The Seal of the Worm (73 page)

‘Orders are to hold,’ came the emotionless tones of Milus’s mouthpiece.

‘Sounds good to me,’ Balkus admitted, ‘but I’m not joking when I say that my lot won’t just sit still for long.’

‘
Orders
are—’ the Sarnesh started again, but Gorenn cut across him.

‘Straessa, we have to fight them.’

‘Are you insane?’ the Antspider demanded.

‘You don’t understand what you’re looking at,’ Gorenn insisted.

‘No, I don’t, which is why . . .’ Straessa tailed off, looking past Gorenn at one of the Mantids, one of those whipcord-lean old women who seemed to make most of their decisions. ‘What does she want?’

‘She wants us to attack, because it’s our duty,’ Gorenn explained, as though everything was so very self-evident. ‘Orders—’ the Sarnesh intoned.

And Straessa snapped at him, ‘Will you just shut your yap while I work out what’s going on? Gorenn, please?’

‘Officer, those out there –’ the Dragonfly’s tremulous gesture took in all of the seething mass heaving its way clear of the earth – ‘they are the enemy. The real enemy. The true enemy. The
only
enemy.’

‘How can you know that?’ Straessa wanted to know.

‘How is it that you do
not
?’ Gorenn shouted back in her face. ‘How blind are you Apt, that you cannot
know
in your bones, in your hearts, in your . . .
everything
that you must oppose what we see there?’

Straessa just stared at her thinking,
Yes, you are right. All of me is saying just that, except for my brain, which has the casting vote. The brain just doesn’t know what the pits is going on, frankly.

‘I’m going,’ Gorenn informed her. ‘I’m going, and the Mantids are going, and if your people want to come, Balkus, then they won’t be alone.’

‘There are thousands of the bastards,’ Straessa said weakly. ‘You’ll be pissing into a storm.’

‘At least we’ll be pissing
somewhere
,’ Gorenn declared, and the bizarre discrepancy between her furiously sincere tone and what she had actually said was the final straw for Straessa. It was official: the world was either mad or ending. Either way, why not?

‘Let’s go!’ she bellowed, in her officer’s voice. ‘Pikes front, swords out, trust to your mail. We’re going to kill some what-ever-the-pits-they-are!’

‘No!’ the Sarnesh liaison protested. ‘Orders—’And then Balkus punched him in the face, as hard as a big Ant can punch, and the man went down.

‘I’ll get my lot.’ He drew a pair of shortswords from his belt and weighed them in his hands. ‘Maybe that turd Milus will die of apoplexy as a bonus.’

‘Right.’ Straessa looked past Gorenn towards the Mantis woman. ‘I’m trusting you pissing Inapt bastards,’ she warned. ‘I seriously don’t understand just what is going on right now, but you’re telling me we have to fight because it’s the right thing to do? Well, Collegium’s played that card enough times in the last few years. So, fine, let’s go at it.’

In his command carriage, Milus stood up suddenly, watching the left flank of his army ripple and bulge and then break forwards, in a weird mirroring of the Capitas wall. Then they began marching – the Collegiate maniples pulling closer to one another and presenting a bristling face of pikes towards the earth-kinden that were already spilling their way.

His liaison had been struck down! And what were the Beetles
doing
? Had the loss of their Aptitude stripped away their reason as well?

And then the Mantids were on the move as well, setting the pace and bringing the Collegiates to a steady jog to keep up. And the whole left side of his battle order was abruptly operating on its own recognizance, and no longer under his control.

He swore fiercely, his displeasure crackling across the face of the Sarnesh force.

All others hold!
he insisted, aware that there were those amongst his own who dearly wanted to attack as well, moved by some urge, some revulsion at what they were seeing that they could not account for and yet could not deny. Milus’s hold over his army was weakening, so he browbeat them, he forced his mind upon them:
You are mine! You have no say! You are just bodies who march to my plan, or we lose everything!

Then the Vekken went. Through the eyes of his soldiers he watched, open-mouthed, as the dark-skinned Ants formed up into that same solid block of shields that he had been trying to dissuade them from all the way from Collegium. Suicide, of course, to march that kind of close-packed formation directly into enemy shot and artillery. Except that there was no shot or artillery, and this traditional Ant fighting formation was perfect for taking on superior numbers in close combat. Milus stared as they set off, keeping a brisk pace to catch up with the Collegiates.

Hold! Have the Tseni hold!
There was a furious argument going on between his liaison and the Tseni commander – the woman demanding to know what Milus was doing and expressing a growing lack of faith in her allies.

Milus smelt smoke.

His head snapped up, his mind abruptly returning to the interior of the carriage.
Smoke . . .?

There was a wisp of it coiling about the carriage ceiling. Yet the carriage itself was detached from any automotive, and there was no machinery that might have overheated or caught light.

The smoke was rising in leisurely coils from the wooden floor at one end of the carriage – and now he was reminded just how much of his surroundings were just wood, after all, and therefore flammable. He stepped a little closer, hunching down. Yes, between the planks of the floor there was a dull red glow.

‘So this is your revenge, is it?’ he murmured.
Lissart, of course.
The little firebug had not fled, after all. ‘More fool you for staying around.’

Wood would burn, but not fast, and the fire had only just started. He stormed towards the door to the carriage and flung it open.

There was a brief tug of resistance halfway through the motion, as of a broken thread.

Facing him was a placard nailed to the carriage rail, hastily painted white letters stating, ‘A present from Despard.’ His eyes had time to register those words, though not to understand them, when the explosives went off virtually underneath his feet, flinging him back into the carriage.

A second later, the fire Lissart had set hit the fuel barrels the Flies had hidden beneath the carriage, and the resulting fireball lifted the entire carriage off its wheels and tore it – and Milus – apart.

Forty-Seven

Stenwold glanced back at the silent vacant city as he paused in the doorway of that remembered Mynan townhouse. The sky above, which he had assumed to be morning, was greying over to evening already. He could see no sun up there, only a uniform layer of ragged clouds.

Bad weather on the way
. But, if he was true to himself, he knew it was not that, not really.

He shivered. If he listened very hard, he could just discern distant voices, and hear that woman, whose name he could not quite bring to mind, calling out his name.

I’m sorry
, he thought. She sounded further away than previously, blown on the wind. He could only just make her out.

Paladrya
. That was it.
I don’t think I can come back to you.

He pushed at the taverna door, half expecting it not to give way, for the entire building just to be solid stone, preserving its secrets from him.

But it swung open, and he stepped into that remembered taproom. For a moment his mind supplied the bustle of a Mynan taverna of two decades before but, no, it was as abandoned as the rest of the city. Abandoned but clean and intact, as though the Wasps had never arrived.

Here was where the soldiers of his Ant friend Marius had sat awaiting the start of the siege.

But I wasn’t here. I was upstairs with my glass, staring out at the gates. Not knowing we had been betrayed. Not knowing that day would hammer me into shape like a smith. What would I have become, if I had not been there? What would the world have become?

A worse place, I hope.
But, at this point, he realized that he had no guarantees.
They named me War Master, an old Moth title from the Bad Old Days. Surely I only ever wanted to prevent war?
But his mind was loose on its bearings, and he could not swear to that, after all.

Stenwold went up the stairs to where it had all started.

He was waiting there, sitting at one of the tables just as when their little band of fools had made their plans. Dead fools now, all of them, Stenwold’s oldest friends, and none older than this one.

‘Hello, Tisamon,’ he breathed.

The Mantis was looking him over, a curiously unreadable expression on his face that at last resolved into the smallest of smiles.

‘Hello, Sten.’

Stenwold went to take a seat across from him, noting how dark it was, already, out of the windows.

‘You’re looking well,’ he ventured awkwardly. It was true and it was not true. Here was the young Tisamon, lean and deadly, but with the old Tisamon clearly visible beneath the skin: the lines of care, of soured hope and self-recrimination all traceable there like veins. And beneath even those was the shadow of the skull, telling of the death that had claimed this man and not let go.

‘It’s good to see you again,’ the Mantis said, and Stenwold was startled to see tears glint in his eyes. ‘It’s been so long, but I knew you’d be here, eventually.’

‘Here . . .?’ Stenwold glanced around, still trying to come to terms with what he was seeing. The room seemed to blur as his memories fought to impose themselves on it. Surely there was a Wasp army out beyond the gates, about to attack. Or was this occupied Myna where Kymene’s resistance was on the streets? Or just a bombed ruin again?

‘I don’t understand,’ he admitted at last, sounding lost even to himself. ‘Why am I here?’

‘Sten,’ Tisamon said softly. ‘It’s always been Myna for you, surely you can see that? Ever since that first time, when you saw the Wasps capture it. Myna
made
you. For you, it’s always been about Myna. Where else would you go, when . . .’

When . . .
‘There is no when,’ Stenwold declared, feeling an unnameable emotion begin to rise inside of him.
Is it grief, if the person you’re mourning is yourself?
‘There’s life, and there’s death. There is no . . . this.’

Tisamon’s smile grew fond. ‘Then perhaps this is just you, in the end . . . in your mind. Does that make it any less true for you?’

‘I . . .’ The Apt part of Stenwold told him he should argue, but it seemed like a lone voice at the Assembly. ‘You died, Tisamon.’

The Mantis nodded. ‘I know.’

‘A long time ago, now. They say you killed the Emperor.’

‘I didn’t, but it pleases me that they say so.’ A rare smile appeared, cut right from Stenwold’s happier days.

‘So why are you here? Myna was never anything special to
you
.’

Tisamon was looking at him, still smiling, his eyes bright with old pain. ‘Sten,’ he said, ‘you didn’t think I’d go on without you, did you?’

For a long time, Stenwold just sat there, looking at his friend, then he looked down at his hands, which had built and destroyed so much, and at the last he smiled back.

‘I suppose not,’ he conceded, and pushed himself heavily to his feet. ‘Shall we?’

They descended the stairs together and stepped out into the night-silent street. Up there, further up the layered tiers of the city, there was an airfield. Where else would they be heading, but somewhere that promised an infinity of destinations?

Stenwold clapped Tisamon on the shoulder. ‘Come on, let’s go.’ He felt twenty years younger.

Above, the stars were coming out.

This time, when the Worm ebbed away again, the crippling pain did not go. It took a step back, like a duellist itself, assessing her condition and ready for its next strike, but when Tynisa lurched to her feet and fended off Tisamon’s immediate strike, she still felt that stabbing hurt deep within her.

Her own time, as opposed to everyone’s collective time, was running out.

She feigned a retreat and twisted inside his guard, gripping the lip of his helm with her off hand and trying to wrench it free, to expose some part of him that she could pierce, to look upon her father’s face. He went with the motion, dragging her into the spines of his arm, which scored red lines across her body. Then his claw was driving back towards her, crooked underhand like a dagger.

She blocked the thrust, forearm to barbed forearm, then grappled at his wrist, getting a hold for long enough that she could drop back on her good leg, turning his attack into an over-extension, smashing him across the helm with her knuckle-guard twice, back and forth, then driving the point of her pommel in between shoulder and neck. She felt the fine mail there give slightly, and for a moment Tisamon was down on one knee, but then he had driven his arm-spines into her side with all the force he could muster, knocking her over and following up instantly, so that she had to roll over the jagged ground to avoid his first thrust, then backwards into his legs to dodge the second. He stumbled over her, and she was slithering out from under him immediately, jabbing back at him and feeling her sword’s tip scrape metal yet again.

She forced herself to her feet – her sword dragging her up more than anything, and saw him stalking her sidelong, assessing her condition just like the pain itself was doing, clearly planning his next attack.

She realized that she was between him and Seda.

He must have grasped it at the same time, breaking from his carefully poised stance in an almost awkward rush for her, but she had already passed out of his reach, just one halting step ahead of him, leading with her blade towards the Empress.

Then the pain returned and she crashed down with a wrenching cry, one hand to her hip to find that old wound torn open again, the blood soaking into her leggings. She flailed at Seda, but the Empress was just out of reach, staring at her in fear and rage, hand out and trembling.