The Seal of the Worm (68 page)

‘And what of those cities that you don’t speak for?’ Marent put in thoughtfully.

‘If they don’t come round, if they don’t see that this is the best for them?’ Ernain shrugged. ‘Then they deserve all they get.’

‘Well, then.’ Tynan looked around at them. ‘I have Marent with me. I have Bellowern, so I suspect that means that a great deal of the wheels that would need to spin to make this work are already in place.’ And now Honory was nodding slightly at that, the weight of his clan and its many, many dependants and adherents in that small gesture. ‘But what of the rest of you? Here’s our experiment in government. You are my assembly, here and now. So speak.’

He saw Nessen shaking his head, shrinking back, a man not in favour but not brave enough to speak out. Vorken had already stepped back, his expression tense and conflicted, quite out of his depth.

‘General,’ Merva of Solarno said, ‘this is probably where I mention that Ernain’s people have already spread the word as far as Solarno. The Spiders there are aware of this proposal, as is my husband. Solarno will take what is offered.’

‘The
Spiders
will join the Empire, will they?’ Nessen demanded.

‘Those families who have made their power base in Solarno may,’ she agreed, ‘so long as it would become their Empire too.’

‘What say the Engineers?’ Tynan asked.

‘I have always been a man of progress—’ Varsec started.

‘Quiet, man,’ Lien snapped at him, but the colonel just looked at his superior for a moment, and then went on.

‘Progress is what an engineer should wish for. If a thing does not work, you redesign it until it does. If a thing could work
better
, it’s the same. And if you do not advance in this way –’ now he was shouting over Lien’s orders to be silent – ‘if you become fond of yesterday’s designs even though they no longer function, then you will fail. Only by changing and bettering ourselves can we survive.’

‘Says the same man who brought mindlinked pilots into the army!’ General Lien snapped.

‘And they have served us well, Lien,’ Tynan stated. ‘And, yes, some of them are halfbreeds, and some of them are women – my own chief of aviators even – and yet they still serve the Empire.’

‘No,’ Lien protested. ‘Tynan, this is treason and, worse, it is a fool’s treason. The Empress has her . . . irregularities, perhaps, but I have faith in her. The Engineers will not sign. I will return to Capitas and prepare to man the wall artillery against the Lowlanders.’ As he turned away he bellowed, ‘Varsec!’

He left the tent, striding out into the night air, and Tynan wondered,
Can we do it without him? What would the Engineers do – elect their own Emperor if we deposed Seda?

‘Lien!’ he called, but then he heard the clatter of steel from outside, and a scream.

Did someone stab him?
Instantly, Tynan was pushing his way out of the tent, too. He saw a cluster of men fighting in the firelight, trying to keep something from approaching him. Even as he watched, that single figure scythed through them, cutting down anyone within reach of its blade, shrugging off or stepping aside from stingshot and snapbow bolts.

The Empress’s Mantis.

Tynan’s blood ran cold just to see it, but the armoured figure was already picking up speed, cutting down any soldier luckless enough to get in its way and coming directly for him.

The first wave of the Worm’s soldiers had fallen on both sides, buried beneath the rockslides that Thalric had prepared. They had used that weapon to the very best of their ability, leaving scores of the attackers crushed and broken. But that was it, for there was no more they could throw down. Now the slingers were working, casting stones into the advancing mass of the enemy as fast as they could, but it would not hold them back long. Nothing would hold them for long.

‘Are you ready?’ Che asked Tynisa.

‘As I can be,’ her foster-sister replied. She was standing up straight, right now, sword in hand and feeding off the strength it lent her. The tide of the Worm would not have to advance far before she was a cripple once more and Che was again just a Beetle girl with delusions.

If this is my last act, let it be the right one
– but she had gone beyond the ability to judge.

She reached out – with her arms and her mind both – searching for that connection with Seda, that conduit through which the Empress would absorb her power. The cries and shouts of the fighting, Thalric’s exhortations to the slaves, trying to shout some backbone into them . . . she did her best to blot it all out. Concentration was everything, as she tried to focus on that ephemeral sense that had been gifted to her, when she had lost her Aptitude.

She had a feel for the great funnel that was the Worm’s world, where it squatted hungrily at the lowest point that all roads led to. From above – and it was not truly
above
but her mind insisted on that comparison – filtered down the fine rain of magic, leaking back into this void of a world after so long. She gathered it to herself. She was the only true magician in this whole world. All the power here was hers by right.

She could feel Seda beyond the broken Seal, reaching towards her, gravid with the strength she had stolen from the lives of slaves, from the ambient power of the sunlit world that had always seemed meagre to Che until she had been banished down here.

Further!
she told the Empress.
Please, I cannot bridge the gap!

Hold out, Che!

There was a faint tremor running through her internal world, the edge of the Worm’s influence brushing her as the attacking warriors gained another step before the raining missiles of the slingers drove them back down the slope again. Tynisa was shifting from foot to foot, wanting to retreat further up, but knowing that she could not move Che.

Almost
, she thought. The ghostly extent of Seda’s power was like a beacon to her, a blazing lamp being lowered into this dark place.

Almost
, again, and Che composed herself, finally separating herself from the distractions of the world around her, shrugging off her fears for Thalric and Tynisa, her guilt, her self-doubt. For one crystalline moment she found a clear, calm place within her from which to muster the magic at her command. In that moment she saw everything.

She touched fingers with Seda, felt the Empress stretching desperately for her power, ritual half complete, ready to recreate the Seal and lock away the Worm forever – or until some other misguided magician should shatter it anew. The lives of thousands of slaves already slain, and thousands more that she had ordered to be slain, all hung about her, bloating her with curdling, stolen strength that prised at every seam of her, demanding to be used.

Che pulled.

She took hold of Seda, accepted the proffered connection, and she pulled, dragging at the other woman’s power, the threads of her ritual, her very being and body. Instantly the Empress was fighting against her, and she would have been effortlessly stronger had she not overextended herself so far in driving a connection down to this lightless pit.

Che pulled and pulled, burning the fickle reserves of magic that she had harvested here, pitting her will against the Empress of the Wasps, and even in the midst of this she heard Seda’s appalled, agonized voice.

Che, we must remake the Seal! Why?

Because some things come at too great a cost
, Che told her.
Because the ends do not justify the means.
And she sank the hooks of her mind into Seda’s unwieldy half-made ritual and tore it apart, and then abruptly there was no resistance and Tynisa was dragging on her arm.

The armoured Mantis drove forwards, and Tynan sank two burning darts of stingshot into its chest without even slowing it. He lurched aside, tripping over the lines securing his tent, seeing one of his officers lunge in with a sword and get his throat cut for his trouble. A moment later, Vorken the slaver was in the Mantis’s way as Tynan’s tent emptied, getting a blow in across the attacker’s pauldrons that was hard enough to stagger the intruder, then diving past with a flurry of wings. The Mantis lunged after him, opening his leg from knee to ankle, and then turned back to take on the next challenger.

It was Marent, Tynan saw, as he struggled to his feet. The general of the Third feinted at the Mantis, his off-hand blazing fire, but the Mantis twisted past both steel and sting effortlessly, the barbs of one forearm raking across Marent’s face.

Tynan put another bolt of his Art into the Mantis’s side, putting it briefly off its stride. Marent, half blinded, was still trying to go on the offensive, though, hacking down at the lithe, mailed form.

That metal claw drove down into his chest, effortlessly penetrating through armour and bone without meeting any obvious resistance. Marent made a choking noise and died.

A dart of loss pierced Tynan’s composure, and he let fly with both hands, bolts crackling and streaking around his enemy, most just seeming to glance away from it as the figure turned to him, taking one long step that put Tynan well within reach of its blade.

The blow never came. Instead, the Mantis lurched sideways as though the ground had betrayed it. Its helmed head whipped about, hunting for an enemy Tynan could not see, and then it . . .
receded
was the only word Tynan could think of to describe what he saw. Without actually retreating from him, the Mantis seemed to fall away suddenly into some unseen gulf, dropping into the shadows as though they were an abyss of immeasurable depth.

Tynan’s knees hit the ground, his legs abruptly too weak to support him. ‘Marent?’

‘He’s dead, sir, sorry.’ It was Oski, now kneeling by the other general’s body. ‘I think we’ve lost at least twenty of the watch as well, the ones who got in that thing’s way.’

‘Vorken?’ Tynan spotted the slaver already under the care of a surgeon. ‘Who else?’

‘General Lien, alas.’ The aviator, Varsec, crouched by him.

Tynan looked at him narrowly. ‘Is that so?’

Varsec’s face was guileless. ‘I believe there was something to sign, General. I appear to be ranking officer of the Engineers.’

On such a shifting foundation do we build.
‘Ernain?’ A sudden cold moment, what if Ernain, too, had got in the Mantis’s way?

There was the living Bee-kinden, though, and Tynan allowed Varsec to help him to his feet. ‘Bring your cursed paper here!’

They signed and signed, copy after copy, those of them who were left. If the Empire was permitted to write its own histories after tomorrow, these same names would go down in those records: Tynan, Merva, Nessen, Varsec, Vorken, Honory Bellowern, Ernain, Oski. After that, and after Ernain had dispatched his precious declaration to the cities that had entrusted him with this task, there remained just one duty, and it was one that Tynan could not delegate to anyone else.

He did not enter Capitas alone, but with some several hundred soldiers of the Gears, and he accumulated more as he approached the palace: Engineers, Consortium men, Slave Corps, Light Airborne, newly freed Auxillians – all the pieces of the Empire, not quite knowing what they were supporting but trusting in Tynan or in the other men who had given them their orders.

There followed some fighting at the palace gates, but surprisingly little – a holdout handful of the Red Watch tried to stop him, but they were just a dozen against all his force, and they died swiftly and fiercely.

He was expecting some other force to ambush him within those corridors of power, or perhaps the murderous Mantis to reappear and finish his work, but Tynan reached the doors of the throne room without incident. There were plenty of servants and courtiers and soldiers within the palace, and yet nobody seemed to have orders, and everyone looked to everyone else, and Tynan just marched on.

He threw the doors open and strode in, and the Empress was not there, only the shaking form of General Brugan, who had once been a soldier to be reckoned with and now stared wildly at Tynan with the eyes of a lunatic.

‘Where is she?’ Tynan demanded of him. ‘Where’s the Empress?’

‘She . . .’ Tears were running down Brugan’s face, which twitched and jumped as though maggots were running just beneath the skin. ‘She’s gone, just gone . . . She fell, far, far away . . . Help me get her back, Tynan. We have to get her back.’ His hands scrabbled at the carved wood of the throne.

Tynan regarded him impassively for a moment and then lifted a hand, not knowing whether it was necessity or revulsion or mere pity that moved him. The crackle and flash of his sting echoed about the chamber, and Brugan’s body rocked back against the throne and then slid to the floor.

No Empress? No Empress and no confrontation, but here was Tynan in the heart of Empire, and nobody to contest the declaration he cast before the throne. He would have to trust to men such as the Bellowerns to ensure that everything held together now, while he got on with his real job.

Soon afterwards the word came: the Lowlander army had been sighted.

Forty-Three

Stenwold woke up.

For a moment, standing there, he had a sense of a great whirl of sound and motion, nearby and yet unseen, as though it was in a further room, in some space separated from him by the thinnest of membranes and yet utterly invisible, undetectable.

He was in Myna. He remembered now.

Before him the gates rose solid and whole, and he felt waves of memory wash over him. He remembered watching them through a telescope while they shuddered under the impact of the Wasps’ ramming engine, but that had been a long time ago, in a world now lost. Those gates had fallen, and then the wall . . . years after, when the Empire had come again . . .

He looked left and right, seeing that remembered wall intact now, re-edified and restored to be the perfect mimic of the way everything had been, before it all started.

There was nobody else there, just Stenwold before the gates of Myna.

Again he sensed a wave of commotion just beyond his reach, the clatter of metal, a woman’s voice – a woman he knew? – making demands. Atryssa? Arianna? No, another woman he knew and loved. A face ghosted brokenly through his mind, of a woman who looked like a Spider-kinden but wasn’t, not quite.