The Seal of the Worm (76 page)

Lissart had gone, of course.

She had thanked him. He had saved her from Milus’s clutches, and then he had given her the opportunity to have her revenge. He had somehow thought that would bind her to him, that she would look at him and see something similar to what he saw, when he looked at her.

‘There’ll be another time,’ she had assured him, but when he had begged her to tell him where she planned to go, she had demurred. ‘That would spoil the surprise,’ had been what she told him, but he’d known that she had not wanted him coming after her, just as he had known that he would not have been able to stop himself from doing so, if she had given him any hint.

She was at large somewhere in the world, that duplicitous, untrustworthy arsonist of a girl, and here he sat staring out at the sea and mourning her already.

‘Hey, loser.’

He looked up irritably, not feeling in the mood for Despard’s jibes. The
Tidenfree
’s chief artificer had always possessed an abrasive sense of humour.

‘Gude wants to know,’ she insisted. ‘We can’t just sit around at anchor here forever.’

‘Go away.’

‘Let me put it another way, Laszlo. The
Bloodfly
wants to know. You’re going to tell
her
to go away?’

‘If I have to.’

Despard uttered a derisive noise and lit off again for the ship along the quayside. It looked just like a swift little merchantman, but it had been one of the most notorious pirate vessels of its day, and would be so again. With or without him.

Stenwold Maker, Laszlo’s friend and patron, was dead. Why would he stay in this war-bruised city? And yet he had no other destination. Liss had not given him a hint of one.

‘Laszlo?’

Another voice. He looked up to see Sperra, the woman from Princep. She was regarding him uncertainly but, before he could turn away, she had sat beside him, in the manner of someone conquering their own fears.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked her. ‘I thought . . .’

‘Princep can manage without me,’ she said, desperately trying to appear casual. ‘I just wanted to see how you were doing.’

He studied her for a long time. He knew full well that she had taken a shine to him, and he also knew that, on occasion, he had taken advantage of that to get her and her Ant friend to do things for him. He was not proud of that.

But, still, here she was and with an obvious purpose, for all that she would not speak it. One word from him and he would be rid of her, and he could see her bracing for it, ready to risk the hurt, but hoping for the small chance that he might say something different.

‘What next for you?’ he asked her, instead.

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. What about you?’ Relentless in her willingness to be put on the rack.

He glanced over at the
Tidenfree
again. ‘You know, I was thinking of a spot of piracy.’ He took a deep breath, aware that he was doing something right for the wrong reasons – or perhaps the other way around. ‘How about you? Only Despard’s always after more help with the engines, and I think you know some medicine too . . .? Always handy, that.’

There was such naked hope in her expression that he felt wretched for her, and, yet, who knew? There might be no Lissart in his future, or he might rid himself of his longing for her, and a man at his time of life should be realistic. There came a day when you had to stop chasing dreams.

‘Come on,’ he suggested, ‘I’ll introduce you to the crew.’

‘Willem,’ Eujen said, reaching for his stick.

Willem Reader, aviation artificer, made a hurried gesture. ‘You needn’t get up.’

‘I’m going to, though.’ Eujen felt the gearing of his supports finally engage and, with a little help from his stick, he was standing within a relatively short period of time. ‘It’s good to see you.’

‘I was beginning to wonder if the Sarnesh would let me leave,’ Reader agreed. ‘There were quite a few of us, in the end, who were asking just who the enemy was, that we were still helping them get ready to fight. I know it’s thanks to you and everyone else here, putting on the pressure, that they finally decided to act like civilized human beings again.’

‘In all honesty, it was your wife leading the charge.’ Eujen nodded at Jen Reader, who hadn’t let Willem out of her sight since his return. The Beetle woman gave him a tired smile, which Eujen returned with, ‘And, of course, congratulations on your election, Madam Assembler.’

Jen shrugged. ‘I decided that if they still weren’t going to give the chief librarian a seat by right, then I’d cursed well earn one the hard way. And, believe me, Master Leadswell, I’m not just going to sit back and cheer while in the Assembly. There’s plenty I think needs changing around here.’

‘But perhaps not the surroundings?’ Eujen suggested. Around them stretched the ruins of the Amphiophos, the shattered wreck of Collegium’s seat of government. Here the bombs had fallen, in that terrible night of fire that had led to the Imperial air force’s undoing. Here the neutered Assembly had met under Wasp rule, to be dictated to by their conquerors. Grass was beginning to grow between the stones. ‘I think we should keep it like this. An aid to the memory, so to speak.’

‘Well, Master Leadswell, the man of the hour!’ Without warning, Sartaea te Mosca was there at his elbow. She was still painfully thin from the camps, but being back in Collegium had gone a long way to restoring her. ‘What a grave face, Eujen. Are you tired of your honours already, the very same day as the Lots voted you in?’

He grimaced with embarrassment. ‘I’m not the only one who . . .’

‘Oh, yes, certainly yes.’ The Fly-kinden woman grinned shyly up at Jen. ‘Quite the new broom. A whole new Assembly, so many fresh faces.’

‘Well, those who did get elected are going to have to do some work for once,’ Jen pointed out. ‘That probably put off some of the old faces. Did Awlbreaker stand, in the end?’

‘Poll? No,’ te Mosca confirmed. ‘He said he would rather fix machines than cities. They voted in Metyssa, though. Plenty of people remember her stories, from when they were stuck in Sarn waiting to come home, and from when . . .’ For a moment she faltered, then hoisted her smile back up with a visible effort. ‘Let’s just say she’s remembered. Willem, the College Masters are now gathering. Shall we go and join the Gownsmen?’

The artificer grimaced. ‘What’s left of them.’ Replacing vacant College posts was proving more difficult than voting in the elected members of the Assembly. ‘We’re not quite back the way we were, are we?’

Eujen shook his head. Across what had once been the Assembly hall, the new government of Collegium – magnates, veterans, adventurers and mavericks – was finding itself a place where it could gather: on the broken tiers of the old seating, on the rubble, on the ground, under the sky.

‘Time to put the world to rights,’ he decided.

Te Mosca smiled slightly, watching the Readers part company: he heading for the College seats, she for the Townsmen’s. The Fly’s expression was thoughtful, philosophical, a mirror to all the turmoil and change that these last years had witnessed. Then she looked up brightly. ‘I suppose I should follow my own advice and take my place. Oh . . . and, Eujen?’

‘Hm?’

‘Congratulations, Master Speaker.’

The young scholar managed a pained smile. ‘Given the work ahead, I can’t imagine what I can have done to deserve such a fate, but we’ll have to make the best of what we’ve got.’

This had been an arena once, a place for gladiators and wild beasts to tear each other apart to sate the bloodlust of the mighty.

How appropriate
, Tynan considered.

Looking around him, all he could see was division. Here, closest to him, were men representing the armies and garrisons and barracks – mostly junior offices, for many of the generals and colonels were sufficiently unsure of how this might play out that they were keeping tight to their little fiefdoms and preparing for the worst.

Beyond, he could see little knots that represented the various corps, each with their numbers prescribed by Ernain’s cursed declaration – Slavers, Engineers, Quartermasters and more, plus a big crowd representing the various factora of the Consortium. The majority of those were Beetle-kinden, and mostly under the domination of the Bellowerns.

And beyond
them
, thronging the raked seating, were the others: the unthinkable; those he had let in to sully the wheels of government.

He broke away from the army seats and strode in their direction, scanning that offensive
variety
, seeing them as all the Wasps must see them. Here were representatives from every city in the Empire, and plainly many of them not at all sure that they hadn’t been lured here only to be murdered. He saw Grasshoppers and Bees, Ants and Mole Crickets, Flies and Beetles, even a couple of skinny little Skater-kinden from Jerez who somehow now had a say in the future of the state.
We must be mad. We must all be completely mad.
And yet, even on those seats, there were some Wasps: men – and a very few women – who had somehow won over the very people that they had ostensibly been oppressing. It was a new world of opportunity, and simply for that reason it was the anathema of the old regime.

Another man was coming to meet him halfway.
Ah, symbolism.

‘Ernain,’ he nodded. ‘Is it Captain, still?’

‘Just not “Captain-Auxillian”, General,’ the Bee-kinden agreed. ‘Second thoughts?’

‘More than you can believe.’ Tynan looked past the other man to the little band of Spider-kinden who had come in from Solarno and points south. The word was that the Aldanraic States – as the new term went for the land between Kes and Solarno – were still somewhat undecided as to what nation they belonged to, but then that was typical Spider-kinden for you. The thought brought a slight, sad smile to Tynan’s lips.

The various families controlling those cities had sent mostly women to this gathering, he noticed, and to Tynan that showed that they were serious. In their midst he caught Merva’s Wasp features as she nodded soberly to him.
Whoever would have thought it would go this far?
she seemed to be saying.

‘The numbers are interesting,’ Tynan observed. There were still far more Wasps here than any other kinden, but the rabble of others could just about balance them, if they were all pointed in the same direction.
And of course there’s no guarantee that we Wasps will all see things the same way, either. Chaos! Surely it will be chaos.
‘I think the Consortium bloc is going to be deciding a great many things.’

Ernain nodded. ‘Only if you’re thinking of us as your enemies, General. Who knows: maybe we both want to stick it to the Consortium.’

Tynan managed a brief, cut-off laugh and, in its wake, he saw a businesslike look in Ernain’s eyes.

‘Are you ready?’ the Bee-kinden asked him.

‘Why me, Ernain?’

‘Because I trust you, and the cities will follow my lead for now. Because your own people trust you – you’re the closest thing they have to a hero. You negotiated an end to the war: a graceful surrender that preserved their dignity and the lives of their sons. And because an Assembly needs a Speaker, even an Imperial Assembly.’

‘How can we be an Imperial Assembly without an Empress?’ Tynan demanded, knowing that this battle was already lost.

‘You yourself said that there was no actual body. The Empress is . . . gone. Not dead, but gone. In her absence, we shall govern in her name.’

‘Until she returns in our hour of need?’ Tynan asked sardonically.

‘Perhaps. It’s worked out well, don’t you think?’

Tynan looked out across the sea of faces, the sea of kinden, all those frightened people who wanted him to tell them how this was going to work. ‘Just so long as she never
does
come back,’ he remarked grimly.

Months after, in the remote reaches of the Tharen mountains, a cloaked figure struggled through the high passes to reach the door of a reclusive community that almost nobody knew of, even amongst the Moth-kinden.

The door was opened by a Wasp who had given up the life of a soldier a decade before. For a long time he stared at their visitor, not quite believing his eyes.

Soon after, he was conducting the visitor through the lamp-lit halls, past all those others who had turned away from a military life and sought the peace of the Broken Sword.

‘I must ask,’ the Wasp said finally. ‘Your . . . scars . . .?’

Esmail paused a long time before answering. ‘A small price to pay,’ was all he said, in the end.

Soon after, he entered a room where a Dragonfly-kinden woman waited, with three children gathered nervously about her skirts.

Esmail had come home.

The road from the Exalsee to the Commonweal was a long one, and Maure never made it back. Instead, misadventure took her into the Empire in all its turmoil, stepping between the gears of government even as men such as Tynan were trying to fit them into place. She fed herself and kept herself free through her old trade of necromancy, calling up the dead and laying them to rest, easing grief and sorrow at a time when there was more than enough of both.

What surprised her was how easily it came back to her. At first she thought herself mistaken – overestimating herself after that long spell in darkness when she had nothing at all – but in the end she had to conclude:
No, this is real.

All over the Empire, the Lowlands and beyond, other magicians were waking up to the fact that the magic, all that magic that had been locked away to maintain the Seal, was slowly coming back.

As for Maure, she headed northwards every day that she could, and in the end crossed over the Empire’s far northern border to the rotting forests where the Woodlice live, those who had trained her, and who knew no strife, nor drew any great distinctions between Apt and Inapt, and who had the greatest libraries in the world, and there she made her home and lived for a long time.

A year after the war, and finding that life in both Collegium and Solarno was no longer to her taste, te Schola Taki-Amre took an experimental orthopter, powered jointly by Nemean fuel oil and new metal gearing, past the west coast of the Lowlands to brave the storms and the open sea in order to either discover new lands or, alternatively, to circumnavigate the world.