The Seal of the Worm (7 page)

She opened her mouth then to gainsay him, to refuse to place her hand in the trap. The echo within her mind called back,
And then what? Where will you go, without him? What have you left to trust, if not this blind guide?

After resting several times, they heard Cold Well before they saw it. The sound rang out across the stony expanses, cutting across the murmur of running water. They heard a disconcertingly domestic sound: hammer on anvil, as from any forge anywhere.

Cold Well was a wound. That was Che’s first thought. It was a gash in the earth, jagged edged and organic, and it had been eaten there by human occupation, as though the mere presence of people had corroded the rock like an acid.

Approaching the settlement at one of the points where a narrow track led, switching its way down, she saw how the miners had made this place their own. The walls of the pit were lined with round gaps like eye sockets, level after level of them, the inhabitants carving out their own community from the walls of the grave they had been set to dig. How many? She could see hundreds of openings and no hint of how deep they went or the numbers they housed.

She did not realize how much light there was until she let her Art slip. She had assumed that the locals had as little use for illumination as eyeless Messel. Instead, though, firelight glowed from most of the entrances – the same weird hues as before, nothing so wholesome as wood providing the fuel, but still a sign of warmth and life in this barren wilderness. Deeper in, there were greater fires, too. Che could look down and see vast glowing vats, streams and strips of incandescence that were being constantly renewed as they cooled. They were smelting there, an operation of a size to gladden any Helleren mining magnate’s heart.

‘What is it they make here?’ she wondered, and Messel went still and looked back at her as he was about to start on the downward track.

‘Tin, copper, iron,’ he explained. ‘Salt-coal as well, though some must be brought in. Swords and armour for the armies of the Worm. Food for it in a good year. Sometimes food in a bad year too. We starve, then, some of us.’

They were all holding back at the lip, unwilling to let themselves be drawn into the pit. Che was looking beyond, trying to make out more details of the scurrying figures who were bustling about the smelting works, ascending or descending the steep paths, but the glare of those fires was dispelling her Art.

‘I see no guards.’ Thalric, relying on the firelight, had made more headway. ‘How can you have a slave town with no garrison?’

It was hard to tell what Messel thought of that, but his reply was hushed. ‘They come, often. For their tax and for our work.’

‘But you’re making swords,’ the Wasp pointed out. ‘Can you not fight?’

‘Fight the Worm?’ the blind man murmured, as though the concept was something he did not quite understand. ‘It has been tried, in earlier generations. Not since then. The price . . . the Worm is many. The Worm is . . .’ A shudder went through him. ‘The Worm is in all of us.’

That pronouncement transfixed them, all trying to grasp just what horror he intended, but he said no more. Indeed, having spoken even that much seemed to give him pain. His lack of expression was maddening.

‘Why have you brought us here, Messel?’ Tynisa challenged him.

‘Why did you come?’

Her sword cleared its scabbard, but then Maure was holding a hand up. ‘Please,’ the magician said. ‘We have come because we are strangers here, and we seek help. I beg you, tell us now if there is nothing to be had here. We’ll just . . .’ And her words failed her, because what was it they could ‘just . . .’? Where else could they go, in this abyss?

‘Help,’ Messel echoed, and began moving down again. ‘There may be help. I hope we may help each other. What else to hope for, in this place, but help?’

‘How much do we trust him?’ Tynisa murmured.

‘A cursed sight far less than just five minutes ago,’ Thalric spat, then glanced around. ‘And where’s that sneak Esmail?’

Che snapped out of her scrutiny and glanced around. The assassin was nowhere to be seen.

‘Just that, sneaking,’ Tynisa confirmed. ‘He’s been here before, remember. He was feeding us from these people’s pockets until Messel came. I reckon it was quick in-and-out stuff, and not too far in, even then. But he’ll be keeping an eye on us, don’t worry.’

‘And how much do we trust
him
?’ Thalric demanded.

‘Enough,’ Che decided, fighting a battle with them now that she had already lost against herself. She set off after Messel boldly, knowing the others would follow in her steps.

Messel’s progress was halting, stopping and starting at no apparent stimulus as though trying to put off the moment when his arrival was noticed. But now the locals were making their appearance. What passed along the rows of eyesocket-like holes was nothing more than a murmur, but it served to populate each hole in turn. It was only moments before their arrival was the focus of a grand and near-silent audience.

Almost none was of Messel’s kinden, whatever that might actually be. Those other faces were more familiar, and Che found herself searching from face to face, cataloguing the inmates of the asylum, matching them with the powers of the ancient world.

The Mole Crickets stood out most, by sheer virtue of their size. Ten-foot tall at the hulking shoulder, white haired and onyx skinned, there were more of them gathered here than Che had ever seen. She knew they had an Art to move and mould stone – even to walk through it as if it were mist – and yet here they were, huge and solemn, prisoners and slaves of the Worm like all the rest.

There were Woodlouse-kinden as well, and in fair numbers. She had seen almost none before – only the Empress’s adviser whom Esmail had killed, and perhaps one or two others. Here were dozens of them, tall and stoop shouldered with grey-banded skins and hollow faces. Here, too, were the Moths, with their blank white eyes that were still infinitely expressive compared to the vacant, socket-less faces of Messel’s pallid kin.

Here and there she saw others, belonging to kinden she could not guess at, whose alien features were never seen under the sun. All of them wore similar clothes to Messel himself: cloaks and trousers and long-sleeved tunics of thick cloth. Some had scarves about their mouths and noses, too, or hats of the same fabric, with folded tops.

But she judged that none of these would have use for the light that Cold Well was decked out with. For that, she must seek out more familiar features, for at least one in three of the denizens here was of her own kinden: the familiar dark-skinned and solid-framed people who dwelled almost everywhere in the world above and could endure anything.

Even this, this abyss, this slavery, they could endure. Abruptly it no longer seemed such a virtue.

Messel had stopped, brought to a halt by the sheer force of that massed regard; those he had led here clustered behind him, hands to weapons, unsure whether they would be welcomed or attacked or simply ignored. The air breathed with the sounds of the bellows, crackled with the distant molten metal, rang with hammers. Those at work had not paused for this novelty. They had quotas to make, perhaps, and from Messel’s account they had masters who would tolerate no slacking.

And there were young children, Che noted. They crowded around the legs of adults of all kinden –Woodlice offspring, infant Mole Crickets, Moth children and eyeless pale children and more. Many pairs of arms had a child in them, men and women both, and there was a profusion of toddlers. A surprising number of the women showed some visible stage of pregnancy. All the most natural thing in the world, save for how quiet the children all kept, and yet some part of Che’s mind was making a calculation, sensing that the mathematics behind what she was seeing here were wrong.

Messel spoke, not loud, but there was precious little competition from his audience. ‘Well, will nobody welcome me?’ He had his long hands spread, inviting censure or approbation, or anything other than this endless silent stare.

‘What have you brought, Messel?’ The speaker was a Moth woman, though it took a moment for Che to pick her out from the crowd. She bore a staff, just a plain length of worked chitin, but apparently this was all that was needed to be marked as headwoman of Cold Well.

‘Strangers,’ he replied evenly, seeming to brace himself.

‘There are no strangers.’

‘Strangers,’ Messel repeated, more firmly. ‘From outside.’

A dreadful murmur went through everyone there, as though he had said something terrible, broken some unspeakable taboo. Che saw plenty of heads shaking in outright denial:
there is no outside.
How many generations of their ancestors had been sealed away down here?

And then she asked, out loud though she had not intended to, ‘Why are there so few children?’

In the echo of her words, all eyes were upon them.

‘Che, they’ve got the little maggots underfoot all over,’ Thalric pointed out tactfully.

‘But the older children,’ she replied. ‘So many babies and . . . look.’

And she was right, of course: that was what had been nagging at her. All those babes in arms, and yet few children who were older than three or four. Even as she said it, she felt a crawling sensation inside her that no matter how barren and bleak this place had shown itself to be, there was an unplumbed depth of terrible revelation just waiting for her.

One thing she had achieved: even to ask the question – the answer to which was surely a constant burden to all here – had established their credentials.

‘Outside,’ the Moth woman repeated, staring.

This time Che actually heard someone say it: ‘There is no outside. It’s a lie.’

‘Speak to them,’ Messel insisted. ‘Where is the Teacher? Has he come? He must see them.’

‘Wandering,’ the Moth replied dismissively.

‘No, he must be here,’ Messel insisted, too loud. ‘I sent . . . he was to come . . .’

‘Well, he has not come,’ the woman spat derisively, and it was plain such a failure to appear matched her general opinion of this ‘Teacher’. ‘Bring them after me. I will speak to them. There is no avoiding it. Messel . . .’ She hissed, sharp and distinctive, and Che guessed it was to convey the glower that he could not have seen. ‘This will fall on your head, the consequences of this.’

Their blind guide spread his hands again. The division between these two was plainly an old one.

The Moth turned round sharply, and the other dwellers of Cold Well got out of her way. She half scrambled, half flew to one of the openings and looked back, gesturing for them to follow. ‘And the rest of you, back to your work,’ the woman rasped. ‘You think this changes anything? You think this is anything to gawp at? Forget these strangers, they will be gone as soon as they came. They are
nothing
.’

Che had hoped that there would be some groundswell of resistance to this dismissive attitude, but already the onlookers were skulking away, vanishing back to their holes or else sloping off towards the gleaming fires of the forges. She tried to catch the eyes of some of her kin, to establish that connection they must surely feel with her, but they would not look at her – indeed they barely looked at each other.

She was halfway after the Moth woman, almost wilting herself under that imperious glare, when Thalric said, ‘What about him? He’s coming too?’

One of the crowd had not simply gone home. Che looked over and saw a vast figure, a Mole Cricket bigger even than his fellows, each of his arms greater than Che’s whole body, and reaching nearly to his knees. He wore a cap of hide and chitin, and the hammer thrust into a loop at his belt must have weighed as much as an ordinary man.

‘Go,’ the Moth told him, but he shook his head.

‘I’ll hear this, for my people.’

‘Forge-Iron, go. This is a fiction, a nothing.’

He strode over to her, his shadow eclipsing the entire opening that she stood in. ‘Let us be peaceable about this,’ he said mildly, though even then Che felt the rumble of his voice through the soles of her feet. For a moment he and the Moth were frozen, locking wills, and Che felt the woman’s Art sally forth to put the Mole Cricket in his place, but he was immovable, like the rock itself, and at last she sagged and nodded and vanished inside.

The huge man waited until the travellers had followed her in before bringing up the rear.

‘Forge-Iron?’ Che enquired, looking up into that dark face, meeting his curious gaze.

‘Darmeyr Forge-Iron,’ he confirmed.

‘Cheerwell Maker,’ she offered. He accepted the name as though it was something of great value.

Beyond that gaping opening was a chamber barely of sufficient size to fit them all, even with Forge-Iron in the very doorway, and two narrower tunnels twisted off into the rock, canting downwards towards a faint but constant sound of tapping and digging.

Is the whole place a mine?
Che wondered.
Do they just sleep in the galleries and chambers, like vagabonds?

‘Where are you from?’ the Moth woman demanded, without ceremony.

Che found that the others were looking to her to speak. ‘I am Cheerwell Maker. I come from . . .’ She wanted to say
up
, but of course the precise direction of the sunlit world she knew was a matter of magical theory rather than pointing. ‘Outside,’ she finished. ‘From under the sun.’

The Moth stared at her bleakly. ‘Liar.’

‘It’s true,’ Messel insisted, and she hissed at him.

‘Renegade,’ she spat. ‘Shirker and abandoner, what would you know? They are fugitives from some other hold, some mine or forge whose toil they could not stand.’

‘Look at them,’ murmured Darmeyr. ‘They bear weapons, and they wear . . . and their kinden.’

‘Their very tread on the stone is different,’ Messel agreed.

‘Listen to me,’ Che insisted. ‘We come from outside here, and we must return there.’

The Moth laughed bitterly. ‘Of course. Fly there then, outsiders. Or step there through the cracks in the rock. Or perhaps you will ride the White Death there. Surely you can return there as easily as you came.’