The Seal of the Worm (6 page)

‘Well, it wasn’t me. It was—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Milus cut him off. ‘And your being here as part of this business is not advancing the war. Both you and I have better things to do with our time.’ Blatantly unspoken was his assessment that the rest of them there did not.

‘Then perhaps we should leave,’ Kymene stated.

Milus locked stares with her, and it became clear that she was not talking about the delegation but about her countryfolk.

‘The Spiders are fighting the Empire. They would take us in,’ she went on. ‘Gorenn, you’d come, wouldn’t you?’

The Dragonfly’s head snapped round at her name. ‘Of course,’ she confirmed immediately, although it was anyone’s guess if she had actually heard the question. She had no patience for politics. ‘What are these here?’

She was indicating the map, and the conversation derailed instantly, Milus taking up a new defensive position by deciding to humour her. ‘Attacks. Attacks made on my people over the last month.’ Four sites were marked within the map’s extent, the closest of them within a few miles of Sarn. ‘Still think we should be sending all our soldiers off to Collegium?’

‘What attacks? We’ve heard nothing,’ Eujen demanded, aware that he had lost the initiative.

‘Small in scale.’ Milus shrugged. ‘A patrol, a merchant caravan, a farm. But no signs of how it was done, no sign of the enemy – just turned earth and too few bodies.’ He let that sink in. ‘So, believe me, I am not sitting here gloating over the plight of Collegium, but I have many demands on limited resources, and my city is not safe.’

‘Like the Eighth,’ Gorenn remarked, again forcing everyone to change step to keep up with her.

Eujen was about to question her, but then an uncomfortable understanding came.
Turned earth, too few bodies, no sign of an enemy
. Surely he had heard that – from Balkus, perhaps? – about what they had found when they went to look for the Eighth.

‘Be that as it may, these are attacks on
my
people,’ Milus insisted, but Eujen could tell from his tone that he had made the connection long before.
And has no idea what to make of it, I’d guess.
‘This war has overwritten most of the rules of warfare that we were used to, and it looks as though the Wasps are still writing it.’ He held up his hands. ‘I fully understand. You all have homes, too. You want to free them. You want to fight the Wasps – of course you do. There will be a reckoning. The Empire will be turned back and then destroyed. I am dedicating myself and the might of my city to this objective. It must be by concerted action, though, so you must trust us.’

He looked from face to face, as if ascertaining that there was just enough trust left, averaged between them, to get him home.

‘And if things change in Collegium?’ Sperra piped up, her first contribution.

‘What changes do you anticipate? Things seem… stable there.’

‘Who knows? New Wasp atrocities . . . or perhaps an uprising.’

For a moment Eujen thought that Milus seemed unsure. Certainly he himself had no idea where Sperra was leading them.

But then the tactician’s customary demeanour returned. ‘Bring me any such intelligence and of course it will be looked at. The war changes on a daily basis. Perhaps tomorrow it will be me coming to you, ready to head south. Who knows?’

He knows
, Eujen decided. He had a great deal of respect for Milus’s handling and control of the war so far, but very little liking for the man.

Four

It was a long walk to Cold Well.

Thalric had a lantern of sorts, a twisted braid of luminescent fibres that gave out a pallid, unwholesome light. It barely showed him where to place his feet but, out of all of them, he was no friend of the darkness. Messel apparently knew he held it, and when their blind guide hissed at them Thalric stuffed the bundle beneath his breastplate to hide its meagre phosphorescence. It was a wretched thing, and he was forced to replace it often from the grotesque fungus things that they found in passing.

They had slept down here more than sixty times by anyone’s best guess, although Maure cautioned that, divorced from the world beyond, even the passing of time might not be the same. The halfbreed necromancer had little to offer save prophecies of doom, it seemed. Che had found it hard to believe that they could have been trapped in some small prison for so long without escape or capture, but she had misunderstood the scale of their surroundings. The world of the Worm was a
world
indeed. What she had seen from the ledge, with Cold Well spread out in the middle distance, was but a single segment of the Worm’s domain, and Cold Well but a single community amongst dozens of similar slave towns. The Worm had its lightless empire.

Messel himself moved surely, crouching low and often with his long fingers trailing over the stone. Some Art led him onwards, and Che began to suspect that he was hearing through the rock itself, interpreting the minute vibrations of distant motion and letting them warn and guide him.

Often they stopped, Messel leading them aside into cracks and overhangs where they could hide. He spoke little, and the supposed threats were often obscure. Once they heard wings, though – vast and slow-beating and strange. Another time, Che saw a hunting beetle, low-slung but as big as a horse, with its mandibles so long that they crossed over one another. Messel led it away, using a sling to rattle stones off its hide until it lumbered after him, then returning after a long anxious time of uncertainty to get them moving again.

Once there was the Worm.

The Worm they did not see, for Messel had found a shallow cave, and they all lay there barely daring to breathe. Messel’s manner had become agitated, almost frantic, where he had met all previous dangers with utter calm. This time he crouched alongside them, his hands clutching at his cloak as though trying to wrest some extra concealment from it. From outside they heard the scrape of armour, bare feet on stone, and Che tried to imagine some other race of blind people – but still just
people
no matter how fearsome their reputation. She failed to picture anything so tame. There was something about the quick, rushing movements out there – the way that, when they stopped, they stopped all at once, then set off all together. There were no words spoken at all, and Messel kept them still and quiet for a long while after the unseen Worm had gone.

‘Ants?’ had been Thalric’s suggestion. He, too, had picked up on the lack of any spoken communication in what had sounded to be a band of a dozen or so.

Che had just shaken her head. The motion of them had been something other than Ant discipline, and she felt that the silence was not due just to an Art mindlink. Why she was so certain, she could not say. It was no magical intuition though, for when the Worm had been near she had felt what little sense of magic she retained being deadened, smothered.

They have done something dreadful
, she thought. Her knowledge of the Worm was scant, but she had been gifted with a vision of the forces mustering for that final battle that had seen the Worm driven beneath the earth, supposedly forever. They had been a thing to fear even then, but she compared what she had understood from that battlefield to what she had experienced just now and concluded unhappily that there was some new horror added to the Worm, some change that had been made, and not for the better.

Thalric was her crutch as they travelled under the false stars of the Worm’s sky. She could tell that he was fighting to understand where they were and what had happened to them. It was a fight he could never win, but he was a survivor. The world had tried to kill him a dozen times, leaving scars on his hide as mementos. He had passed through the hands of so many masters that he had invented a new kind of freedom all his own. And he had stayed with Che through many trials, and he smiled when he looked at her.

And he was a Wasp. That was a strange thing to find strength in, but half the time Thalric looked the world in the eye, and the rest of the time he looked down on it. He had been brought up on tales of his own kinden’s superiority, their ability to master anything. He was not exactly a good son of the Empire any more, but when she was at her lowest, feeling as though she was trapped in a pit she could not escape, his barbed wit would bring the world down to her level. He would make some cynical bleak joke of it all, and things would not be quite so bad after that.

They had camped in a crack in the earth that Messel had scouted for them, but it was too exposed for them to risk a fire and so they huddled together for warmth. Meanwhile the man kept a blind watch nearby.

Esmail was already asleep, or at least pretending to be; he seldom spoke, a private, dangerous man who lacked the past association the others shared. The underworld was left to Che, Thalric, Maure and Tynisa to face.

‘I don’t understand how anyone can have thought this place a good idea.’ Tynisa was staring up at those ersatz stars. Sometimes they saw one of the distant lights twitch and shudder, and knew that some luckless flier had been caught by it and was being reeled in.

‘They were desperate.’ Che wasn’t sure why she was defending the magicians of the ancient world, but the words came out anyway.

‘I’ve known plenty of desperate people,’ Tynisa remarked, and then: ‘I can remember when I
was
desperate, and the things I did, but this . . . Desperate deeds are spur-of-the-moment deeds. This took planning and patience.’

‘Power,’ put in Maure softly. ‘It took power. And when you have that sort of power, then desperation can do very different things.’

‘You’re missing the main point,’ Thalric’s acerbic tone cut in, ‘which is that the bastards who devised this place were never going to end up in it.’

That silenced them for a moment, ceding him the floor.

‘Those old Moths,’ he went on, ‘your great wizards or whatever you call them – there’s nothing inherently
magical
about this story. Change the trappings and it’s everyone’s. Give someone a big stick, and tell them it’s their right, and they’ll use it. Desperation just means they’ll use it harder. So we all know Moths are useless mumblers who live up mountains and wring their precious grey hands over all these machines everyone else seems to have now. But they were executing your people on a whim a few centuries ago, Che. Give someone power, and at the same time you take away any qualms they’d have about using it.’

‘Well, the Imperial subject speaks from experience,’ Tynisa said acidly.

‘Yes, he bloody does,’ Thalric agreed hotly. ‘We know there’s no slave that wouldn’t wield the lash if you gave him the chance. It’s only Collegium that thinks there’s some mythic moral superiority.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ Che reproached, her eyes searching his face in the darkness. She saw the flaws there, the lines of doubt his association with her had marked out: the certainty in his voice was betrayed by his naked expression.

Still, he came back with, ‘Che, since I met you, you’ve no idea how many stupid things I’ve had to believe.’ And she laughed at him then, feeling the weight of that buried place momentarily lifted off her shoulders.

Later, when both Thalric and Tynisa had put their heads down, Che saw Maure stir, shivering. She reached a hand out, snagging at the halfbreed’s sleeve, thinking she must be feeling the cold, but the woman flinched back.

‘I’m sorry,’ Che murmured.

Maure stared out at that terrible sky. ‘No dead, Che. A place of death without any dead. I don’t know if you can imagine it.’

‘Probably not.’

‘I always sensed the dead. Even when I was very young, I could feel them. I got driven out of a lot of places before the Woodlouse-kinden took me in and trained me. No one better for that than the Woodlice. They understand everything there. I wish I’d never left.’

‘Why did you?’

‘Because I thought I had a duty, to the dead, to the living. I thought I was needed, to mediate between the two. And now I’m in a place where the living live like the dead and the dead themselves are gone beyond, utterly consumed . . . I’m sorry, Messel.’

Che started. She had almost forgotten their guide, but the blind man shifted and shrugged.

‘What a world you must come from,’ he said softly, an unplumbed depth of longing in his voice. ‘As for mine, I have no illusions.’

At first it seemed that they were travelling to Cold Well simply because, in all this vast, hostile and inbred world, there was no other landmark on their maps. Messel’s agitation increased as they closed the distance, though, and even on his face Che could make out a certain furtive look, a need for them to hurry towards some deadline he had refrained from mentioning.

In that place, suspicion came easily.

As they stopped to camp after the second span of dayless travel, she cornered him, dragging him away from the others to the edge of their firelight, aware that Thalric and Tynisa would leap to her defence if she encountered some betrayal.

‘So tell me,’ she challenged the blind man.

‘I don’t understand.’ He was a remarkably poor liar.

‘What’s waiting for us at Cold Well?’ she pressed.

‘You wanted to see . . .’ Messel’s words petered out.

‘Who knows we’re coming? You’ve sent word ahead to the people who live there?’ Abruptly she was certain of it. ‘What’s waiting for us, Messel?’

‘Sent to them? No, no,’ he insisted. ‘But there is one . . . a mentor, one who you must meet. The Teacher, we call him. One who still tells the oldest stories. One who spoke of the
sun
to me once; yes, he did.’ The word was given great ritual significance that matched Messel’s evident lack of understanding of what such a thing as the sun could possibly be. ‘Him, you must meet, if you are to do anything, if anything can be done for you . . . He, only he.’

‘But he’s not of Cold Well.’

‘He is of all places – a traveller, a wise man,’ Messel insisted. ‘And, yes, I have sent word. I have left markings and messages since I found you, only for him. And he is coming. He is coming back to Cold Well for you, only for you.’