, what you made me see? Those horizons you have? I want to see it, Maker. Those of my train who will follow me, I will take as far as you need to go. Chenni has my orders for the rest of my people.’

Stenwold’s gaze was still on the woman, though. No words passed between them, but she put a hand on his plated arm, eyes speaking directly to his, and at last he nodded.

‘You’re cracked,’ said the little bald woman he had called Wys. ‘Back home for me and mine, for sure.’

Straessa glanced from face to face: Ants of three cities; her own people just beginning to understand that they had won back their home; and the unfamiliar features of the Sea-kinden.

At the last, she looked back towards Maker, and was able to interpret that hard, driven expression of his in a new way. He was tired. He was a man tired almost to death, but with a long road ahead of him still.

Twenty-Eight

I should have stayed with Che
.

Thalric had been a battlefield officer once, long ago, before the Rekef had recruited him. He remembered enough about the soldiering trade to know that quality of troops counted for more than just about anything. He had never seen a worse band of warriors than the rabble he was trying to marshal now. Military historians would have to invent whole new words for how appalling the slaves of the Worm were in war.

Of course this is hardly textbook stuff: the hopeless against the mindless
. He had seen quickly enough that standing toe to toe with the Worm was not a game these people could win. Even wielding the weapons that they had made for their masters, they lacked all training and coordination – lacked all virtues, in fact, except for a desperation that turned too readily to panic and fear. Thalric had heard that some people believed sheer rage and righteous fury would win a fight, and he could only assume that those people had never been in one. In a massed battle, training and discipline would defeat random flailing every time, however righteous or angry.

Of course, training and discipline were not exactly what the Worm had, but what they did have would serve. Watching them fight made him feel ill – and his varied career had instilled a strong stomach. The way they moved together, the many limbs of a single presence, was utterly unlike soldiers, unlike humans. It served, though. In close combat the Worm was ferocious, unflinching, never retreating, swift and savage and unhesitating. A part of him watched that dreadful will to slaughter and thought,
perfect shock troops
, even whilst the rest of him was trying not to retch.

But Che wanted these hopeless victims to fight, to make their extinction costly enough that the Worm would leave them alone. After all, the driving force behind those human puppets did not understand vengeance or hatred any more than it could know of love or hope or happiness. If they could bloody the enemy enough, then it would draw back from them through sheer expedience. That was Che’s plan. Thalric did not believe it, now.
After all, the bastard’s down here, isn’t it? Somehow it’s at the centre of this place – wherever you go, you reach that city, that’s what Messel said. So is it really going to give its slaves the run of the place while its armies are away?
Thalric was bitterly afraid that Che had miscalculated – but not in guessing that the Worm would dispose of its entire slave population, the other kinden that had shared its banishment. No, that was patently the case, but he was less and less sure that either running or fighting would save these blighted failures from the blades of the Worm.

He wanted to tell her he had no sympathy, that those who bent their backs to the lash had chosen their place in life and deserved no more. He wanted to tell her that he and she – and Tynisa and Esmail, if she insisted – should simply find some place to hide that was as distant as they could find from any tendrils of the Worm, and there they should wait until all the slaves were devoured. Perhaps, having gutted its world, save for the four of them, the Worm would seek elsewhere for its nourishment. He wanted to say that this was the only real use that they could find for this host of useless subhumans.