Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Czajkowski

  It’s as simple as pulling on a string.

  Why had he said that? What would that accomplish? He could no longer remember. Pulling on a string did sound simple, though. One hardly needed to be Apt for that, surely?

  His hand was on that string, just one pull required, and yet he could not do it. The necessary link between impulse and action had been broken. He was betrayed by his own Aptitude, which had guided everything he had ever done. Now that its crutch was gone, such a simple move was beyond him.

  That vast head struck down, blotting out his entire world, but it seemed confused by the struggling melee before it, instead hammering at the rock, smashing one of the priests into a pulp, then drawing back.

  Esmail was coming back round, the warriors right on his heels. ‘Go! Go!’ he was shouting, but only because he did not understand how important all this was. Not for Che, not for Collegium, not for freedom, but for artificers everywhere. This obscenity must go.

  Then the Worm lunged again, and this time its hooked claws pincered his body and lifted him up.

  The mail held. For a few impossible seconds, the god of the Centipede-kinden strove against the metallurgy of the Iron Glove and could not break it, though Totho felt his cuirass twist and groan, felt the latching between breast- and backplate snap under the force. And still his hand was at his waist, paralysed by ignorance. The dark radiance that the Worm blazed with enveloped him, but he felt the solid physical clutch of its fangs, and knew he was right. The lord of the underworld, the god of sacrifice and slavery, was no more than a vast beast.

  Then someone was clinging to him, and he looked down into Esmail’s stricken face as the other man brought the lantern down across the Worm’s head, flaming pieces shattering across its broad carapace, which burned for moments like flaming oil on water before the darkness began to conquer the flames.

  In the guttering light of that fire, Totho locked eyes with Esmail and saw understanding there – at last someone who understood. And Esmail had never been Apt: those parts of his mind that this monster was stifling had nothing to do with the urgent instructions Totho had coached him with.

  To Esmail, it was just pulling on a string.

  The Assassin caught the ripcord that dangled from Totho’s belt, which Totho had carefully fed through all his little devices there, in that tiny corner of the prison where he had last been able to think.

  He let go of Totho, falling away back towards the ledge, the cord ripping free. Totho stared down, seeing him vanish into darkness towards that unseen shelf.

  The mandibles of god increased their grinding pressure and he felt the two halves of his armour shear, each of them still intact despite it all, but the pressure of their displacement beginning to tear him apart.

  The Worm lifted him high towards the cave’s ceiling, fighting against the resistance of the armour, the products of artifice that it could not suppress.

  The thing about artifice, was Totho’s last thought, is that it works whether you believe in it or not.

  The string of grenades that looped through his belt erupted all at once and tore him in two, killing him instantly and ripping apart the head of the Worm.

  Forty-Eight

  Straessa backed off, her blade sliding out of a corpse that was suddenly, horribly, not the figure she had just stabbed.

  The fighting had stopped, all in that very same moment, and now the Collegiates around her who were not concerned with the wounded were drawing back from the sight before them. A grim hush was falling, broken only by the moans of the injured.

  Across the field, on the far side of that choked rift, she could see the Wasps were falling back too, recoiling in revulsion from the mess of bodies that now clogged their breached wall.

  ‘Gorenn, tell me . . .’ She did not mean, What am I looking at? She knew what she was looking at, and yet she desperately needed some clarification, some comforting lie that would let her address this sight, categorize it and turn it into something she could put behind her. ‘Please, tell me . . .’

  The Dragonfly stood stock still, staring out at that massed atrocity with a fixed expression. She had no arrows left in her quiver, Straessa noticed. In her hands was the same Collegiate shortsword that almost everyone there had ultimately resorted to.

  Gorenn had no words, no words at all.

  The enemy had just dropped, all at once, like manikins with their strings cut, across the whole of the battlefield, so that the chasm they had been surging from in such numbers was now glutted and blocked with the tangled mass of dead. But not their dead.

  ‘Get me a Sarnesh here!’ Straessa pleaded. Please, someone tell me what we do now. ‘What does Milus say? Is he seeing this?’

  It was a strained, ghastly minute before an Ant-kinden woman staggered over, her eyes full of the sight before them. ‘Milus is dead,’ she got out.

  ‘Lucky bastard,’ Straessa said, with feeling. ‘So where does that leave us? What do we do?’

  By now she could see that the Wasps were returning to defend their wall, albeit reluctantly. At the same time she became aware again that the snapbow slung over her back was something more than just a weight of metal: it was a weapon, fit for her hands and her mind.

  But nobody was yet moving across that hideous charnel field. Nobody had the heart. The Sarnesh woman was shaking her head. There were no orders.

  Before them lay a carpet of fallen children.

  There were dozens of different kinden among them – Beetles, Woodlice, Moths, Mole Crickets, and some Straessa could not even name. Not one of them looked to be more than eleven, and most were younger, far younger. They lay still amongst the wreckage of arms and armour crafted for far larger bodies. There were thousands of them; tens of thousands. They were uncountable.

  Straessa felt something within her close to breaking point. At no time before had she ever wanted less to be in command of anything, or to bear any kind of responsibility than now, facing this.

  She could not even understand it. She could not know what the sight meant. She thought Gorenn might, from her expression, but the Dragonfly was not putting it into words.

  So what the pits happens now?

  ‘We’ve got it all back?’ she asked the Sarnesh woman. ‘Auto-motives, artillery, all that?’

  The Ant nodded numbly.

  So what? Do we just . . .? We came here for a reason, didn’t we . . .?

  It was the thought of trampling across that vast mass of dead children, of grinding them beneath the tracks of the automotives, of climbing that mound of small corpses that had banked up before the breach.

  I don’t know if I have it in me to do that, or to order anyone else to do it, but someone has to issue some sort of order. We can’t just stand here till we starve.

  What would Eujen do?

  The thought was inexpressibly calming. Eujen would know exactly what to do.

  ‘Fetch me a messenger. I need someone to take word to the Wasps.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Gorenn volunteered immediately, but Straessa shook her head.

  ‘I think sending a Commonwealer over to them would give entirely the wrong message,’ she decided. And, when the Dragonfly made to protest, she added, ‘It’s not you. I just don’t want any dumb Wasp having flashbacks to what you did to them in the Twelve-year War, right?’ It was the world’s weakest joke, and Straessa could barely muster the ghost of a smile, but Gorenn returned it, in just about the same degree, and nodded in resignation.

  In the end, it was Sperra who went. She had not fought in the battle but arrived afterwards, seeming a strange mix of defiance and misery. But when Balkus explained what was going on, she volunteered. She had run enough messages between cities before Collegium was liberated, after all. What was one more?

  And at least she could fly. Nobody was about to tread that body-cluttered distance lightly.

  By then, Straessa had the full attention of all the Lowlander contingents: Sarnesh, Vekken, Tseni, Netheryen, Princep and Collegiate. Staring round at
them all, she thought, How mad are you all, that you’re going to let me do this? Don’t you know who I am? They didn’t make me chief officer even when I was the only officer left in the entire Coldstone Company – that’s how unreliable I am.

  ‘Go and tell the Wasps,’ she said, her voice stumbling over the words, ‘that the army of the Lowlands will offer them terms . . .’

  And in the dark of the underworld the sounds of fighting and massacre went abruptly silent.

  ‘What is it?’ demanded Thalric. ‘What’s happened.’

  Che held him very tight, so that he could feel her shaking. She had no answer for him.

  Then the wailing started as the slaves surveyed what had become of the enemy, and began recognizing faces.

  Esmail was left in pitch darkness after the flash of Totho’s explosives had blazed across the cavern above him. The force of the blast was enough to knock him flat, and everyone else as well, but he was prepared for the onslaught of dark-adapted Centipede warriors descending on him, taking advantage of his blindness.

  Yet they did not come. Only silence came, and silence and darkness were, for a stretched-out moment, his only companions.

  Until at last the cries began, fearful and incredulous. They started as a terrified murmur and rose to shrieking denial, to rage, to utter babbling madness. At least one voice rushed past him, and then receded as it pitched over the brink, surely at the owner’s intent.

  And then his name was called: ‘Esmail!’

  ‘Who . . .? Hermit?’

  ‘Come here. Come here, man.’ There followed the sound of a solid impact. ‘Not you! Get back!’

  Esmail limped over, feeling half broken by his fall. ‘I need light. Can you hold them off?’

  ‘Easily,’ the Hermit grunted, which surprised Esmail at the time because he still expected the Worm’s warriors to be present.

  He had tinder with him, and some dry mushroom stalks, and flint and steel, but it took him a long scrabbling time in the dark to get anything ignited. There was meanwhile the occasional whack of the Hermit’s staff, and the babble of distressed voices did not let up, but no pitched battle flared up. Esmail was utterly bewildered until he finally got the torch lit and cast a look around.

  He saw at once that the Hermit had herded a little knot of Scarred Ones together, and was keeping them hemmed in under the threat of his staff. But of the warriors . . .

  He saw the bodies, and what they had become. He understood.

  Totho . . .

  There was no sign of the Lowlander, just as there was no sign of the Worm, but these corpses gave testament as to its fate. Artifice had triumphed in the end. The new world had undone the follies of the old.

  Esmail felt weak, and then another thought struck him: what he would see when they ventured above into the city. So many . . .

  But there was no other way out. He could either subject himself to that or go blind and let the Hermit guide him, and it was the thought of the old man’s scorn at such cowardice which decided him.

  ‘What about these?’ he demanded, staring at the Scarred Ones, because he dearly wanted to kill them all. He held them responsible for their own actions, and for the actions of all their kin back into the depths of history. His own kind was now but a memory, a footnote, poised on the very brink of extinction, but if ever a kinden deserved complete annihilation, it was the Worm, for all they had done, and for all they had brought into and taken from the world.

  But the Hermit was of their kind, too, and when he said, ‘Leave them. What do they matter now?’ Esmail deferred to him. He felt he owed the old man that much respect for having been able to break those bonds himself and thus become something resembling a human being.

  Or at least as much as I do, anyway. Weary, hurting, disgusted, Esmail led the way back up to the city.

  It was just as he knew it would be. Every street, every space, had been taken up by that vast spiralling progress: the warriors of the Worm off on their crusade to master the wider world. The sight made him sick, that slew of the half-grown, the ultimate victims of the Worm’s madness, extending as far as his torchlight could reach in every direction, and then everywhere he went.

  But then his head jerked up in surprise, because that vast stone city was not silent.

  For a second he stopped, heart hammering, trying to work out what it was that he was hearing, that shrill, drawn-out, squalling sound from the centre of the vast maze of stone. Then he locked eyes with the Hermit.

  ‘The child pits.’

  And they were there, of course, the most recent taxes that the Worm had exacted, the last few crops of children who had not yet lost their kinden and been turned into the Worm. The pits where the final phases of metamorphosis had been penned were still and corpse cluttered, but the youngest still lived – though for how long, if Esmail could not do something? He stared down helplessly, seeing that seething vat of need and hunger and despair, and just trembling at his own utter lack of power. What could he do?

  Then he knew what he could do.

  Soon after that, he had rounded them up – the other survivors. He was surprised at just how many there were, despite the toll the Worm must have taken on them towards the end. He had all the surviving prisoners, those who had not been led down for sacrifice. More than that, he had the Scarred Ones, the last enclave of the Centipede-kinden – old and young, adult and child, men and women – standing in a frightened, unruly group before the child pits, staring with loathing at Esmail and the Hermit.

  ‘Get them out,’ Esmail ordered. ‘Get them all out. Feed them. Carry them if you have to. Keep them alive.’

  When one of them stepped forward to question why they should do what he said, Esmail killed him with a single blow of his hand.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he told them, without a grain of mercy in his tone. ‘I hate you all. I would gladly see each one of you dead, and you deserve it, each one of you. What? No warriors to kidnap and kill for you? No great army to live in the guts of, and perpetuate, and pretend you had no choice? The man standing beside me is living proof that you had a choice. If you do as I say now, this one token act of atonement, then perhaps – just perhaps – your miserable kinden might be permitted to survive. Defy me and I will kill each and every one of you myself. And I can. And I will. Just give me an excuse.’

  Slowly, fearfully, the former priesthood of the Worm began to move. They moved stubbornly, bitterly, and yet they moved to his bidding. In a way he was disappointed that he was not able to make more of an example of them.

  Forty-Nine

  Epilogues

  The camps emptied, one by one, those where the Empress’s will had been thwarted. Imperial citizens returned home to cities that were suddenly more than mere vassal states. Slaves returned to slavery, because change comes gradually and unevenly, and three generations of Imperial history cast a long shadow. Spiders were sent back in long chains to their southern cities. They were all of them currency and bargaining chips in the delicate game of diplomacy that the nations of the kinden were playing in order to extricate themselves from a war that none of them abruptly had the desire for; in order to step back from the brink.

  And a band of Collegiate prisoners was eventually remembered and permitted to board an airship to head for home.

  In those camps where the orders had been obeyed, where the Empress had been granted her harvest of lives, the burial details waited for the poisonous haze of the Bee-killer to recede. So closed an episode of Imperial history that nobody living now understood, but everyone would remember.

  Sitting at the end of a pier on Collegium docks, Laszlo sat staring out to sea, his feet swinging over the water. Looking down, he could see the great metal carcass of an Imperial Sentinel that had been dragged into the water during the retaking of the city, now nothing more than a hazard to shipping.

  A great many things were happening in the world, but relatively few of them held any interest to him just then.

  Lissart had gone, of course.<
br />
  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.’