The Seal of the Worm (47 page)

‘General,’ he hazarded, ‘what’s it all for?’

Lien’s eyes flicked towards him, but the expected annoyance only flashed briefly and went out of the general’s face. What was left was a man looking older than Gannic remembered: a man for whom the wheels of both artifice and state were suddenly spinning too fast.

‘There are camps,’ the general replied. If he was surprised to find himself explaining matters of Imperial policy to a halfbreed lieutenant, he did not show it. Indeed, he seemed almost relieved to get the words out. ‘The Empress is amassing a sizeable number of slaves and captives.’

Gannic frowned, baffled. The question,
To what end, sir?
stuck in his throat. Having his previous impertinence actually answered left him frightened. Being told such things seemed bad for his health.

‘But such matters are not your concern!’ A new voice intervened, an unsteady voice. ‘Give the halfbreed his orders and send him on his way, Lien. She has other work for you.’

Lien did not look at the newcomer, but Gannic could not resist. He saw a man who had once been strong framed but seemed almost eaten away now, as though by a disease. His eyes were certainly fever-bright, and they flinched and twitched as if constantly trying to stare into the sun.

After a long moment of blankness, Gannic found a name to tack onto this sick-looking creature.
Can that really be General Brugan of the Rekef?

‘You’re to take an airship loaded with the Bee-killer to Myna, under Red Watch orders,’ Lien said bluntly. ‘Do everything that’s asked of you. Then come back. There’ll be more.’

Myna?
Gannic turned the city over in his mind. Not a place that anyone felt over-fond of, surely, save for the Mynans themselves. And he had the feeling that
their
views had just ceased to count for anything.

‘Do you understand your orders?’ Lien demanded of him. Gannic tried to lock eyes with him, but the general shook off his gaze without even acknowledging it.

‘Yes, sir.’ What else, in the end, could Gannic say?

When she awoke, he was there, and she could feel the blood inside him, full of it as a tick and yet still hungry: Tisamon.

For a moment she thought he had come to challenge her. Never mind what he might have done to amass such power, she was ready for him to turn it on her now, to wrestle for his freedom. If she had shown any weakness just then, perhaps he might have done so. Instead she struck the instant she was aware of him, holding him with her raw power, and then binding him anew with his oaths and honour and, in the process, finding out the truth.

‘What have you done?’ she screamed at him. ‘I need them! I need them to die for
me
! You’ve wasted them – what if I don’t have enough now?’

He weathered her outburst and told her,
I have saved them for you.

For a moment she misunderstood him, but, yes – the power was still within him. He was not a thief of blood, but a receptacle.

You need them, but you need them dead
, he told her.
For you I have done this. I shall slay all your enemies. I shall lay their very essence at your feet. Make use of me.

For there it was, a growing frustration she had sensed in him: knowing that the whole world was engaged in war and he could play only the smallest part. The great battles that a creature such as he was made for were fought only in the oldest of histories, but so were the great rituals that she sought to emulate.

‘Yes,’ she agreed at last. ‘In this you can serve. You cannot kill them all. Not even
you
could kill them all, or even most of them. I will yet have to rely on the toys of the artificers, to make up the balance. Their deaths shall be sweeter at your hand, though – true Inapt deaths to feed the ritual. But I will need to calculate, to redraw my figures. This changes the measure of my power.’ And here her eyes grew hard. ‘You will kill only on my command, Tisamon. I know you sought to please me, and I am pleased, but you will shed blood on my word, and not on your own whim. I have no use for servants that will not obey.’

For a moment he bucked against her, straining at the leash, and she sensed the words before he said them, and shouted him down with, ‘Don’t you
dare
believe that you know better than I what is best for me – or for my Empire! Too many men have thought just that before, and the world is well rid of them!’

Still she sensed resistance, and for a moment she was going to banish him from her presence. But what mischief might he get up to then? Instead, she turned away from him, anger and contempt in every line of her, freezing him to a mere statue with the removal of her attention. Let him stand there and fret, until she let him loose again.

She was going to send for Brugan, but this new development had focused her mind on her grand plan once more, and she found herself reviewing her calculations, considering how best to make use of Tisamon’s little mutiny. The magical world around her seemed more alive now than ever, even here in Capitas at the heart of an Apt Empire. A strange spring had arrived – or perhaps it was just that the world knew what she intended, and held its breath.

A feat the like of which has not been seen since before the revolution. Long before.

And a distant echo, though louder than before, calling:
Seda.

Not Tisamon’s harsh whisper, but the faint and far-off voice of her unwanted sister, the rival she had plotted to destroy for so long. Che.

How strange now that she felt the Beetle girl to be almost a part of herself. It was through Che that Seda had witnessed the extremity of the horror that the Moths had trapped in that closed-off subterranean world. Without Che as her unwilling advance scout, she would never have known the abomination of the Worm that her own actions were even now unleashing upon the world.
Che, I broke the Seal.

She could not tell whether she sensed anger or blame emanating from the girl, but she knew she deserved both.
Not often does an Empress apologize, but I have done a terrible thing.

Yes, there she felt it. She could almost see the girl nodding vigorously.

But never mind, Che. I’m mending it. I’m mending the world. I’ve found a way. Lend me your power, Che. Lend me your strength, to extend my reach that much further, to be that much more certain of what I wish to do.

Was that questioning she sensed, across the appalling distance between them? Surely Che deserved to know. Even she must see the necessity, for she knew what the darkness held. She knew how important it was that such things be kept from the sun.

At whatever cost. At any cost.

Seda tried to explain. She reached out as far as she could, trying to force her plans into her surrogate sister’s head, to bring an understanding there of the scale and boldness of her endeavour. She could not know what, if anything, was understood. They were far apart in so many ways, even with the Seal finally gone from between them.

Trust me, Che
, she was reduced to thinking. And how absurd a thing was that, to be asking of the girl.
Trust me. This is the only way.

And Sartaea te Mosca looked out over the West-Empire and shivered.

They were packed into the big airship like livestock – or perhaps worse than livestock. Animals tended to be valuable commodities, after all, to be transported with care.

The Slave Corps had been in a mad panic, back in Collegium. They had raided the overstuffed cells with whip and club, forcing their prisoners out into the open and herding them towards the airfields. Around them, the city had seemed to be at war again. Every Wasp soldier te Mosca had seen had been in armour, and most had been running somewhere. There had been smoke on the air.
It’s an uprising!
she had thought at first. Where there had been Collegiate citizens visible, though, they had looked as agitated as the Wasps, just faces peering from behind half-shuttered windows for the most part. Whatever the Empire had been reacting to, it had not been
them.

Even so, she had been waiting for the prisoners to turn on their captors. They had outnumbered the slavers by dozens to one. Many even had unbound hands. Surely someone would throw a punch, wrest a weapon from a soldier, do
something.
And yet they were prodded and cuffed through the streets, and nobody rebelled. A few tried to run, but stingshot caught them almost before they had broken from the mass of their fellows. The Slave Corps were professionals, each of them more than able to read the eddy and flow of a body of human stock in trade. They had been maintaining control of superior numbers of lesser kinden for generations.

And there had been another factor, one that cut te Mosca to the bone. There were a few Beetle-kinden in amongst the captives. There was the odd Ant, even a Wasp or two, renegades brought to heel. The demographics of her fellow captives did not represent those of the city they had been sieved from, however. Metyssa was in good company, for there were remarkable numbers of Spider-kinden present, despite the death sentence pronounced on their kind. There were what looked like most of the city’s fugitive Moth population. There were Grasshoppers and Dragonflies who had fled the Wasps once before, and had now failed to make good their escape a second time. There were some other Flies, quite a number of other Flies. The Wasps had been testing them, back in the cells. Te Mosca had been given a crossbow, of all things – a small model, though still one that she would have struggled with, had she been Apt enough to do anything with it. Because that was what was gnawing at her: they had been testing for Aptitude. Several Apt Flies had been released. Those who had failed the crossbow test had all remained in the cells, with the Spiders and the others, the scions of the Bad Old Days. The grand majority of the herd of frightened prisoners had been Inapt.

And there had been a knowledge of that, in those Beetle faces that peered out from behind the shutters. And te Mosca had read clearly there:
better them than us.

The airship had been hard: cramped, stifling compartments with a derisory ration of water and no food. In the daylight the cargo hold had heated like an oven; at night the chill had crept from body to body. The Slave Corps officers had spent much of the time arguing amongst themselves. They were very obviously doing something suspect, and te Mosca did not sense the hand of General Tynan behind all of this.

In her less rational moments she had imagined writing him a letter of complaint. A polite letter, of course, because she was who she was, but she would certainly take him to task. She indulged in such thoughts because she had been crammed in too far away from Metyssa or Poll Awlbreaker to know how they fared, or even if they still lived. As the Inapt seldom travelled well within the machines of the Apt, there had been a sluicing of vomit about everyone’s feet, and worse soon enough, as the most basic human needs of the captives went unmet. Around her, others had been dying: crushed, parched, succumbing to their wounds. The Slavers had just left the bodies. As a Fly, te Mosca could at least bear being crammed into a small space better than the larger kinden. And so she had crouched in a corner, knees to her chin, and fantasized about correspondence with the general of the Second Army because it gave her a feeble illusion that she could somehow influence her fate.

And now they were somewhere behind Imperial borders, over lands she had never wanted to visit, and the airship was descending.

She could get an eye to the slats and stare out, and see great expanses of open country: the mosaic of fields, with no sign of any town or city nearby. Nobody near her had any idea how far a vessel such as this might have travelled. They might be just inside the border or over the far side of the Empire by now.

But there was something down there. She could just catch sight of it if she contorted herself at the crack. There was what looked like a camp. During the descent she was naive enough to assume it was for the mustering of armies.

And then the airship had been tied off with its keel ten feet from the dusty ground, and the slavers had come and opened the hatches in its underbelly. They had gone from compartment from compartment, dragging out the captives and just throwing them down, let them land how they may. With Fly-manacles killing her Art, the drop was terrifying to te Mosca.

Looking around after her bruising landing, that terror did not go away.

A hand fell on her shoulder, and she saw that Metyssa had fought her way through the crowd to her. Numbly, she let herself be dragged over to where Poll was sitting, clutching at a twisted ankle.

‘Can you help him?’ the Spider asked desperately, and of course te Mosca should have become the instant professional, kneeling down to offer what healing she could. But she just stood there, with her mind full of what she had seen before Metyssa had grabbed her. Her only thought was,
No. I can’t help any of us.

There had been cages. A great host of cages, stacked two and three tall as though some Wasp had seen the poorest ghettos of Helleron and been determined not to be outdone. They had been full of human bodies – many of them Spider-kinden, but plenty of others too. Then there had been the rings of people just sitting out in the open, ankles manacled to great metal stakes driven into the hard earth. And, after them, there had been a pit like a strip mine, and she had known without looking that it, too, had been thronging with people, people on top of people.

And even now, the airship was disgorging the last of its human cargo, and more slavers were moving in to shift them towards that great maw in the earth. Te Mosca had a horror, then: a horror of being just one tiny mote in a vast mass of the dehumanized, the disenfranchised, the faceless. She had thought about what it might be like to be a slave, sometimes. She had wondered idly – oh, the luxury of the Collegiate life! – what master her own skills might attract. She was valuable, of course: a scholar and a doctor. No doubt she would be plucked out, bought at a good price. She had imagined how she might nobly change the Empire from within, given half the chance.