Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The officer he reported to was a small man with a little patch of beard on his chin in the Spider style. His name was Colonel Varsec, and he was either the rising star or the scapegoat for the Engineering Corps, depending on whether it was praise or blame that was going around. He had come close to execution more than once, Gannic knew. Perhaps this assignment would see both of them on the crossed pikes.

  ‘Let’s have it.’ Varsec was uncomfortable, unhappy with what they were trying to achieve here, and the range of means that had been given him.

  Gannic made his report: the truth behind the impossible stalemate between Empire and those Spiderlands Aristoi who had inherited the Aldanrael conquests. ‘What nobody realizes back home, sir,’ he explained, ‘is just who the power ended up with when the Aldanrael went down – after the Second Army killed their woman in Collegium. There were all sorts of little families who hadn’t or couldn’t abandon the Aldanrael and, so far, us being here has stopped any of the big boys moving in. So you’ve got the Arkaetiens and the Melisandyr and the like, who were just hangers-on, and now they’re basically running things here in Solarno, and maybe Tark and Kes and points west too.’

  ‘How are the Solarnese taking it?’ Varsec prompted him.

  Gannic considered what he had seen: the locals going about their business cautiously, with that same hammer hanging impossibly above each of them. ‘Cautiously optimistic, I’d say,’ he conceded. ‘They know there’re wheels turning, and that something’s got to give, but this place is used to Spiders – meaning there’s always some bad news behind the scenes somewhere. They reckon it won’t necessarily touch them, if they keep their heads down and get on with it.’

  He had been very carefully chosen for this assignment, had Gannic. He was an unusual man. He had slipped through the slums and the tavernas on both sides of the city, listening more than talking, overhearing more than being seen. So far he had not misstepped, as evidenced by his continued good health.

  Lieutenant Gannic’s rank badge pinned his fortunes to those of the Engineering Corps, the coming power in the Empire, who were just as wary about competition as any Consortium magnate. He was no artillerist or automotive driver, though. He was a sneak for the artificing age. Saboteur was the official label, and there were few enough of them – men with a formidable understanding of artifice, an easy manner and a soft tread.

  One other thing, of course, as his mirror reminded him every morning when he shaved: Wasp features in a darker, rounder face, the gift of his Beetle mother. Rough with the smooth, he thought, as he wielded the razor. He had the world’s two most Apt kinden as parents, and he made a natural agent, for everyone knew how much the Empire loathed halfbreeds. More than that, though, this job – this very particular job – recommended itself to a man of a certain heritage like himself.

  ‘Sir, did you get word back – from the top?’

  Varsec’s expression was hooded. ‘Just two words: “Do it.”’

  Gannic made an appreciative whistle. ‘You want me across the water, or . . .’

  ‘Not yet. Unless our target in Chasme is going to suffer a sudden change of heart, we need to have our backup plan ready to go. General Lien’s getting impatient. Enough eavesdropping and talking to sneaks. Time to act.’ Varsec looked anything but enthusiastic about that. This is going to end very badly, his expression said. ‘Just be careful not to end up like the last man.’

  ‘The last man’ had been a Captain Carven – not part of Varsec’s operation but a Rekef agent bringing orders from the Imperial governor here: Start the fires, drive the Spiders from Solarno. Varsec and Gannic had discussed those words in detail, and were unanimous in their opinion that they were stupid orders. There had been a great deal of pressure from conservatives in Capitas to strike at the Spider-kinden, though, and somehow nobody up there had considered that Solarno was rather closer to Spider reinforcements than it was to any aid the Empire could give it.

  Supposedly, this Captain Carven had never arrived. The Spiders had been playing espionage while the principal Wasp entertainment had been living in hill forts and stealing the neighbours’ women. Back home the conclusion had been swiftly reached that Carven had been done away with before ever getting in sight of the governor’s townhouse.

  Except that, according to the Fly woman, his body had been dragged out of that same house and dumped in the bay, to be picked over by fish and water beetles and dragonfly nymphs.

  Varsec had guessed that there was a good reason why Solarno had not been riven by civil war: it was not an Imperial city at all, no matter whose flag waved over the high ground. So was that the plan all along, he mused, or did Governor Edvic and his wife look at the odds and start a little dance of their own?

  ‘Personally, I’d rather do without the lot of them and leave the city to stew, sir,’ Gannic stated. It was unforgivably familiar before a superior officer, but he knew by now that Varsec didn’t care.

  ‘From everything you’ve learned, that doesn’t sound like an option,’ Varsec replied. ‘We’re going to have to get our hands dirty here in Solarno before we can move on.’

  We – meaning me, Gannic realized. And nothing’s ever simple where Spiders are involved. At least by now he’d acquired a good idea of what the Spiders wanted here, too. The little families that had their hooks into this place wanted to keep what they had – which meant avoiding a fight with the Empire, and avoiding calling in the bigger Spider clans.

  Between the governor’s wife and the local Aristoi, a rather remarkable piece of diplomacy had grown up, or that was what Varsec believed, and what Gannic’s investigations seemed to confirm.

  ‘Time to go pay a visit, then,’ he decided, and he would just have to do his best to avoid ending up like the late Captain Carven.

  Three

  The Ant-kinden found it baffling, infuriating and hilarious by turns, Straessa understood. Needless to say, very little of that showed on their faces, but there was always one who stopped to watch whenever the Collegiates were drilling, and with them you only needed a single pair of eyes for the whole city to be spying. She had the impression of being surrounded by gales of unheard laughter at every move, every step out of place, every stumble.

  She did not have much to work with here, it was true. Three kinds of soldiers, in brief, and only one of any use. Those actual members of the Merchant Companies who had been able and willing to depart Collegium were her core, but most of that city’s soldiers had stayed there, after surrendering their arms. Even under the Black and Gold, Collegium was home, and the exiles in Sarn lived in agony daily, knowing that they could not help their fellows, that they could do nothing to stay the Wasp lash, because they themselves had . . .

  She still had to catch herself, to prevent the words abandoned their city from coming to mind. We’re going back. We’re here to work with the Sarnesh, so that we can free Collegium. We’ll do more good if we’re free over here than if we’re slaves over there. They were words she had heard from Eujen, from plenty of others. They were all equally desperate to justify themselves.

  The second and third batches of her recruits were equally ill at ease with weapons, armour and discipline, but she was not choosy. By simply turning up, they had passed the one test that mattered. Some were inhabitants of Sarn’s Foreigners’ Quarter, Collegiate expatriates who had made a living here in the Lowlands’ most enlightened Ant city-state, but who still remembered their old home. The rest were genuine Collegiates: citizens who had fled before the siege, or who had got out somehow after the city was taken. They were not soldiers but they were hurting. The Wasp boot was on the neck of their beloved home. It was unthinkable, and it moved them to do unthinkable things, such as volunteering to fight.

  They were nobody’s idea of soldiers: middle-aged men and women with a trade or a shop left behind them, and often family as well. They were driven, though. No drillmaster ever had more willing raw material. Under the stern governance of their Tactician Milus, the Sarnesh had given them snapbo
ws and chain hauberks and swords, and left them to it. At this stage in the war, the Ants were not going to turn away any help at all.

  The Imperial Eighth Army had been defeated, that much was fact. The field battle had seemed inconclusive, and everyone had assumed that the Wasps had pulled out with a sizeable slice of their forces intact, but then Ant scouts had found . . .

  . . . Something. They had found something, although they were not sharing the details with their allies, which was concerning. Balkus – the renegade Sarnesh attached to the Princep Salma forces – said that they were sure the Eighth were no longer a threat, but what he could glean from eavesdropping around the edges of the Sarnesh linked minds suggested that the precise fate of the Imperial army was a matter of concern.

  Eastwards from Sarn, the Empire was still about. The Wasp reserve force sent to support the now-defunct Eighth had been reinforced by elements of the Imperial First and was keeping pressure on the Ant city by its very presence. That meant that the Sarnesh was not preparing for the liberation of Collegium. The Ants were very glad to have allies to fight alongside them, and even more grateful to have the cream of Collegiate artificers modernizing their air power, but their chief tactician would always change the topic when pressed about a return to Collegium.

  Well, maybe today will be different. There was another delegation heading to him soon, Straessa knew. And this time Eujen had said he would be going.

  ‘Officer Antspider!’ The call came from her blind side, so she had to cast about before she spotted a Fly-kinden boy she vaguely recognized as a Foreigners’ Quarter local.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Deliveries, Officer.’

  ‘Already?’ Her tenuous hold over the recruits had broken and they were out of formation, milling about and pressing closer to hear, but she could hardly blame them. ‘Deliveries’ meant a courier had run the Wasp gauntlet from Collegium: word from home. ‘Reading at Bor’s Pit?’

  ‘And soon,’ the Fly confirmed, then kicked off into the air to go and spread the news.

  ‘Class dismissed!’ Straessa called. ‘Bor’s Pit – if you want to hear the latest. Time to yourself, otherwise.’ They would almost all be there, cramming the theatre offered up by its expatriate owner as a surrogate Amphiophos, providing the seat of Collegiate government in exile. ‘Volunteer to let the Mynans know? They like to hear word, too.’

  Someone put his hand up for that task, leaving Straessa free to hotfoot it back to her lodgings, because they would be opening the first letter in the Pit in perhaps half an hour, and it was a full street away from where she lodged. That left her just enough time to cover the ground.

  Eujen was awake when she got there, which was just as well. They were sharing the storeroom of a machinist whose spare stock had been eaten up by the appetites of the war. It would have been intimate, had they not also been sharing it with a drunken Spider and a pair of printers whose presses had been smashed by the Empire.

  He had got himself dressed, although it must have taken him some effort, and his robes were twisted about him, with nothing hanging straight. He occupied the room’s only chair as she came in, using a crate as a writing desk, crossing out as much as he put down. A speech, probably, knowing him.

  He looked up sharply as she entered. He had recovered a lot of his colour in the last month, although there was still a greyness about his eyes and cheeks.

  ‘Is it Milus?’ he demanded. ‘Has he—?’

  ‘He hasn’t anything, at the moment,’ she told him, because Eujen had been waiting for word from the Sarnesh tactician. ‘It’s deliveries. You said you wanted to be there this time.’

  ‘Right.’ He put a hand out for his sticks, which as usual he had managed to leave out of reach somehow. She let him stretch for them because he hated it when she would not let him win these battles against his own weakness. At last he snagged them, and levered himself upright, wrestling their padded forked upper ends under his arms.

  That looked easier even than yesterday. Eujen was, after all, one of the lucky ones. He had gone to death’s country, to the very border, stared at its grey horizon and then turned back. Instar, the drug that the Collegiate chemists had concocted during the war, had worked its kill-or-cure miracle with his failing body. He would, however, never be quite the same – never quite rid of the injuries or the effects of the drug. He would be stronger, but he would probably not walk again without the crutches, or so the doctors said. There were many who were not even that lucky.

  ‘We’re going to Milus tomorrow,’ he told her, setting off on the long voyage to the doorway.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Whether he wants to see us or not,’ he said firmly.

  ‘He has a war to run. He’s a busy man.’

  ‘He has hundreds of our people whom he’s happy to employ in that war – our own, Mynans, Princeps. Retaking Collegium is the logical first step.’

  ‘Perhaps not to him.’ She nodded a greeting to some of the machinist’s apprentices as she and Eujen crossed the shop floor. They worked here all day and most of the night, making parts for all the machinery of war. It made sleeping difficult, at times, but it was the only place she’d found that didn’t involve climbing stairs.

  ‘The closest Imperial force is short on siege engines, all the reports agree,’ huffed Eujen, already starting to make heavy going of it. ‘So it’s not going to invest the city any time soon.’

  ‘The Second was short on siege too,’ Straessa pointed out darkly: Collegium had been taken with sheer aerial manpower and the new Sentinel automotives that the Empire had acquired. Of course, following the mysterious scattering of the Eighth, the Sarnesh had a handful of Sentinels as well.

  Step by step, they came to Bor’s Pit, and by that time Eujen’s painful progress had drawn a lot of attention. He had become a symbol, she knew. He had been a student agitator back home, then a military leader and briefly a rebel standing up against the Wasps. A great many people looked up to him, despite his young age.

  Watching him making his way, though, most of them were fighting to hide their expressions.

  The two of them were almost the last to enter the Pit, but someone would always find a seat for Eujen, one by the aisle, and Straessa stood beside it.

  There was a constant roll-call of names, personal messages from family and friends under the Wasp yoke back home, but if that was what this was about, there would have been no need for the Pit, the stage and auditorium. There would also be a stack of messages marked for public consumption, those who had stayed telling their stories for those who had departed. This is how it is now. Remember us. There would be the latest instalment from the Spider writer, Metyssa – a hunted fugitive still hiding in Collegium – dramatizing the occupation, telling her tales of small courage, humour and tragedy from under the Imperial boot.

  ‘Willem Reader!’ came the call from Bor, the theatre owner, and then a pause to see if he was there. Collegium’s premier aviation artificer was absent, though, still working on the Storm-readers being built for the Sarnesh. One of his colleagues took custody of the letter.

  ‘Jons Hallend! Pella Mathawl!’ And more: each name finding a willing recipient until all the private missives had been handed out and the main show was ready to begin.

  ‘First on the bill, from Mistress Sartaea te Mosca, Associate Master of the College.’ Bor had been an actor once, and his voice filled the auditorium, so very different from that of the quiet Fly woman whose words he would be interpreting. Eujen squeezed Straessa’s arm at the name, eager for word from one of their friends. Even bad news might be better than the long agony of no news at all.

  Sartaea te Mosca moved like a thief through the streets of her own city.

  Or perhaps not quite her own city. She had been born in a little place close to the Etheryon, a logging post, but most of her life had been spent amongst the Moths of Dorax, possessed of just enough magical ability to make training her worthwhile. They had looked down on her, turned her out event
ually, but more because she had not become the magician they had expected than because of her kinden.

  Collegium had been her home now for some years, and when the Inapt studies post had come up at the College she had not exactly had to beat off much competition for it. The College Masters had not cared how meagre a magician she had been, given that they believed in none of it anyway. She had moved into her tiny classroom and begun teaching, without much facility, to students without much interest. The life had suited her well, letting her make friends and host parties.

  She no longer taught at the College. All the lecturers were now under scrutiny and, whilst she had hoped that her esoteric subject might pass beneath their notice, the Wasps had Moth allies as well, and they had driven her out by their suspicious regard and by her own knowledge of her inadequacy. Now she stayed on as staff, a house-master presiding over a handful of student dormitories, doing what she could to protect her charges from the harsh world they found themselves in.

  She had stayed out too late tonight and there was still a curfew in place. After dark, the streets were the official domain of Wasp soldiers and others bearing their writ. General Tynan – acting governor until someone arrived to replace him – rested a light hand on the city, those under his command were often spoiling for any excuse to display their power. There were plenty of arrests still, and some citizens disappeared or were shipped out east for further questioning and never seen again.

  It could have been so much worse, and any day the general might break from his introspection and remember that he could make it so. Sartaea should have stayed behind closed doors, but she had urgent visits to make. It was important to her. There would always be people who wanted word sent out of the city, and she had taken the duty upon herself to help them. After all, she was a tiny speck of a woman, nimble in the air, treading lightly on the ground, and with eyes honed by decades of Moth darkness. The Imperial patrols were a risk she felt qualified to run.