Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘It’s a trap.’ Raullo was well into his wine, but then he could sink quite a lot of it these days. He cut an odd figure in the city, awkward father to a wild and unrepresentative school of painting that had followers amongst locals and Imperials alike and was beginning to spawn imitators. She had brought him along tonight to watch her back in case her mysterious contact turned out to be someone she would rather not be seen with.

  ‘Well, if so . . .’ She shrugged. ‘There’s nothing illegal about meeting someone. Even after curfew, so long as you’re indoors.’

  ‘I still don’t like it,’ Raullo muttered.

  ‘Oh, hush,’ she told him, and then there was a scream. It was outside but sounded as though it was somewhere just along their street, and the taverner paused, about to close the last shutters. Collegium had become used to screams after dark, though. Those caught breaking curfew were punished, and if they were women the Wasp soldiers might exact the penalty then and there.

  Raullo opened his mouth to pass another comment, but suddenly there was a whole chorus of yells and shouts outside, and the floor beneath them shuddered to the grinding sound of stone on stone. Sartaea and the artist stared at one another, and a few of the patrons stood up uneasily, waiting to see if there would be more. A couple were already inching towards the back room and to the trapdoor that would take them underground and away.

  The taverner had been peering round the edges of the window, trying to see, but now he sprang back with a curse.

  ‘What? What is it?’ Sartaea demanded of him.

  ‘I thought I saw . . . Something ran past, something . . .’

  The sounds of panic were escalating outside; the floor quivered again.

  ‘What are they doing? Is it more fighting?’ Raullo whispered. ‘Please, no.’

  Sartaea abandoned him to go to the window, wings lifting her higher so she could see. She got there just in time to see the house across the street begin to shake, cracks snaking up the walls.

  ‘Save us,’ she whispered. The building was coming down all on its own. There had been no explosion, no roar of artillery, but the structure was suddenly falling in on itself, collapsing and dragging the neighbouring buildings towards one another, and there were . . .

  Her eyes were keen in the dusk but still she could not quite believe what she saw: figures emerging from the wreckage, swift and sure and together, a long chain of them seemingly vomited up from the earth itself.

  Then there was a banging at the door. Raullo stood abruptly, knocking his chair backwards and dragging a dagger from his belt.

  ‘You have to get out!’ someone was yelling. ‘Out of the taverna!’

  The taverner threw the door open before anyone could stop him, revealing a Fly-kinden man there, cloaked and hooded.

  ‘Get out now!’ he snapped. ‘Something bad’s happening all down this street.’ As some of the patrons began to run for the rear, he called out after them. ‘Not that way! Not down! Out of the door and head for home!’

  ‘Who are you?’ Sartaea demanded, though she thought she knew him. Was he not . . .?

  He locked eyes with her. ‘Miss te Mosca . . . some other time. Get yourself out of here, all of you!’

  The ground below the taverna shifted. Abruptly the floor was canted towards the cellar stairs. From down there came a scream, then more: some of the patrons had already tried to escape that way.

  They’ll be crushed! But the screams went on, and Sartaea heard the clash of metal. No, they’re being attacked – but by what? The Wasps? And yet she knew it was not the Wasps. Some sense, some vestigial awareness born of her paltry magical ability, was screaming at her.

  Still, she went to help. It was not in her to refuse it. The cloaked Fly was on her in a moment, wings casting him across the crowded room to bundle her to the floor.

  ‘Get off me!’ she yelled into his face, and his name was in her mind even as she did so, ‘Laszlo!’

  ‘Out, please!’ he insisted, but then Raullo had taken a swing at him, drunken and clumsy, and the Fly’s nimble dodge took his weight off her and she darted for the cellar stairs.

  They were emerging even as she got there. She saw pale faces looking up at her from the gloom, colourless eyes, sunken cheeks. She locked gazes with one pair of those eyes, but there was no contact, no human interchange, and then they were moving all at once, the band of them uncoiling from the cellar and taking the stairs at a run.

  She let out a hoarse yell of sheer panic and reached for her magic to cloak her. Her magic . . .

  She had none. In that same stunned moment, her mind turned the word over, ‘magic’, and found nothing in it, no meaning at all.

  Then a hand hooked her shoulder and virtually threw her at the door to the street: not little Laszlo but Raullo’s solid Beetle strength. He was out right after her too, far faster than she would have guessed, sprawling across the uneven paving at her feet, and Laszlo behind him, aiming a little snapbow back into the taverna and yet not loosing. She could hear yells of fear and horror from within – some of the patrons had left their exit too late. She could not force herself to go to help them. There was no helping them. Not after that moment of lost blankness when she had forgotten what she was.

  Around them, the whole of Salkind Way was tilting vertiginously, some buildings already toppling, as if the Empire had developed some new invisible and soundless bombing orthopter and was punishing its own city.

  And she saw them, the lines of them coursing from the broken walls, from the guts of the earth, their movements swift as beasts, human in shape but not in any other way. Some carried bodies between them, but many were dragging living, screaming citizens of Collegium.

  ‘Away!’ insisted Laszlo, and she needed no other prompting. From that moment, she and Raullo were running, desperate to put Salkind Way behind them.

  Only after they were at the doors of the College library, far enough that no outcry could reach them, did Raullo drop to his knees, wheezing, and she realized that Laszlo had not come with them.

  ‘Who was he?’ the artist got out. ‘The Fly? Did he make that happen?’

  Sartaea te Mosca shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. He was Laszlo; you know, the . . .’ A pause as she considered what she was about to say – ‘Stenwold Maker’s friend.’

  The next morning they returned to Salkind Way, finding it broken and shattered as if the earth had buckled beneath its load, and yet the streets on either side lay completely untouched. There were Wasp soldiers searching the wreckage, so plainly mystified by what had happened that not even the most fervent patriot was accusing the Empire of being behind whatever had happened.

  They found no bodies. Upwards of fifty people had just disappeared.

  Seven

  Darmeyr Forge-Iron lurched outside, dropping down a level. ‘Hide them!’ he shouted.

  ‘No!’ Atraea the Moth snapped back. ‘Do you think they will not take all of our people one by one until they find them? They are here because of these renegades. Messel and his dreams have brought this upon our heads. Here! They are here!’ She was calling out into the great chasm, even as Che craned her neck, trying to see what was going on.

  Thalric leapt on the Moth and threw her to the ground, and when she opened her mouth again he slapped her across the face, hard enough to whip her head about. He had his palm out to her in threat, but it was plain she did not realize what he meant by it. Before Atraea could denounce him, before she drove him to kill her, Tynisa had the point of her blade to the woman’s throat.

  ‘No more sound from you,’ she warned, and the Moth’s white eyes glared at her and the Wasp, but she said nothing.

  The chorus of wails and cries was passing down the length of the scar that was Cold Well, gathering in volume as more throats joined it. Not pain, Che thought. Not panic or even fear, but grief, sheer grief and loss. She had never heard anything like it, and the rebounding echo of the rock walls made it all the worse. She felt as though this was the cry of some great bea
st that was approaching, a creature it would be death even to look upon.

  Her Art shouldered aside the darkness, and she saw the Worm.

  Just men, of some unknown kinden, save that nothing about them said ‘human’ apart from their shape. They moved in bands of a dozen or two dozen, and they were swift when they were not completely still. Each body of them was pale, no taller than she and narrower at the shoulder. Their hair and skin were all of the same colourless hue, their eyes so pale that the white shaded into the pale grey of the iris, the mid-grey of the pupils, without any hard distinction. They wore armour of overlapping plates that left their limbs mostly bare and low helms with jagged cheek-guards. For weapons they had swords a little longer than she was used to, but still unremarkable except that most of them carried two. She saw no shields, no bows, no spears, though a few had slings dangling from their long-fingered hands.

  She realized that she could not tell their gender, for they had nothing to their faces or their spare frames to tell her one way or another. Even that was a trivial thing: watching them as they coursed in their groups across the levels of Cold Well, the wrongness in every motion cried out to her.

  They do not move like humans of any kinden. They did not move like humans at all. They walked on two legs, held blades in their hands, had eyes to see with, but the unavoidable impression was that these were not men: that these human figures were the puppets of something utterly other that was rushing them this way and that. No – rather that the entire group was a single puppet linked invisibly, the slaves of one alien mind.

  She felt ill, sick to her stomach just to see it, and Maure was clutching at her arm, swaying.

  ‘It is the tax!’ Darmeyr boomed. ‘They are not seeking our guests, Atraea. The tax is come!’

  Che glanced back at the pinned Moth, seeing her head shake, despite the razor point of Tynisa’s blade there.

  ‘It cannot be,’ she got out. ‘Too early. They have been here already! We have paid our tax!’

  ‘What do we do?’ The huge Mole Cricket sounded utterly impotent. ‘What can we do? That is what they are demanding. Look – I see the priest. He is coming this way.’

  ‘Priest?’ Che demanded. ‘What’s . . .’ The word was familiar from her studies, a holdover from ancient, primitive times: beliefs that even the Inapt would not consider these days. Except . . .

  ‘He is coming here,’ Darmeyr said, shaken. ‘He will want you to give the order.’

  Tynisa made a judgement and stepped back, and then Thalric allowed the Moth woman to get up. Her unguarded expression was piteous to behold.

  ‘We need to get out,’ the Wasp said, but Esmail protested, ‘They’ll see us. They’re all over this place.’ He hissed through his teeth. ‘I should have seen them sooner, but they move so fast.’

  ‘And we need to move fast, too. How far does this go? Can we hide back here?’ Thalric demanded.

  Atraea was staring at them, and perhaps she was wondering whether this ‘tax’ of theirs could be offset by handing over the strangers.

  ‘If they find them here, they will blame you,’ Messel put in, plainly sensing the same.

  ‘Then hide,’ the woman spat, almost in tears. ‘Hide, and hear, if you are truly outsiders.’

  Che fell back into the cave, retreating further into its depths until they were out of sight of the entrance. In moments they heard the rapid patter of bare feet as the Worm arrived.

  ‘Speaker,’ snapped a hoarse voice, an old man’s voice.

  Atraea’s reply was meek. ‘Scarred One.’

  And Che could not stop herself. She inched forwards, despite Thalric frantically plucking at her sleeve. She edged and edged, quiet as could be, until she could put an eye round the corner and look.

  A single unit of the Worm soldiers was entering Atraea’s domain, half of them still outside but a chain of men already coiling inwards. None of them looked at the Moth, or at anything else. Che had no sense that they had any actual presence as individuals at all.

  She identified the male speaker at once, though. He was of that same kinden as the rest, but he wore robes of chitin scales stitched into that hardwearing cloth they all used here. He was old, and his features were sufficiently distinct from those of his underlings that he might almost have been of a different race altogether. Most striking were the scars, though: long, curling, puckered lines that had been scored across his face and down his forearms, then left to heal badly, so that the skin had cracked into jagged darts on either side of the original mark, and the whole resembled . . .

  And she saw it then, at his feet, a long, sinuous, weaving shape. It must have been five feet in length, and she felt an instinctive revulsion as soon as she saw it. The world was full of venomous creatures, but none had a reputation as bad as this sort, so that sane people killed these creatures wherever they found them. But why? Let the academics of Collegium argue as they would, nobody could say just why. Except Che, right now. She understood why the mere sight of a centipede sent shudders down the spines even of the Apt, and why there were so many stories casting them as deadly killers.

  It was the Worm; they were remembering the Worm. The beast there, with its whip-like antennae and curved claws full of venom; the ridged scars that ornamented the old man’s hide; the very line of soldiers, just segments of a greater whole, undifferentiated and mindless. Symptoms of the same ancient disease.

  ‘This is too soon,’ Atraea quavered. ‘You cannot be here for the tax.’

  ‘You will have your people present their tribute,’ the old man – the Scarred One – informed her. He sounded bitter, human, and he regarded Atraea with the contempt of an owner for his slave.

  ‘But you were here . . . I have marked the time faithfully, I have!’

  ‘The Great Lord demands,’ the Scarred One said. ‘Do not believe that scratching marks on the wall allows you to guess the plans of god. Do as you are told.’

  ‘But what has changed?’ Atraea begged him.

  ‘Do not tempt a further tax of Cold Well.’ The Scarred One sounded almost bored, like a College bureaucrat dealing with a student who had filled in the wrong papers. The threat plainly went straight to the heart of Atraea, though, for she was bowing and nodding, practically kissing the man’s filthy feet.

  ‘I will, I will,’ she promised. ‘It will be as the Great Overlord commands. Please . . .’

  But the old man was turning aside, stepping back past his men. Che shivered to watch them follow him, the entire line of them moving like a single living thing. The centipede itself remained a moment, its front segments lifted from the ground, its trident of a head casting from side to side as if sensing that all was not as it should be. Che froze, fearing that it had sniffed her out somehow, but then the beast dropped back down and coursed fluidly off after the priest.

  Atraea was already gone, but they could hear her thin, hopeless voice crying out beyond: ‘We must do as they say! Do not defy them, or we will suffer all the more! Please, my people, please!’

  ‘Cold Well goes hungry this season, then,’ Thalric murmured. ‘I’ll admit I’ve seen the same in the Empire on occasion.’

  ‘You have not,’ Messel told him flatly. ‘You do not understand. Of course you do not understand.’

  There was something in his voice, some dead echo, that affected Che. ‘Then make us understand,’ she urged. ‘Tell us. Show us.’

  He crept past her, fingers brushing the stone as he moved to the cave’s entrance. ‘Then see,’ he told them. ‘And see what you have been sent to save us from. See the Worm at work.’

  They moved to the entrance of Atraea’s cave cautiously, but it was Che alone who went so far as to put her head outside, so that she could witness what was going on.

  Work at the foundry had stopped. All the people of Cold Well were standing out in the open, as the chains of Worm soldiers passed between them. There seemed to be some manner of census going on, or at least Atraea seemed to be flying here and there, trying to account for
people.

  Che expected to see goods being brought from the forges: weapons or armour or metal ingots, such as Messel had mentioned. Or else food: Atraea had been worried about something more than simply not making quota, surely? Was Cold Well going to starve in order to load the tables of the Worm?

  ‘Cages.’ Esmail was beside her, crouching low; she had not realized he was still at the cave mouth until he spoke to her. She saw what he had seen: there were Mole Crickets and a few Beetles up at the lip of the cliff, overlooking the whole of Cold Well, and they were lowering angular lattices of chitin struts on ropes.

  ‘Containers, for the tax,’ Che corrected, desperately. ‘Not cages.’

  There was activity from further away down the chasm of Cold Well, where the cages had already descended. It was coming closer. She could hear the sobbing and crying start up again.

  ‘Cages,’ repeated Esmail grimly.

  ‘But they’re so small . . .’ Che started, and at last her eyes could hide it from her no longer. She watched as a Beetle woman held up a child of no more than two, tears running down her face. A soldier of the Worm snatched the infant from her and passed it back down the chain towards one cage, in which another two children already crouched, crying, arms thrust through the gaps towards their helpless parents.

  ‘They’re just . . . handing them over,’ Che whispered. She saw plenty of reluctance, even some fights between parents before the inevitable surrender, but as the Worm passed through the people of Cold Well, they were making that impossible choice. Each family was selecting its least favourite son for the cull, offering up its own flesh and blood to the Worm.

  ‘How can they? They’re . . . it’s monstrous,’ she got out.

  ‘A thousand years of defeat and resignation.’ Esmail the killer, the assassin by birth, sounded just as sick and shaken as she. ‘They are shackled, body and mind.’

  She saw Darmeyr Forge-Iron, who could have broken any of the Worm soldiers in two with his bare hands and hurled the pieces into the chasm. She saw him stare down at them, and his great frame trembled. There was a woman behind him – his mate, no doubt, and as large and powerful as he – and they had three children clustered close at their feet, a girl and two boys, hiding their faces in their mother’s skirts.