Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Czajkowski

  ‘He can keep the Worm from finding us, because he is of the Worm already,’ Esmail stated. ‘Explain, quickly.’

  Orothellin sighed. ‘He the only one I know who has turned from the Worm.’ He shrugged broadly. ‘Either you will come with us and talk, and have some trust, or you will go.’

  There was a scattering of exchanged glances.

  ‘I’m with Messel,’ Thalric grumbled, but it was plain that Che had already made up her mind. After all, how better to learn about the Worm than from this creature here?

  The Hermit dwelt within a cave that stank of him: a thin, sour reek, the taint of an unwashed body that was not quite human, even though it had come a long way towards that goal. That the place seemed hostile to human life merely placed it alongside almost everything Tynisa had seen down here so far. It was an oppressive thing to look out of the cave mouth and see a darkness that cared nothing for night and day, enlivened only by those false, murderous stars.

  Messel laid a fire, with plenty of nervous glances at the cave’s owner, who sat on a rock staring at nothing, as though trying to wish all his uninvited guests out of existence. Orothellin was the only one his small pupils lit on, ignoring all the rest as if they were hallucinations until Thalric had kindled the blaze with sparks from his steel lighter.

  The Hermit stretched his hands out carefully, as though rediscovering how close he could bring them to the flames. For a long time further he just stared at nothing, his Worm’s face set into a faint frown that was nevertheless a library of expression compared to those of his kin that they had just fought.

  At last: ‘Someone, say something,’ from Thalric.

  ‘I don’t seek visitors.’ The voice of the Hermit was surprisingly strong, a College master or military officer turned gravelly with age, but not lacking in authority.

  ‘Not even visitors from the Old World?’ Orothellin prompted. He and the Hermit, sitting near to one another, had a curious sort of commonality, Tynisa decided. A pair of freaks with no place in this freak-show world.

  The Hermit made a disparaging sound. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Place them for me, then,’ the Slug-kinden challenged him mildly. ‘Where are they from?’

  ‘Do I care?’

  ‘Excuse me, Master Hermit,’ Che, of course painstakingly polite. ‘What are you to the Worm?’

  At that he turned to her, seeming to acknowledge her presence for the first time. ‘A loose limb it doesn’t realize it’s missing. What are you?’

  Che opened her mouth, and Tynisa saw quite clearly that she had no answer any more. The ready responses that she would have owned to under the sun outside had been stripped from her.

  ‘She is a scholar of Collegium.’ The words came to Tynisa quite readily. ‘A freer of slaves, caller of ghosts, speaker of words.’

  The moment teetered on the edge of solemnity before Thalric put in, ‘Too many words, mostly.’

  ‘And the rest of you?’

  ‘Her followers,’ Tynisa stated, and Esmail said, ‘Her creatures,’ at the same time, prompting a surprised look from the others.

  Esmail faced up to them boldly. ‘I have had many masters in my time. I want to return to my home, to my family. I see no way to do so, but she does. If we must fight the Worm to do so, then so be it.’

  Che glanced anxiously to see the Hermit’s reaction to that, to see if he had some residual loyalty to the people – or the entity – he had apparently abandoned. For a moment his pale face screwed up, then it relaxed, lines of character springing away into nothing.

  ‘I have lived free of the Worm this long by avoiding its notice, just as Orothellin has. The Worm need only glance my way, recall that I was once a segment of its body, and I do not know if I would have the strength to refuse it a second time.’

  ‘We do not come to ask you to fight. We ask you to teach us. We need to understand the Worm,’ Che told him. ‘I know that your kinden were not like this when they were sealed here.’

  ‘Oh, you know, do you?’ The Hermit stared at her. ‘And what do you know, Beetle-kinden?’

  ‘They were a power of the Old World,’ she replied. ‘They were magicians. They sought to remake the world in their image, somehow. That much I know. The other great kinden united against them and defeated them, and such was their fear that your people might return to contest possession of the world again, that the Moths and the others made a terrible choice.’

  ‘Feh.’ The Hermit spat into the fire. ‘You know more than I.’

  ‘But what I have seen here is not the Worm of those memories,’ Che insisted. ‘I need you to tell me.’

  ‘Do you?’

  She glanced at the Slug, who seemed halfway to dozing off. ‘Orothellin says—’

  ‘Does he? And what is she to you, Orothellin. Why bring her here? What’s the point?’

  The huge man opened one eye. ‘Is that a new version of your asking me why I’m still alive?’

  ‘If you choose.’

  ‘I have hope still. Even after so very long, I have not lost hope.’

  Another derisive sound from the Hermit.

  ‘And I will help her, help all of them, when they go to fight the Worm. When they go to my poor people here, the slaves and the victims, I will speak for them.’

  The Hermit was looking into the fire again. ‘And you will come to the notice of the Worm at last, old fool.’

  ‘It seems likely.’

  The old man spat and turned away – from Orothellin, from Che, from the world.

  Later, when the others were sleeping, Che found herself awake, staring at the ceiling of the cave, calling on her Art to see, then banishing it again, swapping between a world of black and a world composed of shades of grey.

  Their host was not with them, she realized. Thalric lay beside her, and Tynisa a sword’s length beyond him. Esmail was a curled shape across the fire from her, still keeping his secrets. Towards the back of the cave, Messel lay with his blank face turned towards her; impossible to know if he slept or not.

  And yet she heard the murmur of voices, and where now was Orothellin’s great mounded form? At that, she knew she must have slept a while, because the big man could not have crept past her unobserved when she was awake.

  Careful not to wake Thalric, she inched towards the cave mouth, straining her ears to catch their words.

  ‘You had no right,’ she heard the Hermit say.

  A sigh from Orothellin, but no words.

  ‘I have been beyond its notice for so long. I do not know what I may become if I do this.’

  ‘I have faith in you,’ the Slug-kinden murmured.

  ‘What you are asking . . . I have no words. I would have to take her . . . How else can I make her understand that what she seeks cannot be done?’

  ‘Do you instead fear that perhaps it can be done?’ Che heard Orothellin prompt gently.

  A fraught pause between the two unseen men, and then the Hermit was saying, ‘If I come to the attention of the Worm, if I cannot pass beneath its gaze, if the other Scarred Ones recognize me . . .’

  ‘You have often said that you have lived too long.’

  ‘Easy for you to say!’ An old man’s bitter curse.

  ‘That’s well – for that is what I am saying.’

  Hearing those words, Che did not understand what Orothellin meant, but it was plain that the Hermit did. The silence that followed had a different quality, until eventually he said, ‘You cannot mean it. You intend to remedy that drawn-out thread you call a life, do you?’

  ‘If not for this, then what?’

  ‘For this girl? This Beetle child?’

  Another enormous sigh from Orothellin, and Che had the distinct sense that he knew she was eavesdropping. ‘The greatest failure of my people was ever their refusal to acknowledge this: that all things end. And this place, this prison for the Worm, it ends too, and the Worm plans to be outside, and what it leaves behind here will be picked-over corpses in the hollow scoured-out shell that it has
hatched from. What have I preserved myself for? Life for its own sake, or a life with meaning? If any of my works are to have meaning, then this is the time . . . the time to give everything.’

  ‘You could at least have the decency to outlive me!’ Che heard their host snap. ‘You made me, you fat waste of breath. You taught me to be this useless thing I am now. You took me from the Worm . . . I am your whim, your experiment.’ The Hermit had looked the older of the two, but Che was forced to remind herself that, of course, the former Master of Khanaphes predated this entire world that they were trapped in.

  She had it then, their relationship. Only confusion over their apparent ages had misled her.

  ‘It was unforgivable, I know,’ Orothellin said gently.

  Another long, melancholy silence from the Hermit, until: ‘Why can’t you just leave well enough alone?’

  ‘The great failure of my kinden is that we always think we know best. Will you do this, for me?’

  She pictured the two of them sitting in the darkness, side by side, those two men, and neither with anything similar to them in the whole of this closed-off world: the bloated father; the withered son.

  ‘I will take her. I will show her. And then she will beg me to remove the knowledge from her mind.’ The Hermit’s tone was suddenly fierce. ‘I will bring her to the Worm in all its glory. She wants to understand? I will make her regret her curiosity tenfold. I will kill her hope within the Worm’s coils. I will smother it in the pits.’

  ‘If it dies so easily, it cannot truly be hope,’ was all Orothellin would say.

  Eighteen

  What does it mean?

  What can it mean, that she saved me?

  The question turned over and over in Maure’s head like her very own unquiet ghost.

  She had been in that dark place, that terrible place of no escape. Che had been conducting her ritual. Maure had given her all – that little all she had to give. She had felt the others, from each according to their ability, and at the end she had sensed Che’s desperation and despair: Not enough! Not enough, though it was all the power they had in the world. Maure had resigned herself to defeat, even then.

  And, somehow . . . this.

  She had felt the curtain tear, just for one moment; the world around her had twisted and tensed, furiously unwilling to let even one of its multitude of captives free. But she had been sprung free, nonetheless. Che had freed her.

  She had been the only one. She was enough of a magician to know that. No chance that the others had made it out, too, only to be scattered to the four winds. The Weaponsmaster, the Assassin, Che and her Wasp lover, they were all condemned to the dark.

  But me she freed. And why?

  Maure could not imagine. She had been nothing to Che, not sister, not lover, not even a friend, truly. Merely an acquaintance, an unasked-for follower.

  Looking on the sun, now, she wanted to weep. The tears did come, a little, and not for the first time. There is no sight more beautiful than this. And that was true despite the fact that her Moth eyes could pierce that lightless abyss. After what she had seen below, blindness down there might be considered a mercy.

  So what does it mean? Because that was always the curse of the Inapt: everything had meaning. Nothing was pure chance. The world fell the way it was because human thought nudged and interpreted and read it. Divination saw the web of the future and wove it at the same time, the seer’s vision collapsing all the myriad paths the world might take into fewer and fewer, until the truly gifted magician might look towards autumn and know where every leaf might fall. In theory, anyway. It was true that the science had decayed somewhat since the revolution, the toys of the Apt tearing holes in that predictable web with their mechanistic cosmos that was, paradoxically, so much harder to foretell.

  But Maure was a child of the old days, of the Commonweal and other places where divination was still a tool to live by, not a sham to gull the foolish with. She searched for meaning. Why me? Why here? Why him? There must be reasons.

  There was a town ahead, or perhaps just a collection of shacks crouching on the shore of the Exalsee. Her companion, Totho, had put on an extra stumble of speed, fixing his eyes on it, ignoring Maure, making it plain that she was just an unwanted woman trailing his footsteps.

  He had spoken to her precisely twice since their first meeting. The first time had been to ask what she was eating, as she started gnawing something grey and fibrous left over from the supplies that Messel had foraged for them. Maure had scrutinized the unappetizing fare and confessed she was not entirely sure. For a moment Totho had just stared at her, and she had thought that he would say something more, as though some great revelation was just on the tip of his tongue. Her expectant expression had frightened him off, though – he had seen Che’s name written there and had shied away from it, turning his shoulder and stomping off once more, trying to leave her behind.

  The second time, not long after that, he had rounded on her without warning and just demanded, ‘Why are you following me?’

  Maure had blinked at him. ‘For a lot of complicated reasons,’ she told him; then, as he was turning away once more, she found herself desperate to keep him talking in case she could prise that meaning from him. ‘And one simple one: I don’t have the first idea where I am. Following you’s better than nothing.’

  ‘You’re by the Exalsee,’ Totho had spat back.

  ‘Good.’ She had nodded, desperately earnest. ‘What’s an exalcy? Is it like a principality?’

  He had just stared. ‘It’s this.’ A gauntleted hand waved across the water that ran all the way to the horizon. ‘It’s basically the thing people know about this part of the world. How can you not know this?’

  ‘I was never here before!’ she snapped at him, feeling the keen unfairness of it all – she, who had counted herself well-travelled once. ‘I come from the Commonweal, understand? I have not the first idea where any of this is!’

  For a moment she thought that he might even be sympathetic – but, no, it was just that she had now furnished him with an excuse to explain her away. ‘What, you’re an escaped slave? The Imperials brought you here?’

  ‘No, I told you. Che—!’

  He had snapped, lunging for her – she had skipped back out of his way the first time but his armour didn’t slow him half as much as she expected and, on the second try, he had one of her wrists in his metal grip.

  ‘You don’t know Che!’ He had bellowed into her face. ‘Shut up about Che! You don’t know her and you don’t know me! I’ll . . .’ Looking into that incandescent expression, it was easy for Maure to finish that bitten-off sentence: I’ll kill you if you say her name again. He must have seen something in her frightened face – a woman only a few years his senior, and just as lost as he was – and he had just flung her hand away and marched on, bunching his shoulders against her inevitable, unsheddable presence, now dogging his heels like some part of his shadow that had become detached but would not just go away.

  Totho had been walking for too long, and each step he took just emphasized the fact that he was going nowhere. He might as well tread round and round the Exalsee’s vast circumference like a clockwork toy, until he wound down forever. With that thought, the woman’s constant trailing acquired a sinister connotation, as if she was patiently waiting for him to drop so that she could rob or dismember his corpse. Certainly there seemed something of the dead about her, impossible to put his finger on, but just as impossible to ignore.

  Now there was something ahead that spoke of other people, after what seemed an eternity of lonely journeying with only the maddening, unwanted company of this inexplicable woman. Totho had never been fond of people, as a general rule – a trait born out of their general lack of feeling for him. Nowhere in the world loved a halfbreed.

  Or, no, there had been one place, but it was gone.

  Just now he felt he needed company: company that was not hers. For company could supply him with something to ease his pain, in exchange
for the coins he had in his purse. That was the function of company, if it was not to be the company of his peers.

  He saw mostly Bee-kinden there, some outpost of Dirovashni with a couple of piers extending into the Exalsee and a living based on fishing. There was a taverna, though. That was enough. It was a rough, unfinished sort of place – no tables and nowhere to sit but empty kegs. Three Solarnese were playing a game of cards in one corner, and a Spider sat by herself, clad in armour of silk and tarnished scales, a rapier sheathed at her hip.

  The taverner was a squat Bee woman, blind in one eye, and she regarded Totho nervously, already sensing trouble brewing.

  ‘Wine.’ Totho threw a coin at her, close enough to make her duck. It was gold, though – a central from the Helleren mint. It would keep his bowl full for a while.

  His halfbreed follower was still loitering at the door, but Totho was waving for a refill before she deigned to find a patch of ground to call her own. The taverner assailed her immediately – even the dirt on the floor was for paying customers only.

  She had no coin. Perhaps she was someone’s slave, after all. That made so much more sense than anything involving Che. Just another halfbreed slave cast adrift on the shores of the Exalsee. He wanted her to have some commonplace unhappy story, and all the rest of it to be mere delusion.

  ‘Oi, woman,’ Totho waved another coin at the proprietor. ‘Let her drink. Why not?’ He was desperately hoping that if he treated Maure like a deranged beggar for long enough, she would turn out to be nothing more than that.

  That settled that, and he took the chance to drain his bowl and hold it out again. He was not much of a drinker. He had never had the means when he was a student, and later there had always been his work. A drunken artificer was a creature of little use to anyone. Drephos, of course . . . oh, Drephos never touched a drop. He was . . . he had been drunk on his own brilliance.

  Totho felt the cracks start, inside, where the armour could not protect him.

  A beautiful abomination, Drephos had been: never to be repeated or to be equalled. A man who cared nothing for kinden or the purity of blood, but for merit only. He had put Collegiate Masters to shame with his egalitarian attitudes. If you could, if you were a brother or a sister of the engine and the gear train, the refining vat and the forge, then you had worth to Drephos, no matter what else.