Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Of course, General,’ and knowing her luck was stretched as taut as a bowstring, ready to break under the slightest additional strain, she left it at that.

  Fifteen

  After it was done, and after they realized what it was she had done, Thalric left without a word, scrabbling outside into the cavernous blackness without even his torch.

  He had not understood at first, none of them had. He had just put on a wry face and shrugged.

  ‘That didn’t work, then,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

  Che could not look at him, for he would read the truth in her face, and she was willing to buy more of his ignorance with any coin she had. Instead she glanced at Tynisa, who was looking more frustrated than anything else: a woman denied an enemy she could fight. Che had felt her trying to force the strength of her emotions down the narrow link that connected her to her sword, as though sheer determination could somehow be transformed into magic. Her contribution in truth had been pitiful. Tynisa would never be a magician.

  But trusting, so very trusting.

  Che’s eyes skipped to Esmail, his closed, narrow face, seeing him already picking apart what had happened, sieving it for meaning as any good spy would.

  Then Orothellin; he met her gaze, and his own eyes spoke volumes: he knew. He had been with her, at the end. He had a thousand years of bitter life behind him, enough to understand the decision she had made.

  And Messel . . . but of course she could not lock eyes with him. He had realized, though. He could not overlook absences as the others did.

  Then, from Esmail: ‘The halfbreed’s gone. Maure.’

  Che felt the realization reach the other two.

  ‘Where did she go?’ Tynisa was still working it out. ‘Did she . . .?’

  ‘She got out,’ Esmail stated flatly.

  ‘Yes,’ Che confirmed. ‘I got her out. There was only the chance for one. I only had a second to make the choice.’

  A silence fell softly, in the shadow of her words.

  ‘But . . .’ Thalric said at last, ‘it was a choice.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And how could she have done it, in that vital moment, with the lives and futures of those closest to her riding on her whim? And now they were all three staring at her, waiting for her to justify her decision somehow.

  ‘Of all of us, she was least to blame for being here,’ Che whispered. ‘She wasn’t fighting the Empress. She wasn’t a part of it. She was just . . . unlucky enough to be with me.’

  Esmail she had no responsibility for. He had been one of the Empress’s party from the start. And, as for the others, her lover and her sister . . .

  She should have saved one, she knew, but she could not make the choice. That was the truth. How could she have sent either one of them from her side, only to doom the other?

  And Thalric and Tynisa had both been in the web with her from the start, connected by invisible threads to the vendetta between Che and the Empress. Maure, halfbreed necromancer, had been the closest thing to an innocent in this whole sorry business.

  That was when Thalric left, and she let him go. It was not as if he could go far. He was here in prison with her, after all.

  Esmail drew in a deep breath, and only in that did she read his disappointment and realize how much he had been wanting to go home.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked, quite casually. ‘Where did you send the woman, the halfbreed?’

  Che closed her eyes. ‘Away, to the surface. I had so little control . . .’ Even as she said it, she realized that was not quite true. ‘Somewhere connected to me, somewhere that meant something to me . . .’ Please not to Capitas, to the Empress – but, no, that was not what her subconscious was suggesting. ‘Somewhere safe, I think.’

  ‘Che, you should have saved yourself,’ Tynisa reproached her. ‘From the outside you could have . . . Well, maybe you could have done something, I don’t know.’

  Che shook her head. Escaping herself, and abandoning everyone else, had been the first course of action she had dismissed, and not just because she could not have lived with herself afterwards.

  ‘Messel,’ she said, startling the man, ‘what did you think, when you found us? What did you think it meant?’

  For a long time he did not answer, and only when Orothellin murmured encouragement did he admit, ‘That you had come to save us. From the Worm. All of us. I always – I had always thought the day would come, when the sunland kinden would return for us.’

  ‘Is there . . .’ Che glanced at the Slug-kinden. ‘Is there a prophecy? Did you foresee that we would come?’

  Orothellin smiled weakly. ‘I did not. I am no oracle, nor is this any place for divination. There is no prophecy. But I have done my best to keep alive the idea of the Old World for the people here, and perhaps I have been incautious in the words I used.’

  ‘And yet . . .’ Che added thoughtfully. Esmail’s eyes flicked from her to Messel and back. Tynisa was just waiting, somehow retaining complete faith that Che knew what she was doing.

  ‘We are responsible,’ was what the Beetle girl said eventually, and Orothellin nodded.

  ‘For what?’ Tynisa demanded.

  ‘For all of this. The mantle I have assumed, the inheritance that was thrust on me, it includes this place. The imprisonment of the Worm may or may not have been fair and just to the Worm, but the Worm was not alone when it was sealed down here. There were other kinden, like Messel’s people, who had been their prey for generations, yes? And there were still more – those from the surface who had tried to take the fight beneath the ground – Moths, Woodlice, my own people. Argastos and those other great magicians, my predecessors, they doomed them all to this.’

  ‘Che, what do you expect to do about it?’ Tynisa asked, her faith finally eroding. ‘Especially if you can’t even do . . . whatever it is you do. This place has been – what? – Worm-ridden forever.’

  ‘But something has changed now,’ Che reminded her. ‘The Seal is breaking.’

  ‘And that helps us how?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it means the Worm is venturing outside. It means that there is some way out that the Worm controls. For the present, they step through it one by one, sliding into cracks in the rocks that I cannot even see, but the Seal is failing, this entire place is falling back towards the real. Eventually, perhaps there will be no separation, and any cave or crevice from the surface may lead down here, and then we can all go home. But only . . .’

  ‘But only if we have a home to go to,’ Esmail finished for her. ‘And you think that’s it? That you can defeat the Worm, even as it masses for invasion?’

  ‘I think that the Worm must have a weakness. It relies on its slaves. Just as the Wasp Empire could not survive if all its slaves could throw off their shackles, so too can we fight the Worm.’ The words sounded hollow to her but she was desperate to justify herself.

  ‘And those who will bleed for your vision?’ Esmail asked her, watching her face carefully.

  Che glanced at Orothellin. ‘There was a tax of children when we were at Cold Well. It had come sooner than the people there expected.’ The simple fact that such a practice could be ‘expected’ made her voice tremble a little.

  The huge man nodded slowly.

  ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ she pressed him. ‘Patterns are changing. The Worm is changing its habits. Because of the Seal.’

  Again that ponderous nod.

  She turned her gaze towards Esmail again. ‘The Worm has its eyes on the surface world. It is preparing for a campaign that it has surely dreamt of for centuries. It will want to make best use of its resources. The slaves here are expendable – after all, there are so many more almost within the Worm’s grasp.’

  ‘And if it gets what it wants, if it can achieve its final goal, then perhaps it will not need slaves at all,’ Orothellin added grimly. ‘Nothing but the Worm surviving in all the world.’

  ‘But it needs strength, bodies. I think it is consuming its stockpile here.
It will consume its slaves, take their children, devour their bodies. But what if those slaves evaded it? There is a great, dark space around us, and the Worm cannot be everywhere at once. Even if the slaves cannot fight, they can hide. I need to understand, though,’ Che decided. ‘If I am to do this, I need to know what the Worm is. They call you Teacher. Teach me.’

  ‘There is only so much I can tell,’ Orothellin replied, ‘but there is another who knows it all. Messel must seek him out for us, and then we will travel to him. Once he has spoken to you, shown you, you will wish you never asked. He is unique. He is half-mad. Most likely he is not to be trusted. But nobody else can tell you all he knows. Messel, you know who I mean.’

  ‘The Hermit?’ the blind man replied. ‘The Cursed One?’

  ‘Even he. I know you don’t want to, but we need him. Che needs to hear what he has to say. She needs to see what only he can show her.’

  Messel shuddered, but nodded. ‘I will sleep, and then I will go,’ he confirmed.

  Che sighed, knowing that she too should rest. She ducked outside and went to find Thalric.

  He was standing out in the open, staring into the darkness that surrounded him, but that could not hide him from her.

  ‘Thalric.’

  He did not turn at her voice. She noticed his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides.

  ‘Thalric, I’m sorry. If I could have . . . No, I won’t say that. I could have sent you back, and not Maure. But in that moment, it was just . . .’

  ‘Justice, innocence, I know.’

  ‘And I needed you here with me. It was selfish. You and Tynisa are my strength.’

  ‘Strength?’ he demanded bitterly. ‘Strength here, with me blind and her crippled? Che, of everyone here I am the one who understands nothing, who can’t even use what he was born with. This place . . . I can’t understand it. It’s not part of the world I’m meant to live in.’ She knew he did not just mean the physical, sunlit world they had left.

  ‘Can you believe that it’s just about the same with me?’

  ‘No,’ he said bitterly. ‘Che, I don’t know what it is you have gained, truly, but if you call it magic, so be it. You’re Inapt and you have your magic, and this . . .’ His arms swept about, encompassing all the great chasm that he could not actually see. ‘This is all magic, and nothing but.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ she corrected him. ‘It’s the negation of magic. And the Worm even more so. When they were near, I could not even . . .’

  But he was already speaking over her. ‘Che, I was brought up to expect the world to act in rational ways. I learned calculus and basic principles of artifice. I’m no engineer but I know machines – I know that they work, and they make sense. And here, and when those things were after us . . . it was gone, Che. There was a hole in my head, and everything I thought I understood just fell out. It was as if I’d learned nothing . . . no, it was as if everything I’d learned had been a lie.’

  ‘Yes, that is what it is like,’ she whispered, and she felt shaken. She had thought that this place, locked away from the magic of the world by its Moth creators, had emptied itself of magic, leaving no clay for her mind to sculpt with. That should not affect Thalric, though.

  It is the Worm, she understood. It is not this place, it is the Worm itself. What has it become?

  ‘You still have your Art,’ she told Thalric, although the words came out as more of a question than she had meant.

  ‘For what it’s worth,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I’m going to fight the Worm,’ she told him. ‘I want you to help me. I’m going to start a revolution.’

  ‘That’s it, then, is it?’ he demanded. ‘We’re here for the duration, fighting in the pits until we die?’

  ‘If there is a way out now, it is over the defeated body of the Worm.’

  His face turned, hunting the dark in search of her, and she reached out for him – catching his hand first, then pulling him close, putting her arms about him. ‘Please, Thalric,’ she breathed.

  He held her gently enough, his head bowed over hers. ‘We always do seem to end up in dark places.’

  The Empress Seda was reinventing magic.

  This was her blessing and her curse, that she had been Apt, once.

  She had never been tutored by great magicians or had anyone explain to her the shifting laws by which magic functioned. She had worked always from first principles, but hers was a quick and enquiring mind. She had tested her powers, working on the world and on the minds of those around them. She had already accomplished something unheard of with the Red Watch, a corps of the Apt suborned to serve as her senses and her voice, drawing on that ancestral Inapt spark they all kept hidden away. Was it something the Moth-kinden would think of? It was not, but of course they had Inapt servants aplenty that they could rely on.

  She was trying to mend the world with broken tools.

  But she had learned in logic classes how to test a theory, back when the world had been smaller and made more sense. Such methods made awkward bedfellows with magic, but she had no other way. She needed to be able to measure.

  She could sense the Seal always now, her mind attuned to it. She could feel each spreading crack in it, sense every one of the smaller seals and bans as they shattered one by one. Daily, even hourly, her Red Watch brought her word of every Worm incursion, reports coming in from across the Empire and beyond. She had a map that plotted them all, lines weaving and spiralling and connecting. It did not matter that her former self would not even have recognized it as a map.

  If she stretched her mind as far as it would go, she could appreciate the pattern; she could begin to measure the approach of the Worm.

  Knowing that, she had begun to devise a theoretical countermeasure.

  Had she been Apt, then she would have calculated, abacus in hand, and filled pages with her equations, charts, graphs – all impossible to comprehend in her current state. As it was, she had a whole book of diagrams, sigils, glyphs, the ideograms of an Inapt calculus that perfectly described everything she had uncovered about the Worm, its spread, its paths into the world, her projections for its complete emergence.

  Had a Moth Skryre looked over that book, he would have understood completely and been horrified and shocked. Perhaps even now there were Moths working on exactly the same calculations, coming to the same terrible conclusions. Although probably not to her final conclusion. The Moths had been a race conniving at their own extinction since the revolution. She was Wasp-kinden: she believed that all obstacles could be overcome.

  With enough strength behind her, she could stop the Worm, renew the Seal, perhaps cut off its bleak and terrible home from the world forever. Her magic had always been one of brute might – those were the cards she had been dealt – and now it was raw strength that the world needed.

  She knew that she would get one chance only. If she tried but lacked sufficient power, then what she spent would be wasted, and, once wasted, that power would never come again. Experimentation was therefore needed to work out just what she would be required to do, how far she must go.

  ‘Tisamon,’ she directed, ‘when you are ready.’

  They were in the Mantis room of the Imperial museum, that hidden nook with its walls covered in vines and dead branches, standing before the great worm-ridden idol ripped from its place in the Commonweal as a war trophy, and now returned to its original purpose: a focus for a very specific form of magic.

  Tisamon’s armoured form remained still, because such things were not hurried. The revenant Weaponsmaster, another of her grand magical triumphs, had his metal claw folded back along his arm as he regarded the slave before him. She was an old Grasshopper woman, some skivvy that nobody would miss or care about, just a worn-out menial at the end of her useful life.

  But Seda had one use left for her. This woman was about to provide a great service to magical theory.

  She was tied to the idol and, although she had probably been amongst the Apt for decades, she knew exact
ly what was going on. Seda had ordered her gagged, because her screaming had become a distraction, and still those muffled, desperate sounds issued from her.

  I envy you your ignorance of why this is necessary, the Empress considered. But if you knew how important this was, you would understand. This is for everyone. This is to save the world.

  Tisamon brought the blade of his claw to the old woman’s chin, tilting her head back. Seda saw her eyes try to seek out those of her killer, to appeal to some common humanity between them, but of course there was nothing there. His pale dead face had been short on empathy even while he lived.

  Still, she almost saw tenderness in him as his off-hand touched the woman’s cheek, before forcing her chin up further, baring that wrinkled throat.

  He angled the edge of his blade, so that the point was jutting down towards her collarbones, the line of it along her neck, then with a sudden, almost ecstatic motion, he cut her throat.

  As he moved, Seda focused on the moment of death, the idol’s greedy drinking, drawing that release of power and turning it downwards, inwards, in whatever impossible direction it was that the Worm was approaching from. She felt the infinitesimal give – the tiny reaction to her sacrifice – that validated her calculations. It could be done. It must be done. She could put it all right.

  Soon thereafter she had summoned General Brugan to attend her. She was beginning to tire of him, in truth. Something in him had broken when his conspiracy had been undone, when she had forced him to drink the blood of his comrades, and to watch his Rekef supplanted by her Red Watch. She had expected more of him. She remembered first setting eyes on him – so strong, so ruthless and determined. She barely called him to her bed any more. He had become a dull lover, too timorous to be satisfying.

  She needed him and his Rekef now, though, because her Red Watch was simply not numerous enough for this task.

  ‘Brugan,’ she addressed him. She had chosen the throne room for this audience, hopeful that this reminder of the familiar ways of the Empire would put some steel back into him. He remained kneeling, though, barely able to look her in the face.