Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And if she were caught, well, she had made a point of getting to know a few officers in the garrison. There were a dozen sergeants who knew that they could stop at her kitchen in the College and get something hot to eat or drink. She had to hope that those fragile bonds might bear the weight of a Fly-kinden life if the worst came to the worst.

  The Reader house was near the College – a good first stop – and she rapped at the shutters of an upstairs window until Jen Reader let her in. The College’s librarian would have word destined for her artificer husband, who had been evacuated to Sarn.

  After that, there was Poll Awlbreaker the engineer, whom the Wasps had working for them in their commandeered factories, and whose back, Sartaea knew, bore the trace of the lash to testify just how that arrangement had been brokered. His forced collaboration had bought him some concessions from the Empire, though. His house was unlikely to be searched so long as he kept the work up.

  ‘Any word?’ she asked him as he let her in.

  He nodded, took a good long look out at the street and then closed the shutters. He was a strong-framed man in his prime, made broad and powerful by artificing work and fighting with the Coldstone Company during the war.

  ‘We’ve got papers for a single airship heading out for Helleron,’ he confirmed to her. ‘Space for two passengers and as many letters as you’ve got. Courier’s all set to take them.’ Only the courier herself would know the precise detour the airship would need to make in order to drop off its illicit cargo for onward transmission to Sarn.

  ‘Is Metyssa going?’

  He made a face and then shook his head. ‘I told her she should, but she won’t. Two other Spiders, though. They’re going freight, nailed up in crates. It’s getting harder to pull this business off.’

  Sartaea nodded. Being Spider-kinden in Collegium – or anywhere under Imperial control – was a death sentence ever since the inexplicable falling-out between the Second Army and its erstwhile Aldanrael allies. Whatever had happened, a whole second front had opened up down the Silk Road, draining Imperial manpower and resources. However advantageous this was for those fighting the Empire, it had resulted in the summary execution of hundreds of Spiders who had already fled the Spiderlands to make a new life elsewhere.

  Metyssa was one such fugitive, Poll’s lover and fellow soldier. Her presence, hidden behind a false wall in his cellar, had been more persuasive than the whip in getting him to work the Wasps’ machines.

  ‘Has she written anything?’ Sartaea asked.

  ‘Oh, you can be sure. For someone who doesn’t get out much, she’s certainly got a lot to say,’ Poll remarked with a strained smile. ‘Nothing to the purpose, as usual, but it makes for good reading.’ Metyssa had made a living writing sensational stories for the Collegiate presses before the city had fallen. Now she was working on her own vivid account of the occupation, and Sartaea always had to scribble onto it the caveat that none of it was strictly true before passing it on to the courier. It was popular over in Sarn, she understood: each chapter eagerly awaited.

  She dearly hoped that Metyssa would have a chance to finish the account. A Spider-kinden man had been unearthed only two days before and shot dead when he tried to run, and the family that had sheltered him had been arrested, their subsequent fate uncertain.

  After that there was a string of other visits, a score of patrols dodged or hidden from as Sartaea skipped through the night-blanketed streets of Collegium, striking her tiny blow against the Empire. Last on her list was the home of Tsocanus, an Ant-kinden merchant who lived above his workshop, where he had previously run a brisk trade as a wholesaler to the airship trade. Now he sold, at the poverty-level mandated prices, to the Empire’s engineers and Consortium, and even sent his prentices to fix their machines when the Wasps themselves could not be bothered. Like Poll, though, he did it with apparent willingness. His cellars had a hidden room, and there would usually be a handful of Spiders there, or others seeking to evade the Rekef, ready to be smuggled out as soon as an opportunity presented itself.

  She arrived there just in time. Had she turned up any earlier, she would have been inside when the Wasps broke in; any later and there would have been no witnesses to what happened.

  When she turned the corner she saw the door was already smashed, and her instincts – good Fly-kinden instincts, those – had her back pressed to a wall, frozen in place, her grey cloak pulled about her.

  She could hear fighting, inside – or panicky sounds that were probably a handful of civilians who didn’t have the wit simply to surrender. Tsocanus was an Ant, though, and even a renegade Ant who hadn’t picked up a sword in ten years still had some fight in him. If he fought, so would his prentices, the half-dozen Beetle-kinden who lived under his roof. And then there were the Spiders . . .

  For a moment Sartaea te Mosca made a dreadful miscalculation about the odds, thinking, If there are that many of us, surely . . . Then Tsocanus himself stumbled out through the shattered door, grappling with a Wasp, hurling the man away with Art-boosted strength before raising what was surely a kitchen knife.

  Te Mosca shrank back as the stingshot found Tsocanus, the flash and glare of golden fire that slammed into the Ant half a dozen times making his body dance with the force of it before he dropped.

  There was quiet then, and she had a horrible thought that the Ant had been the only survivor. Next they were bringing the rest out: some of the prentices and a bruised and battered trio of Spider-kinden. Sartaea’s headcount came up three short, meaning that Tsocanus wasn’t the only one who had tried to make a fight of it, and failed.

  They were led away, cuffed sharply when they slowed, or just when the Wasps felt like it, and through it all she did nothing, nothing whatsoever. She was one small Fly-kinden woman, and barely a magician at all, and she crouched there, unseen and castigating herself for having only one unworthy thought: that she was lucky that Tsocanus was now dead, as otherwise her name would shortly be on Imperial lips.

  ‘You’re off to see the Bastard, then?’ asked Balkus, with that irritability that had hung about him ever since he had been unwillingly repatriated to Sarn.

  ‘Want to come along?’ Sperra cocked an eye at him. ‘It’s about the only time I could put you in front of him without you throwing a punch.’

  Like so many others, the Ant-kinden Balkus had been injured in the Collegiate fighting, evacuated at the last moment from the city after the student insurrection failed. The physicians had not dared try him with Instar – they saved that for those with a Beetle’s sterner constitution. Even now he was weak, shaking if he walked too far. He did walk, though. Sperra knew that he was determined to wrest his strength back from the bolt-wounds that had drained it from him. A full confrontation with Tactician Milus – ‘the Bastard’ as he and Sperra had renamed the man – was likely to finish him before a sword was drawn. Even now, just back from a few turns about the Foreigners’ Quarter, he looked exhausted as he slumped in a chair.

  Balkus was a renegade from this very city, which would normally have made his return a death sentence. However, he was also a citizen of Princep Salma, the new city lying half-built in Sarn’s shadow. Even though Princep’s military assistance had been provided under Sarnesh duress, Balkus’s status there lent him some protection.

  Sperra was likewise a Princep citizen and former tenant of a Sarnesh inquisition room, the two of them united in their dislike and distrust of their hosts. Whilst Balkus was nominally the military commander of the Princep forces – whatever that was worth – she was just a Fly-kinden, a foreigner in Sarn, someone who at any time could be suspected of knowing too much. The Sarnesh had run her through their machines before, on the off-chance that she knew more than she was telling, and then they had done it again just to be sure. If it wasn’t for Balkus, nothing would keep her in this city: Balkus, and the need to keep her adopted city of Princep free.

  Right now, the best chance for Princep to have any voice in the war was to link arms with the Collegi
ates. Whilst Balkus was recuperating, Sperra had been busy winning Beetle-kinden affections. She was one of the regular couriers, making the hazardous trip between Sarn and the conquered city to pick up news and intelligence. She had enough artifice in her to pilot a flying machine, and she was quick, quiet and had a nose for danger.

  ‘Let the fighting belong to the Ants and the Wasps,’ she had said. ‘Right now, it’s a Fly-kinden war.’

  ‘The Bastard won’t listen,’ Balkus told her. ‘I catch just enough, for all they try to keep me out. He’s fighting a Sarnesh war for Sarn. He’ll keep the pot boiling in Collegium, ’cos it bottles the Second Army up there, but why should he want the place free? The city would be half-smashed in the fighting or by the Wasps when they pulled out, and then what? He has half an Imperial army at large, probably, and all his willing Beetle soldiers and artificers want to go home and pick up the pieces. He’s got everything where he wants it, believe me.’

  Sperra shrugged. ‘He’ll push them too far.’

  Balkus snorted. ‘The Beetles?’

  ‘You haven’t seen them. And it’s the Mynans as well – and our lot.’ She shrugged again, abruptly defeated by the ability of the Sarnesh to prevaricate. ‘But you’re probably right, this time.’

  ‘And the next, and the next.’

  ‘Maybe not.’

  His head had been sagging but it jerked up at that. ‘What news? Something you didn’t tell the others?’

  ‘I don’t peddle false hope to the Collegiates. I’ve not said anything, because I wasn’t sure. Rumours, though. Rumours out of nowhere.’

  ‘So tell me!’

  ‘Can’t. Have to go now. Off to see the Bastard, don’t you know?’ And she skipped back to the doorway of his room. To her delight, he lunged out of the chair after her with a shout – for a moment the two of them again as though the war had never come. Then he was steadying himself with a hand against the wall, but standing, even managing a grin.

  ‘Go tweak the Bastard’s nose,’ he directed. ‘But after that you’d better tell me what’s up.’

  The delegation was five in number, a bizarre cross-section of Sarn’s unruly allies. It was accepted that Eujen would take the lead, even though they would have to wheel him there in a chair. Kymene herself would stand for the Mynans, a good number of whom had congregated in Sarn. Sperra represented Princep Salma, and the artificer Willem Reader had broken from his work to accompany them. His services were crucial enough to the Sarnesh that any delegation including him could not simply be turned away. Finally, appearing uninvited at the last moment, the Dragonfly named Castre Gorenn would stand for the Commonweal Retaliatory Army, which was to say, herself.

  We just need a Mantis-kinden from the Netheryon for the set, Eujen considered. In truth, nobody knew what the intentions of that newly renamed Mantis state were, despite over two months of Sarnesh diplomacy. The Mantids had attacked the Imperial Eighth and directly contributed to the Sarnesh victory there, but the one certainty with them now seemed to be that all previous alliances and agreements were off. That this included their longtime subservience to the Moth-kinden was currently absorbing the full attention of Dorax as well, to the frustration of anyone who had been counting on their support.

  Tactician Milus met them alone, but of course he had the whole weight of Sarn within his head. He outnumbered them by thousands to one. He was in his full armour: dark steel plate heavier than a normal soldier’s but undistinguished by finery or any badge of rank. All his soldiers knew who he was, after all.

  The interior of the Royal Court buildings was crammed with innumerable little square rooms, gaslit and often windowless, each changing purpose by the hour as the busy Ants ordered their state, their daily lives and the war. They found him in one such, with a map tacked up before him, displaying Sarn and the immediate tens of square miles, out as far as the edge of the Netheryon forest.

  ‘Well, now, haven’t we done this before?’ He was unusual for an Ant: a confident speaker with a good voice and a sound grasp of expression and body language, who was well used to dealing with other kinden. He carried a presence with him, a tangible strength of purpose that most of his inward-dwelling people lacked. His face was all slightly exasperated good humour as he looked them over: Eujen, young and chair-bound; diminutive Sperra; Willem Reader, a man of ideas who flinched slightly before the Ant’s stare; Castre Gorenn, already losing interest and peering at the map instead. Only Kymene met him on even ground. She had led the resistance in her city, freed it from the Wasps and lived to see it taken again. She had enough force of will for the five of them.

  ‘We have been here before, exactly. I believe that we left with the impression that you would be bringing forward your plans to liberate our city.’ Eujen’s voice was steady, even strong, coming from somewhere the injuries had not touched.

  ‘The Empire is bringing another army up—’

  ‘There is an army in Collegium, if only you will release it from its chains. There is no suggestion that the Empire intends anything other than to forestall a Sarnesh attack. Which, I would add, they are achieving with a minimum of effort.’

  Milus regarded Eujen placidly. ‘You are asking me to gamble with my city in an attempt to save yours. A familiar statesman’s trick, but we have no statesmen here.’

  ‘You sell yourself short, Tactician,’ Eujen replied implacably.

  There was a second of utter stillness that he had learned to recognize: it was when emotions that Milus was not showing were quietly led off to execution. Then the Ant turned his attention to Reader. ‘Master Reader, you must be well aware of how much further our preparations must go. Or is your work complete?’

  ‘It is not, Tactician,’ Reader admitted, and plainly Milus overawed him somewhat. ‘However, the Second still has minimal air power—’

  ‘It has enough, and you of all people know how quickly the Empire can move reinforcements in. They could have two score Farsphex out of Capitas and over my city, and us with only a few hours’ warning from that Ear device you set up.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me. It was—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Milus cut him off. ‘And your being here as part of this business is not advancing the war. Both you and I have better things to do with our time.’ Blatantly unspoken was his assessment that the rest of them there did not.

  ‘Then perhaps we should leave,’ Kymene stated.

  Milus locked stares with her, and it became clear that she was not talking about the delegation but about her countryfolk.

  ‘The Spiders are fighting the Empire. They would take us in,’ she went on. ‘Gorenn, you’d come, wouldn’t you?’

  The Dragonfly’s head snapped round at her name. ‘Of course,’ she confirmed immediately, although it was anyone’s guess if she had actually heard the question. She had no patience for politics. ‘What are these here?’

  She was indicating the map, and the conversation derailed instantly, Milus taking up a new defensive position by deciding to humour her. ‘Attacks. Attacks made on my people over the last month.’ Four sites were marked within the map’s extent, the closest of them within a few miles of Sarn. ‘Still think we should be sending all our soldiers off to Collegium?’

  ‘What attacks? We’ve heard nothing,’ Eujen demanded, aware that he had lost the initiative.

  ‘Small in scale.’ Milus shrugged. ‘A patrol, a merchant caravan, a farm. But no signs of how it was done, no sign of the enemy – just turned earth and too few bodies.’ He let that sink in. ‘So, believe me, I am not sitting here gloating over the plight of Collegium, but I have many demands on limited resources, and my city is not safe.’

  ‘Like the Eighth,’ Gorenn remarked, again forcing everyone to change step to keep up with her.

  Eujen was about to question her, but then an uncomfortable understanding came. Turned earth, too few bodies, no sign of an enemy. Surely he had heard that – from Balkus, perhaps? – about what they had found when they went to look for the Eighth. />
  ‘Be that as it may, these are attacks on my people,’ Milus insisted, but Eujen could tell from his tone that he had made the connection long before. And has no idea what to make of it, I’d guess. ‘This war has overwritten most of the rules of warfare that we were used to, and it looks as though the Wasps are still writing it.’ He held up his hands. ‘I fully understand. You all have homes, too. You want to free them. You want to fight the Wasps – of course you do. There will be a reckoning. The Empire will be turned back and then destroyed. I am dedicating myself and the might of my city to this objective. It must be by concerted action, though, so you must trust us.’

  He looked from face to face, as if ascertaining that there was just enough trust left, averaged between them, to get him home.

  ‘And if things change in Collegium?’ Sperra piped up, her first contribution.

  ‘What changes do you anticipate? Things seem… stable there.’

  ‘Who knows? New Wasp atrocities . . . or perhaps an uprising.’

  For a moment Eujen thought that Milus seemed unsure. Certainly he himself had no idea where Sperra was leading them.

  But then the tactician’s customary demeanour returned. ‘Bring me any such intelligence and of course it will be looked at. The war changes on a daily basis. Perhaps tomorrow it will be me coming to you, ready to head south. Who knows?’

  He knows, Eujen decided. He had a great deal of respect for Milus’s handling and control of the war so far, but very little liking for the man.

  Four

  It was a long walk to Cold Well.

  Thalric had a lantern of sorts, a twisted braid of luminescent fibres that gave out a pallid, unwholesome light. It barely showed him where to place his feet but, out of all of them, he was no friend of the darkness. Messel apparently knew he held it, and when their blind guide hissed at them Thalric stuffed the bundle beneath his breastplate to hide its meagre phosphorescence. It was a wretched thing, and he was forced to replace it often from the grotesque fungus things that they found in passing.