Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  In her head, where for a long time had been only the echo of her own thoughts, she heard a faint, deep susurration, the muted, distant sound of some great voice, and she shivered. Other than that imagined noise, the city had only a single sound: a thin, constant keening, high and painful to hear, so that she wondered if the Worm, the destroyer, was itself in constant pain.

  ‘These scars—’ she started, but the Hermit waved her back, and the two of them hid, crouching beside a wall, whilst another of the Scarred Ones – the priests – passed in the distance.

  ‘They are necessary. Without them, my kinden are just loops and segments of the Worm. Our stigmata, they spiral and they spiral, and they lead the Worm’s attention away so that the mind may be kept free. The scars bind us to the Worm, but keep us from its domination – just enough to be useful, yes. And you hear the Worm’s voice, don’t you? I know you do.’

  She could see ahead a broad open space – a market square in any other city perhaps, but amongst the Worm there was nothing bought or sold, only taken. There were pits there, the same circular shafts she had marked from afar – too broad simply to be wells – and she realized with a start that the wailing sound originated there, and with that she knew what it was. The Hermit turned sharply away from the pits, dragging her with him when she paused to stare.

  ‘You must stay with me!’ he hissed. ‘Step from my shadow and every eye here shall mark you.’

  ‘I wanted to—’

  ‘That is not the way.’ There was something agitated, almost furtive in his manner as he pulled her away from the pits. ‘We do not, we do not . . . here, we will enter the earth. Come. Everything will be explained.’

  He had found a smaller shaft, and Che watched a string of soldiers exit from it, coursing from the narrow shaft without hesitation. The reverberation in her head seemed louder, as they closed with that aperture, and the image of it as a mouth in the stone was unshakeable.

  ‘Orothellin says . . .’ the Hermit told her again, ‘but, no, you will sense it yourself. I feel it myself. We go to the cavern that all roads lead to. History is thick here. The way we were, my people, when first we were sealed down here, you will feel it. I have come here and known just how it was, for them.’

  He ducked inside, and she could only follow him, hauled unwilling in his footsteps for fear of the Worm recognizing her as a trespasser.

  ‘You cannot imagine it, you who have always had your sun. What desolation they must have known, seeing themselves so humbled, so trapped. How they sought within themselves for some means to survive.’ He was picking up pace now, forcing her almost to run after him. Half the time he was on all fours, scrabbling and scuttling. She wondered what would happen if they met a Scarred One, here where there could be no hiding.

  ‘Do you feel it?’ he demanded, far too loudly. ‘Do you feel my ancestors searching for their purpose? Do you feel their terrible despair?’

  And she did. It was like a sour taste in her mouth, the anguish of an entire civilization locked away to rot. Looking back, the Hermit must have seen it mirrored in her face.

  ‘Those feelings are still here, all the images and the emotions that my kinden divested themselves of. When they found the Worm within them.’

  ‘But they were always the Worm – or the Moths called them that . . .’ Che objected.

  ‘Oh, the Moths and their clever insults. How could they have known that down here we would find the Worm in truth?’ the Hermit hissed.

  Then he would answer no more questions, but led her down, ever downwards, through cramped tunnels, steep slopes, and always that wordless voice waxing in her mind – a constant urging, an incessant dirge like no sound she had ever heard before.

  And then the Hermit had stopped, and she was looking out into a vast cavern from a high vantage point. We must have gone as far down as this world allows. But she had no idea of how the metaphysics and the geology would work, and the sight before her gave the lie to her thought, because the rock below was riven by a chasm that descended further into the depths, into a darkness beyond even her eyes’ ability to pierce.

  Approaching that plunging drop she saw a handful of figures and flinched back when she identified no fewer than three of the Scarred Ones, the Hermit’s former brethren. They had some of the Centipede soldiers, too, but the most prominent figure was surely a slave, a hulking Mole Cricket man who looked as though he should be throwing his captors about the cave. Instead, he stood with head bowed, arms by his sides, utterly resigned to . . . what?

  Will they throw him into the rift? was her initial thought. The Hermit’s hand clenched on her shoulder painfully as he crouched beside her, and she saw a bizarre war of expressions on his face: disgust, fear and a dreadful hungry anticipation.

  There was something coming, and with it came the voice. That colossal echoing murmur was growing and growing inside her head, strengthening into an incoherent ranting, the colossal demands of something infantile and hungry and almost mindless. The soldiers of the Worm and their scarred priests were falling back from the slave, where he stood on the very lip of the chasm.

  ‘What is it?’ Che got out, feeling that monstrous ascent within every fibre of her being. ‘What’s coming?’

  ‘God,’ breathed the Hermit in her ear, and then god came.

  It uncoiled from the depths. Perhaps it was the depths. Che’s eyes, which knew no darkness, could not see it, only the cold stark night that radiated out from its great articulated body. It reared high towards the roof of the cave, and a wave of crushing despair washed over her. It was a hole in the world in the shape of a centipede, from its flailing whiplike antennae and the hooked poison claws that crowned its head to the rows of clutching, pointed limbs. Screaming horror seethed visibly off it like dark steam, even as that roaring voice reached an incomprehensible crescendo in Che’s mind.

  And still it came, segment after sightless segment thrusting that head up to sway over the gathering below.

  And Che beheld the Worm.

  She forced herself to stare at it, to encompass it within her understanding, to reduce it to something she could name. Just a centipede, she told herself desperately, but how far from the truth! It was a wrong made physical. It was a devouring tear in the substance of the world, a writhing, many-legged door to somewhere that made this cavern world seem verdant and filled with life in comparison.

  It was not utterly lightless. Small pale specks seemed to swim in its depths, or across its carapace, and Che sought them out, hoping to find something there she could understand.

  She found it, and she wished she had not. The substance of the Worm was swimming with faces. They were faces of many kinden, rising and submerging, contorting into plastic screams that only added to the Worm’s ranting chorus. And Che remembered what Maure had said, that there were not even fragments of the dead here in this underworld. Now she saw. Now she was witness to where the dead went, both whole and in fragments. They went to the Worm, to drown in its freezing depthless body and be devoured.

  ‘Under the sun, perhaps my people could not have found god,’ the Hermit whispered, ‘but here, buried in their own despair and self-hatred, they reached within themselves, and this was what they called to. You see it? You see god?’

  ‘I see . . .’ Old College lessons were rising to the upper reaches of her thoughts. ‘What did they do? What did they call?’

  And that swaying head, boiling with a darkness so intense it was harder to look at than the sun, had risen twenty feet or more over the gathering below and, with most of its body yet confined to the depths, had gone very still.

  ‘Our essence, the heart of our kinden, the perfect form of the Centipede, from which we draw our Art and our identity,’ the Hermit breathed. ‘We reached into ourselves with all our rage and spite, and ripped out all that we were, all of the human, and gave form to what was left, our base nature, our totem as seen through the mask of our bitter defeat: our god.’

  The doctrine of perfect forms . . . Of c
ourse she knew the theory, how each kinden had a perfect exemplar, a theoretical ultimate from whence all Art was drawn. It was only a theory, though. She was not supposed to be able to look at one.

  ‘What does it want?’ she demanded.

  ‘Want? It wants nothing but the Worm. It wants what the Worm – my people – always wanted. It wants to be alone in the world, to have a world that is nothing but segments of the Worm, replicated over and over. It has no other desires, no thought, no reason to exist save to continue to be, and to grow greater, and to destroy all that is not of itself. What else could be the result of all of our despair and horror but this insensate, pointless god of ours?’

  With that, the god of the Worm struck – savagely swift for something so large – and she saw those puncturing claws seize on the Mole Cricket, who screamed at last, writhed in their grip even as they crushed his body between them. Che listened for some change now to that constant hungry mantra, but there was nothing except that litany of mindless desire, over and over again.

  ‘Why does it want slaves?’ she wondered numbly.

  ‘It does not,’ the Hermit told her. ‘You think god cares? But the priests will sacrifice nonetheless. It gives an illusion of control, but it is only an illusion. This is what you propose to fight, Beetle girl. This is the source of my kinden’s dominion – over this world, and soon over the sunlit lands as well. This is the Worm that will eat up the world. Now you see. Now you share our despair.’

  She watched the shape of the great hooked mouthparts treading over the ruined corpse of the Mole Cricket, each curved claw a hole in the weave of the world that stretched longer than her body: the blindly working mandibles of god.

  ‘The Worm knows only enough to know that there are things it cannot accomplish. In order to live and last, in order to replenish its numbers and arm its warriors, there is thought and planning needed,’ the scarred old man went on. ‘That is why I exist. That is why the Scarred Ones exist. They think themselves priests down there, giving homage to god, but god doesn’t care. God permits us our petty freedoms because we advance its cause, and its cause is to consume everything, to be everything. When god has devoured the sunlit lands and made all the world like itself, it will have no need of Scarred Ones. When god has eliminated all who are not of the Worm, it will have no need of warriors. It will consume and consume until this thing you see will be the entire world.’

  ‘And the Scarred Ones know this?’ Che whispered.

  ‘We do, and yet we serve, because even that conscious servitude is better than becoming a thoughtless segment of the Worm.’

  ‘But . . .’ Che shook her head. ‘Just existence for existence’s sake . . . what could be the point?’

  ‘Why do you think I listened to Orothellin,’ the Hermit said grimly, beginning to retreat down the tunnel. ‘My poor kinden . . . myself, those scarred wretches down there, we are all that is left of our people. This is what the Moths wrought when they bound us down here. We are what they left us.’

  The Hermit was keen to be gone, but Che turned back suddenly, staring down towards the cavern to which all paths led, the seat of the Worm.

  Could she possibly destroy it, and destroy all of the Worm? Could she, right now, assassinate the Centipedes’ god, and release the world from their curse?

  But all the strength she ever had would not be enough to pierce that lightless carapace. The very thought of drawing upon herself that colossal attention sapped her ability even to think about it. As she searched desperately for some possible weakness, it seemed to grow stronger and stronger in her mind. Even if she could bring an army before it, the army would be help-less. The crushing denial of the Worm would stifle the best weapons of the Apt, would see the magic of the greatest magicians fade to a mere dream. The greatest of Weaponsmasters would not have the courage to raise a blade against it.

  What, then, could the slaves of the Worm accomplish? What would they have left to them? The strength of their arms, their Art, their skills. Could those possibly be enough to overcome what she had just seen? The Worm did not conquer as the Wasps did, by bettering themselves to overcome the advances of their enemies. The Worm dragged everything down to its own primal level. The Worm did not believe in Aptitude or Inaptitude. The Worm believed only in itself.

  I will do this. But her thoughts seemed muted and tiny against the constant rush and rumble of the Worm.

  They emerged again into the city, amid that wordless seething of the Worm’s human bodies. The Hermit crouched in the tunnel mouth, eyes alert for his former brethren.

  ‘Now you have seen enough,’ he declared. ‘Now you regret coming here. Now we go.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she insisted, but inside her was something dying and near dead, the fires of her hope dimmed to an ember.

  They were halfway clear of the city when she heard it – shrill sounds piercing the constant murmur and scuff of the Worm’s movements. A new consignment had arrived. The Worm had been exacting its tax.

  She stopped, and the Hermit dragged at her sleeve, but this time she stood firm, watching a train of warriors course between the walls of the city, bearing cages crammed with screaming infants. They were heading for the pits, as she had known they must be.

  ‘We must go!’ the Hermit insisted fiercely, but she could not – not until she knew the full scope of what was done here.

  She saw the cages opened at the pits, the squalling captives hauled out, one by one and dropped in almost gently – as if to be kept alive for something. Something that likes live prey?

  ‘What are they feeding those children to, Hermit? Is it the Worm?’

  He managed a sickening, wretched laugh. ‘Yes. No, no. They feed them to nothing. Come, we must go!’

  The insincerity on his face was hideous. As a Scarred One he had never needed to lie, save to himself.

  ‘I’m going to see.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t. I’ll leave you here.’

  Looking into his pale eyes, reading the twitchings and spasms of his expression, she shook her head, and set off for the pits. Instantly he was at her heels, begging her, clutching at her, and yet unable to prevent her progress.

  She passed like a dream through the purposeful bustle of the Worm, all those enemies seeing only a Scarred One’s shadow. She came to the lip of the pit, the sounds of wailing, terrified children louder in her ears, the air below reeking of death and excrement.

  What will I see? Is this the Worm’s stomach? Are these the pens where its beasts fatten themselves? What is the last piece of the puzzle?

  She looked down.

  Maggots.

  That was her first thought, seeing those countless bodies writhing and clawing helplessly over one another, smeared with their own filth, turning their faces towards her to shriek out their need, to demand the human care and comfort that they had been torn from. Not maggots, though. Children, infants, carpeting the floor of the pit. Infants of all kinden, twisting and knotting and fighting, and here and there just lying still, already dead. Many of them were blankly silent, but some – probably the newest arrivals – were wailing at the tops of their voices, demanding their lives back, their parents, that fragile little slice of love that they had known. Their voices, that chorus of loss and loneliness, raked claws deep down inside her.

  The Hermit was still trying to pull her away, but she had become immovable, nailed there by sheer horror and revulsion.

  ‘You must go,’ he mumbled. ‘This was always the way.’

  At that intervention, she could break free some fragment of her attention for him, enough to lash out and take him by the throat with a strength she had not known she possessed. ‘What do you mean,’ she demanded, ‘“This was always the way”?’ For this was exactly what he had sought to keep her from, she realized. Not to protect her but to protect himself, the memory of his already-accursed kinden. He was ashamed.

  ‘Orothellin says . . .’ he whimpered. ‘He says this was why the Moths and the others warred against us. This
. . .’

  I should hope so . . . But it did not explain anything. It did not make sense. Her legs were shaky as she stumbled over to the next pit, although her grip on the Hermit did not weaken.

  She had expected to witness the same scene, but the children here were older, larger. They struggled and fought with one another, and it was as beasts fought – in sudden confrontations just as suddenly abandoned. Again, some were dead, and there was a curious look to the rest that sent her hurrying on to the next pit, revelation curdling in her gut. They made no sounds here. Because they have learned it will do them no good, was the inescapable conclusion.

  ‘Orothellin . . .’ The Hermit’s voice came to her. ‘He says that my people ever sought to make the world in our image. That was what the others could not forgive – what our efforts showed them, of how the world truly worked. Our intolerable truths.’

  And the bodies in the third pit were older still, looking not far from grown, pallid and lanky and all too similar to one another, save that here or there she could see some mark of ancestry: darker skin, a larger frame, a Moth’s blind eyes. But they were the Worm, all of them, or would be soon. They were the foot-soldiers of the Worm.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ she whispered. ‘What does Orothellin say this is?’

  ‘That we found a way, long before the war, to break the bonds of kinden. That we took the children of our enemies, and we made them into our own. So that when others fought the armies of the Worm, they knew that they would shed their own blood, make themselves kinslayers, every blow they struck. We called them the New Soldiers, Orothellin says. In those days it was just to supplement our numbers, to swell our armies. He says.’

  She wanted him to stop then, but she had called the Worm from dark recesses of his mind and it would come forth, segment after segment, whether she wanted it to or not.

  ‘But now we are the Worm, in truth. Now my people have become a mindless appendix to our god. Only we Scarred Ones can even sire or bear children, the rest are just . . . segments. Segments is all they are. Sexless, mindless, hollow shells they are. But the New Soldiers, oh, that is easier, far quicker than once it was. It took so long to grow a mind to the fullness of intellect. But to grow a body to strength is short work. No wonder they tax the slaves. They will tax them until their wombs are barren. The Worm needs soldiers to swallow the world, to empty all the lands under the sun. The Worm can spend the futures of its slaves, for there are a million new recruits in the wider world. Already they are being carried down here, the children of your kin. The Worm grows ready to hatch from this place. It will consume everything here, and it has no patience for things it no longer needs.’ That divide within the man, his present self-knowledge warring with the thing he had once been, was blazing on his face.