The Seal of the Worm (55 page)

‘Perhaps we can . . . attack their city,’ Che whispered. ‘That is where their master is, the mind behind them all. If we could . . . somehow . . .’

‘Che, Esmail’s just returned from there, and he says it can’t be done,’ Thalric cautioned. ‘He also says the place is crawling with them. All the Worms who aren’t hunting us or actually . . . heading up, whatever . . . are there, in that city. Which means that if we tried to go there, we’d basically end up fighting all the locals plus every single one of them who’s already trying to find us. Which is almost all of them. And it’s not as if this pack of bolt-fodder could pull off a sneak attack, even if the enemy couldn’t see in the dark . . . even if they ever actually slept, which Esmail says they don’t. And most of our fodder here aren’t even combatants, by any stretch of the definition.’

Che was staring at him desperately, and she realized that this was the limit: that she had thought him sufficiently resourceful in ruthless ways she herself could not countenance, and that he would always have a plan. He just looked at her, a man who had left his hope behind, his face gaunt and pale in the unhealthy firelight.

After having slept, cold and shivering on the hard stone, surrounded by the quietly mounting misery of those she had wanted to save, she woke and had no new answers, except to know that the pressing needs from before had only become more pressing.

Then Messel arrived. She saw him heading through camp with a knot of people trailing in his wake – new arrivals – asking questions and being pointed towards her. It was strange, for to start with she had been almost unable to distinguish him from the rest of his eyeless kinden. Now she couldn’t imagine not knowing him. It was just a matter of looking beyond that absence.

‘Cheerwell,’ he hailed her. He looked grimy and ragged and worn to a nub, but terribly animated, as though something within him was on fire. ‘I must speak to you. Something remarkable has happened.’

‘I could use something remarkable,’ she replied sadly. ‘Sit with me, Messel, please. Tell me.’

Tynisa and Thalric were just stirring, but the blind man’s next words startled them fully awake.

‘There is a name . . . a man you know. Totho, he called himself.’

Che felt her world shift sideways abruptly; things she thought she had understood suddenly uncertain. ‘How can you know that name?’

‘I was with him,’ Messel told her. ‘He came here searching for you.’

‘That’s impossible,’ she told him flatly. ‘He’s no . . . he’s nothing that could come here. There’s no way . . .’

‘He
walked
,’ Messel insisted. ‘He entered a cave he had seen the Worm use, in their raids.’ His hands clutched at the air, as though groping for understanding. ‘Cheerwell, the Seal, you said it cracked . . . and then that it was broken.’

‘Yes.’

‘If only we had the Teacher,’ Messel muttered, for Esmail had brought back the news of Orothellin’s death. ‘I do not understand the way things were, in that time he spoke of, before this place was made as it is. But . . .’

‘The domain of the Worm – of the Centipede-kinden – was underground,’ Che said slowly. ‘That means . . .’

‘I understand “underground”, from the Teacher’s stories. But at that time there was no seal, and the Worm walked in and out of its domain, and he said that there were those of the Old World who walked in also – ancestors of some of us here. What now, with the Seal gone?’ Messel asked at last. ‘If the Seal kept us from the Old World, what keeps us from it now?’

Che stared at him, knowing that Thalric and Tynisa must be wearing kindred expressions.

‘You mean . . .’ the Wasp said, ‘we can get
out
.’

Che took a deep breath. ‘Everyone can get out. Every single person can get out. If we can get people to some caves, any caves that carry on through into the world. It doesn’t defeat the Worm. It won’t save the lands above. But it can save the people here, for now. Messel . . . did Totho say where he came in?’

‘I know the place,’ the blind man told her. ‘There
are
caves there. They go . . . when I was there, they went nowhere. Now . . .’

‘Where is Totho?’ Tynisa asked.

Che froze, an appalling dismay falling upon her.
Why did I not even think to ask?
For surely Totho was not amongst the handful that Messel had been trailing.

Messel’s hands twitched, and he explained.

He and Totho had been with a fleeing band of refugees. The Worm had been behind them, gaining pace, but it had still seemed as though they might break away, at some cost – that some at least of the fugitives might escape.

Then the second Worm column had been sighted ahead of them. Messel did not know if this was some actual plan of the Worm, or just unfortunate chance. At that point, of course, it had not seemed to matter.

‘Some fought,’ he recounted sadly. ‘Most . . . just remembered how life had been under the Worm. That it had still been life, despite all. And they gave up: some the Worm killed, and others the Scarred Ones took away, to their city.’

Esmail had said that the priests of the Worm seemed to be sacrificing more and more to their uncaring god. Che imagined that they must see the end of their own world here, with the Worm focused more and more on its intended new conquests.

‘And Totho?’ she pressed.

Messel shrugged. ‘He did not break free with the few I managed to get out. I cannot say what his fate was.’

She sent for Esmail and the Hermit, and they came reluctantly. The Assassin had been brooding since his recent return from the city of the Worm, and his news regarding Orothellin had hit the renegade Scarred One hard. Neither looked impressed when Che told them she needed their help.

She explained about Totho. That did not help much.

‘So this friend of yours, whom I wouldn’t know from a stranger, might have turned up down here and might have been captured, and might be in their city right now, instead of just torn apart and already feeding their fields, or their bellies,’ Esmail summarized in disgust.

‘Esmail, please,’ Che said simply. ‘The two of you can go to that place safely. Or I’ll go myself, but I need one of you to take me.’

‘And she’s needed here,’ Thalric interjected, over her shoulder. ‘Because at least some of the people will listen – and listening to Che’s the only thing that’ll save them.’

Esmail moved to make some sharp retort, then bit it back. ‘Is it true that you can get out? That we can all get out?’

‘I hope so,’ Che told him. ‘We have nothing else, now.’

The Assassin closed his eyes, considering. ‘If I – we – go, he may not be there. He may even be there but hidden from us. Even if we find him, we will not be able to get him out.’

‘Cut the scars into him and hide him. At least try,’ Che insisted, a surge of frustration welling up inside her. She had intended to say, ‘please’ like the good Beetle girl she had been brought up as, but instead she found herself standing up, with some unspoken word echoing about them. Esmail’s eyes were wide as he scrabbled back.

‘What?’ Thalric demanded, and Tynisa’s sword was already clear of its scabbard. But Che was still trying to work out what had just happened, what she had done. Esmail was regarding her in a different way, now – respect and fear together.

‘You have it back,’ he murmured. ‘For just a moment . . .’

‘I have what?’ Che asked, almost plaintively.

‘The crown, the mark of the Masters that I saw on Seda . . . and on you, before we came down here. The magic came back for a moment.’

It was true that they were far from the Worm – or so she hoped – and so its deadening, levelling smog was not robbing her of the ability even to consider magic. Still, this place was parched dry of power, choked off from the world beyond, a dead place drained of its strength by the Moths and their Seal . . .

Their broken Seal.

Che felt an odd flutter.
Like a disarmed duellist finding a dagger in her belt.
That door was open only a crack, but did she perhaps have more options than she had realized? The Worm’s cavern realm was open to the world once more, and she could reach out for the magic that still existed outside. But, more, the
Seal
was gone. All that magic tied up in one place to keep the Worm locked away, and now the great knot of it was undone, all that magic was freed to . . . to do what? To drain away, even as all the magic had? Or could she still grasp for it?

‘Will you do it?’ she asked Esmail.

‘I cannot promise that I can accomplish anything, still less save your friend,’ he told her, ‘but I will go. I will search for him.’

‘And you?’

The Hermit had stood silent through this whole exchange, merely glowering at her. ‘Me? Return to that place? To my people? Forget myself that much, eh? Would I come back, I wonder? Now that
he’s
dead, should I even care?’

‘Please . . .’

The old man shook his head angrily. ‘I would lose myself. Then I would be gone. Without Orothellin, what am I but a broken-off piece of the Worm. I will not go. Let this fool go back to that place. I will not go.’

That night she tried to dream. She lacked the props she had once used to retain the pictures that issued from her sleeping mind, but she simply concentrated, meditated and absorbed the slow filtering of magic that was permeating this world for the first time in a thousand years.

Who else here, after all, could make use of it?

To her reopened mind, the cavern world was a continuum strung from the bright flare of the outside down towards the obscuring murk of the Worm itself. Up above, beneath the sun and moon, she could touch Seda distantly and feel the Wasp woman trying to reach back towards her.

Che, I need your strength! I am so close! I can defeat the Worm!

And then there was a sense of some great plan in motion, forces of ritual like great stone slabs sliding into place, leaving Che terrified and appalled and yet unable to say exactly why. The details did not come through.

And, besides, she was seeking a different communion. She was trying to find Totho.

I know him so well, after all. We were friends for so long. If he is down here, and living still, then surely I can find him.

But she hunted and hunted, gaining transient glimpses of other groups of slaves – fleeing, dying or squatting in filth and misery as they waited for their end. Even if Che got her current charges out of this charnel world, they represented only a fraction. So many more would die; so many more were already dead.

But there was no sign of Totho, and so she turned her attention to that coiling blot at the heart of the world – where the Worm dwelt.

By now she was deep in dreams, her revelations progressively less reliable, more likely to be the product of her own wishes and needs. When she did find a momentary contact with a familiar personality – the callused edges of his innocence, his earnest striving, his bitterness towards the world – it was a fleeting thing, and she could not know for sure if she had found him after all.

More likely he was dead. More likely he was smothered beneath the cloud of the Worm’s influence, and she could not reach him at all. Or else his own stubborn Aptitude prevented her from touching him.

Or perhaps I just don’t know him as well as I should do.

Thirty-Six

The Red Watch man – he never revealed his name – entered the governor’s residence in Myna as though he owned it.

In truth, just getting here had been a struggle. Myna itself was in chaos, the streets fiercely contested between the Wasp garrison and the local forces.
It’s as though they know what we’re about to do
, Gannic thought. The reality of what they were planning – what his vaunted technical expertise would propagate – was something he was doing his best not to think about.

There were lines drawn now. The governor had been sent his orders, and the garrison forces had done their best to corral the bulk of the Mynans into a single district, pushing them up through the tiers of the city until they were crammed into its highest areas. By then, there were no intact flying machines left in native hands, and the Imperial Spearflights and Farsphex could drop incendiaries on the locals to their heart’s content. Except that orders forbad it.

In actuality, a great part of the city was not safe for either side. Insurgents were constantly breaking out and setting traps and ambushes for Wasp forces, or being caught and killed in turn. Keeping the Mynans bottled up was a constant struggle.

The great governor’s palace, which had once dominated the city for more than a decade, had been torn down by the ingrate locals after they had driven the Empire out during the last war, but they had yet to replace it with anything else. Their interim government had been keeping the Empire’s seat warm in a structure still only half complete when the Wasps returned, and that building had been methodically destroyed during the retaking of the city. Instead, the garrison had fortified its own district, turfing out all locals and barricading all the streets. In between those two districts of concrete loyalty, the Wasps had a fair run of the streets, but their control was piecemeal.

The airship, with its lethal cargo, had been shot at by ballistae when it arrived over the city – and Gannic was by no means sure that all those incoming bolts had been Mynan. It was a fearful chaos down there, and the thought of what might have happened, had some explosive cracked open the hull, did not bear thinking about. When at last they had the vessel anchored to the ground, he breathed a sigh of relief.

He had thought, without much hope, that he might be able to hand over responsibility to the local engineers. The Red Watch man kept close to him, though, leaving the airship under heavy guard and snapping at any of the garrison men who tried to get in his way. Gannic remembered the way the Rekef had always worked. Yes, the name had inspired fear, but its presence had been subtle – everywhere and nowhere: could be your superior officer or the man next to you on parade, or even your own slave. The Red Watch was nothing but a fist backed by the Empress’s writ. It was great power given to little men. Gannic, a little man himself, knew how that would feel.
Oh, what I’d do if only I . . .