Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Czajkowski

  ‘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.’

  ‘We came by magic,’ Che said, matter-of-factly. ‘There was a seal that held this place closed, and it was broken . . .’ She stopped. The Moth had both hands up, fingers crooked as though trying to cram her words back down her throat.

  ‘There is no magic,’ declared the Moth-kinden with absolute assurance.

  In the silence that followed, they digested this.

  ‘Magic . . .’ Che began, shaken.

  ‘Magic is a lie,’ the woman insisted fiercely. ‘It is a trick of the mind. There is no magic. Only madness lies that way. It is a fool’s story.’

  Maure held her hand to her mouth in abject horror.

  ‘I can assure you there is magic,’ Che stated, wondering at that same moment whether it was herself she was trying to convince. ‘Here it is . . . less than it was. There is something wrong with this place. It ebbs, it’s true, and sometimes it is hardly there at all, but I still feel it, just. There is magic.’

  ‘No,’ the Moth whispered. ‘It’s a lie. It has always been a lie.’ She was shaking slightly, and Che made a sudden connection with her, a moment’s clarity, magician to magician. In that painful instant she saw a life of decades lived, inheritrix of a grand magical tradition but born into a place with nothing but the blown dust of exhausted sorcery to fuel her. She saw that the Moth’s occasional sense of a wider, grander world was dismissed as a delusion, a lie; it was a path easier to follow than having to face what had been lost.

  ‘Atraea,’ the Mole Cricket spoke. ‘Ask them.’

  The Moth stared at Che with equal parts fear and hatred, obviously desperate to hurt her, to erase her and bury the truth of her, but she stayed her hand.

  ‘What will you do?’ she demanded at last. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Something was broken,’ Forge-Iron recalled. ‘She said a seal . . . Are you here to mend it? What is it that has broken?’

  And, even as Che opened her mouth to answer, his next words were: ‘Have you come to fight the Worm?’

  ‘Yes!’ Messel crowed. ‘Why else are they here? We have all heard the forbidden tales: that our ancestors were imprisoned, punish
ed for their ways, but that there would come our kin from outside, who would redeem us, who would rescue us. What else could they be but that?’

  ‘Lies!’ the Moth, Atraea, shouted desperately. ‘There is no truth in prophecy. It serves only to lead fools astray. And there is no fighting them, our masters.’

  ‘The Worm,’ Darmeyr insisted.

  ‘You must not say that. You must say, “our masters”, or say nothing at all. Do you think they will not take even you, if they overhear—!’ Atraea was becoming more and more agitated.

  ‘Listen to me. We must spread the word of their coming,’ demanded Messel, and Forge-Iron was insisting, ‘I will say Worm, and I will say they can be fought,’ and then he cried out, a yelp of pain that seemed ludicrously high from such an enormous man, and backed hurriedly out of the opening.

  Esmail was there, lean and tense against the shadows and the firelight.

  ‘Trouble,’ he snapped. ‘Get out, now.’

  Already they could hear a commotion outside that their argument had blotted out. A gathering wail of dismay was rising from many throats, from all the way down the chasm of Cold Well.

  ‘It is them,’ Atraea said, dead-faced. ‘Your loose talk has brought this upon us.’ And then: ‘No, they have brought it. What else can it be? These “outsiders” have summoned our doom.’

  Five

  The wife of the governor of Solarno had been out the whole day, and the evening too, and Gannic’s informers strongly suggested that she had been meeting covertly with agents of . . . well, his spies weren’t that good but he’d bet that it was certain of the local Spider Aristoi. They would be constantly weaving, daily patching the accord that they had secretly stitched together to keep Solarno out of the war.

  As for the governor himself, he was a Consortium man, a merchant and not a soldier – but either he was the most blinkered buffoon ever to get a colonel’s rank badge or he had the rare attitude in a Wasp of being prepared to let his wife get on with things. After all, Spiders would always have more respect for a woman across the negotiating table.

  Insane that we ever allied with them, even for as long as we did, Gannic reflected, and not for the first time, but the cautious détente here in Solarno showed that anything was possible.

  Since just before sundown, Gannic had been an unannounced guest in the governor’s townhouse, hiding from the servants and settling in while the place turned in for the night around him. He was amused to discover that Edvic and his wife occupied separate rooms, but then perhaps that was part of the unique way that they worked together, and certainly it seemed to have served them well so far.

  So, time to kick over the barrel. After all, he had his instructions from Colonel Varsec, who was keen to meet the woman who had bridged the Wasp–Spider gap, that everywhere else had ripped apart into open warfare.

  The house as a whole had gone to bed by the time the governor’s wife got in. Gannic held very still as he listened to her dismiss the last few servants who had waited up for her return, and then she entered her chambers. It was late, she was tired, and Gannic hid himself well. She considerately lit only a single candle before casting off her robe, obviously worn out by the diplomatic demands of her day.

  Time to introduce myself. Gannic had inherited the dark-seeing Art of his Beetle mother, and he had to admit that Merva was a fine piece of work, as tall and elegant as any Spider woman, hair of gold and skin perhaps paler than he liked it, but he could imagine her matching the Aristoi pose for pose as they trod their diplomatic tightrope together.

  ‘Now there’s a sight,’ he said – and watched her freeze, naked before an unseen enemy, exposed and vulnerable. Then she had collected herself, the shift dropping from her fingers and her palms coming up ready to sting.

  ‘I’d keep those hands down, woman,’ he told her, and by then she knew exactly whereabouts he was. ‘Was it you that killed Captain Carven?’

  ‘Remind me, who was Carven?’ she asked, and he watched each muscle tense as she braced herself for the moment of violence, ready to snap out an arm and unleash her Art.

  ‘Firstly, and as a point of etiquette,’ he told her calmly, ‘my sting’s probably a bit on the feeble side but I’ve a snapbow on you right now, one of the little ones, but good enough at this range. Secondly, I love a show as much as the next man, but how’s about you get your kit back on and then we can talk about why there’s at least one dead Imperial messenger in the bay – and a Rekef man at that – who I know walked into this house alive.’

  He saw her consider her options calmly. He had considered having her remain unclad to intimidate her but, even standing naked before a stranger, she seemed far too self-possessed, and he felt that he would just push her towards a violent retaliation which could lead anywhere – but probably nowhere useful to Gannic.

  Slowly she took up her shift again and pulled it over her head, for all the barrier it provided. When her head emerged, her eyes glinted like steel.

  ‘The governor’s a lucky man, I’ll say that,’ Gannic put in. ‘But you’re playing a dangerous game when you cross the Rekef. That’s better, now. Sit down, and keep your hands out flat on the sheets there.’

  ‘So what does the Rekef suggest happens next?’ she enquired coldly, waiting for that moment of divided attention when she could go for him.

  ‘Sod the Rekef,’ he told her cheerfully. ‘I’m none of them. If you hadn’t done for Carven, I might have had to do him myself.’ A pause followed for that to sink in. ‘Peace in Solarno, eh? Who’d have thought it? But it turns out that suits my superiors just fine. They’ve a use for a Solarno that’s not demolished and on fire. Captain Carven’s current watery grave tells me that so do you – you and your man here.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘And if we do?’

  ‘Fellow who gives me orders is very keen to talk about how you’re keeping this particular plate spinning.’ He stepped forwards at last to let her get a look at him. He saw her take in his features, wrinkling her nose at the very thought of being outmanoeuvred by a halfbreed. But she saw the snapbow as well and passed no comment.

  ‘So who gives you your orders?’ she asked him cautiously. If not the Rekef, was the obvious subtext.

  ‘I am Lieutenant-Auxillian Gannic, lady,’ he introduced himself. ‘Engineers, believe it or not. Take it from me, a lot of eyes are pointed at Solarno right about now. I’d say you’d be surprised, but I’m not sure you would – not you. So let’s get some ground rules straight. Yell out, and I’m going to shoot you. Maybe not to kill, but who can say how good my aim is? And if you or your servants or your man do get the better of me, and I don’t show up safe in the morning, then my chief will make sure word is on its way to Capitas by an hour past dawn, to tell them just how you’ve been playing them. So I suggest you behave.’

  Merva gave him a level stare. ‘What do you want me to do? Book your commanding officer an appointment?’

  ‘No need – he’s ready right now. So how about you get yourself a cloak and we’ll go out quiet, the back way. No need to trouble the staff.’

  He saw her stiffen, considering the odds, and he lifted the snapbow a little to keep it in the forefront of her mind. ‘Let’s go now, and slowly – or I’ll have to say all this stuff to your widower husband tomorrow.’

  He saw himself reflected in her eyes: the brutal halfbreed who might do anything. I’m not the one who killed the Rekef captain, lady, he reflected. Woman or not, I reckon you’re more dangerous than me, given half a chance.

  He put the weapon up against the pale hollow of her neck as he bound her wrists, feeling the thought in her mind about whether she could sting without him killing her by reflex. He kept to one side, though, denied her the most obvious opportunities, and then he had her hands tied palm to palm.

  They moved through the house like some strange dream, soft footed, an invisible thread linking the small of her back to the barrel of his snapbow. At any moment he was sure she was going to cry out or just run, but she ret
ained a stately calm, as though she was merely sleepwalking.

  The side door that Gannic had been shepherding her towards opened just as they got in sight of it, and Colonel Varsec appeared. Gannic stopped, staring at his superior in dumb amazement.

  Am I betrayed? Was Varsec about to stage some heroic ‘rescue’ of Merva? Did that sort of thing even work?

  Then Varsec stepped inside with a wry look at his subordinate. And behind the colonel was a Spider-kinden woman, a slight little thing with short, dark hair and the face of innocence, save that she had a long knife held to the colonel’s neck.

  ‘Good evening, Lady Merva,’ the Spider said politely.

  ‘Lady Giselle.’ The Wasp woman even managed a cordial nod.

  ‘Perhaps your over-enthusiastic slave will put away his device now?’ The Spider smiled at Gannic, who had the snapbow levelled at her face.

  Merva did something complex with her hands and Gannic’s ropes fell away, leaving her palms directed straight towards him. ‘What’s the matter, Engineer? Are all your little cogs failing to mesh?’

  ‘Oh, very good.’ Varsec grinned at Merva over the knife blade. ‘Might I suggest that, since the underhand approach is apparently off the menu, you send for some wine and your husband?’

  ‘And why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Because, right at this moment in Solarno, I am the Empire, or a very large part of it, and the Empire has a deal to make. I want to talk about Solarno’s current détente, and after that I want to talk about Solarno and Chasme and the Iron Glove.’

  ‘Three days since the last delegation left, and here they are again,’ Drephos mused, watching the bustle of the Chasme docks, but with particular reference to the Solarnese sloop that word said had brought another batch of Imperials to their door.

  ‘Perhaps it’s just another order. They still have a few armies to outfit with Sentinels.’ Totho was away from the balcony, studying reports from some of the metallurgists by lamplight, despite the bright daylight he could have had for free if he moved his desk five feet over.