Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Of my support – and so of Consortium support,’ Auder murmured. He glanced at Alysaine, and Ernain caught a brief sliver of emotion alien to his lined face, a moment of genuine affection. ‘I’ll not put my name to anything, you can be sure. No Rekef interrogation rooms for me in my old age. If your moment arrives, though . . . if you make your move, well . . . the Consortium will do well out of your new world, I feel. We’ve chafed at the shackles of the throne as much as any slave, believe me. I wish you luck, Captain, I truly do. May we meet again when you have some more concrete achievement to report.’

  In the light of his study, the lamps turned up high, General Brugan of the Rekef studied the latest reports.

  Outside his window, the world was fading to twilight and, though he had ordered the shutters closed, still the darkness seemed to creep in around the edges, to steal into his room and hang heavy about him, as though his eyes were failing before their time.

  He ordered the lamps turned up, but his servant assured him they were as high as they could go.

  ‘Bring me more lanterns,’ he croaked. ‘More light.’ To his own ears his voice sounded as his ghost might. How long had it been since he had spoken? His mind raised the spectre of General Reiner, a long-dead rival for power. The man had ruled his agents and spies in near silence, weaving a mystique about himself by his unspeaking presence, but Brugan knew that Reiner’s closed mouth had hidden only weakness. And when the man had died – Brugan had not even needed to kill him – all that fraudulent inscrutability had died with him.

  Now Brugan found his own voice drying up because silence was preferable to disclosing any of the thoughts that sat rotting in his mind. Thoughts about the Empress. Thoughts about the nature of the world. Thoughts about his own death. Sometimes he imagined taking his own life, because that would at least be a decision he himself could make, an attempt to exert some vestige of control over the world, even in that one small way. But always he failed to turn such thoughts into execution, and recently he thought that it was not fear of personal extinction that stayed his hand, but a fear that she would somehow prevent him from carrying the business through – that, in his final moment of action, he would discover he was even less his own man than he had thought. As long as he did not attempt it, he could persuade himself that the attempt was possible. He did not want to discover that even death was no release.

  At other times he thought that she would have him killed. He would look up, and every shadow would carry its knife. He would see her dark bodyguard, the pale Mantis called Tisamon, lurking in his sight, cold eyes fixed on him, and never know if this was the moment that the Empress tired of him. He had long since tired of himself. He was drained, traumatized. The Empress, their couplings, her rule over him, the failure of his coup: she had left him nothing of the strong man he had once been.

  Sometimes he saw Tisamon, and the man was actually there. Sometimes the man was not there, but Brugan peopled the shadows with him anyway. ‘More light!’ he insisted, and his servants would run to light lanterns and candles for him, but the shadows only multiplied.

  He stared at the reports, fighting against the encroaching darkness to read them. Here was matter that any Rekef officer should be gripped by: detailed movements of slaves, Auxillians, unauthorized meetings and journeys, gatherings of men who had no business being together save to plot treason.

  His eye settled on one name: Captain-Auxillian Ernain of the Engineers, attached to the Second Army, but whose recent activities should be sounding the alarm even now, however much the man had tried to hide them. And that attempt at concealment was itself the action of a criminal or a traitor.

  Brugan stared at the reports. He must act, of course. He must tell the Empress. He must send out his agents to have these people arrested and questioned.

  But his hand shook, and the darkness only gathered closer about him, and he saw the gleam of Mantis steel in the corner of his eye, and he did nothing. He was lost in the night, and he could not find his way back to a place where any of his life made sense. He scanned the reports but saw only words, and the more he read, the less anything connected to anything. If the Empress could do those things he had seen her do, if she had become the impossible, then how could he trust any chain of logic? How could any of these suspicions bear the weight of his belief?

  He swept the papers from his desk and called again for more light.

  General Lien was lean and bald, and a man loyal to the Engineers first and foremost. His recent promotion, and the general advancement of his beloved corps, had bought his almost unquestioning support for the throne. He was one of the few who came promptly and gladly when called before the Empress.

  Seda had caught him off guard, however. He had not expected to be quizzed on matters technical.

  ‘There are ways . . .’ he started, and then stopped again, and she could see him thinking the matter over as an artificer should, breaking down the problem into manageable pieces: the little cogs of mass destruction.

  ‘You have engines, surely?’ she prompted. She did not want to know the details, and indeed she could not have understood them if he had told her, but she wanted to know for sure that the Apt had advanced so far in this specialist field to be of use to her.

  ‘They could be devised, Majesty,’ Lien told her, and he was still elsewhere in his head, even in the presence of his Empress. He was a leader of engineers rather than a grimy-handed mechanic, but she had brought out the craft in him with her question. ‘What timescale . . .?’

  ‘Now, General,’ she told him. ‘Or very soon. I cannot wait for inventions and drawings and tests. Surely your engineers have something for me?’ She was thinking of all the work that lay ahead, the slaves, the cities, the unthinkable harvest that she must needs reap in order to reforge the Seal of the Worm.

  At that, he looked up with a speculative expression.

  ‘Majesty,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘have you heard of the Bee-killer?’

  Twenty-Two

  ‘Instructions are simple,’ Sperra confirmed. ‘Stay in your houses. No grand uprising.’

  Poll Awlbreaker shook his head. ‘Makes no sense.’ He looked about the circle of his friends for support, the little band of revolutionaries gathered in the back room behind his workshop.

  To Sartaea te Mosca it seemed there were few there as dedicated to action as he was. Raullo Mummers the artist shrugged unhappily, and the Spider, Metyssa, put a hand on Poll’s arm.

  ‘I’m not exactly keen about being penned up in your cellar for months at a time,’ she told him, ‘but taking to the streets will get messy.’

  Poll stared at her. ‘It’ll be war. What were you expecting?’

  ‘I’m expecting the Sarnesh or someone to have a plan that won’t get everyone killed.’

  ‘Poll, have faith,’ said te Mosca. ‘And, believe me, I’ve seen the Empire close up recently, and things are as taut as a bowstring. The first sign of an uprising, and Tynan will give the order to shoot everyone who takes to the streets.’

  ‘And here you were saying he’s a reasonable man,’ Poll grumbled.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I think he is,’ she confirmed. ‘But he’s a reasonable Wasp with an army, and that would be the reasonable response to a mass revolt by the people he’s been set to watch over.’

  Poll stood up abruptly, frustrated aggression making him clench his fists over and over, unable to be still. ‘Have you seen how many the Sarnesh have brought? It’s a joke, a glorified lorn detachment, a suicide detail! Even with the Vekken and that handful who’ve supposedly sailed from Tsen, it’s not enough to take the city unless we rise up.’

  ‘By your own logic,’ Metyssa observed, ‘that means that, if we do, the Wasps can hold off the Ant-kinden with just a small force on the walls and turn most of their weapons against us. Is this that Apt logic you’re so proud of?’

  ‘Sit tight,’ Sperra confirmed. ‘That’s all they ask of you.’

  ‘They who?’ Poll demanded angrily.
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  ‘Laszlo,’ Sperra announced proudly. ‘I met with him only yesterday. He says he got the orders from . . .’

  The others waited, watching her fight over whether to say it or not.

  ‘Stenwold Maker,’ Raullo Mummers finished for her, in mock-prophetic tones.

  Sperra deflated somewhat. ‘Yes, that is what he said, actually.’

  ‘Maker’s dead,’ Poll said dismissively.

  ‘He’s not,’ Sperra insisted. ‘Laszlo said.’

  ‘I rather fear that if I was writing a story intended to inspire the people of Collegium, I wouldn’t admit to the man being dead, either,’ Metyssa noted drily. ‘What say you, Sartaea?’

  The Fly magician hunched in on herself. ‘I would like to believe . . .’ she said slowly, ‘but I very much fear—’

  The crash of the front door being kicked in seemed appallingly loud. Poll had a solid door but, when the wood failed to yield to the first impact, there was an explosive splintering as an impatient hand simply blasted at the hinges with a sting.

  ‘Metyssa, get under cover!’ he shouted, lunging across his back room for the nearest available weapon, one of his heavy hammers. The others were on their feet now, and Metyssa was dragging a dagger from its sheath.

  ‘No! Hide!’ Poll got out, and then the Wasps were swarming into the room, palms out ready to sting. He launched himself at them, the hammer catching one on the shoulder, sending the man staggering and denting his mail. Then, three against one, they were on him, not stinging but punching and kicking, beating him to the ground with brutal efficiency.

  The rest of the Wasps were still ready to sting, fully half of them wearing the closed helms of the Slave Corps.

  ‘Sartaea te Mosca,’ one of them announced, staring at the Fly-kinden. ‘Your presence is requested.’

  ‘Is it the general?’ she asked in a hushed voice.

  ‘“Is it the general?”’ he echoed, mocking. ‘My, what airs you have. Turns out someone has a use for a few Inapt like yourself, and Major Vrakir was kind enough to put your name forward especially. Been making friends, you have.’

  ‘What is this about, please?’ te Mosca asked, her voice quavering slightly, and the lead Wasp punched her hard, a straight downward blow that knocked her flat to the floor to cradle her bruised face.

  ‘Slaves don’t get to ask questions,’ he spat – and then Raullo hit him with a chair.

  For a moment there was chaos, and Sartaea remained curled into a ball, terrified of being stepped on but unable to scramble out from between that tangle of legs. Poll was trying to get upright or to drag Wasps down to his level, and Metyssa was in there with her dagger. Then there was a flash of stingshot, and abruptly all was quiet. The Slave Corps was well used to keeping its inferiors in line.

  From her vantage point on the floor, Sartaea te Mosca stared over into the face of Raullo Mummers her friend, gone ashen now and quite still. His hands were crooked like claws about the charred crater in his chest.

  She, who had always been so mild, let out a howl of loss that surprised her. If she had been some great magician of olden days then she would have summoned a spell to wipe the lot of them off the face of the earth in that moment. She was barely even a magician of the current age, though, and a Fly-kinden to boot, and all she could do was beat at them with her tiny fists as they laid hands on her. Then they hauled up Metyssa and bound her for transport as well.

  ‘What about this one?’ One of them indicated Poll, hanging between a pair of Wasps, his face bruised and bloody. ‘Doesn’t look Inapt to me.’

  ‘So they’ll get some gold amongst the dross, and who cares?’ the lead slaver replied carelessly. ‘Bring him along. We’ve got a quota to hit.’

  She did not look at the corner where Sperra had been sitting, knowing only that the woman was neither a living prisoner nor a corpse. One of them, at least, had possessed the sense to duck for cover when the Wasps burst in.

  Then the slavers were hauling Sartaea away, wrenching her head around when she tried for a final glimpse of Raullo’s still form.

  All over Collegium the same scene was being played out. Anyone even suspected of being Inapt was sought by the slavers, and soon they simply ceased discriminating, used as they were to fulfilling orders of quantity rather than quality. After all, the Empire had an inexhaustible need for slaves of all types, and they had the Empress’s writ. Besides, as a number of Tynan’s officers agreed, Collegium was well overdue for a humbling.

  Bergild found Major Oski supervising a team of sweating Engineers as they manhandled a leadshotter down the streets of Collegium towards the docks.

  ‘Shipping out?’ she called over to him.

  He gave her a filthy look, then a second glance. ‘You look wrecked.’

  ‘Two straight sorties against the Stormreaders.’ She had seen her own face in a dented mirror not long ago: grey with fatigue, as dark about both eyes as though she had some possessive husband to beat her. Perhaps the war’s my husband.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ the Fly advised her curtly, then turned to yell at his charges as the bulk of the leadshotter threatened to crash into a shop front.

  ‘Tried that. No good,’ she muttered. ‘Where’s your man Ernain, anyway. Don’t think I’ve seen you without him tagging at your heels before.’

  ‘Elsewhere. Engineer business.’

  ‘Air Corps is still engineers, Major.’

  He scowled at her. ‘My apologies, Captain. Should have said “terrestrial engineer business”.’

  For a moment she was just about to go, but she needed to be taken out of herself; the company of pilots, the same constant round inside her head over and over, was anything but that. Oski was the only company she knew outside her comrades. She settled on, ‘Keep your secrets, then.’

  ‘No secrets to keep,’ he replied, before the business at hand claimed his attention. ‘Piss on the lot of you, do I have to—? All right, I’m going to—’ And his wings took him over to stand on the leadshotter’s barrel. ‘Now you steer this thing straight or I will kick each one of you in the head!’ A little man, half the size of the Wasps he was abusing, but how else was a little man to get things done?

  ‘You’re a funny man, Major,’ she called to him.

  ‘What can I say? It’s a funny war.’

  Then they were in sight of the docks and she swore outright. ‘What the pits is this?’

  ‘Oh, this?’ He turned around on the trundling leadshotter, wings glimmering in and out of being as he caught his balance. ‘This is the old man and Major Vrakir having another pissing contest, only I guess this time Red Watch pissed higher, because we’re moving all these sodding engines off the walls – y’know, where they’re going to do us any good – to the seafront. And why not? Artillery crews need a bit of sea air, just like every man, right?’

  The docks of Collegium had become a siege front waiting to happen. Bergild watched as several hundred of the Second’s soldiers dragged out furniture from every nearby building, to pile it into barricades, whilst leadshotters and other engines were wheeled into position as if to repel an armada. On the rooftops overlooking the docks there were soldiers with piercers and nail-bows and repeating ballistae, whilst a pair of huge, articulated Sentinels picked their way between the labouring men with absurdly dainty movements.

  ‘All I can say is,’ Oski shouted over the noise, ‘that if those couple of hundred Tseni marines out there try sailing in, they’re in for one pissing enormous surprise!’

  ‘This is insane!’ she yelled back, unable to take it all in.

  ‘You’re going to tell that to the Red Watch?’ Then he was bending down and, pointing, directing his men to where the leadshotter needed to go.

  Bergild opened her mouth, about to embark on a sentence that started with, ‘But why don’t you . . .?’ and had no conceivable ending, then she shrugged.

  ‘Exactly,’ Oski confirmed, hopping down. ‘That’s fine there. Make sure it’s braced.’ He swung through the air back
to her. ‘Got just about all my boys here in full clank. Got the artillery we hauled all the way to Collegium. Got a load of stuff like that heavy bastard that the Collies helpfully left on the walls for us, including some real special toys and games. I almost want the Tseni to make a go of it now, just for the laughs.’ He looked her over again. ‘Seriously, Captain, get some sleep.’

  ‘Tried.’ She shrugged. ‘They broke out the Chneuma five nights ago, and now we’re all buzzing about inside our own heads like flies in a bottle. None of us can get our heads down.’

  He shrugged. ‘I know what that’s like, though for me it’s more as if there’s only one of me but enough engineering work for three majors and a colonel.’

  ‘So ask for a promotion.’

  With that, she raised a smile from him. ‘Yeah, well . . .’ He glanced over the line of artillery, the soldiers camped out in all the dockside buildings. ‘“Fear death by water.”’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘Supposed to be what Red Watch said.’

  After that the two of them just stared across the unquiet sea.

  ‘I dreamt of Che last night,’ Totho said.

  ‘No, you didn’t.’ Maure barely glanced up from the fire. He had found out that her woodscraft was significantly better than his after they had struck out away from the lakeshore, in case anyone else came looking for refugees from Chasme.

  Her reply made him angry. ‘So you know what I dream now, do you? That’s another Inapt lie you want me to believe?’

  She had frozen in place – obviously she was still wary of him. He found his anger came almost without warning after Drephos’s death, a roiling well of frustration and impotence constantly churning inside him. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘No, I understand.’ He stood up abruptly, eyes darting to his armour laid out on a cloak as though they were mourners at its funeral. His snapbow lay alongside. ‘So the Apt aren’t allowed to dream, is that it? Our humdrum lives don’t qualify.’