Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The band of the Worm approaching was made up of a couple of pack millipedes, a score of warriors and a Scarred One, not unlike the group who had come to exact the tax before. It was Thalric’s job to strike, to use his natural advantages to kill as many of them as he could. He would give the slaves a little time to overcome their fears and arm themselves. He would also commit them. He was not sure whether Che had quite seen her plan evolving in that light but, by striking first against the Worm, they would be forcing the slaves’ hands.

  They’re dead anyway, so who cares? In this subterranean world there was no place for sentiment.

  And here they come. The first of the Worm resolved from shapes in the dark to shapes in the light, the lead soldiers rushing forwards with that constant hurrying tread as they danced to the mindless urgings of their god. Thalric coursed over them and wheeled, seeing them begin to spread out as they sensed him but could not quite locate him.

  There. And Thalric’s sting spat fire, and the Scarred One in their midst, the only human mind amongst the lot of them, was down and smoking before he had had the wit to look up.

  Thalric had hoped that there would be a few shots’ worth of milling panic or blank stillness as they tried to digest what had happened, but the Worm’s bodies were on to him almost before their priest had hit the ground. Some of them had slings, and they had the weapons to hand on the instant, fitting stones to them and whirling them up to speed.

  At least the bastards don’t have bows, and Thalric let his hands speak for him, lashing into them with his sting, his Art searing streaks of gold across them, striking down, burning them, melting their armour. Of all the gifts of the Wasp, this one had always been strong with him, reaching further, striking harder, sapping his strength less. He kept on the move, darting and diving through the air above them, lashing left and right with both hands, feeling his wings eat up his strength. Let the Worm be as coordinated as it might be, let its aura of denial smother all thoughts of Aptitude in him, but he was no artificer and he needed only what nature had given him.

  Then a sling stone struck the armour of his shoulder hard enough to spin him in the air, and the next moment he was skimming the rocky ground, knowing that they would be running for him with those nasty little swords drawn. He tried for height, but then another rock hit him in the chest, knocking him on to his back even though his mail took the brunt of it. He lurched to his feet, hands out and blazing, seeing one onrushing figure cut down in the flash. How many did I get? Not enough, apparently.

  Then Esmail was with him, darting past to open up a Centipede-kinden as a conjurer would, mail and all, just with a sweep of his hand. Thalric took the chance to back off, hands up and hunting for targets, seeing a dozen of the Worm still on their feet and running full-tilt towards them. Another slingshot skimmed past his ear.

  Tynisa was there too, although she was holding back with him, and he remembered how she had fallen before the Worm the last time, how her fighting grace had deserted her and left her crippled. Che was on his other side with her sword drawn, and he wanted to shout at her to get back – except she was rousing the rabble, and the rabble sometimes needed to be led by example.

  His hands flashed again to send a further Worm down, seeing Esmail dancing between two of them, another whose Art was equal to the task.

  And if something doesn’t happen about now then we know this is a lost cause.

  He was ready to fall back, to grab Che by the arm and haul her out of the way, to let the others do the dying. But the rabble had apparently made its decision, and not a moment too soon.

  Thundering between Thalric and Tynisa went the enormous figure of Forge-Iron, the Mole Cricket. He whirled his great hammer in one hand, and Thalric saw it strike a Worm soldier square on, practically turning the creature to paste. There were now sling stones zipping past towards the enemy, too, and then a ragbag of fighters deigned to present themselves: men and women without armour or any real idea about how to fight, but suddenly the odds were in their favour, for all that they looked terrified of everything that they saw – and of the Worm most of all.

  ‘Now!’ Che yelled, and charged forwards, and although Thalric cursed her for it, he knew it was the right thing to do. He drew his own blade and hurried after her and, like the feeblest tide of history, the slaves came as well.

  Once the Worm had been dispatched, all of its bodies strewn at the periphery of Cold Well like broken dolls, the slaves stood around, staring. Not one of them seemed to know what came next, and Thalric felt that he could share their apprehension. Did Che really think she could forge anything from this downtrodden dross, even with the threat of extinction as the whip?

  Still, Thalric had been a soldier once. ‘Strip the bodies!’ he shouted at them. ‘They have armour, weapons! Things you lack, you wretches! Come on, do yourselves a favour!’

  A few did pick up a sword or pluck disconsolately at the mail of the dead, but most just stood there, staring at the corpses, staring at him, staring at each other.

  Then he heard a voice, and knew it for Atraea the Moth woman: ‘What have you done? You have killed us all!’

  ‘You’re as good as dead, anyway,’ Thalric spat back, but then Che was there, hands extended to call for attention.

  ‘Listen to me,’ she called. ‘This is just the start! Now you must go to the other communities nearby, all those other people who have lived under the tax, who have suffered as you have suffered. I know that they are there. You must tell them what we have told you. They must do as you have done. They must rise up against the Worm, if they value their lives, and the lives of their kin. This is their only chance.’

  ‘It is forbidden to travel to other towns!’ someone called back, and Che blinked, plainly finding a complication she had not anticipated.

  Thankfully, Messel came to her rescue. ‘And yet it is done! I have done it. Many of you have done it. The word must be spread – so fly, run, follow paths of stone, but go swiftly!’

  ‘Not swiftly enough!’ Atraea insisted fiercely. ‘Raise a hand against one soldier of the Worm, and all the Worm knows of it! They are on their way here even now! You have only ensured that everyone in Cold Well will die.’

  ‘Then there shall be no one in Cold Well when they arrive,’ Orothellin’s voice boomed out. ‘You must leave, all of you – strike out into the wilderness, set off for False Hearth or The Shelves. Take all you have, and most especially the food and the weapons that you have already gathered for the Worm.’

  ‘This is madness!’ Atraea insisted. ‘This . . .’ And her jabbing finger found Che. ‘This is because she knows the Worm is attacking her people in the Old World. She thinks to sacrifice all that we are just to aid her kin under the sun!’

  A silence fell, and Thalric looked from face to face: Mole Crickets, Beetles, Woodlice, all the detritus of this grim place, and not one of them with a thought in their heads, or so he assumed.

  Then one of the Woodlouse-kinden women coughed and said, ‘So you believe in the Old World now?’

  Despite himself, Thalric’s heart leapt. Is it possible? Did one of them just have an idea? Wonders will never cease.

  ‘That is . . .’ Atraea’s pale eyes flashed as she stared around, trying to muster support. ‘They are using you! That is all that matters. They don’t care about you!’

  ‘Do you care about yourselves?’ Che countered. ‘The Worm doesn’t care. The Worm remembers the sun. From the moment the Seal was broken, you became nothing to the Worm but a resource, a vessel to be emptied and cast aside. Ask him, he knows – he hears the Worm still though he tries to deny it.’ She was pointing at the Hermit, who hugged himself and flinched away from her. ‘The Worm doesn’t care about you, for all that you have been the fat it has lived off all these centuries of imprisonment. If you sit here like good, obedient slaves then the Worm will harvest all you have, down to the flesh from your bones. But the Worm is already marching. If you make it work, if you run and hide and fight, then it will spend its blood and its time hunt
ing you down.’

  The Mole Cricket smith loomed beside Atraea, and she sagged into him, hands about her midriff.

  ‘We will die,’ she got out.

  ‘Some of you will, surely. Perhaps I will too,’ Che said equably. ‘But you mistake me if you think I do this for my kin. I do this because the city that gave birth to me teaches what is right and what is wrong, even if we do not always practise it. We hold no slaves, where I come from, and we value human life, of all kinden. And in the Worm’s blind hunger, and with the collaboration of its priests, a great evil has been created here, and it must be fought. Perhaps a year ago you could indeed have said that to live in the Worm’s shadow is better than to die on its swords. Now you will die, every one of you, unless you set yourselves free.’

  ‘Gather everything you can take, everything you can carry. Use the pack animals the Worm has so thoughtfully brought you!’ Orothellin boomed. ‘Fill those cages with something more wholesome for once. Cold Well must be emptied. Take everything you can.’

  ‘Teacher . . .’ Atraea’s taut, frightened face turned towards him. ‘There must be some way . . .’

  ‘It is the end of many things,’ the big man told her gently. ‘Unless we act now, it will be the end of all things.’

  Around them, the people of Cold Well began to move, slowly at first but then with a gathering urgency, preparing for their exodus, whilst others were already setting off to pass word of what had happened across the Worm’s realm.

  Twenty-Four

  Major Oski dropped down beside the artillery crew positioned on the roofs overlooking Collegium docks. ‘All right, what now? What’s so important? The engines have gone wrong or something?’

  ‘No, sir,’ the sergeant of Engineers reported. ‘Out on the water, though—’

  For a moment, Oski went cold. But this is nonsense, isn’t it? Vrakir’s lunacy. There was a half-moon tonight, and it touched the wavetops as they rolled forever in towards land, and out there . . . Ships? Did he see ships?

  For a moment he thought this must be it, that somehow Vrakir had been right. Is it the Spiders? Have they sent an Armada to relieve Collegium? Why the pits would they even bother? Then he spat. ‘That’s – what, is that the Tseni, in their little boats?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Oski slapped him across the back of the head, using a flicker of his wings to gain the required height. ‘You stupid sod, you got me out of bed for that?’

  ‘Sir, they’re moving. It’s as if they’re getting ready for something,’ the sergeant insisted, aggrieved.

  ‘Do I look like someone who gives a piss? Go send for the officer of the watch or something.’

  ‘That’s you, Major. You were given the harbour defence.’

  ‘No, I was given the set-up, the artillery . . .’ Oski bit his lip, trying to remember exactly what he had been told, because he had been so angry with the whole pointless venture that he hadn’t exactly been taking notes. ‘Listen, there must be a captain, or some army major, or . . . Ah, piss on it.’ Besides, he was well and truly awake now and out of bed, so he might as well blow things up.

  ‘Let’s shoot at them. What’s the range?’ He could see better by moonlight than any of them, and he had a better head for figures too. And a better flier. Makes you wonder how the Wasps ever got this far, really. The Tseni had come in a host of little metal craft, swift and low to the water. Bergild’s pilots had reported that they had repeating ballistae mounted on them, of some superior design that had actually given the aviators some tough moments when they tried to overfly them too low to the water. Nothing that would trouble the ludicrously overstated defences here, though. Oski hopped up onto the engine next to him and saw several hundred very bored Wasps – some sleeping, others keeping the watch. A couple of Sentinels had pulled up right at the water’s edge, as though about to embark on a trip around the bay. All those engines, the leadshotters and the ballistae and these new toys he’d lifted from the Collegiates were dutifully pointing out into the great emptiness of the sea, across which the Tseni ships were skimming as though happy to oblige his need for some target practice.

  ‘Right, get this bastard’s engine primed,’ he instructed. The device he was standing on was something like a ballista, with an explosive bolt in the breech, but there was no string, no arms, and the bolt was all metal. Oski’s people had blown up two of these before they had worked out the principles, and it was a diabolical little toy indeed that the Beetles had come up with. The charge of the lightning batteries in the base created some sort of magnetic differential down the length of the engine, which resulted in that metal bolt being thrown . . . basically as far as you like.

  ‘Primed and ready, sir,’ the sergeant said. ‘Only you’d better—’

  ‘Right.’ Oski let his wings lift him off the machine, to avoid one of his own feet being sent hurtling at the Tseni fleet at a thousand miles an hour.

  There was a curious shiver through the air and the bolt was gone, faster than the eye could follow it. His aim was dead on: one of the Tseni ships instantly blossomed with flame, the explosion seeming to come almost in the instant the engine loosed. Oski grinned broadly and declared, “Hooray for Collegiate engineering,” and then someone screamed.

  He swore and was airborne in a moment, cornering over the barricades and the lines of soldiers, hearing a growing murmur in response as men began to wake up. ‘Report!’ he shouted out. ‘Someone report!’

  ‘Sir!’ A cry from the waterside, on one of the piers. ‘Here, sir!’ And Oski skimmed over the heads of the soldiers, swinging wide around a Sentinel’s great segmented bulk to touch down on the timber of the wharves.

  ‘Report!’ he demanded again, seeing a cluster of Wasps staring down at the water.

  ‘Sir, it’s the lieutenant, he’s . . .’ said one, before running out of words, so that another had to fill in, ‘He’s gone, sir.’

  ‘Do you call that a pissing report?’ Oski shouted.

  ‘He fell in,’ the first soldier started, but the other spoke over him, ‘He was grabbed, sir – something in the water got him.’

  Oski stared at him. The water – and out here on the pier there was a great deal of it on three sides – was very dark, slapping and slopping at the pylons.

  A moment later, fighting broke out on one of the neighbouring wharves. He could not see clearly what was going on, just soldiers kicking into the air, or falling back towards the land, because – he could not see because what, just something moving there that his eyes refused to find a name for. He saw stingshot flash and crackle, caught a glimpse of something shelled, many-legged.

  ‘What . . .?’ he got out, and a man next to him went down, shrieking. A pincer as large as Oski’s whole body had clamped the luckless soldier’s leg, the bone already shattered in its iron grip. As Oski watched, a crab the size of a small automotive began hauling itself up on to the pier, the wood creaking and protesting under its weight.

  In a heartbeat he was in the air, seeing stingshot – even snapbow bolts – scatter off the thing’s carapace. And, the next thing he knew, the entire wharf front was heaving, the creatures climbing sideways from the water everywhere, snapping mindlessly at anyone luckless enough to be near. Even as he tried to phrase an appropriate military response, some part of Oski’s mind was shouting, What the pits are they doing? As though there was some naturalist’s explanation, some freak migration that could rationalize what he was seeing.

  ‘Back, back from the water! Form a shooting line where you can do some good, you morons!’ The order was unnecessary. The entire waterline had come alive, bristling with legs and pincers and stalked eyes as a wave of bafflingly enraged sealife boiled from the surf with a weirdly unhurried inevitability. Some of the creatures were picked apart by bolts from those soldiers already safe behind the barricades, and Oski saw a pair of them just explode into wet shards as one of the leadshotter crews woke up and began doing their job. Vrakir! Did he bring this on? Is this what he saw? How could he .
. .?

  The Sentinel at the waterfront tilted itself, trying to lower its leadshotter enough to do any good, whilst its rotary piercers began chewing up the emerging crustaceans, the firepowder-charged missiles rapidly disassembling the animals into their component pieces. Then the vehicle was tilting further, at an unhealthy angle, and Oski let his wings speed him over, thinking perhaps that a particularly large beast had somehow got underneath the automotive’s legs.

  Even as he closed in, he saw the entire vehicle jerk forwards by a man’s length, an impossible sight as though there was some great magnet beneath it that had just yanked it across the stone of the wharves, halfway onto one of the piers. The Sentinel’s legs were scrabbling, digging in for purchase, and yet it was shuddering closer to the sea even as Oski watched.

  He spotted them then, the tentacles that had snared it, four or five thick rubbery cables snaking across the automotive’s armoured shell. A ripple of muscular contraction shivered through them, and the Sentinel lurched again, its front half hanging over the water, legs waving frantically, uselessly.

  Before Oski’s eyes, it wavered, caught on the fulcrum of its body, and then whatever unthinkable monster had hold of it just pulled again, as effortlessly irresistible as an earthquake, and the vehicle was gone into the sea.

  He swung back towards the Imperial lines, where concerted snapbow volleys were flaying away the slow advance of the sea creatures. Order was being restored, and he was only hoping that the owner of the tentacles wasn’t up to the brief walk that separated his new position from the water.

  Even as he touched down, another cry went out, and he turned to see something new emerging from the sea.

  It was a man – or the shape of it was something like a man – wearing a colossal suit of armour, and almost as broad as he was tall. Before Oski’s eyes, the apparition hooked its way out of the ocean, water streaming from its joints. The sword it bore was the most mundane thing about it, and even that was the length of a man, curved forwards to a savage point. Seeing the enormous claws of its gauntlets, Oski wondered that it needed the blade at all.