The Seal of the Worm (72 page)

I have no idea how any of this metal works.

Something had reached up and obliterated any understanding that she might have had of her work, her lifelong trade.

Her Farsphex lurched to one side as she twitched and fought with controls that no longer made any sense to her. The densely peopled ground wheeled about her madly. She could not even get out of the cockpit. She could not release the hatches. Her last few moments gave her a view of a spinning sky that was raining flying machines, each one spiralling out of control, tumbling earthwards as though gravity had finally come to its senses.

Bergild screamed.

Straessa saw the walls shake and at first she thought it was an illusion, a heat-shimmer brought on by the sunrise. Then the Sarnesh messenger at her back made a peculiar, almost plaintive noise, and she realized it was real.

Her people were ceasing to shoot, at first just a few but then more, then all, until only Gorenn in their midst was still sending her arrows up at the Wasps . . . the Wasps who were no longer shooting downwards but milling around in the air, pulling back towards the Imperial lines.

‘What’s going on?’ Straessa murmured, but too quietly for anyone to hear, because she had no expectation that anyone had an answer. She stared down at the snapbow in her hands – an unfamiliar weight of metal that did . . . something. It was a weapon, that much she knew, but one she had no idea how to use.

Out beyond the Sarnesh contingent, all the automotives had ground to a halt, save one that was ploughing about in a determined circle. The only other machines in motion were the orthopters and, as she watched, she saw them fall from the sky, each in its own graceful, doomed arc, and that seemed only natural because she could not see how such things could possibly have got airborne in the first place.

Then the walls of Capitas shuddered again, rippling like a curtain, and her hands grasped her telescope, and then were unable to do anything with it.

‘They’re cracking.’ Gorenn sounded deathly afraid, far beyond the very understandable fear that Straessa was fighting down. ‘The walls . . .’

‘The ground . . .’ said someone else.

The Imperial forces out there were moving. Those who could fly were getting within the city’s boundaries in the air. The rest were abandoning their positions, fleeing while they could. Straessa saw the ground heave and twist, and heard herself ask, ‘Is that because of
us
? Are we doing that?’ She would have believed just about anything, right then.

‘No,’ came the hollow, shaky voice of the Sarnesh. ‘That’s not us.’

‘There’s something coming up from the earth,’ Gorenn declared flatly.

‘People,’ someone else with sharp eyes suggested.

‘Not people,’ the Dragonfly corrected, staring out at those human-shaped forms boiling out of the riven ground that had consumed the Empire’s earthworks, already butchering those Imperial soldiers too slow to get out of their way. Around them, the ground seethed with the segmented forms of centipedes of all sizes.

‘What are they? What do they want, if they’re not ours?’ Straessa demanded plaintively. None of them could not know that – between them, by their repeated contact – Che and Seda had bored a path of least resistance between Capitas and the Worm.

Forty-Six

Milus stared out across the rapidly disintegrating battlefield, stepping from mind to mind as his officers in turn relayed to him what they were seeing. There was a constant chaos of reports, an army’s worth of shock and bafflement. In the back of his thoughts his pilots were screaming as they died.

The ground before Capitas had just caved in, as though undermined. In fact, he had even prepared a plan to sap the walls if more conventional means failed to take them, but this . . . Their walls were bowing forwards, the foundations rotten and eaten away. Men and engines were tumbling from the top as the great curtain of stone swayed and then cracked across, immense sections of masonry just falling away. He watched the enemy’s capital city simply opening up to him like a flower. He had never seen a city’s defences fall so swiftly.

His officers were asking him for instructions, and there was a rising tide of fear trying to force its way through his army.
Something
incomprehensible had swept over them: the use of all their weapons – snapbows, automotives, even crossbows – was suddenly denied them, whole sections of their brains just failing to connect. The more level-headed scouts were reporting that the Wasps seemed to be suffering under the same impossible effect.

Be calm
, he instructed them. He himself was calm, and that helped. He was not seeing a violation of the way the world worked. He was Milus, and he had different eyes to the bulk of his kinden. He was seeing an opportunity.

He studied the Wasp response – they were pulling back to the broad gap in their walls, seemingly stripped now of all discipline and order. It was a fighting retreat because the broken earth was swarming with bodies, a ravening horde of some kinden Milus had never seen, laying into everything nearby – which meant the Wasps themselves.

Sheltered back here, he could consider carefully. A tactician had no business being on the front line, and no need either. In his mind the concepts of Aptitude were therefore still strong, but whenever he tried to communicate with his engineers and his artillerists he was met with blank incomprehension, a desperate reaching for an understanding that never came.

No matter. We’re still the best soldiers on the field. Sling your snapbows and draw swords.

Orders, Tactician?
came from a hundred minds, but they were steady now because he himself was steady.

They wanted to go in, he knew. They wanted to get inside the Wasps’ city, but also to clear the way of that crawling mass of intruders erupting from the earth. There was something about them that made the skin crawl: they had a human shape but it was animated by something else entirely.

Hold
, Milus decided.

There was some surprise at that, some resistance even. He rode out the backlash of queries and demands, eventually just bludgeoning them with his authority,
I have been given command here!
repeated over and over until he had beaten them all down. He knew that there were parts of his army who were not happy with some of his decisions and some of his priorities, but he knew that they would do as he said. Out here, beyond the reach of the Royal Court,
he
constituted Sarn. Anyone who disobeyed him was a renegade to their city, and that was a door that only opened one way.

Our enemies are fighting one another
, he told them with some satisfaction.
I don’t care what these things are. Let them kill Wasps. Let them kill all the Wasps they want, and let the Wasps kill them back. Whoever’s left standing will answer to us.

Tactician, they’re still coming out of that hole
, one of his scouts reported.
No end to their numbers. They’re spreading this way.

Then kill them once they get close enough. Keep your shields up and interlocked, and turn them back towards the city. Channel them, but no more than that. They’re just a weapon, like any other.

But, Tactician
, from another officer,
what’s happened to us? Our bows . . .?

Metaphysics can wait
, Milus replied sternly.
Shields up and hold, and let them shed blood for us.

Tynan did not want to hear casualty reports just then. He reckoned that perhaps a third of his ground-bound troops were still out there fighting to get clear of this new foe. He had lost dozens of wall engines . . . but what matter when his own artillerists seemed unable to use them any more? The sky, by now, was completely swept clean of orthopters from both sides.

It’s the end of the world.
In his head, a mad little voice was saying that this was something out of the old Inapt legends, back from the myth days of monsters and magicians. Impossible things were happening and, worst of all, they were happening to his city.

The Light Airborne had fared best – already in the air and mobile enough to get wherever they wanted. Their officers had made the right call and pulled them back from their attack on the Lowlanders to throng the breach with bodies, on the ground itself and all up the jagged edges of wall on both sides. Beyond them, the infantry and support of the Second and Third armies was in headlong rout, fleeing for the compromised safety of the city.

And the enemy . . . the
enemy
? Tynan had thought these must be some new Lowlander ally at first, but the foe that he had been
expecting
to fight was not taking advantage of the sudden disintegration of the Wasp position, and instead looked to be keeping well clear of whatever was happening here. The earth-kinden – whatever they were – just kept erupting out of the ground, a great boiling host of them like maggots pouring from a wound.

Like worms
, said an old, old part of his mind steeped in the stories they used to frighten children with.

They threw themselves at the retreating Wasps with a shocking speed and savagery, and no sense of self-preservation at all. Their beasts, that scrabbling tide of centipedes, were underfoot everywhere, the smaller lunging upwards to sink venomous fangs into legs, the greater ones rearing up to coil about their victims, rending armour, driving down at men’s faces with claws agape.

By now enough officers had contacted him that Tynan could start giving some kind of orders but his mind was still scrabbling for what orders he could possibly give. His mouth was getting the words out, though, as decades of military experience took over, shunting his stunned surprise to one side.

‘Get me a perimeter across the wall!’ he snapped. ‘Use all the infantry you can, spears and heavy armour.’
Why did we let them take away our Sentinels?
Not those useless machines but the elite heavy troops who would have stood off this tide until dusk, if they’d had to. ‘Airborne, get yourselves over them – I don’t see them flying, and I don’t see them with bows. I want a storm of stingshot into their heads as they come in, and I want strong stingers flanking the breach and backing up the infantry. Consortium!’

‘Sir!’ Some clerk or other, but coming at his order.

‘Get into the city. Get every man of our kinden . . . get every
adult
of our kinden, men and women, everyone who can sting.
Everyone
comes to defend Capitas. Go get your people to spread the word.’

The clerk stared at him, wide-eyed, but was off into the city the next moment.

The breach was meanwhile filling up with heavier troops, freeing up the Airborne who had seized it first. Tynan saw a great solid block of Vesserett Bee-kinden – solid armour, axe and interlocking hexagonal shields – take up their positions and brace, with Wasps stationed ready to sting over their heads.
Ernain’s lot
, he thought suddenly.
Stab me, but I’m glad we’ve got them.

‘They’re still coming, sir!’ Major Oski dropped down beside him. ‘The ground keeps just pissing them out and pissing them out. There’s no end to them.’

Thank you for your contribution
, Tynan thought, but before he could actually say anything, one of the Airborne dropped down beside him.

‘General, they’re climbing the walls. We’ve got stingers up top, but not enough.’

Tynan nodded, looking back into the city. Sure enough, here came the first wave of stunned-looking Wasp-kinden – artificers, Consortium book-keepers, intelligencers, factory overseers, wives, mothers, surgeons, whores – all the little cogs that made empires and armies run.

Well, today they’re all soldiers.
‘Go, get any Wasp not in uniform up on the walls and sending stingshot downwards. Men, women, slave, free – I don’t care.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Sir?’ It was Oski again, and when Tynan rounded on him he shrugged helplessly. ‘Sir, I don’t seem to be able to
do
my job, with the . . . with the . . .’ He waved his arms towards the surviving wall artillery that was sitting idle and devoid of meaning. ‘You need a messenger or something?’

‘Good man, Major.’

The surging tide of earth-kinden and their sinuous beasts went crashing against the breach, barely held in check by the Wasps and Bees stationed there. The air above them crackled and sang with a storm of stingshot.

And Oski was right: they were still coming.

‘Sod me, just look at them,’ Straessa breathed, horrified. To say that she had never seen anything like it would be sheer understatement. The sight of the soldiers of the Worm venting up from the earth, clambering over one another, a great coiling mass of human bodies driven by one hungry purpose – it was not something that anyone should have to see.

‘Tactician says to hold,’ the Sarnesh man told her.

‘Oh, no fear,’ she assured him. ‘I don’t see me wanting to go any closer to
that
, thanks.’

‘Antspider.’ The voice was Gorenn’s, though it took Straessa a moment to recognize it. Something completely unfamiliar seemed to have gripped the Dragonfly woman.

‘I know,’ Straessa assured her.

‘No, you do not. This is wrong,’ Castre Gorenn insisted.

‘You don’t need to tell me. I never saw anything more wrong in my life,’ Straessa agreed, increasingly aware that she and the Dragonfly were speaking at cross-purposes.

‘What is going on?’ A new voice – that of Balkus forcing his way through the Collegiate troops to get to her. ‘What
are
those things?’

‘Why would anyone expect me to know?’ Straessa demanded of the world in general.

‘Listen, Antspider.’ Balkus looked frightened – in a way that even the wrath of his fellow Sarnesh hadn’t made him look. His nailbow hung on its strap, a useless deadweight. ‘Most of my lot are saying that we either run away or we charge.’

‘What?’

‘My Inapt, which is most of us Princep lot – Roaches, Moths, Spiders, all that – they’re going crazy. They want out, or if there’s no out, they want to get stuck in.’