Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Czajkowski

  He had seen through her. He saw through most things. Having now had a proper opportunity to study him from the unenviable vantage point of being his prisoner, she knew what he was. Ant or not, he was a kindred spirit to her. He walked through the world as though he was the only solid thing in it, as though everything else was just a kind of mist that he could shape as he liked. She knew him better than the other Ants who shared his mind, because he never let them into the main parts of it. He was a singularity amongst his kinden: a man who could feign sharing and yet hold himself private and aloof.

  He had got information from her, at first. He had found new ways to torture her – utilizing the cold machines that she was staring at even now. Then the information had run dry, the Sarnesh war effort expanding beyond her knowledge of the Empire. But the machines had not stopped. He had come sporadically, when his busy schedule allowed it, and made her scream for him. He had taught her what he wanted, what would spare her the worst – not complete acquiescence, but a carefully judged combination of defiance and surrender. He liked her to fight him.

  Only because he thinks I can’t win.

  But, right now, she could not win. They had long ago found the limits of her fiery Art, and now her hands were kept locked away in gloves, as her wings were suppressed by the Fly-manacles across her back.

  When they moved her into this carriage, she had been desperately on the lookout for some sign of hope, but she had not even spotted Laszlo in the brief moments before she had been bundled in here.

  She found she had faith left in him, though: that he had not forgotten her. It was a tenuous thread to cling to, especially as he was such a fool, but she had little else. Until now.

  Now she had company. She might have preferred company that wasn’t a Wasp, but anyone was better than nothing.

  He had been taken by force, judging from the bruises and the cuts, but he was wearing Lowlander clothes.

  ‘My name is Aagen,’ he explained to her. ‘I come from Princep Salma.’

  She was enough of a rumour-gatherer that this name rang bells. There had been a Wasp who was ambassador to Collegium, but had perhaps been killed or perhaps deserted, and perhaps was right here in front of her.

  ‘That didn’t work out, then?’

  ‘It did until the Sarnesh walked in.’ He was bound as well, hands behind his back and strapped together to stifle his sting. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Te Liss.’ She wasn’t sure why she had fallen back on her Solarnese name, but telling her real one never felt right.

  ‘You were . . . what? Why are you here?’

  The official answer was, Because I was an Imperial agent. But she went with, ‘Because Milus is a bastard,’ which seemed truer.

  ‘I was supposed to be assisting the tactician. I told them that I did not flee to Princep because I wished to betray the Empire. I simply wanted . . . I wanted out. I wanted to be . . . somewhere they wouldn’t make me choose sides,’ Aagen told her.

  ‘Well, I know what that’s like,’ she agreed. ‘Just like I know that people like Milus don’t see things that way, whatever side they’re on.’

  ‘We’re on the Sonn–Capitas rail now,’ Aagen said softly. ‘That’s my home, ahead of us. A huge Lowlander army, moving east as fast as the automotives can haul them, a string of carriages a mile long, with thousands of soldiers, supplies, munitions, this deep into the Empire . . . It’s unthinkable. Where can this lead?’

  ‘I assume your presence here means that Milus wants your help with that question,’ she observed.

  ‘They just came and took me from the Princep camp . . . just grabbed me and marched me off. Nobody stopped them – it’s not as though the Ants have much use for us in Princep. I think Balkus would have . . . but he would have died. I’m amazed they didn’t take him as well, but Ants follow orders, and maybe Milus didn’t think to give that one yet. I didn’t think that Milus would . . .’

  ‘I think he’d do any cursed thing he wants,’ Lissart said. She was thinking rapidly, trying to find some use she could put this man to. If she used her Art to heat her gauntlets up, could they burn through the straps that secured his hands? Could he use his sting, then, to free her? Could she get out, with or without Aagen? Once she had regained the skies, the bulk of the Sarnesh army would cease to be relevant.

  Then the carriage door opened, and Milus and a handful of his specialist artificers stepped aboard.

  ‘Now, Aagen,’ the tactician said mildly, ‘we were discussing the defences of Capitas. You’re an engineer, after all, so I’m sure you’ve got a useful professional viewpoint on them. Special focus on weak points, if you please.’

  The Wasp took a deep breath. ‘I will not betray my own people.’

  ‘You already have, plenty of times,’ Milus told him. ‘This is no different.’

  ‘To me it is, Tactician.’

  Milus smiled. Lissart recognized that smile, and in fact he glanced at her at the same time, as though automatically linking her with what he was about to do.

  ‘You’ll tell me,’ he said pleasantly to Aagen. ‘You’ll see that we Sarnesh are the coming kinden. Just as you Wasps picked up so much from your conquests, so we’re learning from you now.’ He patted the nearest machine, which was an interrogation rack taken straight from the Rekef chambers in Sonn. ‘It’ll be a taste of home for you.’

  Paladrya was suffering from the sun, therefore spending most of her time below decks. Stenwold had been surprised that Rosander’s Onychoi soldiers could weather the land as well as they did. He remembered his first excursion with Paladrya and the Sea-kinden into Collegium and Princep. They had complained about everything – the food, the cold, the heat, the dry air.

  Or, no, she had not complained, but she had suffered, just as she suffered now, her white skin reddening and cracking where the light caught it, so that she went about veiled and cloaked like a theatrical ghost.

  Rosander’s people seemed far better able to cope, and eventually the Nauarch of the Thousand Spines had explained that their armour had been specifically designed for the land campaign. Stenwold had thought about that, and about how much warning the Sea-kinden had honestly received, after he had made his unexpected arrival at sunken Hermatyre to plead for their help.

  Rosander had been about to invade the land once. Stenwold did not dare ask whether this armour, with its internal pockets and channels of water, had been left over from that attempt, or whether the Thousand Spines had simply never forgotten that dream.

  In which case I am very glad I gave you this outlet.

  Right now he stood at the airship rail along with Rosander and a handful of his men, watching their little fleet scud across the sky towards Myna. This was another memory made flesh. ‘You remember . . .’ he said, and the huge Onychoi nodded vigorously.

  ‘Oh, I do. You took me up into the skies and showed me your land world and said, “Will you conquer all this?”’ He laughed. ‘And of course I was shocked – whoever thought there was so much land, eh? But I tell you this, Maker – once I went home, to where life is sane and nobody’s in constant danger of falling to their deaths, I never forgot. I dreamt of horizons, Maker.’ Rosander grinned into the wind, showing neat yellow teeth. ‘And so here we are.’ He did not seem to care about the web of politics that had diverted them here to Myna, so long as there was a fight at the end of it – and that Stenwold could certainly promise him.

  The airships had come from Helleron. Stenwold had tried to obtain them by negotiation and credit, but his separation from the main Collegium force had been very quickly known – Milus’s work no doubt – and his personal credit was less than nothing. The Helleren merchants had not even taken the time to meet with him.

  So he had taken his force, Collegiates and Mynans and Sea-kinden all, and simply appropriated what he wanted from the Helleren airfields, acquiring a small fleet of airships to carry the soldiers and their supplies and as much water as could be loaded aboard. He directed any objectors to take matters up with
Rosander. It was not exactly the finest hour of Stenwold Maker, diplomat and scholar, but by then he had run out of patience with the entire city of Helleron. And was running out of time as well.

  Leaving Rosander at the rail, the former War Master of Collegium retreated below to the shrouded undersea gloom of his cabin to find Paladrya.

  ‘Myna will be in sight soon,’ he told her. ‘We’re almost there.’

  She smiled at him, though a little uncertainly. She had said before that she felt that the Stenwold she knew was just one of many sharing Stenwold’s skull. The War Master was an intractable, intimidating companion, far from the man she had met once in the cells of Hermatyre. I think I liked you better when you were a fugitive, she had joked – or half joked.

  He took her hand. ‘This is almost over, but I cannot abandon Kymene and Myna.’

  ‘You’ve told me: this was where it all started,’ she confirmed. ‘Your friends are fortunate in you, Stenwold.’

  He shrugged, sitting down beside her. ‘There have been plenty of my friends who wouldn’t say so. That makes the survivors all the more precious.’ He noticed her concerned look and shook his head. ‘But I won’t stay. I don’t think Collegium needs me any more . . . in fact, I think that having a relic like me stomping around and trying to run things will do far more harm than good. I’m not suited to peace. Or at least not peace on land.’

  When he had returned to Hermatyre, he remembered how the two of them had hedged and edged about one another, neither quite sure where they were. Two veterans of different conflicts, both of them marked by their own privations and grown old in different worlds.

  In the end, the ruler of Hermatyre, Aradocles, had summoned them to a meeting of his advisers at which nobody else had turned up, and they had found themselves alone, in the Edmir’s private chambers, with a banquet laid out. Paladrya’s young protégé had been wise beyond his years, apparently.

  For Stenwold, the morning after that night had been one of terrible soul-searching, not because of anything so irrational as guilt, or because he had any regrets, but because he could no longer pretend that he did not love Paladrya. In the face of that, he very nearly abandoned Collegium and the dry land to its fate.

  Duty, though – its cords still bound him. Even now he was doing what he knew needed to be done, paying his debts, severing his ties one by one. Myna, he felt, was the last of them. After that, everyone he owed anything to would be paid in full or dead.

  For a long time they lay together quietly, Paladrya curled into his chest as though sheltering behind him from some great storm.

  Later they sent for him, one of the Maker’s Own soldiers hammering at the cabin door. Myna was in sight, and the Mynan airmen in their Stormreaders were already fending off a questing band of Spearflights sent to investigate. The time had come to land as close to the walls as possible, and to disembark. Stenwold Maker was returning to Myna.

  Thirty-Seven

  There were several hundred of them in the slave pit, when it was dug. More arrived all the time, day and night. Even with their wings shackled, plenty could climb. Even without that, they could have simply stood on each others’ shoulders. The Slave Corps were at the rim constantly, watching. There was a sense of frustration about the lot of them: professionals not being allowed to do a professional job. Looking up at their faceless helms, te Mosca could still read emotion in them. The slavers who just came here to deliver a fresh load of live human meat were brusque and hard: it wasn’t their problem what happened after they left. The camp guards had probably been like that too, at heart. They were men who had chosen a profession that was a filthy word in Collegium. Surely, of all the villains of the Empire, the Slave Corps harboured the worst.

  And yet she looked up at those men silhouetted against the bright sky and she saw them as just that: men. Some were still and some were vicious. Some threw stones at their charges for sport. Some took women from the pits for their own uses, and nobody stopped them.

  And yet, though they tried to seem impassive, they were troubled: she saw it in the way they stood. There was a slow panic creeping through the Slave Corps. It was insignificant compared to the misery and squalor and fear of their charges, but it was there. The slaves kept coming in, and none was permitted to leave save through the slow death of neglect. They were being overwhelmed with their chosen commodity, like a glutton being force-fed with luxuries until he burst. Something in the Empire had gone dreadfully wrong, and these men had become the touchstone of it. Even the Slave Corps was asking the question ‘Why?’

  Te Mosca wondered why as well. She had an active mind, a good imagination. It was not a facility designed to give her much joy, here and now.

  Today the hungry mouth of the pit was given a change of diet. Today it fed on Wasps.

  When they came to the brink, te Mosca thought they were more persecutors come to see the waste of life and potential this place represented. Then they were flung in, first a few and then by the dozens. They were women, uniformly, and most of them wore white robes. Asking around, te Mosca discovered they were some sort of sisterhood, the Mercy’s Daughters. They had followed the Imperial armies, giving respite and medical aid, but apparently they had not been an approved part of the Empire’s hierarchy. And now they were here, as expendable as the rest. Yes, they could have stung, perhaps; they could have fought. But they had been beaten and whipped, and some bore ragged scars or open wounds on their palms, to show what the slavers did to those of their own kind who resisted them.

  And yet te Mosca watched, and she saw that these Daughters were plainly known to the Slave Corps, and she saw that disquiet take a deeper root and grow in their captors. It was as though they were waiting for the next orders, which might demand they consign themselves to the pit.

  That night, as the slaves huddled in their great host, elbowing and pushing to keep away from that part of the pit which had become their overflowing and stinking latrine, Metyssa spoke.

  At first the Spider storyteller was just speaking to those closest to her: Poll Awlbreaker and a handful of others from Collegium. She had been talking for some time before even te Mosca realized it. Metyssa had a low voice for a woman – slightly husky – and it did not carry well against the constant murmur and moan of the prisoners.

  Except that that undercurrent of complaint was slowing and falling silent around her, as more and more tried to listen. Te Mosca pushed between the tight-packed bodies – a Fly-kinden’s meagre blessing – until she could hear what the woman was saying.

  She’s calling on them to rise up, she assumed at first. She’s inciting them, somehow. But there was nothing of the call to arms in Metyssa’s voice. There was no dirge there, either. Her voice was bright and crisp. She was telling them about Collegium.

  Not the real Collegium, of course. Not the city pocked with bomb craters; the city labouring under the boot of the Second Army; the city picked to pieces by war after war, siege after siege, until it had run out of all the resources required to keep out the foe, up to and including simple defiance. The stories Metyssa had sent to the expatriates in Sarn had never been the bleak truth, after all. They had been daring tales of a resistance that never was. They had been the stories of prisoners rescued, of lovers reunited, of rooftop chases and heroic deeds. She had populated them with distorted mirrors of the people around her. Locked in Poll’s basement, denied the sun and the air for fear that her very kinden would see her arrested and killed, she had cast herself as the dashing swordswoman. They had been Spider tales, full of energy and life, of trickery and convoluted plots.

  To te Mosca’s ears, at first, there was nothing sadder that she could possibly hear than a doomed woman telling her shining stories to her companions in oblivion.

  And yet they listened. Pressing close on all sides they came: men and women culled from the Collegiate streets; captives ripped from the broken principalities of the Commonweal; slaves bought or just confiscated from their settled lives about the Empire; citizens of Imperia
l dominions taken up in their scores because of their Inaptitude; Spider-kinden prisoners of war. A wave of quiet rippled piecemeal across the pit as they jostled each other into silence, until the only sound was Metyssa.

  She spoke for an hour that night, and an hour the next morning. Te Mosca had been frightened that the Wasps would single her out but, so long as the prisoners were quiet, they didn’t care.

  The next night she spoke for two hours – and now she was improvising, not just repeating the stories she had written for the expatriates. She added characters, she tangled their relationships. She told of their lives. That was the thing: she told of people who lived in some other world where things had gone differently. She took her imaginary protagonists to other places – her approximations of lands that her fellow captives had known. Nobody tried to correct her, even though she was fabricating most of what she said from whole cloth.

  And the day after, a Slave Corps sergeant hauled Metyssa out, because she had caught his eye, and two of his colleagues – unranked soldiers as far as te Mosca could see – kicked him half to death and made him send her back. Only then did anyone realize that her stories had attracted a wider audience.

  Still the new slaves came. Soon enough there was another shovel detail working on a third pit. But te Mosca would lie awake at night, once Metyssa was sleeping, and hear distorted snatches of story being passed about elsewhere: in the other pits, in the cages, between the guards.

  She saw, then, how it would go: that the story, that invisible agent, would go from ear to ear amongst the slavers, and it would win them over. It would make them see their captives as individual and human, and they would be unable to go on with their work. They would turn against the evil that was demanded of them. They would open the cages, and step back from the lip of the pit. In te Mosca’s mind – famished and thin and filthy as she was – she could plan it all out, the liberation of thousands by the words of one Spider woman. It was a tale fit to be a legend of the old days, when armies were charmed by song, and monsters were tamed by a few magic phrases.