Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She had heard the fire ebbing in his voice as bitterness crept in to steal away his genuine aggression. ‘Actually, that is what I meant, only not quite, and I spoke hastily. When I would talk about dreams, though . . . my dreams mean something. Inapt dreams do, if they can only be interpreted.’

  He snorted. ‘Dreams mean nothing. They’re just our minds stirring all the thoughts we’ve had. So you come to me babbling about Che, so I dream of her.’

  ‘Just so.’

  Her dismissal only aggravated him more, although even he was asking himself, What do I possibly want out of this conversation? Where am I trying to take it? ‘I wouldn’t have—’

  ‘If I hadn’t come along to bother you, yes,’ she finished. ‘And I’d tell you I didn’t ask to and that I’m only here because you’re still connected to Che, because she’s still in your mind like a ghost. But you don’t believe any of that, so why are we going over this again? Let’s get to this Spider place of yours and then you can go . . . wherever, and I can go wherever else.’

  ‘And where would you go?’ he demanded of her.

  She looked up at him with those pale, irisless eyes. ‘North. If I head north for long enough, I don’t think I can fail to hit the Commonweal.’

  ‘Hundreds of miles.’

  ‘Hence “for long enough”.’

  ‘You’ll be dead or a slave or raped before you even hit the Lowlands.’

  For a moment she stared into the fire, breathing deeply, and he thought she was pondering those fates, but belatedly realized that she was summoning her composure to deal with him without losing her own temper.

  ‘What do you suggest I do, Totho? Why are you trying to bind me to you?’

  ‘What? I’m not—!’

  ‘Everything you’ve said has “Stay with me!” shouting out loud between each word. Only I didn’t think I was such a catch.’

  He knew that should only make him angrier but, confronted with that, the rage refused to venture forth. His own knowledge of how unreasonable he was being caught up with him, and he was suddenly out of easy explanations, vacillating, opening his mouth, then shrivelling before her cool, shrewd stare.

  At last she said, ‘Che. It’s Che, then.’

  ‘You think that, just because you—’

  ‘I’m a link to Che, yes. Or isn’t that it? Tell me what, then.’ And, when he wouldn’t answer, ‘What did you dream?’

  He blinked at this sudden turn. ‘She was in a dark place,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s true. Congratulations, you’re obviously Inapt and a prophet.’

  ‘I’ve been a lot of bad things in my time, but Inapt isn’t one of them.’ At last he sat back down, feeling somewhat more collected. ‘Just that: a dark place. Like when I found her in the farmhouse cellar after the Battle of the Rails. Got herself into trouble again, and it was down to me to save her.’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘I thought I had, at the time.’ He tested his fragile composure and found that it would take his weight. ‘But she was playing me, all along. The Moth bastard had her, and she loved him, but it didn’t stop her leaning on me when it suited her.’

  ‘Perhaps she thought you were a friend.’ Maure poked the fire speculatively.

  ‘A friend. Right.’

  ‘I couldn’t even say that much for myself, I don’t think,’ she said softly. ‘Just some hireling magician who did her a favour once, but she got me out of there. And all the country between here and the Commonweal will be a joy to cross, believe me, if I never see the Worm again. Although, if I understand correctly, that’s no guarantee.’

  ‘Because this Worm has a way out.’

  ‘Right.’

  A long pause followed. Totho took a swig from his water skin, and Maure chewed on some hard biscuit they had acquired.

  ‘If you could help her . . .?’ he began eventually.

  ‘I owe her a great deal,’ Maure told him. ‘If it meant something as simple as me sticking my hand out and hauling her from a hole, I’d not hesitate. Though I’d like to think I’m a decent enough type that I’d do that for most people. ‘

  ‘But if you could—?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I will not go back to that place, Totho, not even to help Che. You don’t know. You can’t know what it was like. I don’t even know how long I was down there, without the sun, surrounded by the earth, and without my skills – and with all that I ever made myself into just stripped away. I was going mad, Totho. Not even for Che, no.’

  ‘But you could.’

  She rounded on him furiously, demanding, ‘Are you judging me?’ and froze, staring at his face. ‘You’re not, are you?’

  ‘No,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I’m not talking about this any more.’

  ‘Fine.’

  She turned her back on him, almost theatrically, shoulders hunched as though awaiting a blow.

  ‘She was in a dark place in my dream,’ Totho repeated. ‘She was in pain, in fear. She was calling out.’

  ‘Your name?’

  He stared murderously at her back. ‘No,’ he spat, at last. ‘Not my fucking name. Of course not my name. Why ever should she call for me?’

  Twenty-Three

  There came a night where the following morning – or its sunless surrogate – would see them putting Che’s plan into action, to whatever extent that was even possible. In the Hermit’s high cave they sat around a fire that burned with salt colours, whilst outside the world of the Worm waited for them, ready to break all their hopes against its vast scale and its uncaring brutality.

  Then the Hermit shuffled into the back of his cave and returned hesitantly with a jar of something that reeked like paint. He held it out to Orothellin, who took it almost reverently.

  ‘Is that supposed to be wine?’ Tynisa demanded.

  ‘Approximately.’ The huge man took a draught, his eyes creasing about the sudden tears the taste had pricked there, before handing it over to her.

  Tynisa had never drunk much wine, and the mere smell of the stuff made her gag, but everyone was watching her now, Thalric especially. It was like being back at the College, engaged in some ridiculous student dare – only then she herself had always been the one to set the stakes. And now I have become merely a follower, somehow.

  She took a half-mouthful, and that almost overpowered her. The sharp, acrid taste was so much the antithesis of wine that she felt almost awed to be in its presence. ‘Did this . . . did this come from the surface?’ she demanded of Orothellin. ‘Have you been saving this for a thousand years?’ She would have believed it.

  For a second the Slug-kinden just goggled at her, but then something happened to his mournful, majestic face and he exploded into a belch of laughter. ‘Thousand-year wine? Not even my people would drink thousand-year wine! No, no, the Hermit brews it from—’

  ‘Don’t!’ Thalric interrupted. ‘Nobody cares. You’d only put us off. Let’s face it, there’s nothing wholesome out there to ferment. I don’t want to hear that it’s crushed mushrooms and cricket piss or something.’ He snagged the jar from Tynisa and tipped it back almost contemptuously. A moment later he almost spilled the lot, Che rescuing it from him just in time as he doubled over, coughing ferociously.

  ‘So much for the Empire,’ Tynisa remarked, sounding somewhat croaky herself.

  Che sniffed at the jar’s lip and recoiled. ‘I think I’ll abstain.’

  ‘Oh, get some in you,’ Thalric managed – or something like it.

  ‘Well, yes, I can see the power of good it’s done you.’

  Tynisa met her eyes, the two of them grinning at each other just as though they’d never left Collegium.

  ‘Go on, drink. Perhaps it’s magic,’ Thalric pressed.

  Are we drunk, already? Tynisa wondered, but it was not the vile concoction of the Hermit’s that had brought on this mood. Rather it was the knowledge of what they were about, the terrible odds, the horrors of the Worm that
Che had brought back from that cursed city. What was there to lose, therefore? The worst was already here, and had been squatting and growing in these caverns for a thousand years.

  Like the wine, thought Tynisa, and she snorted. In their minds they were making the Worm small enough to manage. They were belittling it, each of them inside their heads, because otherwise it was so large and appalling that they would have given up.

  Che tried some of the Hermit’s vintage and gagged, pulling a face that Tynisa remembered from years before. ‘That’s what you do with real wine,’ the Weaponsmaster taunted, remembering when Stenwold had first let his niece try the stuff.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Che was blinking furiously, ‘it’s quite lovely. Esmail?’

  For a moment the Assassin was going to remain aloof and preserve his dignity, but then he took the jar and took a long swallow, keeping his face meticulously composed, though Tynisa saw one of his hands crook itself into a claw.

  ‘A little tame,’ he decided, each word precisely pronounced, and handed the jar back to the Hermit, who had watched stony-faced through the entire routine, blankly baffled by all of it.

  A few days later they walked into Cold Well, and the reaction of the locals was gratifying. Thalric looked at their faces and saw every emotion there that he would have looked for in a slave: guilt, terror, shame, shock. These wretched downtrodden animals had no doubt consigned the memory of their surface-world visitors to their impoverished histories. No doubt they had been telling each other how the Worm had caught those impossible visitors, those imposters, those renegades. They would have nodded at each other, oh so sagely – how right they had been not to fight the Worm.

  And here we are, you worthless maggots. How he felt about Che’s current venture was hard to say. Thalric looked on these creatures with disdain. Not only were they slaves, they had been enslaved in such a humiliating way as even the Empire had never contrived. Born and dying in the dark, barely more than a herd of sheep with useful skills, kept about in order to breed the next generation of their oppressors.

  Che had told it all, spared nothing.

  And Thalric had thought, The vermin are beyond saving, and yet at the same time something had risen up in him, contradicting and complementing that part of his Wasp upbringing that still saw slaves as something inferior. What the Worm was, what it did here in its lightless places, was an abomination – something more unnatural, by whole orders of magnitude, than anything he had seen in Khanaphes or the Commonweal. Even the horrors of Argastos paled before the Worm the man had been set to guard.

  The panic, the scattering of the slaves, was predictable. They had no resources, no resolution, no purpose other than to run about and babble.

  So come listen to us. We have your resources and your resolution and your purpose, right here.

  There were seven of them that went striding into Cold Well like figures out of some Inapt legend. Che went first, her arm bandaged about the spiral scars she bore there. Tynisa limped at her side, gaunt and silent, balanced by Esmail’s slender shadow. Bringing up the rear came the ponderous figure of Orothellin, and at his side the Hermit, picking nervously at his filthy robes. He had never come down here before, nor to any of the other slaves’ places. Nobody knew how they would react to him.

  Messel was keeping close to the big Slug-kinden as well, to shield himself from the ire of his kin here, but Thalric ranged out wider, taking advantage of his wings now that the fires of Cold Well were lighting his way. If any of the slaves did have more steel than the Wasp gave them credit for and chose to turn it on Che rather than the Worm, then his sting would be ready for them. It would serve as a solid object lesson.

  There was a welcoming committee rather reluctantly assembling ahead, a few levels down. Thalric overflew them, realizing that not one of them even looked up. He caught a few familiar faces: the Moth woman – Atraea? – was there in the centre, and that big Mole Cricket smith – something Forge-Iron – and a handful of others: Woodlice, Beetles, another blind Cave Cricket like Messel. Forge-Iron had a weighty hammer in his hand, his clothes sooty from his work. There were a few staves otherwise, and probably some knives.

  And yet Esmail saw scores of those nasty little Worm swords all waiting for delivery, the stupid bastards.

  ‘What do you want?’ Atraea demanded, her voice shaking. ‘You must not come here!’ With her blank white eyes it was impossible to know whom she was most frightened of.

  Thalric swooped down and found a perch overlooking the meeting, landing delicately enough that still nobody noticed him. He saw Che stop and regard the delegation grimly.

  ‘To get you to fight,’ the Beetle girl began.

  There was a murmur that passed back through the crowd, one of horror, of incredulity, as though they had never heard the word ‘fight’ before. Some were already shepherding their children away as if they did not want them to learn such inappropriate language.

  Keeping them safe for the Worm, Thalric reflected derisively.

  Atraea stepped forward, leaning on her staff. She had one hand about her stomach, and Thalric suddenly realized that she was pregnant – would have thought she was too old, myself – and after that he saw how many of the women were, or might be. The thought struck him as depressing beyond all the tales that Che had told. Not so long ago they had been handing over their babies to the Worm, and even then they had been working on the next batch. This was not a community of slaves. It was a factory.

  ‘You cannot be here,’ the Moth woman hissed desperately, as though trying to wish Che out of existence. ‘You will bring the Worm down on us with your madness. They will punish us.’

  ‘They’re already on their way,’ Che told her, and Thalric fancied he saw in her face at last a little of his own scorn, at these pathetic specimens. The reaction was certainly the one he expected from such craven wretches, the underland slaves wailing and moaning and lamenting and yet doing precisely nothing, not even offering a threat of retaliation against the bearers of bad tidings.

  Except, no – here came the big man, Forge-Iron, pushing past his fellows, jaw jutting angrily. ‘You have drawn them here,’ he accused.

  ‘No, but we are here because we saw them on their way. They are coming to exact another tax.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’ Atraea insisted. ‘They’ve only just . . . they’ve been, already been.’

  ‘And you still have children to spare, so they will come again, and again, until you have no more, and you are no use to them. Then they will come for you instead, for your own flesh. They will tax and tax, and take and take, and in the end your fires will be cold ash, your homes just empty caves.’

  ‘And how do you know this?’ the Moth demanded.

  ‘He has shown me.’ Che indicated the Hermit. ‘He knows. The Worm is entering the Old World, as your Teacher calls it, those lands beneath the sun that so many of your ancestors sprang from. They will not need you any more.’

  Atraea made to speak again, but Forge-Iron laid a broad hand on her shoulder. ‘Evastos, fly a circle and look for the Worm.’

  A younger Moth – barely more than a boy and therefore one of the younger generation’s few, a veteran of taxes that must have stripped away his siblings – flared his wings and rose unsteadily into the air. It was quite the worst flying Thalric had seen in a long time, but then, he had even wondered if the Moths here had lost the Art altogether. Che had mentioned the unpleasantness that hunted above them, the star-makers and their sticky threads, and the appalling flying monsters – the White Death as the locals charmingly called them.

  ‘And if they are coming, what do you suppose we should do?’ Atraea exclaimed, although Thalric felt that she was losing the sympathy of the crowd a little. ‘We cannot fight the Worm!’

  ‘You must,’ Che told her flatly. ‘You have no choice.’

  There was a chorus of despair and denial already rising up, but Orothellin struck his staff once on the stone and they all fell silent. Thalric blinked: for a moment the
haggard, run-down giant had mustered a little of the majesty of the Masters of Khanaphes, his voice resounding with the cavernous echoes of their last stronghold, and tomb.

  ‘Listen,’ the huge man said, not loud, yet clearly heard. ‘These are the end times. No prophecy, but a promise. The Seal is broken – it has been real, all this time, and now it is gone. The Worm works its way upwards to claim the world that I still remember, just. That world is vaster than you can dream of, peopled by kinden you cannot imagine. The Worm is ambitious. It will scour this place of everything it can use and consume so as to gain its foothold, and after that it will treat the people of the Old World – your cousins – just as it has treated you. And for you – nothing. Oblivion. If you think that would be kinder, then await it. For those who wish a chance at tomorrow – and a tomorrow where none come demanding a tax of your flesh and blood – then take up arms now. Fight, now. Die, if you must, so that others may live, for you will die anyway in the end, and better it be for something.’

  Silence fell, after that, and Thalric found himself nodding, impressed despite himself. Give that man a general’s rank badge.

  Then the Moth boy, Evastos, was back, already yelling out as he dropped from the sky, ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’

  My cue.

  ‘Fight now!’ Che was calling. ‘Take up the same weapons you’ve made for your oppressors, and put them to use. Take up your hammers, your slings, your staves, the blades of your Art! Fight now, because they will take the last of your children, and then they will take your lives! Fight, or be extinguished so that none will know you ever were!’

  Thalric had stepped into the air, his Art wings catching and lifting him, already looking for the Worm’s soldiers encroaching into the light spilling from Cold Well’s fires. Before, when they had fought outside the Hermit’s hole, the darkness had been his greatest enemy. The Worm’s slaves feared the dark, though, even those of them without eyes. They feared the cold and the isolation. They feared the Worm, and kept the fires burning, and now Thalric could see.