Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘And you, Sartaea te Mosca, why do you say you’re here?’

  She mustered a fragile little smile. ‘I have been deputized by our citizens to bring a petition to you, General.’

  ‘Have you, indeed?’ And that statement marked her out as some sort of ringleader, and he could lock her up for less than that. ‘And what is it that your citizens are so unhappy about? I’ve reopened their precious College, have I not? My men keep order on the streets. I even have my chief engineer overseeing the rebuilding.’

  Te Mosca cleared her throat. ‘Ah, well, there are just a few matters that people are curious about.’ The Moth was stalking about behind her, and she was doing her best to ignore him pointedly. ‘Such as, for example, the Spider-kinden.’

  ‘What about the Spider-kinden?’ Tynan asked flatly.

  ‘How long will an entire kinden be outlawed from our city, under threat of arrest?’ Abruptly there was a thread of bravery in her tone. The Moth stopped pacing, staring down at her.

  ‘We are at war,’ Tynan informed her dismissively. ‘Next matter.’

  ‘I beg your indulgence, General, but you are at war with a state, not a kinden. Collegium is – was – home to hundreds of Spiders who had fled their homeland, or who simply preferred to live here amongst the Beetles. So I . . . we were wondering . . .’

  Tynan wondered if she knew his own past, how he had been close to the leader of the Spider-kinden before that inexplicable order had come through to turn on them. It was common knowledge amongst his men, but perhaps not in the city as a whole, and he could not imagine that this woman wanted to provoke him.

  ‘Send for Major Vrakir,’ he ordered, shocking the entire room into stillness.

  ‘Sir . . .?’ one of his aides queried nervously.

  ‘I think hers is a valid question, so we’ll go to the source.’ And it’s been too long since I hauled him from his pit to remind him of the chain of command. ‘Tell him he’s needed.’ Everyone knew the Red Watch was answerable to nobody, but ever since Vrakir had brought the order concerning the Spider-kinden, Tynan had been fighting the man at every opportunity. It was as if he had found the resolve to refuse the man, just one order too late.

  ‘What else?’ he demanded of the Fly woman, once the aide had set off.

  ‘I have a list, General,’ she said, a little more softly.

  ‘A list of demands?’

  ‘A list of names, I’m afraid.’

  Something in her tone warned him he was not going to like this – not that he had liked much of it so far. He was already making the relevant adjustments for a fight with Vrakir. The Fly had given him that opportunity, and now he just wanted rid of her. ‘You understand that you’re going from here to the cells to await questioning, yes? There’s too much stink attached to your name to avoid it.’

  ‘It did seem likely, yes.’ Was that a faint tremor in her voice? He thought it was. Her veneer of calm was cracking, then, but she was still putting on a brave face. I’ve had soldiers who broke sooner. She’s doing well for a Fly-kinden.

  ‘Well, then, what’s this list? Perhaps it can be looked at while you’re otherwise engaged.’

  ‘I do hope so.’ This time there was a definite trembling. ‘Only . . . I am aware from what I’ve heard about Myna and other places that your administration here has not been heavy-handed, by Imperial standards . . .’

  He nodded bluntly, accepting the praise to exactly the extent that it was intended.

  ‘Only, by Collegiate standards, it has still been something of a novel experience for us, and I was wondering . . . we were wondering . . .’

  ‘What’s your list, woman?’ Tynan demanded of her.

  ‘Everyone who has been arrested, taken away without charge or who has disappeared after being in the company of your soldiers, and who has not thereafter been seen, General,’ te Mosca declared. ‘All those sons and daughters of Collegium, Spiders and other kinden, whose fate remains unknown, and who have families and friends who desperately wish to know the truth.’

  He found that, in the silence she left, he had stood up, staring down at this woman who dared to question Imperial practice. She met his eyes, this tiny thing that he could have struck down with a sting or broken with his bare hands.

  ‘Do you think that they will like the truth when they hear it?’ he demanded of her.

  ‘I suspect not,’ she replied quietly, ‘but they wish to know, nonetheless, because not knowing is worse.’

  He closed his eyes, wavering on the point of violence, of some punitive order that would serve no purpose but to make him feel as though he was again in control of the situation. At the back of his mind: Is this really what I have become? He had been meant as an army commander, not to become mired in this civic morass.

  ‘Take her away,’ he snapped, and then, as they were marching the woman out, ‘Bring me the list.’

  Captain Bergild of the Imperial Air Corps knew that most of the Second Army were getting restless. They were a battlefield force pressed to act as a city garrison, and she was frankly amazed that General Tynan was holding them in check as much as he did. She remembered, from her childhood during the Twelve-year War, just how soldiers could be.

  Her own pilots were suffering in the same way. They were warriors of the air, and so far no aerial threat had come to attack the Second or its new possession of Collegium. The Sarnesh had yet to venture south, and who else was there?

  Instead, Bergild and her people were flying endless long-range scouting missions, like this one, looking for an enemy that wasn’t there. Technically the orders were Tynan’s, but she had spotted Vrakir, the Red Watch man, about the airfields, insisting that they scout further and further, that a foe was out there, if they could only find it.

  The man was going mad, by her reckoning, and, as he was in command whenever Tynan’s back was turned, that was a very bad thing indeed.

  Then there was Oski, the major of engineers who had formerly been the one non-Air Corps soldier she could really talk to, but he was off doing some secretive business that he was evidently very keen for her not to know about. This left her and her pilots rattling about in their Farsphex orthopters, ranging out over ludicrous spans of ground, looking for . . . anything, really. Anything at all.

  If there had been more of them, then perhaps they might have formed an effective scouting force, but the Imperial manufactories were still replacing the catastrophic losses that the Collegiates had inflicted on the Air Corps. And now, of course, there were multiple fronts to supply: both the fighting down the Silk Road and the force that was blocking the Sarnesh path eastwards. The Second Army had to make do.

  I remember the last war. The Empire had stretched itself too far, fought on too many fronts, then the Alliance cities had risen up . . . and then the Emperor had died. Leave it to the historians to untangle that mess, but it certainly seemed to Bergild that they were fighting at least one enemy too many, right now.

  Always the same question: why did we turn on the Spiders? And Vrakir, who had borne that order, wasn’t talking about it. He was just giving erratic instructions to pilots: Search here! Search there!

  I know, I know, came the thoughts of her wingman into her mind, and she realized that she had been sending at least some of her opinions across their mindlink.

  He sent Halden and Lidrec out to sea a tenday ago, as if there was an army just treading water out there. Someone needs to do something.

  She conveyed her agreement, but added, Except ‘someone’ means Tynan, and enough people believe this ‘Empress’s voice’ business that, if Tynan and Vrakir go head to head, it’ll be unhealthy for pretty much everyone else in the city.

  You reckon he’s going soft?

  She paused before answering, turning that thought over in her mind. Her wingman meant the general, of course, and he wouldn’t be the first to suggest it. Most of the Second were still fiercely loyal to their general, and some were even trying to match the tentative manner in which he was governing Co
llegium – treading around the locals as though they were as brittle as eggs. Do the Beetles even realize how pissing nice we are being to their snobby, jumped-up city? The muttering dissent was steadily increasing, though. There were always those who felt the hand of restraint as an unbearable weight on their shoulders.

  But that sent them off toadying to Vrakir instead and, whilst Tynan might sit around moping, the Red Watch man was as crazy as a Moth mechanic.

  None of that talk, she cautioned, aware that her long pause would lead the wingman to draw his own conclusions.

  It’s because of that Spider he was poking, the man opined knowledgeably.

  I said, shut it – look out! And she was sliding sideways in the air because suddenly she was under attack.

  She had a brief glimpse of the orthopters as they dropped on her. They moved like lead in the air: bulky boxy machines with repeating ballistae spitting out bolts. There were four of them and, even with the advantage of perfect surprise, they had not touched her. She reached out for her wingman, found that he had been clipped but was still airworthy. Then the two of them were coordinating courses, outrunning the sluggish enemy, which had split up to follow them.

  And yet she tracked their lines and saw how they worked together, pushing the limits of their technology, coordinating in the air as well as Bergild and her wingman.

  Ant-kinden, she decided.

  Sarnesh? asked her wingman.

  If these are the Sarnesh, then we seriously over-estimated the threat their pilots pose. Those machines are ridiculous . . . and what would the Sarnesh be doing this far west along the coast? . . . Oh . . . oh stab me . . .

  For a moment she and her wingman coasted in silence, after seeing what was below, matching it up with where they were. Oh, you can’t be serious! Vrakir was right?

  Orders, sir?

  We get out of here immediately, lose our Ant friends and get back to Collegium. Things just got interesting.

  They kept te Mosca under lock and key for a tenday, confined down in the cellars of the counting house that the Rekef had appropriated for its own use.

  They fed her erratically. They did not torture her, but sometimes she was taken out and up to the ground floor, where the business of interrogations and confessions had shouldered out that of money-changing and loans at interest. Shackled across her back to clamp down on her Art wings, she was left in a guard’s custody for up to an hour before being taken back down again, as though some missing piece of vital paperwork had inadvertently gifted her with another few hours of pain-free existence. She was wise enough to know that this was all part of the game to her captors: their standard procedure, without meaning and almost without malice.

  She was not the only guest of the interrogators. She heard some of the others, for whom that piece of paperwork had most definitely come. Yes, the Imperial hand lay light on Collegium, by the standards of Myna or the half-ruin that was Tark. That meant that fewer were taken up, and perhaps even that more of those put under the machines had done something to occasion it. It did not excuse the methods that the Wasps had built into their culture for rooting out those they believed were their enemies.

  And they only gain more enemies from it. Brave words, those, but they rang hollow in her head right then. Oh, she recalled the rhetoric of the College academics, about the inferiority of the Wasp way, how their violence would inevitably lead to instability and defeat, the uprising of their slave cities, the end of their oppression. A convenient line to take for those Beetle scholars not personally keen to cross swords with the Empire, but te Mosca had believed it. She had lived with the cold and distantly contemptuous Moths of Dorax, and she had seen the excesses of Beetle merchant magnates, but in her naivety she had fervently believed that the Empire was an aberration of history and thus could never last.

  But here she was in Imperial Collegium, and the Empire’s rough vitality had survived civil war and insurrection and seemed only to grow larger and stronger, until she sat in her dark cell and wondered whether it was not Collegium itself that was the freak, the error that the Empire’s conquest was correcting.

  At last they came for her and did more than just stand her about to watch the Rekef clerks mark up their scrolls. She was led across what she now thought of as the Imperial district, to where she had first stood before Tynan.

  There were fewer officers in attendance there, and Tynan himself was not slouched and brooding, but on his feet and talking to a Fly-kinden officer wearing the insignia of one of their specialist corps. The trailing words of their conversation washed over her, technical details that she could not understand.

  Tynan glanced around and saw her; a flick of his fingers dismissed the officer, who gave te Mosca a curious stare as he exited.

  ‘So, it’s you,’ the general grunted. His eyes passed over her, taking in the grime, the thinness of face, the eyes dark from lack of sleep.

  ‘Good morning, General,’ she responded politely. ‘I hope I find you well.’

  He strode closer, searching for mockery. She was surprised to discover that she was not scared of him, nor of being thrown back in the cell, nor even of the Rekef’s machines. Instead she found, from somewhere, a mild and self-contained boldness that plainly baffled him. She had no idea where all that fear had gone.

  Tynan opened his mouth, and just then another Wasp burst in, to the general’s obvious astonishment. The newcomer wore a uniform with red pauldrons and had some badge she didn’t recognize, but his mere appearance was nothing to the horrible feeling of wrongness that washed over her just to look at the man. With a small cry she stumbled away as he advanced on the general.

  ‘Major Vrakir, what can I do for you?’ Tynan growled.

  ‘I require a redeployment of the wall artillery . . .’ Vrakir trailed off under te Mosca’s horrified scrutiny. ‘Who is . . .? This is the seditionist, the Fly lecturer from the College.’

  Tynan blinked slowly. ‘She’s being released.’

  ‘She’s been interrogated?’

  ‘She’s being released.’

  Vrakir digested that, as Sartaea te Mosca shuffled back from the two men, lest the loathing between them cut her in half.

  ‘The Tharen believe—’

  ‘I don’t care what those dust-peddlers say. They can’t back it up with anything solid.’

  ‘General, since when—?’

  ‘And, unlike some, they can’t claim to be the voice of the Empress.’

  In the silence that fell, Sartaea had her hands over her mouth to stop even a whisper escaping.

  ‘Well, then, the Empress commands—’ started Vrakir, but Tynan cut him off with an angry gesture.

  ‘Be very careful when you next play that card, Major. Be sure you mean it. Perhaps you should restrict the Empress’s wisdom to military matters such as the artillery, your recommendations for which you can bring to Major Oski, who knows more about such things than either of us.’

  ‘General Tynan, I am concerned that your personal dislikes are colouring your command of this city.’

  Tynan regarded him with utter distaste. ‘Believe me, Major, you’ll be the first to know if I let my personal dislikes start influencing me.’

  ‘I am not responsible—’

  ‘Men like you never are. Go and seek out the engineers, Major. Don’t come here with your artillery.’

  How is it they don’t kill each other? Te Mosca knew that either man carried death in the Art concealed within his hands. How is it that the entire Empire hasn’t torn itself apart over private squabbles like this? And in that moment she saw it: how the Wasps had clawed their way up from chaotic barbarism to make their Empire; how they had taught themselves that iron self-control; how their strength had turned that rage and ability to kill on the rest of the world.

  And is that it? Is that the secret? Will they consume all other cultures and never become other than they are? Or can there be some metamorphosis into something new? If it is too late for the Wasps, is also it too late for the worl
d that they have set their sights on?

  After Vrakir stormed away, Tynan’s gaze returned to her, and this time she could not keep away a shiver of fear – not for the man but for what he represented.

  ‘What did you see?’ he demanded. ‘You looked at Vrakir as though he was covered in blood.’

  ‘A fit image,’ she whispered. ‘I saw . . . something twisted, something wrong. I’ve never seen the like before.’

  ‘A singular man, is our Major Vrakir,’ Tynan agreed heavily. ‘Now get out of here, and if you come to someone else’s attention it’s the machines for you, you can be sure. Stay away from petitions in future. I’d thought only the Beetles were stupid enough to believe in them.’

  She had already been backing away, but then she slowed, fighting off the fear, remembering her purpose.

  ‘General,’ she said, as steadily as she could, ‘on that subject, did you get a chance to consider the petition I brought you?’

  He stared at her for a long moment, a sad old man with all the power in the world, or at least this corner of it. ‘Did you know, when you came, what was going on west of here? North of here? If you’re a seditionist, you should know.’

  She was sure her face betrayed nothing, that it held only that mild and polite expression that had got her through Moth-kinden disdain and College meetings alike. It’s started? It really has started! But, then, why . . .?

  He took up a scroll, glanced at it once and then threw it towards her. It was her list, and there were notes against many of the names.

  ‘You won’t like it,’ he told her flatly.

  Her eyes were telling her just that already, seeing those brief words: dead, dead, slave, sent for interrogation.

  ‘At least we will know,’ she told him softly. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I choose to believe you’re a foolish philanthropist who will keep her head down in future, but if you meet anyone intent on sedition, you should tell them that the forces moving against this city are not sufficient to take it. Any citizens of Collegium who might be harbouring the misguided notion of rushing to the streets with sword and crossbow would do well to remember that.’