Seal of the Worm

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  There was much jockeying then, shouldering and elbowing for precedence, and she would gladly have given up her place at the front if only someone had come to demand it. Instead she found herself standing there, feeling as though she had gatecrashed a horribly inappropriate party, while Stenwold Maker introduced his allies.

  The Tseni Ants were led by a stern-faced woman with blue-white skin, and Stenwold explained how they were maintaining a presence on the Collegiate streets, keeping order until the Beetles themselves were ready take that mantle from them. Why them? Because, compared to the forces that had won Collegium against the Second, the Tseni were practically familiar faces.

  The little contingent of Vekken were meanwhile keeping well away from the Sarnesh. They would also be marching east against the Empire, in a symbol of the newfound solidarity between their city, Tsen and Collegium. Straessa was watching Lycena carefully for her reaction then: surely the Sarnesh would go berserk on hearing that two enemy Ant city-states – and all other Ant city-states were surely theoretical enemies at all times – were now allied to the Beetle city whose affections they had been monopolizing. Her face was blank, though, any whirl of emotions hidden well away inside.

  Laszlo was fully reintroduced, as though anybody would not know him, but Stenwold said he was from the Tidenfree, and named the little muster of Fly-kinden with him as that vessel’s crew, although Straessa spotted Sperra in their number.

  Then Stenwold turned to his other allies, upon whom most eyes had been fixed since they turned up.

  ‘May I present Rosander, Nauarch of the Thousand Spines Train; his mechanic Chenni; the magnate Wys; and Paladrya, chief adviser to the Edmir of Hermatyre.’ He reeled off the string of titles and names as though they were supposed to mean anything to anyone. ‘The Sea-kinden,’ he finished.

  Straessa looked at them and saw a middle-aged Spider woman, a couple of little bald girls about the size of Fly-kinden, and . . . and a very, very big, broad man in pale crusted armour that made Maker’s suit look as if it was made of paper.

  ‘Sea-kinden,’ went the murmur, passing back down the ranks, or passing invisibly between the heads of the Ants.

  ‘Explain,’ said Lycena, almost desperately.

  He did. Concisely, and with obvious gaps in the narrative, Stenwold told them about the Sea-kinden, opening up a secret that had stayed beneath the waves since the revolution.

  Listening to his calm, measured account, Straessa had to keep looking at the massive figure of Rosander, because otherwise she would not have believed any of it.

  ‘You, Officer.’ Abruptly Maker’s gauntleted hand was directed at her.

  ‘Officer Antspider, Coldstone Company.’ Probably. Whether there was still a Coldstone Company to be part of was debatable, but what else could she say?

  Although he might have recalled her as Eujen’s friend, if nothing else, there was no recognition in his face.

  ‘Get a pilot off to Sarn to call back the Expatriates. This city’s going to need to stand on its own feet just about immediately. We can’t spare the soldiers to . . .’

  ‘Administrate it, War Master?’ Straessa dropped into the gap, because she was horribly sure that the unwanted word Maker had bitten back on was ‘garrison’. He said ‘this city’, not ‘our city’, she thought, but maybe she was being too hard on the man because of Eujen’s clashes with his ideology. Or perhaps going where Maker had gone could not help but change a man.

  ‘Officer.’ At Straessa’s elbow was the aviatrix, Taki. ‘I’ll go.’

  ‘Thank you. Cram everyone who wants to come aboard a rail automotive and get them over here, double time. I don’t think we’re hanging about,’ the Antspider told her. ‘Take word to Eujen and he’ll sort the logistics. I expect the Sarnesh’ll be glad to see the back of us.’

  The Fly-kinden nodded, casting a sidelong look at Stenwold Maker. ‘Right you are.’ Then she was lifting herself into the air and scudding over the assembled heads towards her Storm-reader.

  ‘War Master, regarding your allies . . .’ Lycena indicated the Sea-kinden. ‘What do I tell the tactician? Do they march east with us? The Vekken, you have spoken for –’ no disguising of her distaste there – ‘but these?’

  Straessa saw the ‘No’ on Stenwold’s face, but the Spider-looking woman at his side said, ‘Yes,’ immediately, and Rosander, the vast armoured brute, echoed her a moment later. Maker glanced at them, and she noticed his facade crack briefly.

  ‘Paladrya—’ he started, but the huge Sea-kinden broke in.

  ‘You once showed me the land, Stenwold Maker,’ he rumbled. ‘Do you think I put it from my mind, what you made me see? Those horizons you have? I want to see it, Maker. Those of my train who will follow me, I will take as far as you need to go. Chenni has my orders for the rest of my people.’

  Stenwold’s gaze was still on the woman, though. No words passed between them, but she put a hand on his plated arm, eyes speaking directly to his, and at last he nodded.

  ‘You’re cracked,’ said the little bald woman he had called Wys. ‘Back home for me and mine, for sure.’

  Straessa glanced from face to face: Ants of three cities; her own people just beginning to understand that they had won back their home; and the unfamiliar features of the Sea-kinden.

  At the last, she looked back towards Maker, and was able to interpret that hard, driven expression of his in a new way. He was tired. He was a man tired almost to death, but with a long road ahead of him still.

  Twenty-Eight

  I should have stayed with Che.

  Thalric had been a battlefield officer once, long ago, before the Rekef had recruited him. He remembered enough about the soldiering trade to know that quality of troops counted for more than just about anything. He had never seen a worse band of warriors than the rabble he was trying to marshal now. Military historians would have to invent whole new words for how appalling the slaves of the Worm were in war.

  Of course this is hardly textbook stuff: the hopeless against the mindless. He had seen quickly enough that standing toe to toe with the Worm was not a game these people could win. Even wielding the weapons that they had made for their masters, they lacked all training and coordination – lacked all virtues, in fact, except for a desperation that turned too readily to panic and fear. Thalric had heard that some people believed sheer rage and righteous fury would win a fight, and he could only assume that those people had never been in one. In a massed battle, training and discipline would defeat random flailing every time, however righteous or angry.

  Of course, training and discipline were not exactly what the Worm had, but what they did have would serve. Watching them fight made him feel ill – and his varied career had instilled a strong stomach. The way they moved together, the many limbs of a single presence, was utterly unlike soldiers, unlike humans. It served, though. In close combat the Worm was ferocious, unflinching, never retreating, swift and savage and unhesitating. A part of him watched that dreadful will to slaughter and thought, perfect shock troops, even whilst the rest of him was trying not to retch.

  But Che wanted these hopeless victims to fight, to make their extinction costly enough that the Worm would leave them alone. After all, the driving force behind those human puppets did not understand vengeance or hatred any more than it could know of love or hope or happiness. If they could bloody the enemy enough, then it would draw back from them through sheer expedience. That was Che’s plan. Thalric did not believe it, now. After all, the bastard’s down here, isn’t it? Somehow it’s at the centre of this place – wherever you go, you reach that city, that’s what Messel said. So is it really going to give its slaves the run of the place while its armies are away? Thalric was bitterly afraid that Che had miscalculated – but not in guessing that the Worm would dispose of its entire slave population, the other kinden that had shared its banishment. No, that was patently the case, but he was less and less sure that either running or fighting would save these blighted failures from the blad
es of the Worm.

  He wanted to tell her he had no sympathy, that those who bent their backs to the lash had chosen their place in life and deserved no more. He wanted to tell her that he and she – and Tynisa and Esmail, if she insisted – should simply find some place to hide that was as distant as they could find from any tendrils of the Worm, and there they should wait until all the slaves were devoured. Perhaps, having gutted its world, save for the four of them, the Worm would seek elsewhere for its nourishment. He wanted to say that this was the only real use that they could find for this host of useless subhumans.

  He had said nothing of the sort to her. In his mind’s eye he saw the reaction in her face, the disapproval, the knowledge that, by her impossible Collegiate standards, he had failed some test of morality. But you can’t save the world, you can’t! Sometimes it’s all you can do to save yourself.

  The time would come when this doomed venture turned sour, and even Che would have to admit defeat. Until then Thalric would play her game and hunt for a battlefield on which the Worm could be even mildly inconvenienced.

  There had been tactical exercises when he had graduated from sergeant, about pitting an inferior force against one larger, swifter, more skilled. None of them had been quite this hopeless.

  Light had been the first problem. Most of the native combatants on both sides could see in the dark. He himself could not, and a blind general was not someone the history books had ever had cause to sing the praises of. He had spoken at some length with Che, and then with his troops, gauging the nature of their sight. Chiefly this revealed that actual light – fires, lanterns, whatever – did not leap out at their eyes if they relied on their Art. And the same would go for the Worm, so that he had a whole chain of beacons up the route of retreat, for his eyes, and to remind the wretched slaves where they had to go.

  ‘They’re here! They’re here!’ A Moth woman hurtled overhead and disappeared back into darkness, and Thalric’s troops began milling and trembling.

  ‘Remember what I told you!’ he shouted at them, just one step away from, Do what you’re told, for they were little better than children, at war, and he had no time to explain his logic.

  There were no bows in the whole extent of the under-earth, as far as he could work out. The people here did all sorts of clever things with fungus fibres and rock and coal, but there was no wood, and no substitute for it. They had no crossbows, either, and it had been something of a vertiginous revelation that they had been trapped down here since long before anyone thought of that quintessential Apt weapon.

  And of course, with that whatever-it-was that the Worm did to peoples’ heads, perhaps crossbows would be no great asset anyway. Another thing that your general here doesn’t understand – and what do I recall about tactical decisions made in ignorance?

  What they did have were slings, which Thalric reckoned to be surely the least efficient ranged weapon after just throwing things. He had to work with what he’d got, though.

  ‘I’m going to give them something to think about!’ he called out to them. ‘As soon as they’re in range, you start on them. Make every stone count.’ If you can even actually aim a sling. He was unsure about that, and he had no real grasp of their range, not in this dark place where his sense of space was hopelessly compromised.

  The host of the Worm was approaching.

  He let his wings carry him lightly towards them, lifting higher, hoping one of the appalling hunters of the cavernous sky didn’t choose this moment to complicate his life. His furthest fire was just casting its light on to that onrushing tide: a sinuous, weaving inroad of the Worm, the green-blue flames glinting on bronze mail and steel blades.

  Neither of which they’d possess without their slaves. How can people connive at their own impotence like that? How could they even give up their own children to the bastards?

  The Worm, much like Beetles and other ground-bound kinden, did not look upwards half as much as they should.

  He was no strong flier, but he did not spare his sting, soaring across the face of the Worm like a stormcloud, hands crackling with fierce gold light. He had no need to aim, with that dense column rushing below him, and he just let his hands work, a dozen blasts in as many seconds, each one tearing into a target, cutting a jagged wound across the mass of the enemy.

  There was no confusion: they knew him immediately, and some of them had slings, too. Not so many, though, compared to how many bodies advanced down there. He kept moving, and he guessed they did not get much practice against a flying target – if these vacant segments did anything as human as practise.

  Another staccato burst from his hands, curving back above them, and of course they were not waiting for him, were still rushing towards the hapless mob of his own followers. The dozens he struck down were nothing, less than a scratch on the body of the Worm.

  Then the air was alive with hornets. One clipped his foot as he pulled up, and he saw a ripple pass across the face of the enemy, the leading edge of their charging column fraying and coming apart as three score sling stones pelted into them. Those weapons he had dismissed as weak were cutting apart the front ranks of the enemy by sheer numbers.

  The slaves here did not go to war, but they must hunt and defend themselves from the savage beasts that had been locked into this asylum alongside them. Slings were all they had, and the animal foes they used them against were also armoured.

  Emperor’s balls! Thalric thought, seeing that initial salvo, because the entire front line of the Worm advance had just disintegrated. Surely, only around one in five or six stones had achieved anything, but there were close on a hundred slingers stacked up the raked incline where he had placed them, and they were already loosing their next shot.

  Had an Imperial advance hit such unexpected resistance, then Thalric reckoned a regroup and redeploy would have been in order, but the Worm needed no such devices and simply pressed on, trampling the discarded bodies of its own fallen whether they were dead or not.

  For a handful of seconds, as his own hands kept busy, he thought they might achieve something. It had seemed as though the slingshot was tearing down the Worm as swiftly as they could advance. Then reality asserted itself, and he saw that the enemy were still advancing – advancing swiftly, even – and that the attrition was insufficient to achieve anything against an enemy that had such immense numbers and no concept of personal extinction.

  He let his troops loose and loose again, though, because each dead enemy surely counted for something, and then he was skimming over his own lines, calling, ‘Fall back! Fall back! Remember the way!’ The Worm were really coming on swiftly now and, as soon as the sling barrage stopped, they would become swifter.

  Some of his people had already been inching away, and at Thalric’s order – or perhaps it’s my permission – the whole mob of them were scrabbling and running up the slope away from the enemy, and at least a sling was easier to run with than a bow and a quiver. He saw some of them stumble, even fall downslope, and they would certainly die, and there was nothing he was able or willing to do about it. The majority had good Art for climbing, though, and they were hurtling upslope almost as fast as the Centipede-kinden were pursuing them.

  Thalric thanked his parents for giving him wings and overtook the lot of them, rising to where the rest of his force – the non-slingers – were waiting.

  ‘On my mark,’ he alerted them. He wondered if the insensate nature of the enemy would mean this sort of set-up would keep working, or whether the Worm would adapt to it.

  It doesn’t matter. Let it work as often as you like, but we’re still pissing into the hurricane.

  The Worm was beginning to catch up with the stragglers now, each wretched victim overcome in a knot of struggling figures and rising blades.

  ‘Go! Now!’ he shouted.

  ‘There are still—’ someone objected and he shouted them down.

  ‘They’re dead. If they’re in the way, they’re already dead.’ He dropped down and put his shoul
der against one of the great rocks they had piled up here. In all honesty, he barely shifted it, but then one of the Mole Crickets followed his lead, and then others were pushing and prising and levering. And, with barely a prequel, there were tons of stone in sudden movement, descending on the body of the Worm. Some of his followers would be caught under that, but the majority were already clear. By Thalric’s book that was a considerably better outcome than they were due.

  ‘Now move!’ he snapped. ‘No going back for them, no sitting around spectating! Get your legs moving, come on. They’ll be after us quick enough.’

  Che was learning about a chain of command.

  The slaves had been trickling in for days, but word was spreading. Some came because Messel or others had warned them to flee, others because the Worm had descended on their villages, taken their remaining children and begun killing the rest. Nobody could say how many communities had nobody left to speak for them, wiped out without witnesses, their lights put out forever.

  There were a handful like the Moth, Atraea, who had been headmen and headwomen of their own communities. These Che set to work in organizing the rest. They pooled whatever food there was, found places to sleep, reunited families. Others, those who could move swiftly and surely in the dark, were set to foraging – young Moths and the blind Cave Crickets of Messel’s kinden particularly. They ranged further and further, hunting with their slings and gathering fungus and lichens. Some of them did not return.

  Darmeyr Forge-Iron and a few others were responsible for recruiting more warriors. None of the slaves had any prior experience, but many were willing, in return for having their dependants fed and looked after. There were plenty of Worm swords, and there was a little armour, and anyone who could use a sling was always welcome.