Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Czajkowski

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  The Tor UK team & our authors

  For Scott Young

  Principal Cast

  The Empire

  Seda, Empress of the Wasps

  General Tynan, Second Army

  General Marent, Third Army

  General Brugan, Rekef

  General Lien, Engineers

  Colonel Varsec, Engineers

  Colonel Brakker, First Army

  Colonel Nessen, governor of Helleron

  Honory Bellowern, Beetle diplomat

  Major Vrakir, Red Watch

  Major Vorken, Slave Corps

  Major Oski, Fly-kinden, Engineers

  Captain-Auxillian Ernain, Bee-kinden, Engineers

  Merva, wife of Edvic, governor of Solarno

  Lieutenant-Auxillian Gannic, Engineers

  Tisamon, Seda’s undead guardian

  Collegiates and their Allies

  Stenwold Maker, Beetle-kinden War Master, missing, believed dead

  Straessa ‘the Antspider’, officer, Coldstone Company

  Eujen Leadswell, Beetle-kinden officer, Students’ Company

  Castre Gorenn, Dragonfly-kinden, Coldstone Company

  Laszlo, Fly-kinden agent, former pirate

  Kymene, Beetle-kinden commander, free Mynans

  Tactician Milus, Sarnesh Ant-kinden

  Sperra, Fly-kinden, agent from Princep Salma

  Balkus, commander, renegade Sarnesh from Princep Salma

  Sartaea te Mosca, Fly-kinden magician and lecturer

  Poll Awlbreaker, Beetle-kinden artificer

  Metyssa, Spider-kinden writer

  Raullo Mummers, Beetle-kinden artist

  Lissart, Firefly-kinden agent, prisoner of Milus

  Aagen, renegade Wasp-kinden, now of Princep Salma

  Others

  Cheerwell Maker, ‘Che’, niece of Stenwold, magician

  Thalric, Wasp-kinden renegade, her lover

  Tynisa, halfbreed Weaponsmaster, Tisamon’s daughter

  Maure, halfbreed magician

  Esmail, Assassin Bug spy

  Dariandrephos, ‘Drephos’, halfbreed master artificer and leader of the Iron Glove

  Totho, his second, halfbreed artificer

  Messel

  Orothelin

  The Hermit

  Contents

  Part One: Buried Alive

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Two: Tremors

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Part Three: On the Edge of the Abyss

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Glossary

  Praise for Shadows of the Apt

  About the Author

  By Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Buried Alive

  One

  It was cold down in the bowels of the earth. The darkness was not the same hindrance to her that it was to her companions, but the cold she could do nothing about.

  Worse than that was the absence. Born Apt in Collegium, she had no precise words for it. Perhaps the Moths might have done before her ancestors had thrown them out. To a magician, every place had its own feel. There was some additional sense thus engaged that the Apt could never guess at, and that she herself was still learning how to use. Travelling from her home city to the halls beneath Khanaphes, from the great wild expanses of the Commonweal to the tortuous knots of the Mantis forest, all these places had touched her and informed her, even if she had not realized it. There had been a constant voice, and now it was gone – at best. At worst, when she strained that unnamed sense of hers to the utmost, she could hear something else.

  A chanting, a susurration from the stone depths. The voice of the enemy. The voice of the Worm.

  They were all in the realm of the Worm. In her rage, the Empress Seda had broken the Seal holding that common enemy in its prison domain for a thousand years. Che and her companions had been cast into that dark closed-off place.

  It was still closed off, like a woodlouse clasped about itself, but uncurling now, slowly but surely. There would be cracks showing already, weak points that the Worm could pierce to cross, experimentally, into the wide world beyond. Che had thought to do the same, at first. So simple, to exercise her powers as a great magician in this magic-forged place, where surely power was concentrated and free for the taking. She would find out where the fractures were, and she would leave the Worm’s realm before its denizens ever realized new guests had arrived.

  But that sense, that ability of hers, had fled. She could not breathe water. She could not walk through rock. The medium of this place was inimical to her powers. She, crowned by the Masters of Khanaphes as inheritrix of the ancient ways, had been cut off from her throne and from her inheritance. She was denied the Aptitude that was her birthright, and also the magic that was its replacement. Without those crutches, she fell.

  Only one lifeline remained to her. She yet held on to one faint and tenuous connection back to the world, as if fate had considered her exile not cruel enough. Seda was still her sister, in some perverse, bitter way. They had been crowned at the same time. They were linked. Sometimes, unbidden, Che sensed her.

  She knew, from this bond, that the doom that had befallen her and her fellows had not touched Seda. Seda was free, still out in the world.

  Seda had won.

  Faced with that realization, something had broken inside Che. She was aware that she had been down here now – if down was even a meaningful word for where she was – for some time, for days, tendays, months even. She was moved, goaded to her feet and forced onwards from place to place. The hands t
hat shoved at her, that grabbed at her and pulled and would not let her just sit down and give up – they belonged to her friends. She remembered them, distantly. She had brought them to this fate, led them here to their banishment. She would not have blamed them if they abandoned her in the dark, just left her behind. Possibly she would have preferred that, but they would not let her be.

  They brought her food. It was horrible, uncooked and slimy, breaking into brittle, dry pieces in her mouth. They would not leave her alone until she had eaten. They brought her metallic-tasting water.

  Sometimes she was aware that they were hunted, and then they hustled her along from hiding place to hiding place. In the depths that she inhabited – her own personal prison – she could not raise sufficient curiosity to care who pursued them, or why.

  Let it be the Worm, was all she thought. Let it make an end of me. For surely that hideous, all-consuming monster of legend was more than equal to the task.

  In those moments she listened too hard and heard that chanting, ranting echo of it, so distant and yet so potent and hateful, she knew it could do more than make an end of her: it could make an end of all the world. The Worm was a thing apart from Apt and Inapt, from mere kinden and kin. The Worm would devour the world, and Seda had given it the chance to do so.

  After unknown ages, there was fire.

  Che had lived with the cold and the dark – within and without – for so long that at first she did not understand what it was. The feel of warmth on her skin, the light – so brazen, such a lure to all the dangers of this place – it was like a distant beacon to her, calling her back from the lonely places where she had become lost.

  She, who could see in darkness, only realized how blind she had become to her surroundings as she began to return to them.

  How long. . .? But she could not know. Some part of her, some internal regulator that marked the hours and days, had ceased to function once she was cast down here. The land of the Worm had no sunrise, no phases of the moon. Timeless, undying, it had lain here for an age beneath an unchanging stone sky. It was beyond the sun, therefore beyond time.

  Her eyes were already open, but she opened them anyway, beginning to see rather than just stare vacantly.

  She remembered her companions, her friends, fellow inmates of this final asylum. What could be worse than being a lone prisoner of this dungeon? Being responsible for the imprisonment of others. She found their faces as the fire lit them, one by one.

  There was Tynisa, her sister in upbringing if not in blood, Weaponsmaster, Tisamon’s daughter. Tynisa, whose revenant father was now a slave to the Empress, bound by chains of magic. The girl had always run ahead through all the years of their shared childhood, with poor clumsy Che stumbling in her wake. So how did it come to this, that she has followed me even to this place? Che could feel all the sharp points of the Mantis breaking through Tynisa’s Spider-kinden facade, and all it told her was how fragile that combination really was.

  Thalric next, her enemy, her captor, her victim. Thalric, whom she had wrested from the Empress, transformed from Imperial consort to renegade lover of one Cheerwell Maker, dysfunctional Beetle magician. How could he cope in the realm that she had come to? His limited ability to accept or understand magic must have broken him, surely . . .? And yet here he was, still sitting beside her. The hand that cradled hers was his. She knew its callouses and its lines, the touch that warmed her, the heat in it that could kill.

  Further from her: Maure, the halfbreed magician from the Commonweal, no doubt fiercely wishing she had stayed there. She lacked Che’s power but far surpassed her in understanding. Seeing her, Che found hope: surely Maure could help her. The woman was a survivor. She must have some way of wriggling free from the bonds of this place.

  And last of them: the unexpected, the unasked, the assassin. Esmail, his name was, and he had travelled in the Empress’s company. He had tried to kill Seda, and he had succeeded in putting an end to the ancient Moth magician, Argastos. That success and that failure together had led to him being by Che’s side when the Empress had unleashed her wrath. But he was a killer by blood and by training and by deed. He had surely earned his place in this realm of the damned.

  Her hand clenched suddenly on Thalric’s and he started. She heard him speak her name, soft and almost in her ear, as though wanting to keep her only to himself.

  The fire leapt in her eyes, dancing in unnatural hues of violet, blue, corpselight green. The colours glinted on the enclosing walls: a cave? Of course a cave, but she had a sense that they had previously been travelling through vast spaces, caverns whose ceilings were high beyond guessing. Her residual senses recalled waterfalls, lakes that were almost seas, the far constellations of distant cities.

  There was a smell of food – of meat cooking – and abruptly Che felt hungrier than she had ever been. On cue, Thalric drew her hand towards a flat rock on which strips and shreds of something pallid and stringy were laid out.

  It looked awful, but it was meat and it was hot, so she ate with vigour. Chewy but almost tasteless, it was not what she had been living on since . . . since whenever.

  ‘Someone tell me what’s going on,’ Che said at last. ‘What’s happened since we . . . Since whatever. I don’t care who, but someone tell me.’

  ‘Now there’s the Che we were looking for,’ Thalric remarked drily. ‘Always with the useless questions.’ His sardonic smile was leavened by something uncharacteristic, though: worry. Worry for her.

  ‘We’ve been on our own down here for a long time,’ Maure declared, her voice strung taut with fatigue and nerves. ‘We’ve been avoiding other people for most of the time. We . . . this place is huge, a whole world locked away. There are strange kinden here . . . we didn’t know, none of us, what they would do with us. So we’ve been living like vagrants for . . . time. A long time. We wanted just to strike out. I thought I could . . . find a way out.’ Her voice shook. ‘I can’t . . . I have nothing left of my skills. Thalric says they were never real, and I . . . sometimes I think he must be right. This place has killed them, eaten them. And out there, in the true dark, there are things . . . and so little food, so little of anything. And you . . . at first we thought you would come back to us and tell us a way out, but you just . . . there was nothing . . .’

  ‘I . . .’ Che’s mind thronged with excuses, mystical nonsense about seeking answers, fighting some higher battle. She knew, wretchedly, that they would probably believe her: even Maure, who should know better. The words were in her mouth but she swallowed them down. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t . . . It was too much, and I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But you . . . you’ve kept us together, all of us. You’ve found . . . something?’

  ‘People,’ said Esmail quietly. ‘We found the people who live here.’

  ‘We lived in the wilderness at the start,’ Maure explained. ‘But it’s hard out there. There’s just rock, darkness, mushrooms and lichen. When we couldn’t last any longer, when we were starving, we had to go to where the fires were. We’ve been chained to where the people are, since then, where the food is. But never meeting with them, hiding ourselves. Stealing. We’ve been living by stealing. Esmail, he crept in and took from them, their food, their water . . . It was the only way.’

  ‘But the Worm . . .’ Che whispered. This name – and it was not even that ancient enemy’s true name, just the Moths’ insult for them – had been unspeakable and erased from history, but here . . . what was there to lose in saying it? ‘You can’t just walk up to the Worm and steal from its table, surely?’

  ‘Slaves,’ from Esmail. ‘Those we saw, those we took such care to avoid, for fear of their terrible power . . . They’re only slaves of the Worm. We have seen the Worm since.’

  Che took a deep breath, feeling that her hold on the here and now, rather than the dismal wastes within her, was suddenly failing. Too much, too soon, and yet she had to know. She had to understand. ‘What’s changed? The fire . . . the food . .
.’

  ‘Someone found us,’ Maure told her.

  ‘He’d been spying on us for days,’ Thalric interjected, in what sounded like a jab at Esmail’s ability to remain unseen. ‘Messel is his name. He’s a . . . a renegade, of sorts, but there’s a place near here where he has kin. He won’t talk about it, but he’s not exactly an exile and he’s said he returns there sometimes. A slave village.’

  Another deep breath. ‘You have a plan?’

  ‘We need to know where in the pits we are,’ Thalric explained. ‘Next, how to get out. This man, this Messel, he had a sort of a laugh when I first said that, but when he realized that we’d got in somehow, he shut up real fast. After that, when we asked him again about talking to more of his folk, he was a lot keener.’

  ‘Does your plan go any further than that?’ Che asked.

  ‘Why, yes, the plan is: find out how, get out, never mention this place again. Needs fleshing out a little, though. We need intelligence first,’ said Thalric, the former agent. ‘We’re in somewhere completely alien, but there are people here. That means common ground. That gives us something to work with.’

  ‘And the Worm?’ Che asked.

  There was a long silence. Clearly nobody had any answers.

  While the fire burned itself out, they rested. Thalric, Tynisa and Esmail slept, and Che guessed that they had been doing most of the work while she had been refusing to face reality. Now she took hold of herself, still ashamed of the way that she had just given in. So I have no Aptitude? It’s not as if anyone down here’s going to ask me to fix their gear train. So this place has no reserves of magic, somehow. Are the Worm Apt nowadays, then? Was there an underground revolution that drove it all out, or . . .? But it was as Thalric had said: they needed more information. If there were any people here who would not kill them on sight – or worse – then Che needed to speak to them.

  Messel had led them to this cave, she was told, and it was deep and tortuous enough that the firelight would not show outside. While the others slept, Maure took Che to the mouth of it, a jagged slash of dark in a broken rockface, where some ancient upheaval had changed the contours of this buried place. The terrain fell away from them in a tumbled field of jagged stone and shale, and Che’s Art let her see out across it, the great desolation of it: as inhospitable a landscape as she had ever seen.